L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 229 
example, at first taken for granted that the new free places would be filled 
without competition, indeed that they might even go unfilled for lack of 
qualified applicants. 
Let us see what has actually happened. In 1902 the number of schools 
receiving State aid through the Board was under 300, and the number of 
pupils taking an approved course under 32,000. ‘Three years later the 
number of schools had risen to 600 and the pupils to 100,000. By rg11, 
the last year of Sir Robert Morant’s term at the Board, the number of 
grant-aided schools was 862 and the number of pupils had passed the 
150,000 mark, if we include those in schools recognised as efficient but 
not in receipt of grant. 
The first year of the War came and found 205,000 children in the 
schools. Down to that point the rising tide of numbers from 100,000 
to 205,000 in ten years had encouraged authorities and administrators to 
lay their plans with confidence. The flow was steady as well as strong ; 
there was no falling off in demand to warn us that high water was nearly 
reached. Was the War that warning? Had we come to the turn? 
The answer soon came in a thrust for secondary education the like of 
which this country had never seen before—is hardly likely to see again. 
In the five years 1915 to 1920 the school numbers leaped with accelerating 
speed by 113,000. ‘The thrust was not due, as the cynics suggested, to 
easy money which enabled parents to pay school fees without feeling 
them much, for in the next year, the year of the first economy wave, there 
was a further leap of 32,000 and, save for a slight fall of less than 
1,000 in 1924, the advance has continued until in 1932 there were 
452,000 children, nearly 10°5 per 1,000 of our total population, receiving 
secondary education in nearly 1,600 schools recognised as efficient, of 
which the local authorities provide not quite half. 
In the discussion of educational problems the layman probably gets 
less help from the professional than, as paymaster, he is entitled to, not by 
reason of undue reticence on the part of the professional, for we are a 
talkative profession, but so much of the talk is about temporalities—pay 
and pensions, status and prospects—and argument at the top of the 
voice, in other words shouting one’s opponent down, is very fatiguing to 
the listener. So the layman is driven to reason from his own youthful 
experiences until he renews his contact with the schools through his 
children. It is not surprising that the idea that the secondary school is 
a Class school should still linger on. Is there anything in it? Rapid as 
the growth of the schools has been, the free place holders have increased 
even more rapidly. In the first year of the century there were about 
5,500 children from public elementary schools attending the secondary 
schools with the help of public funds. By 1906, the year before the 
Free Place Regulations were made, there were 23,500. Within four years 
of the passage of the Regulations there were over 49,000 free place 
holders, and nearly a third of the total numbers in the schools were in 
this category. At that time one out of every twenty-two elementary school 
leavers in England went to a secondary school, and one out of every forty- 
six received free education there. This process of social interfusion has 
gone on without a check during the twenty years which have since elapsed, 
