L.— EDUCATION. 221 



The idea that the value and continuity of education depends upon the 

 number of hours spent in school has no basis except the bureaucratic love 

 of a tidy system. May one dare to say, in passing, that the chief danger 

 of a State system of education is that the teaching profession is already 

 peculiarly susceptible to the morbus of bureaucracy without the additional 

 risk of infection arising out of continual contact with civil servants ? 



The third unhealthy influence, to which we are particularly exposed 

 at the present moment, is the unnatural connection between the ideal of 

 popular education and the idea of statutory compulsion. Compulsion is 

 a necessary ingredient in elementary education, and at that stage, therefore, 

 statutory compulsion has a certain justification, not only in expediency, 

 but in reason. It is at any rate not out of harmony with the atmosphere 

 of the elementary school. The same may be said of the transition stage, 

 though here, if carried beyond a certain age, it should be mitigated by 

 exemptions. But compulsion is utterly alien to the whole conception of 

 higher education, and no sound system of higher education can ever be 

 based upon the expedient of statutory compulsion. For the same reason, 

 the principle, so dear to many of our fellow citizens, of ' no public money 

 without public control ' may be applied with some show of reason to 

 elementary education, but is wholly out of place in higher education. 



At this moment we are in imminent danger of pushing up the methods 

 of elementary education into the sphere of higher education. If we do 

 this, we fail to secure higher education, by whatever name we call our 

 schools, and we merely keep children in an elementary atmosphere beyond 

 the age at which they should be entering the atmosphere of higher 

 education. We have now reached, or more than reached, the point at 

 which we can no longer work upwards from the elementary school, with 

 our old tools of statutory compulsion and public control. We must begin 

 rather to work downwards from the University, introducing more and 

 more into our education, whether given in full-time schools or part-time 

 classes, the influence of those standards of academic freedom and 

 intellectual authority which it is the peculiar function of the Universities 

 to maintain. 



In working downwards from the university, however, we must be 

 careful not to confuse two quite distinct meanings of the phrase ' higher 

 education.' In the sense in which I have been using that phrase, and 

 shall continue to use it, it means the guidance required by all normal boys 

 and girls at a certain stage in their mental development through which 

 they all pass. The guidance they require is almost infinitely varied, 

 according to their bent of mind and the work they are going to do in life, 

 and this higher education must therefore be selective in the sense of being 

 discriminatory. But the phrase ' higher education ' also means either 

 advanced studies for which only a minority are fit, or a certain refinement 

 and tempering of the powers of the mind which is not generally necessary 

 for salvation, and may even be harmful to many minds. Not all metals 

 can be ground to a fine edge, not all tools need to be ; and to keep a 

 fine edge on a fish knife is a positive waste of metal. This is the higher 

 education of the universities themselves, and it must be selective in the 

 sense of being given only to a comparatively small number of selected 

 students. Confusion between these two meanings of the same phrase 



