SECTION L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 



EDUCATION : THE NEXT STEPS. 



ADDRESS BY 



CYRIL NORWOOD, M.A., D.Lit., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



The chief advance made in the first quarter of the twentieth century has 

 been that the nation as a whole has been converted to belief in the value 

 of education. When the century began there were still very many who 

 had received little or no schooling in their youth, but had won their way, 

 not without a considerable measure of self-satisfaction, to substantial 

 positions. That perhaps legitimate pride was based on a certain mis- 

 understanding of the values of life, and it involved the fallacy vividly 

 exhibited by a certain local millionaire of my acquaintance, who was asked 

 to support the movement for the establishment of the local university. 

 ' University,' he said : ' what do you want with a university ? I left 

 school when I was thirteen, and look at me.' Now it was just because 

 we were looking at him that we desired the means of higher education to 

 be at the command of the community, though at that particular interview 

 it was hard to say so. To-day, nearly a generation later, that particular 

 type — a type usually of sturdy independence, strong character, and 

 material outlook — has largely been gathered to its fathers ; there have 

 been twenty-five years of constantly extending further education ; the 

 War has taken place. Opposition to education as such, at any rate to 

 education after the age of fourteen, is now confined to the National 

 Confederation of Employers' Organisations, and to the farmers, both of 

 which circles are mostly interested in the continuance of the supply of 

 young labour under the conditions to which they have been hitherto 

 accustomed. But they represent now a definite minority of the nation, 

 which as a whole is unwilling to think of a large mass of its members as 

 merely raw material to be utilised in its course from the school to the 

 scrap-heap ; it believes that each boy and girl has a right to be trained 

 as an individual. There flourishes to-day a living and growing belief in 

 the value of human personality ; it dominates all that is best in our 

 education, and I believe it will soon be unquestioned in any quarter. 

 It must so dominate the general mind if our democracy is to justify itself, 

 if, indeed, it is to survive. 



Anyone who studies the growth of our education during the last 

 century cannot fail to be impressed by the fact that it has been developed 

 to meet needs which made themselves felt in practice, and not to satisfy 

 preconceived theories, or a logical perfection. Its history is that of a 

 soldiers' battle : it has been the creation of actual combatants, and not 

 of a general stafi. As a result it has all the vitality which comes from 



