PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 699 
years ago. Our merchants and manufacturers and employers of labour, our 
teachers in secondary and technical schools all join in the chorus of complaint. 
They tell us that the children have gained very little useful knowledge and 
still less power of applying it. There is enough in this general expression of 
discontent. to give us pause and to make us seek for a rational explana- 
tion of our comparative failure. The inadequacy of the results attained to the 
money and effort that have been expended is in no way due to any want 
of zeal or ability on the part of the teachers, or of energy on the part of school 
boards or local authorities. They have all discharged the duties which were 
imposed upon them. It is due rather to the fact that the problem has been 
imperfectly understood, that our controlling authorities have had only a vague and 
indistinct idea of the aim and end of the important work which they were 
charged to administer, If we look back upon the history of elementary education 
in this country since 1870, we cannot fail to realise how much its progress 
has been retarded by errors of administration due very largely to the want of 
scientific method in its direction. It is painful to reflect, forjinstance, on the 
waste of time and effort, and on the false impressions produced as to the real aim 
and end of education, owing to the system of payment on results, which dominated 
for so many years a large part of our educational system. We must remember 
that it is only within the last few decades that education has been brought within 
reach of all classes of the population. Previously it was for the few; for those 
who could pay high fees; for those who were training for professional life, whether 
for the Church, the Army, the Navy, Law, or Medicine, or for the higher duties 
of citizen life. This had been the case for centuries, not only in this country but 
in nearly all parts of the civilised world. If we read the history of education in 
ancient Greece or Rome, or medizval Europe, we shall see that popular education, 
as now understood, was unknown. All that was written about education applied 
to the few who got it, and not to the great mass of the people engaged in pursuits 
altogether apart from those in which the privileged classes were employed. Trade 
and manual work were despised, and were considered degrading and unworthy of 
the dignity of a gentleman. I need scarcely say that these social ideas are no 
longer held. The fabric of society is changed, and we have to ask ourselves 
whether the methods of education have been similarly changed, whether they 
have been wisely and carefully adapted to the new order of things. What is it 
that has really happened? Is it not true that we have annexed the methods and 
subjects of teaching which had been employed during many centuries in the 
training of the few and applied them to the education of the people as a whole— 
to those who are engaged in the very callings which were more or less contemned? 
Surely it is so, and the results are all too manifest. We have applied the principles 
and methods of the secondary education of the Middle Ages to our new wants, 
to the training of the people for other duties than those to which such education 
was considered applicable, and it is only within the last few years that we have 
begun to see the error of our ways. In the report of your committee, to which 
I have referred, it is pointed out that the problem of primary education has been 
complicated by the introduction of the methods which for many years prevailed 
in secondary schools, and at a meeting of the National Education Association, 
held only a few weeks since, it was truly said: ‘In this country secondary 
education preceded primary by several centuries, and so the nation now finds 
itself with the aristocratic cart attempting to draw the democratic horse.’ 
Let it not be supposed that in the days not so far distant, yet stretching back 
into the remote past, the people as a whole were uneducated. This was not so. 
But we have to widen the meaning of education to include the special training 
which the- people then received—an education that was acquired without even 
the use of books. It cannot for one moment be said that the artisans, the 
mechanics, the farm hands, male and female, were wholly uneducated in those 
far-off days. In one sense possibly they were. Very few of them could read or 
write. But from earliest childhood they had received a kind"of training the want 
of which their descendants have sadly felt in the cloistered seclusion of the modern 
elementary school. They were brought face to face with Nature. They learned 
