L.— EDUCATION. 205 



together with manual work, physical exercises, and, for girls, housewifery. 

 As that course has been worked in practice in the last twenty-five years, 

 it has been in the main academic in spirit, and the important subjects 

 have come to be the native tongue, the foreign language or languages, and 

 mathematics and science ; the schools have continued to look to the 

 universities, and to the development of those advanced courses which 

 lead up to university studies. All this efiort has been directed and 

 stabilised, and some would say stereotyped, by the setting up of the 

 system of school certificates, for which in England and Wales eight 

 university authorities examine. All the secondary schools, therefore, have 

 in the main the same outlook, which is primarily that each pupil should 

 at the end of the first stage of the course be able to matriculate at a 

 university ; the school certificates have been brought into relation with 

 the matriculation examinations, and the system is now organised in all 

 its details. 



Meantime the number of schools, and the number of pupils at each 

 school, have greatly increased. In 1904 in England the number of 

 secondary schools for boys, for girls, and for boys and girls together was 

 575 ; there are now 1,184 recognised for grant by the Board of Education 

 and 305 recognised as efficient, but not eligible for grant. In 1904 the 

 number of pupils was 97,698 ; in October 1927 it was 349,430, and if 

 you add the 57,655 in the schools not eligible for grant you get a total 

 of 400,000 boys and girls who are in England pursuing a course of secondary 

 education. Now the reason why I have troubled you with these figures 

 is to point out that, while the content of secondary education has not 

 changed, and remains academic in spirit and outlook, the number of 

 schools has more than doubled, and the number of pupils has increased 

 by more than four times. To put it clearly in another way, in the first 

 year in which the school certificates examination was held, there were 

 14,232 candidates ; for the last one for which figures are available there 

 were 54,593, again very nearly an increase of four times. 



The result of pouring all this mass of new material into a single mould 

 has produced a slowly increasing volume of protest, but those who protest 

 are much more sure in describing the symptoms of the distresses of the 

 secondary schools than they are in pointing to their cause or in finding 

 the cure. It is said that there is a good deal of overstrain among the 

 pupils of the secondary schools, particularly among the girls, and that 

 for the average the effort of reaching a satisfactory level in English and 

 English subjects, in a foreign language or languages, and in mathematics 

 and sciences is too much. That this is so is shown by the fact that when 

 the examination was established it was supposed that nearly all would 

 be successful at the end of their course in obtaining a school certificate, 

 but as a matter of experience less than two out of three have been able 

 to do so. It is alleged that the examination hampers the freedom of the 

 teacher, who during the whole four years' course can never turn aside to 

 browse in the pleasant paths of literature or to pursue interests common 

 to himself and his class, but must concentrate the attention of his class 

 and himself wholly upon what will pay in the examination room. Great 

 schoolmasters of the past are quoted who could never have pursued their 

 favourite methods with success under present conditions. It is asserted 



