208 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



knowledge. On tlie other hand many professors and university teachers 

 are loud in their condemnation of the state in which their pupils come to 

 them, with minds ill-balanced and ill-furnished. I submit that this 

 region of the last two years of school is insufficiently explored, and the 

 nature of the work that should be done by the average student not thought 

 out. I submit further that it is a matter which might well engage the 

 attention of all the universities of the country in conference. They have 

 perhaps no common mind, but I do not know that they have attempted 

 to arrive at one : they have never clearly stated what they want ; they 

 have never faced the fact that through their scholarships they make 

 extreme specialisation necessary, and through their professors complain 

 of the result. I regard the matter as urgent, for as chairman of the 

 Secondary Schools Examination Council I know that the curriculum and 

 the examinations proper to this later period of school life stand in great 

 need of definition, and that in proceeding to the work, which cannot long 

 be deferred, we have no clear guidance from the universities as to what 

 they really want. 



However, it is not only in the secondary schools that some thinking 

 needs to be done about the requirements of the immediate future ; there 

 is also some advance that needs to be made after due thought in that 

 very complicated field which is known as technical and further education. 

 There has just lately been issued the second part of the report of the 

 Committee on Education and Industry in England and Wales, to which 

 I would commend this audience if they would like to go deeply into the 

 matter. In this department of education the next steps which require 

 to be taken are all of them steps to secure better contact with other 

 branches of the educational system, and with industry and employment. 

 Technical education is a field which has been developed all by itself, and 

 in isolation from almost everything else. Each part has grown to meet 

 a need, and usually a local need. It is cut off from the elementary educa- 

 tion which precedes it, for elementary and technical education have been 

 controlled by different departments of the Board of Education, and it 

 is cut off from the university education, which in the case of the best 

 students ought to follow. There is frequently a gap of one, two, or even 

 more years between the end of the elementary course and the beginning 

 of technical instruction, and that instruction is frequently sterilised by 

 the fact that students have to come to it tired, late in the evening, and 

 in the centre of cities. Finally, there is need of much fuller contact, of 

 more mutual knowledge and sympathy, not only between technical educa- 

 tion and industry, but also between all forms of industry and commerce 

 and all forms of education. There ought to be a full inquiry into this 

 difficult and complicated problem ; educationists ought to know and 

 consider more thoroughly what is wanted, and employers ought to take 

 much more trouble to find out what is being done. May I quote in this 

 connexion a paragraph from the recent report of the Committee on 

 Education and Industry with which I thoroughly agree ? ' We do not 

 consider,' they say, ' that educational policy should be determined by 

 industrial requirements, however legitimate in themselves. What we do 

 feel most strongly is that in the interests of the boys and girls, quite as 

 much as in the interests of industry, educational policy, and still more 



