238 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



the production of various outlines and summaries of contemporary know- 

 ledge. Necessarily they had the defects and limitations of a private 

 adventure but in making them I learnt a great deal about — vi^hat shall 

 I say ? — the contents of the minds our schools are turning out as taught. 



And so now I am proposing to concentrate the attention of this Section 

 for this meeting on the question of what is taught as fact, that is to say 

 upon the informative side of educational work. For this year I suggest we 

 give the questions of drill, skills, art, music, the teaching of languages, 

 mathematics and other symbols, physical training and development, a 

 rest, and that we concentrate on the inquiry : What are zoe telling young 

 people directly about the world in which they are to live ? What is the 

 world picture we are presenting to their minds ? What is the framework 

 of conceptions about reality and about obligation into which the rest of 

 their mental existences will have to be fitted ? I am proposing in fact 

 a review of the informative side of education, wholly and solely — informative 

 in relation to the needs of modern life. 



And here the fact that I am an educational outsider — which in every 

 other relation would be a disqualification — gives me certain very real 

 advantages. I can talk with exceptional frankness. And I am inclined 

 to think that in this matter of the informative side of education frankness 

 has not always been conspicuous. For what I say I am responsible only 

 to the hearer and my own self-respect. I occupy no position from which 

 I can be dismissed as unsound in my ideas. I follow no career that can 

 be affected by anything I say. I follow, indeed, no career. I have no 

 party, no colleagues or associates who can be embarrassed by any un- 

 orthodox suggestions I make. Every schoolmaster, every teacher, nearly 

 every professor must, by the nature of his calling, be wary, diplomatic, 

 compromising — he has his governors to consider, his college to consider, 

 his parents to consider, the local press to consider ; he must not say too 

 much nor say anything that might be misinterpreted and misunderstood. 

 I can. And so I think I can best serve the purposes of the British Associa- 

 tion and this section by taking every advantage of my irresponsibility, 

 being as unorthodox and provocative as I can be, and so possibly saying 

 a thing or two which you are not free to say but which some of you at any 

 rate will be more or less willing to have said. 



Now when I set myself to review the field of inquiry I have thus defined, 

 I found it was necessary to take a number of very practical preliminary 

 issues into account. As educators we are going to ask what is the subject- 

 matter of a general education ? What do we want known ? And how 

 do we want it known ? What is the essential framework of knowledge 

 that should be established in the normal citizen of our modern com- 

 munity ? What is the irreducible minimum of knowledge for a respon- 

 sible human being to-day ? 



I say irreducible minimum — and I do so, because I know at least enough 

 of school work to know the grim significance of the school time-table 

 and of the leaving school age. Under contemporary conditions our only 

 prospect of securing a mental accord throughout the community is by 

 laying a common foundation of knowledge and ideas in the school years. 

 No one believes to-day, as our grandparents — perhaps for most of you it 

 would be better to say great-grandparents — believed, that education had 



