SECTION L.—EDUCATION. 
THE WARP AND THE WOOF IN 
EDUCATION. 
ADDRESS BY 
W. W. VAUGHAN, M.V.O., M.A., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
My working life has been spent in the Public Schools. They share with 
all other forms of education and classes of school the honour of being 
virulently attacked and affectionately defended ; but attack and defence, 
even when victorious, do not carry us far into the problem of education, 
and so, under the somewhat vague title I chose in the far-away spring 
days for the address I had to give in the waning summer, I propose to 
raise some important but not burning questions that have troubled my 
own mind in my daily duties and in the public work which has brought 
me during the last ten years into close and admiring contact with almost 
every kind of education. They will not be solved to-day or to-morrow, . 
but they will never be solved until all men and women of good will, with 
the humility that comes of experience and without the prejudice that so 
often accompanies it, take counsel together. 
Without claiming any deep knowledge of the mystery of weaving, it 
may be assumed that we all know the difference between the warp and 
the woof. In the factory the loom stands as the essential machine for 
the creation of the stuff that is to clothe or adorn. In life the school 
stands for the fashioning of the fabric of character. The lengthwise 
threads of the warp must be crossed by the threads of the weft, or woof, 
before feeble isolation can become compact and serviceable texture. 
But I have no wish to follow up the metaphor too elaborately. Sup- 
posing that the warp represents in education the influences that shape the 
child’s destiny as imagined by the State or the parent, now enlarging, 
now cramping in their effect, the cross-threads are those the teacher 
with skilful or clumsy hand, as the case may be, shoots, with the help of 
the shuttle, across the warp. I know well that the weaver’s fingers of the 
original hand-looms have been supplanted by many cunning devices, and 
that the simple and primitive division of the warp threads is now super- 
seded by countless heddles, or heald shafts, which allow of innumerable 
variations of pattern. 
So has it been with the educational loom. The simplicity of the 
three R’s has been superseded by complicated programmes of work that 
have grown up haphazard to meet momentary needs and to fulfil sudden 
hopes, and there is hardly more difference between the mat on which the 
half-civilised man knelt to pray and the varied and extensive products of 
modern cloth and ribbon looms than there is between the programme of 
an elementary school a hundred years ago and what children of the same 
class may learn to-day. And yet, as I have said, chance, or caprice, or 
