220 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



that full-time schooling does not meet his needs. There is a tendency- 

 to-day to assume that full-time schooling up to sixteen must be good for 

 everyone, and that all we require is a sufficient variety of schools and 

 curricula. But no one has the least right to make so sweeping an 

 assumption. The more we can vary schools and curricula the better, 

 but at any given moment we must assert that a pupil who fails to progress 

 in this way at the school or schools which are in practice available to him 

 had better leave school. If at the age when he ought to be showing 

 intelligent preferences he continues to require forcible feeding, he had 

 better be moved for a time to an atmosphere where he can become 

 conscious of intellectual hunger. If at the age when he ought to be 

 responding to the attraction of a teacher's intellectual authority, he 

 continues to require the discipline of compulsion, he had better be handed 

 over for a time to the discipline of the factory. Observe that I say, for 

 a time ; I will return to that point in a moment. Higher education cannot 

 work by compulsion ; if it is forced to do so it will destroy the soul of the 

 society which sets it to perform so uncongenial a task. 



At present our attitude towards higher education is vitiated by three 

 unhealthy influences. The first is the superstitious reverence for full-time 

 schooling which we owe to a hereditary governing class. When at about 

 the time of the Reformation the lay servant of the king succeeded the 

 ecclesiastical official in the government of the country, the grammar 

 school, which had been the selective recruiting agent of the ecclesiastic, 

 was gradually expanded into the routine training-ground for all the sons of 

 all the king's servants. Through this parade ground they all passed, with, 

 on the whole, astonishingly good results ; but any public school man could 

 draw up a deplorably long list of the misfits of which he had personal 

 knowledge among his contemporaries. The number of these misfits is, 

 I think, growing as the old hierarchical social system of the nation crumbles. 

 The public school boy of to-day surely tends to weary of school at an 

 earlier age than did his father, and an increasing number of ' upper ' and 

 ' middle ' class parents must experience an uncomfortable feeling that, 

 after all, this or that one among their sons might have developed much 

 stronger intellectual appetites if he had gone through a workshop 

 apprenti'ieship at a comparatively early age. Yet this is the moment 

 we choose for compelling all parents to burn incense to this aristocratic 

 idol of indiscriminate full-time schooling. 



The second unhealthy influence is a corollary of this superstition : the 

 assumption that all education must take the form of a continuous school 

 and university life, that if a boy leaves school he abandons definitely all 

 hope of pursuing any connected course of education. Hence we have 

 despised the idea of part-time education, as if such education were merely 

 a sop thrown to the imfortunate orphans of our civilisation in part com- 

 pensation for their lack of full-time schooling. Nothing could be further 

 from the truth, as we can see if we glance at the Danish folk school, at the 

 German educational system, or even at our own technical colleges. The 

 truth is, on the contrary, that our secondary schools and universities 

 should be paralleled, throughout their length, by courses of part-time 

 education, and that opportunities should be provided for all students, 

 according to their needs, to change from one to the other at any stage. 



