236 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
derived from the very independence of the line they have taken to get 
there. We may yet come to the drawing of lines and the erection of 
fences dividing the people, but if we do the educationist, I fancy, will be 
the last person whom the community will choose for the job. 
I have already indicated that the number of young people who 
voluntarily avail themselves of the evening institutes and other forms of 
part-time education reaches a substantial total, but for every one who 
does so there are at least three whose official education ceases when they 
leave the elementary school at fourteen. It is often suggested that this 
is a point at which the principle of compulsion should be introduced into 
a hitherto voluntary system. The compulsory continuation school 
clauses of the Fisher Act have been on the statute books for fifteen years. 
They would secure that every employed young person received in- 
struction in the employer’s time for the equivalent of one day a week 
between the ages of fourteen and sixteen and later between sixteen and 
eighteen. Why not put them into force? For a short time they were 
applied in London, but the enforcement broke down because London 
draws so much of its juvenile labour from contiguous areas to which the 
clauses were not applied. There is still one day continuation school 
under Mr. Fisher’s scheme which owes its success largely to the con- 
sistent support of the local employers. For the rest the clauses are a 
dead letter. They are, I fear, destined to remain so for a long time to 
come. Their general enforcement would be a very costly matter. It was 
calculated in 1919 that a complete system would require at the end of the 
third year no less than 32,000 teachers. Enforcement by areas would 
only be less costly on the assumption that some areas would not enforce, 
and the London experience goes to show that enforcement on that assump- 
tion is impracticable. For enforcement by industries, which is a 
conceivable alternative in some industries, Mr. Fisher’s Act did not 
provide. 
We are told that the nation is already spending upon the social services 
the utmost it can afford under present conditions. It may be so, though 
apparently the indulgence of a taste for expensive town halls is of no 
social service and is, therefore, permissible. At any rate in a time in 
which education is only allowed to expand at the price of making counter- 
vailing economies elsewhere, on the principle of the Irishman’s blanket, 
which you remember he lengthened by cutting a piece off the bottom 
and sewing it on the top, the day continuation school can be no more than 
a day dream. Moreover, when funds again become available, the raising 
of the school age has the first clam. We are too far committed to that 
by the adoption of the Hadow policy of senior schools to draw back. 
We may regret that it should be so and that the case for the continuation 
schools has never been properly put to the nation for decision. Indis- 
putably the transition from school to industry is the most critical operation 
in adolescent life. Is it not far more important for society that so 
bewildering a change of outlook and environment should be explained 
and related to the adolescent’s previous experience, that he should be 
guided and steadied through the first years of independence by teachers 
who themselves have a knowledge of industrial conditions, than that the 
