224 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
mentary enactment and departmental regulation, including separate 
rating, should go over into the new régime. There were no beginnings 
even of organisation in higher education out of which a unified system 
could be constructed. The distinction, however, always was unreal. 
Higher education is by statute education other than elementary, which in 
the absence of a definition of elementary education gets us nowhere. 
There is no definition of elementary education in any statute, but an 
elementary school is defined as a school in which the principal part of 
the instruction is elementary, which recognises the possibility of some- 
thing more than elementary instruction being given in it. At one time 
indeed the old Science and Art Department impartially aided the teaching 
of science in both elementary and secondary schools. 
In actual practice, higher and elementary institutions have always 
overlapped, both as regards the ages of the pupils attending them and 
as regards the details of the curricula followed. The distinction is purely 
administrative, serving no useful educational purpose, and the modern 
development of the division between primary and post-primary has made 
it not merely useless, but absurd. It is also a nuisance, for it involves 
debatable apportionments of common expenditure, separate accounting, 
and other duplicate arrangements. Economy will be promoted in more 
than one direction by its abolition. 
The tide of opinion is setting towards the effacement of the Part III 
authorities—witness the recent Act which forbade the creation of any 
more of them as the result of the re-arrangement of local areas under the 
Local Government Act of 1929. There is already a clause in the Educa- 
tion Act which allows them to surrender their powers to the county — 
council. Need I say that the instances of such surrender are few. If 
local authorities, educational and other, have a common characteristic, 
it is the pertinacity with which they cling to the powers they possess. 
‘What we have we hold’ is their motto. Some of the Part III’s should 
be absorbed into the adjacent county area, the larger of them should be 
vested with full powers. No authorities should be allowed to survive 
which are unable to support a reasonable number and variety of schools at 
least to the end of the secondary stage ; on which principle some county 
and possibly some county borough authorities ought to lose their present 
powers. 
The relative positions of the central and the local authorities are very 
different in the two spheres of elementary and higher education. The 
Act of 1870 was extremely regulative. The powers, the duties, and the 
procedure of the school boards were prescribed with great particularity, 
and the control of the central authority was secured through its minutes, 
the well-known Code of Regulations for Public Elementary Schools, 
which, after confirmation by Parliament—an almost nominal proceeding— 
become the conditions of the payment of parliamentary grant. And the 
Code was even more detailed than the Statute. There were 130 articles, 
many of them with sub-sections, in the first Code under the Act of 1902. 
The school board and their successors were to enter the field of elementary 
education, but there must be no walking on the grass. It reminds me of a 
one-time open path which I used to take through beautiful country, but 
