L.— EDUCATION. 201 



springing direct from the national life, so that the life of the schools is 

 interwoven with that of the people ; but as a system it is not logical, and 

 it is not complete. There have been remarkable and successful achieve- 

 ments in some directions, but gaps have been left unfilled in others. It 

 has been well said that the landscape of English education is one of peaks 

 and valleys rather than that of a uniform tableland. It is our business 

 now to think nationally as well as locally, and to apply our minds to the 

 filling up of those valleys, some of them deep, which still exist, and it is 

 the purpose of this paper to indicate what, in the opinion of one who has 

 spent more than twenty-five years in service in one field of our education, 

 are the next steps which we should take if we are to move towards the 

 creation of a system which is really national, and will provide for all the 

 varying and complicated needs of a great nation of the twentieth century. 

 Right across the path of advance lies a lion, at the moment only 

 apparently asleep, which has already devoured imprudent wayfarers, and 

 may devour more : I need not say that I refer to the existing system of 

 dual control in elementary education. It is as well to know what is the' 

 size of this problem. According to the last published figures, those for 

 1926-27, out of 22,629 public elementary schools in England and Wales, 

 10,478 were Council Schools and 12,151 were Voluntary Schools ; of these 

 12,151 again 10,457 were Church of England, 135 Wesleyan, 1,196 Roman 

 Catholic, 12 Jewish, and 351 of other types. Taking it another way, by 

 the numbers of children in attendance, there were 4,924,102 in the Council 

 Schools and 2,711,244 in the Voluntary. It is therefore a very large 

 problem, the solution of which cannot be left to time, as is our national 

 way when we are in the presence of a difficulty ; for, while it is true that 

 the number of Council Schools tends steadily to increase, and the number 

 of Voluntary Schools to dwindle, yet the process is so slow that it would 

 take very much more than a century before the Voluntary Schools became 

 negligible. The position is this : that the Act of 1902 left the buildings 

 of the Voluntary Schools in the possession of the denominations, and the 

 religious teaching of the schools under the authority of the school managers, 

 who retain also the right to appoint the teacher. Those who to-day have 

 to organise the whole of education in any district find themselves hampered 

 at every turn by the fact that they do not control all the schools. If, on 

 the authority of the Education Act of 1921, they want to take the older 

 children from a number of schools and group them for better teaching 

 into one, they may find that the non-provided schools will not part with 

 the very children for whom the system is designed. They may desire to 

 reorganise, re-equip or rebuild a school, and find that the managers may 

 very probably not possess the means, and in some cases not the will, to 

 bear the expenditure involved. They may be aware, as in some cases 

 they are aware, that the buildings to which the children have to go are 

 ill-equipped, badly planned, far below the standards of the present day, 

 but there is very little which they can in practice do to remedy this state 

 of affairs. Even if they are willing to build a totally new school they have 

 to face the fact that, without the good will of the managers of the non- 

 provided school, they may fail to obtain the attendance of a proportion 

 of the children large enough to justify the expenditure. Thus there is at 

 present neither simplicity, economy, nor efficiency. On the denominations 



