202 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
by the teacher. The supply of ability and will-power that is available for 
his purposes varies from day to day, from year to year. In one case it 
is scanty when the child is thirteen, to be abundant at sixteen ; in another 
case the glorious promise of thirteen fades away as years go by. In many 
fancy plays strange tricks, and now and then the imagination is chased 
away from the mental precincts by an over-retentive memory. The 
teacher has no sensitive weaver’s fingers, no miller’s golden thumb, by 
which he can infallibly test his judgment, and yet the shuttle must fly back 
and fore, because if the teacher rests the threads will soon be tangled ; 
and even when he works there are other workers too, some deliberately, 
with Penelope-like perversity, unravelling by night the labour of the day, 
others bringing confusion into the pattern by adding threads of strange 
colours and uncertain strength. Because teachers feel this they often 
occupy the whole of a child’s leisure and endeavour to monopolise its 
mental activities. Before abusing them for doing this, ought not the citizens 
to see to it more zealously that the city is a place for children to live in, 
that there are fewer polluting sights, fewer discordant noises in it? The 
school where the child spends six hours may be made beautiful; what of 
the streets where twelve hours of wakefulness are spent? And if from 
day to day the woof may be interfered with, marred by outside influences, 
after the holidays the teacher may fail to recognise his work at all. 
It was only the other day I heard one of the wisest and most experi- 
enced social workers advocate a longer day in school, not that the child 
might be taught more, but that he might spend a greater proportion of 
his life away from the contagion of the streets and the discomforts of the 
crowded home. What a comment on our streets and homes! What a 
condemnation of our false ideals! What a challenge to all teachers to 
revise their ideas of citizenship ! 
But I must not end on a note of exclamation or even on one of 
interrogation. 
What is really wanted in England now is a series of experiments—- 
experiments not made, as so often, in a limited field, but experiments made 
on a geographical basis. Grants are made by the Board of Education 
to individual schools for ingenious experiments in the teaching of special 
subjects. Let the State have more courage and make not a bigger but a 
freer grant to some city, say, of 50,000 inhabitants, which will experiment 
on the whole field of education, or to some county district which will do the 
like. Up to now the experiments made have been no guide as to the best 
way of designing the loom of education. They have been made, too, on the 
voluntary system for those who believed in co-education or insome Dalton 
plan, and little has been learnt, for success or failure in isolated cases may 
be due to a variety of causes. In my 50,000 city I should allow anyone who 
wished to contract out of the experiment by paying fees for the full course 
of their children’s education, otherwise no citizen of the future should 
escape the experiment. Assuming that 40 per cent. of the child population 
were ripe for what we call secondary education, schools should be provided 
for them, 5 per cent. might contract out, 5 per cent. need special treat- 
ment ; of the remaining 50 per cent. half should go on with their education 
until at least fifteen and should leave the elementary school when the 
secondary children do. On the whole I should be inclined to leave the 
balance in the elementary school where they would be known and be sure 
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