PRESinENTIAL ADDRESS. 775 



These individual cases of industrial betterment are especially valuable as point- 

 ing the way to reform, and as showing the lines on which public authority may 

 hereafter wisely enforce a higher standard of educational and physical well-being 

 among the young people of the nation. For, very great as is the value of this 

 voluntary work, it yet does not touch that huge residuum which we feel is drift- 

 ing off, after the elementary school, into physical and intellectual disorder, losing 

 the habit of work, losing the habit of discipline, becoming casual, losing exactly 

 the powers of mind, body, and character which are needed if a skilled trade is to 

 be learned. 



But it will be insufficient merely to make attendance at existing continuation 

 schools compulsory unless we also touch the question of the hours of employment 

 of juvenile workers. Tbe remedy will lie in throwing a statutory obligation upon 

 all employers of juvenile labour to facilitate the attendance of their young people up 

 to seventeen years of age at evening classes without incm-ring physical overstrain. 

 The local authority should act in concert with the employers and with the repre- 

 sentatives of the workers in each trade in planning a course of study in the evening 

 schools which will be technically useful to those who receive it and at the same 

 time beneficial to them as citizens. 



This is exacUy the stage through which Germany has passed. Munich has 

 especially distinguished itself under the administration of Dr. Georg Kerschen- 

 steiner, by its sensible and practical development of the civic as well as the tech- 

 nical side of continuation school work. The kingdom of Prussia is organising, by 

 local option, in district after district, obligatory attendance at continuation schools, 

 by throwing on the employer the duty of facilitating the attendance of his own 

 workmen at such schools, and permitting the local authorities to make such attend- 

 ance obligatory for boys, and, if they wish it, for girls, within such period of 

 years as may seem to them suitable. In varying degrees, attendance at continuation 

 schools is compulsory in a number of other German States, viz., Bavaria,Wurtemberg, 

 Baden, Saxony, Saxe- Weimar, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Ooburg Gotha, and Hesse. 



In Switzerland attendance at continuation schools is in part, if not wholly, 

 obligatory in seventeen out of the twenty-five cantons for boys, and in one canton 

 for girls. I should like to see a beginning made in England by some local authori- 

 ties requiring attendance at a course of physical training for all boys and girls up 

 to seventeen. But we must also quicken the intellectual power of the teaching in 

 the primary schools by securing further opportunities of liberal education and of 

 professional training for all teachers and by reducing the size of the larger classes. 

 We must develop our secondary schools in order to spread a wider educational 

 outlook among the employers and foremen. And these two changes, working to- 

 gether, will, I believe, steadily and at no distant time lead us to the conclusion 

 that it is not only necessary but wise to make some measure of attendance at con- 

 tinuation schools obligatory for boys and girls until they are seventeen years of 

 age, leaving the details to local option, but encouraging by a double grant those 

 districts which adopt compulsory attendance. 



There are three great names in educational history connected with the county 

 in which we are met : Alcuin, the head of the great school at York, who organised 

 for Charlemagne the palace school at Aachen ; Roger Askham, of Kirby Wiske, 

 near Northallerton, a friend of Lady Jane Grey, and the teacher of Queen Eliza- 

 beth, who among older writers on education was unsui-passed in his psychological 

 analysis of the different types of mind with which the teacher has to deal ; and 

 Joseph Priestley, man of science, philosopher and teacher, who opened out for the 

 middle classes a new ideal of modern secondary education, insisting that the 

 studies of the secondary schools should be brought into real touch with the needs 

 of modern civic life, and who wrote, perhaps, the best essay in the English language 

 against any undue State monopoly in the control of national education. 



Has not each of these great Yorkshire leaders his message for us to-day ? — 

 Alcuin to remind us that, whatever else is done, the nation must educate its 

 leaders; Askham to remind us that, in order to individualise our scholars, we 

 must distinguish between their aptitudes and natural rates of individual gi'owth | 



