L.— EDUCATION. 223 



syntheses and changing industrial organisation, education remains static, 

 it is not because the teacher lacks originality but because he lacks touch 

 with those who are the real originators. 



The organic defect in our higher education is that, like our government, 

 it is not harnessed to the life of the society it claims to serve, to the new 

 power and the new opportunities which society is constantly generating 

 from new knowledge. This lack of touch is most clearly seen in our 

 traditional attitude towards industry. The ' upper classes,' though deeply 

 affected by changing economic conditions, still think in terms of the 

 ' liberal professions." The choice before their sons, in their view, is either 

 to enter a " liberal profession ' in order to serve the community and make 

 a career, or to ' go into business ' in order to make money. The ' working 

 classes,' imitating as best they can this aristocratic superstition, assume 

 that their sons must as a rule submit to the drudgery of industry, but their 

 great ambition is that as many as possible should escape from this bondage 

 and become teachers, civil servants or trade union organisers. This is 

 still the atmosphere of both the public school and the secondary school. 

 The idea that industry may be made to offer the most adventurous of 

 careers, that it is the chief, and indeed the only direct, agent of social 

 welfare, and that the liberal professions, including government administra- 

 tion, have at best only the secondary job of diverting some of the wealth 

 produced by industry into particular channels of social welfare which 

 might otherwise run dry — all this is an unfamiliar conception of society 

 to many teachers and to most parents. The key to a new policy of higher 

 education is to make it a familiar conception. 



Now, the synthesis of new knowledge is pre-eminently the function of 

 universities. Universities, indeed, have played, and should play, a large 

 part in discovery itself ; but all discoveries, whether made within their 

 walls or not, come back to them for formulation and assimilation into the 

 general body of human knowledge. Hitherto the universities have 

 performed this function mainly in the field of the humanities and pure 

 science, but in recent years they have been called on increasingly to 

 perform it also in the realm of applied science and technology. In this 

 latter field their function of synthesis and interpretation is, or ought to be, 

 shared by the technical colleges, particularly in that part of the field 

 which relates to factory organisation and commercial practice. It may, 

 at first sight, seem absurd to include factory organisation and commercial 

 practice among the syntheses of knowledge for wliich universities are 

 partly responsible, but the fact remains that applied science is never 

 really applied until it is embodied in the most efficient factory unit 

 possible, and the most intelligent methods possible of selling goods in the 

 manufacture of which the latest discoveries of science have been used. 

 The Appointments Board of a great University, rightly understood, is a 

 recognition of this fact, for it embodies the acceptance by the University 

 of the responsibility for supplying to commerce and industry men trained 

 for the practical requirements of manufacturing and trading firms. It is 

 in these practical ways, as well as through the more purely academic 

 formulation and assimilation of new knowledge, that a university interprets 

 the outside demand for education both to its own teachers and to teachers 

 in all schools of higher education, and it is essential to the soundness of 



