226 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



school of the United States, cannot provide machine shops within its own 

 walls. That fact puts a definite limitation on the function which it should 

 seek to perform and the full-time school should, therefore, not attempt, 

 as it is attempting at present, to cover the whole ground of adolescent 

 education. Its justification lies in the mental training it can give, and it 

 should beware of ineffective compromises with the needs of boys who 

 still require physical rather than mental training. 



In my view, therefore, our first aim in higher education should be to 

 develop part-time education in technical schools and continuation classes 

 for all children over the age of fourteen. The reason for this is not that 

 part-time schooling is better than full-timp schooling for the mass of our 

 r)opulation. The experience of the United States seems to indicate that 

 in the coming machine age, full-time schooling will, under the influence of 

 industry itself, more and more supersede part-time schooling. The reason 

 is rather that we are in a stage of transition when purely manual labour, 

 and therefore juvenile labour, is still required in many industries which 

 will increasingly eliminate it in the future as they reorganise themselves, 

 but when almost all industries desire that their young employees should 

 remain in touch with education in some form. In these circumstances, we 

 should not run the risk of starting the full-time schools of the future on 

 wrong lines, by forcing them to assimilate a mass of pupils who would 

 stay on at school with no clear object either in their own mind or in the 

 mind of their future employers. The various types of full-time schools 

 should, on the contrary, be given an opportunity to detach themselves, 

 as it were, from the background of popular education, to define the kind 

 of mental training they seek to offer and then to draw away from the great 

 reservoir of part-time education an increasing number of pupils who need 

 that kind of training. Moreover, the adequate development of part-time 

 technical education is of the first importance because, if American 

 experience again is any guide, many pupils in full-time schools will, in the 

 future, have to combine their mental training with a considerable amount 

 of practice in the machine shop, and this they will only be able to do if 

 they have at their disposal technical colleges equipped to receive them for 

 a certain number of hours in the week along with pupils attending part- 

 time classes. The part-time technical school or college must, in fact, 

 increasingly occupy the position of a central focus for a large range of 

 full-time schools, who will be grouped round them for ' practical ' 

 instruction purposes. 



Parenthetically be it remarked, this is, of course, an urban conception 

 of education. The rural problem is, in many respects, a different one 

 with which I have no time to deal to-day ; but, here too, it is to be hoped 

 that we shall see a development of agricultural colleges occupying much 

 the same position as the Danish folk school — the more so because full-time 

 education will never play so large a part in the life of an agricultural as of 

 an industrial community, however much the mechanisation of agriculture 

 may be developed in the future. 



I know that these views will be distasteful to a large number of people 

 who, fixing their eyes on the idea of a comprehensive reorganisation of 

 full-time schools associated with the Hadow Report, have no thought to 

 spare for what they regard as the pis alter of part-time education. They 



