PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 767 



here. The Eui>:li8liman is being compelled to admit that, just as highei* technical 

 education can only flourish upon a basis of efficient secondary education, so, too, 

 all practical training for the duties of life is facilitated and furthered by a liberal 

 education during the early and impressionable years of childhood. This is the 

 conclusion which, because of its inevitable expense and because of its interference 

 with cherished class prejudices, the Englishman most reluctantly allows himself 

 to reach. But he is being forced to reach it, and one sign of his reaching it is 

 the new attitude of mind with which he approaches the question of elementary 

 education. The old class view of the question is gradually fading away, and in 

 its place, out of the blurred confusion of the dissolving view, we may hope, 

 sooner or later, to see emerge in clear-cut outline the definite form of a national 

 conception of education — national in its range, national in its unity of purpose, 

 and national in its insistence upon personal obligation towards the State in return 

 for the benefits which the State confers upon each of its citizens. 



This great change has not yet come. It is hard to see any sign at present of 

 a strengthening of national purpose and of the sense of individual obligation 

 to the State, though this is the psychological pre-requisite to any eflective 

 handling of the problem of national education. But these things come not by 

 observation. That such a change will come I, for one, strongly believe. But all 

 that we can say at present is that the recent movement of educational thought in 

 England has significantly weakened or cleared away some of the chief obstructions 

 to the general acceptance of a national view of what education must mean in an 

 efficient modern State. 



The old English idea was that each class ought to have its own educational 

 arrangements, those for the poor being a matter of charity, and the rest primarily 

 a private concern of the families, with such help as old endowments might provide. 

 'J'he idea now prevalent in the progressive parts of the world, and notably in 

 Germany and Japan, is that education from top to bottom is, first and foremost, a 

 public concern, a national affair rightly subjected to national supervision. By 

 slow degrees we in England are giving up our old idea and are moving towards a 

 new standpoint, from which, in educational matters, a synthesis of State action 

 and of individual initiative is seen to be desirable, and from which again a bureau- 

 cratic monopoly is seen to be as mischievous as are the disorders of laisser-faire. 



From the old view, that each class ought to have its own educational arrange- 

 ments, It followed that we have had in England three educational systems which 

 were virtually distinct. That for the poor was narrow and brief ; that for the middle 

 class was imperfect in organisation, stunted in its higher stages, and cut off from 

 many of the finer traditions o( culture; that for the upper class was for the most 

 part a training in manners, and barely touched by the new ideas which had sprung 

 from the advance of physical science and from the application of science to 

 industry, commerce and questions of social betterment. In broad outline these 

 three separate educational systems still remain, but wave after wave of change 

 breaks over them and obliterates their sharp distinctions. At each extremity 

 there has been a great widening of educational purpose. The public elementary 

 schools, once regarded as the schools for tlie poor only, have broadened out into 

 something which is clearly destined to serve as a common basis for all but a small 

 fragment of the whole educational system. At the other end of the line the 

 Public schools have rapidly expanded, with the result that they now bring together 

 as boarders the boys of nearly all the well-to-do families in the country, irrespective 

 of denominational differences and of many social distinctions which in former 

 days forbade such amalgamation. The midway schools, which used to serve 

 the needs of the old middle class and, when in competent hands, rendered a great 

 public service, are being hemmed into a smaller space b}^ the expansion of the 

 school systems above and below them, and are suffering from this double competi- 

 tion. The result is that friction has been set up nearly everywhere between the 

 upper edge of the elementary school system and the survivals of the middle-class 

 schools, and that every year an increasing number of the latter are shifted into a 

 closer connection with the public elementary schools, so as to serve as what may be 

 called continuation departments to them, instead of being, as in old days, virtually 



