SECTION L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 
EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, 
1831-1931 : 
A CENTENARY SURVEY AND A FORECAST. 
ADDRESS BY 
SIR(CHARLES GRANT ROBERTSON, C.V.O., M.A., LL.D., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
Tue honour of presiding over the Education Section at this Centenary 
Meeting of the British Association is no mean one, and I gladly acknow- 
ledge the pleasure that the invitation to be your President has given me, 
even though it inevitably carries with it the duty of inflicting on my 
audience a Presidential address. My life as far back as I can remember 
has been concerned with one form of education or another, although I have 
successfully avoided on the whole the dubious duty of adding to the burden 
of printed books on the theory or practice of a subject, which has been 
more than once described as more dismal and arid than even the dismal 
science of Political Economy, and more vulnerable even than Theology 
to the charge that, in all such contributions to theory or practice from 
Zoroaster to, shall we say, Mr. Bertrand Russell, whatever is true is not 
new and whatever is new is flagitiously and demonstrably untrue. The 
world, as far as I can make out, has always teemed with educational 
reformers. The continuous puzzle for the historian has been to find out 
where the Reforms of the Reformers have gone to, or in what the Reforms 
actually achieved have precisely consisted. At this moment in particular, 
standing alone in the tumbril which we politely call the Presidential 
Chair, I am acutely conscious that as a small boy I was part of an historic 
experiment in educational reform when I was sent to the school of R. H. 
Quick in Orme Square, Bayswater. Quick deservedly has, by a notable 
book on ‘ Educational Reformers,’ a secure niche in the history and 
practice of education ; but neither at the time nor since have I ever been 
conscious that under Quick I was learning new things in a new way. 
And the only convincing reason that I can give for this deplorable failure 
on my part is that if, in that misty past, I had been subjected to a Binet 
Test I should have been at once shown up as, for my age-level, much 
below the normal metrical scale of intelligence. 
In selecting the subject of my Presidential Address, I was confronted 
with one obvious difficulty. Presidents of this and other Sections, 1 
understand, usually can press into their addresses the fruits of their own 
independent and original research. But though for more than thirty-five 
years I have been an investigator, a teacher, and an administrator, I 
