SECTION L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 



A POLICY OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 



ADDRESS BY 



THE RIGHT HON. LORD EUSTACE PERCY, P.C, M.P., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



My audience will, I hope, forgive me if at the outset I indulge in some 

 platitudes. 



Education is not schooling. To approach the problem of higher 

 education from the administrative point of view, to start by planning a 

 school system and a school curriculum, is to begin at the wrong end. The 

 only assumption that the educational administrator has any right to make 

 is that, up to the age of eighteen, a boy or a girl should never be out of 

 touch with educational opportunities, and that it is the duty of all public- 

 spirited citizens to co-operate in providing such opportunities. What 

 the opportunities should be must depend, not upon any preconceived 

 assumptions as to the best and most efficient school system, but on the 

 needs of the individual boy or girl, as expressed in their demand, or the 

 demand of their parents or employers, for a particular kind of education. 

 Our first business is to discover that demand and to make it conscious and 

 articulate. When we have done that, the educational administrator can 

 come in to satisfy it. 



The first step towards discovering what is the demand for education is 

 to realise the difference between elementary and higher education. Up to 

 a certain point in a child's life he must be compelled to take what he is 

 given. This is the stage of elementary education. The good teacher will 

 make elementary instruction attractive, but he must avoid like poison 

 the sloppy idea, into which teachers were in danger of falling a few years 

 ago, that the soundness of elementary education is to be measured by its 

 attractiveness. In some degree elementary education must always be 

 forcible feeding. Then comes a transition stage between elementary and 

 higher education when the pupil needs in a special degree the discipline 

 of a good school, but when he is beginning to be a responsible person with 

 a conscious bent of mind and intelligent preferences, to which the wise 

 teacher, not to speak of the wise parent, must attach full value. Last 

 comes the stage of higher education, when forcible feeding becomes 

 impossible and school discipline fades into the background. In that stage 

 the lifeblood of education is the attraction exercised by the free teacher 

 over the free pupil, the willing recognition by the pupil of the teacher's 

 intellectual authority. 



These stages run into each other. They vary in length according to 

 the individual. Personality defies all attempts at rigid classification. 

 But, broadly speaking, every boy or girl must progress from each of these 

 stages to the next, and if he cannot do so at a full-time school it is a sign 



