204 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



and not dull : the atmosphere is that which is proper to early childhood, an 

 atmosphere of freedom, spontaneity, and joy. I should like to see the 

 policy steadily followed of developing and increasing the number of these 

 admirable places. I have no doubt, too, that the policy will be steadily 

 followed of reducing the size of classes in the primary school. I need not 

 labour this, for to this audience it will be obvious that a teacher confronted 

 by sixty, seventy or more pupils cannot follow the same methods, or seek 

 the same ends, as the teacher who deals with thirty-five. The teacher of 

 the large class can seek only discipline and a certain amount of mechanical 

 accuracy ; as the numbers fall he can begin to treat his pupils as indi- 

 viduals. He can develop those methods, for instance, which I believe are 

 admirably suited to the stage of the primary school, which are associated 

 with the name of Miss Charlotte Mason, and the Parents' National 

 Educational Union. Promising experiments have been made on these 

 lines in Gloucestershire, Kent and elsewhere, and during our sessions we 

 shall hear more of them. Other experiments also can be tried so long as 

 the teacher is not overborne by numbers. But of primary education as 

 a whole — and I am speaking of the stage that ends at 11 + , not at 14 — I 

 would say that it is no longer the region of the three R's ; it is the region 

 of another trinity, the hand, the eye, and the voice. It is the business 

 of the primary school to teach the child to see and observe, to make and 

 to do, and to speak and to sing. And then the child will be much more 

 fit to enter into the great inheritance of the world, with more capacity 

 for true happiness, and more capacity for true intelligence. 



In passing from this digression once again to the consideration of 

 post-primary and secondary education, it is in place not to omit the 

 mention of one other administrative reform, and that is the rearrangement 

 of local authorities so that in any given area there should be one authority 

 for the whole work of education. At present there are 318 authorities 

 for elementary education and 145 for higher education ; the mere mention 

 of the fact shows that in many districts it is impossible to organise the 

 education as a whole. Clearly the areas should be wide, for to-day 

 communities spread over great distances, and their members sleep in 

 one place and work in another ; not only in education it is beginning to 

 be found that units which are too small do not make for cheapness or 

 eflS.ciency. 



To turn to the problems of secondary education proper — by which I 

 mean education of boys and girls up to the age of 18 — it is advisable first 

 to survey the present position and to see how that position has arisen. 

 The public schools and the great day schools of the nineteenth century 

 were inspired both in regard to curriculum and method by Oxford and 

 Cambridge, and they were largely classical ; a reaction against this undue 

 narrowness led to the experiment of the Organised Science Schools of the 

 last ten years of that century. These in their turn certainly carried the 

 reaction too far, and produced juvenile chemists and physicists without 

 culture or general education. In 1907 the Board of Education issued its 

 first regulations for secondary schools, and sought something broader 

 than either of these two rival institutions ; they established a four-year 

 course in which English, geography and history, at least one language 

 other than English, mathematics, science, and drawing should be studied, 



