228 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



tempts me to an ecclesiastical analogy. The old English village knows 

 and understands the old English parish church ; it fits into the landscape ; 

 it is a familiar part of the local life. So with the elementary school ; it 

 has grown into, because for sixty years and more it has grown up with, 

 the social life of the masses of the people. The old English town knows, too, 

 and understands its larger churches and its cathedral ; here and throughout 

 Europe the towers and spires of the Middle Ages soar above the huddle of 

 roofs below them and yet seem a natural part of the picture. So with our 

 universities and our grammar and secondary schools, old and new ; 

 England understands them and can labour intelligently to fit them to 

 serve the needs of each succeeding generation. But what of the new 

 and staring churches of many of our great industrial cities, built as it 

 were to order and seeming often to intrude an alien air of middle-class 

 respectability into crowded streets and bustling business centres ? These 

 are like too much of our modern educational legislation and administration, 

 fine, pretentious, roomy, expensive, but representing, not what the man 

 in the street needs, but what other people think he ought to need. Those 

 who labour in these new structures, the teachers like the parsons, are 

 doing a tremendous work, but they are doing it under a severe handicap. 

 Let us resolve in future to plan our education, not on any mere past 

 experience or on any analogies with aristocratic traditions, but in response 

 to a growing demand which we may indeed seek to guide but which it 

 must be our main task to interpret and to satisfy. 



