L.— EDUCATION. 225 



functions, but will on the contrary be merely fulfilling their traditional 

 function of synthesizing research into doctrine and keeping new learning 

 up to date with new knowledge. 



And now, let us endeavour briefly to interpret this outside demand 

 and suggest the lines of a policy. 



The most important fact about it is that it is a demand for mental 

 keenness rather than for physical skill. Broadly speaking, industry is 

 approaching its apotheosis of mechanisation and requires the mind that 

 can marshal machines and can grasp the social purpose of cheap mass 

 production even in the dull routine of repetition work. A generalisation 

 like this is, indeed, no sooner made than it must be qualified. There are 

 signs in some directions that we are reacting away from the machine. 

 The world is probably less content, for instance, with machine-made 

 furniture to-day than it was twenty years ago, and the craft element is 

 increasingly coming back into that industry. The cheap jewellery 

 industry of Birmingham is suffering, not so much from a decline in demand, 

 as from the competition of better taste and greater and more highly 

 organised skill in France and other continental countries. But, while 

 some industries may depend upon craftsmanship, the number of industries 

 which rely on purely mechanical skill acquired at an early age is to-day 

 very small. The textile industries constitute one of the very few 

 exceptions, and it is surely an extraordinary reflection on our social 

 intelligence, that, so far as I know, we should have hitherto failed to make 

 any serious scientific study of the extent to which early apprenticeship is 

 really necessary to efficient production in a cotton or woollen mill equipped 

 with the most modern machinery. But, for our present purpose, we must 

 take the demand as we find it. 



This demand for mental keenness means, for most occupations, longer 

 schooling, and schooling directed primarily to the training of the mind. 

 One danger of our present school policy is, I think, that we are tending to 

 fall between two stools. Impressed as we rightly are with the need for 

 training of hand and eye in education, we are putting more and more 

 emphasis on ' practical ' instruction for older children in full-time schools, 

 and we are trying to give this education at the carpentry bench. In this 

 we are, perhaps, inclined to make the same mistake as has been made in the 

 ' arts and crafts ' movement. It is our business to make terms with the 

 machine, not to attempt to promote an ineffective reaction against it by 

 reviving the craft spirit of a past age. The reason why we are being called 

 on to keep children longer in school is not that the boy who is going to be 

 a manual worker, skilled or unskilled, ought to be kept out of the labour 

 market until he is fifteen or sixteen, but that the demand for manual labour, 

 skilled or unskilled, including juvenile labour, is declining every day and 

 is giving place to a demand for labour involving at least some measure of 

 abstract thinking and planning. To a very considerable extent — to what 

 extent it is one of the main duties of our educators to work out in detail — 

 this training of the mind should, no doubt, be carried out in actual contact 

 with the material things upon which the pupil's mind will have to work, 

 but these material things are not hand tools but machine tools. The type 

 of small full-time school to which we are accustomed in this country, and 

 which most of us think infinitely superior to the vast polytechnic-high 

 1930 Q 



