L.— EDUCATION. 227 



will find it strange that an ex-Minister, who has himself urged the 

 importance of this reorganisation and who believes that industry is 

 rapidly coming to demand longer full-time schooling and higher mental 

 training, should turn aside from this simple and neat conception of 

 adolescent education in order to plunge into the disordered tangle of 

 part-time continuation schools. To these critics I would reply that, 

 however important the recommendations of the Hadow Report may be, 

 nothing could be more disastrous than prematurely to confine the changing 

 demands of industry and the adventurous tastes of the growing boy within 

 the limits of any nicely-ordered school system. The small full-time 

 school of the English tradition is an inelastic institution, tending constantly 

 to conform, at best, to one of two or three types. The great advantage of 

 the part-time technical school at the present moment is its elasticity, its 

 ability to conform easily and tentatively to the demand of different 

 industries, its power of reacting directly upon that demand, guiding it, 

 modifying it and developing it. 



Consequently we ought, I think, to expand the Hadow ideal of four- 

 year courses of full-time schooling for all children from eleven to fifteen, 

 into the wider ideal of five-year courses for all children from eleven to 

 sixteen, beginning for the first three years in full-time schools but com- 

 pleted in the last two years either in full-time schools or in part-time 

 schools according to the pupil's needs. We should seek to ensure 

 attendance at the last two years of such courses, not by compulsion, but 

 by attraction and by arrangements with employers. A boy over fourteen 

 may legitimately be required by the State to show that he is either at work 

 or at school. That is a principle which in one form or another is as old 

 as the reign of Elizabeth, and as new as modern American policy ; but 

 that should be the limit of compulsion. The full-time school should, at 

 every stage, work in with the technical school, so that the five-year 

 course is really a continuous one. We shall thus secure, through close 

 co-operation between two distinct institutions, the same result as is 

 secured in America through the rather amorphous polytechnic-high 

 school, without destroying the individuality of our full-time schools. 



This should be the foundation and first storey of our policy of higher 

 education. If we want a name for this first storey, better than our 

 present phraseology of senior, central and technical schools, we might 

 consider the general name of junior high schools, full-time and part-time. 

 From this first storey will rise side by side our traditional type of secondary 

 school and our senior technical courses, bringing the pupil up to the 

 college stage of higher education, whether in the technical college or the 

 university. 



I need not continue further. My object has been not to sketch a new 

 structure of higher education, but rather to suggest that we should look 

 at our existing structure with new eyes and be prepared to make additions 

 to it, not according to some preconceived plan, but according to the 

 demands of a changing world. In order to do that our educators must 

 look at it from outside, not from inside. They must go out into the 

 highways and byways of our industrial life and mark how meaningless and 

 reinote appears much of our educational architecture to the puzzled gaze 

 of the ordinary man and woman at work in the world. My metaphor 



Q 2 



