L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 237 
transition should be deferred in favour of one more year of full-time 
schooling ? 
But if we cannot have what we would like, let us try to make the best 
of what we have. It is a solid gain that the young employee’s efforts to 
improve himself in the evening school are no longer regarded by em- 
ployers in general as entirely his own affair. Fees are paid by employers, 
prizes are offered, reports are called for, and are sometimes allowed to 
influence wages and promotion ; and interest is shown in many other 
ways: These are all good in themselves, but a time-off system, such as 
already obtains, for example, in the large engineering centres, would be 
better than all of them put together. Is it treating education seriously 
to relegate it, as we do, to the hours which should be hours of leisure 
after the day’s work is done ? The youth of lively and independent mind 
is repelled by such an arrangement. The standard and quality of the 
work are alike depressed. It is notorious that irregularities of attendance 
occur which no other educational institution would condone. Better 
work is done in the evenings than we have any right to expect, for youth 
will be served whatever the conditions. But until the classes can be held 
in the day, the employer finding his share of the time required, there is 
no prospect of any further large development of part-time education. 
The nearest approach which has been made in this country to the type 
of school with a strictly vocational outlook, but so far comparable in other 
respects with the secondary school that it can reasonably be regarded as 
alternative to it, is the junior technical school, which has been officially 
recognised for about twenty years, though there was much earlier experi- 
ment. At the present time there are about 170 of these schools, with 
about 20,000 pupils between them. They recruit these students at 
thirteen or fourteen years of age for a three or four years’ course of full- 
time education, with the object of preparing them for entry into industry. 
Sometimes they prepare for a single local trade, but usually for a group 
of allied trades. ‘Their success—and they have been very successful— 
is conditioned by their ability to place their students advantageously at 
the end of the course, for enrolment is voluntary, and parents and pupils 
naturally expect some return for the deferment of employment which 
the course involves, ‘Their association with industry is, therefore, bound 
to be close, and for the same reason they have individually no latent 
possibility of indefinite expansion. They are ill suited to the conditions 
of recruitment and employment in some industries—for example, agri- 
culture and the iron and steel industry. There should, however, be room 
for a carefully prepared increase in the number in areas where industries 
predominate, to which the junior technical school is an appropriate 
introduction. 
Their position in the educational system is a little anomalous, for the 
.age of entry does not synchronise with the leaving age in the elementary 
schools, and falling as it does in the middle of the secondary school course, 
they tend to lose the children who are recruited by the secondary schools 
a year or two earlier, for some of whom the junior technical course would 
be more suitable. To overcome this difficulty it has been proposed that 
the junior technical school should be made a complete alternative to the 
