L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 239 
reading, writing and speech : the active exploration of the material environ- 
ment, including drawing and handwork: the formation of ideas of 
magnitudes of all kinds and the application of the ideas of number to their 
expression. The little country junior school, in particular, freed from 
the incubus of the handful of older scholars who could be such a nuisance 
to themselves and their teachers, is going to be a happier and more 
efficient place. Singleness of purpose promotes earlier accomplishment ; 
there is good reason to hope that in this respect a year at least of school 
life may be saved, and that the curriculum on which not so very long ago the 
elementary school child was released at thirteen years of age may be 
effectively completed by the average child of eleven to twelve. 
In the new senior school, taking children of eleven to fourteen and 
fifteen, the most conspicuous feature is the break with the old bookish 
tradition of elementary education. From a third to a half of the school 
time is given over to practical work—science, experimentally studied, 
including domestic science, woodwork and metal work, and many handi- 
crafts. It is commonly postulated that there shall be no vocational bias 
in this practical work, not even in the later years. At the same time, the 
children, in the words of the Hadow Report, are to be ‘ encouraged to 
take an interest in local industries and occupations, and illustrations for 
teaching in the several branches of the curriculum should be drawn, where 
possible, from local examples.’ 
Allow me for a moment to follow the argument whither it leads. In 
what way that is educationally profitable, and not merely superficial, can 
we interest the older children in local industries and occupations? In 
the case of the modern mass industry, I suggest that at least one way is to 
explain to them the fundamental process or processes on which the industry 
depends, and to allow them where possible to try their hand at them. 
For example, the boot and shoe industry, which is staple in the area in 
which we meet and the area from which I come, is a mass-production 
industry. 
In shoemaking the fundamental process is the attachment of the upper 
to the sole, in the case of the welted shoe by means of stitching mediated 
by the welt and the insole. If that is explained to the children as a process 
of development in time which is not yet completed, and if they are allowed, 
under expert guidance, to try their hand in simple materials at this and the 
immediately connected operations of the original handsewn work as 
practised before the days of machinery, an intelligent interest in that 
particular local industry will have been aroused, and the educational 
effect will extend beyond those of them who know that this is the industry 
which they will take up when they leave school. But what you will in 
fact have done is to put the children through the first lessons which the 
lad who is entering the industry takes in the department of boot and shoe 
technology at the local technical college or in the monotechnic. Teachers 
are prone to be too gingerly in the use they make of vocation in the schools. 
Academically minded people with no personal experience of industry or 
commerce assume an opposition between education through vocation and 
general education: the one they say tends to dwarf the growing mind 
and to narrow the outlook, as against the liberalising, expanding influences 
