PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 739 



audience can only be got for concerts, entertainments, or at most lectures 

 with lantern pictures. All this seems, as far as it goes, to show a diminution 

 in culture, in capacity for the higher intellectual pleasures, in fruitful curiosity. 

 My correspondent is not prepared, however, to say that this change is due to 

 changes in school education. It comes, he thinks, ' of the different spirit in 

 young people, less under authority, indulging more in pleasures, not pressing 

 hard or thinking they need this in order to get on.' He thinks, in short, that 

 the young men now are more self-indulgent and less energetic than they were, 

 and he looks to the nobler spirit which the War has called out to carry us into 

 better ideals of life. He may be right in thinking that causes independent of 

 school education have produced the result. But we must admit that if it is true 

 that, concurrently with a school education improved in some important ways, 

 there has been a diminution in intellectual interests — in culture, in short — the 

 school education has at any rate failed in one of the objects aimed at. 



Well, you must take these views about a particular country district for what 

 they are worth. Facts observed among a comparatively small number of 

 people may not represent the average. Moreover, my correspondent and I are 

 both old — we could not remember, or think we remembered, the state of things 

 fifty years ago if we were not — and you may, if you think proper, discount 

 what we have to say, on the almost proverbial ground that old people put the 

 Golden Age behind them. I am not, however, myself conscious of any such 

 tendency. I believe very much in progress, and look forward to a gradually 

 improving world, and I believe we are on the whole improving in educational 

 ideals and educational methods as in other thing.?. But it behoves us to watch 

 what we do, and not to acquiesce, if we can possibly help it, in loss on one 

 side without being very sure that it is more than compensated for by gain on 

 the other. The loss of the parents' real co-operation where it has existed, 

 and the failure to gain it where it has previously been absent, is serious. It is 

 serious even if it is limited to the intellectual side of education and does not 

 extend to the formation of character, as I fear it sometimes does. With the 

 greatest zeal the schoolmaster cannot replace the parents, nor even the parents' 

 influence in producing the right attitude of mind in the pupil. And it is at the 

 very least doubtful whether the better teaching which improved methods 

 secure to the pupil can make up for any loss of spontaneous desire to put his 

 own mind into the effort of learning for learning's sake. 



And so I come back to the point that the general public must be encouraged 

 to take its share even in the part of education carried on at school and college, 

 and in particular those members of the general public who are parents of pupils. 

 But this conclusion is rather barren, for I have no very definite plan to suggest 

 for carrying it out. The State cannot now, even if it would, abandon "the 

 responsibility for the elementary school education of the children, and even if it 

 could it is more than doubtful whether it would be desirable. For though we 

 have now secured that all parents shall themselves have had school education, 

 we still cannot trust them all voluntarily to give that advantage to their 

 children. So the drawback must be put up with that parents cannot feel the 

 same degree of responsibility resting on themselves when the responsibility is 

 undertaken by the State. 



It is to be hoped, however, that we shall be very careful how far we 

 entrust to the State the regulation of education higher than the primary. 

 Bureaucratic regulation may be well adapted to produce German Kultur, but it 

 is not the way to secure the attitude of mind which leads to freedom, inde- 

 pendence of thought, and culture in the best sense. And it is very apt to lead 

 to want of independence in the teacher. 



Probably our best hope for progress in the right direction lies in movements 

 like the Workers' Educational Association, where we have voluntary effort put 

 forward to satisfy spontaneous desire to learn. As this movement extends we 

 may hope more and more to get a generation of parents who, having themselves 

 experienced intellectual curiosity and the joy of satisfying it, who, h<aving them- 

 selves felt the gain of a wider outlook on men and things, may by their 

 example inspire their children with a similar disinterested desire for learning 

 and culture. 



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