238 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
secondary school, recruiting its students at eleven for a five or six years’ 
course, the first two years of which would be devoted to their general 
education. I doubt, however, whether this would advantage the schools. 
With the choice between the secondary school and the technical school 
before them, most parents would elect for the secondary school, and not 
for social reasons only. It is too early to decide at eleven years of age 
that a boy or girl is to enter one of a group of trades at sixteen or seven- 
teen. Even if the object were realised, one would anticipate a large 
increase later on in the number of misfits, and some weakening of the 
vocational purpose, confused, as it would be, by the need to give a general 
course to the younger pupils. 
Meanwhile, the schools are experiencing no difficulty in getting pupils: 
rather they are threatened with a different danger, for they have been so 
successful that in many of them recruitment becomes a matter of selection 
among applicants, and is decided by competitive tests, which as at present 
conducted are no certain guide to the comparative ability of the applicants 
to profit by the instruction given. On the other hand, self-selection by 
the pupil is no certain guide either. 
I can offer no solution of this very interesting little problem. It is 
interesting because we are here within sight of one of the fundamental 
difficulties which the fashionable modern doctrine of the planned society 
encounters. By whom in such a society, and on what principles, are the 
allocations of man-power to be made, and how, if at all, can they be 
reconciled with the preservation of that freedom to strive for advance- 
ment which I have already spoken of as one of the ideals of democracy ? 
Hitherto we have not been much troubled in education with this aspect 
of planning, for the junior technical school is unique among our institu- 
tions in the deliberate equation of supply to demand. But we are likely 
to hear a good deal more about it in the immediate future unless economic 
conditions alter substantially for the better. Although we may not believe 
that education can be reorganised on the quota system, so many and 
no more being trained to be clerks, so many to be machinists, and so on, 
yet I think this feature of the junior technical school is well worth re- 
taining for the sake of the light which will be thrown on the bigger 
question by the working out of the equation on a small scale. 
This discussion of the organisation of pre-employment vocational 
education, fragmentary though it is, should not conclude without some 
reference to the effects which the reorganisation of elementary education 
at the age of eleven into primary and post-primary stages is likely to have. 
This reorganisation is well on the way to accomplishment in the urban 
areas. In the country areas there are special difficulties, due in the main 
to sparseness of population, which it will take years to overcome. 
While it is too early to speak positively of the results of reorganisation, 
certain tendencies can already be discerned. It is much that we are getting | 
rid of the confusion of aim between primary and post-primary, to which 
was traceable the general feebleness and failure to grip the minds of their 
pupils, which was found in many of the old mixed schools. The junior 
school can now apply itself unhindered to the business of the primary 
stage—development of the ability to communicate with others through 
