L— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 239 



an end somewhere about adolescence. Young people then left school or 

 college under the imputation that no one could teach theni any more. 

 There has been a quiet but complete revolution in people's ideas in this 

 respect and now it is recognised almost universally that people in a modern 

 community must be learners to the end of their days. We shall be giving 

 a considerable amount of attention to continuation adult and post- 

 graduate studies in this section, this year. It would be wasting our 

 opportunities not to do so. Here in Nottingham University College v^^e 

 have under Professor Peers the only Professorship of Aduh Education in 

 England, and the Adult Education Department which is in close touch 

 with the Workers' Education Association has broadened its scope far 

 beyond the normal range of Adult Education. Our modern idea seems 

 to be a continuation of learning not only for university graduates and 

 practitioners in the so-called intellectual professions, but for the miner, 

 the plough-boy, the taxi-cab driver and the out-of-work, throughout life. 

 Our ultimate aim is an entirely educated population. 



Nevertheless it is true that what I may call the main beams and girders 

 of the mental framework must be laid down, soundly or unsoundly, 

 before the close of adolescence. We live under conditions where it seems 

 we are still only able to afford for the majority of our young people, freedom 

 from economic exploitation, teachers even of the cheapest sort and some 

 educational equipment, up to the age of 14 or 15, and we have to fit our 

 projects to that. And even if we were free to carry on with unlimited 

 time and unrestrained teaching resources, it would still be in those 

 opening years that the framework of the mind would have to be made. 

 We have got to see therefore that whatever we propose as this irreducible 

 minimum of knowledge must be imparted between infancy and— at most, 

 the fifteenth or sixteenth year. Roughly, we have to get it into ten years 

 at the outside. 



And next let us turn to another relentlessly inelastic packing-case and 

 that is, the school time-table. How many hours in the week have we 

 got for this job in hand ? The maximum school hours we have available 

 are something round about thirty, but out of this we have to take time for 

 what I may call the non-informative teaching, the native and foreign 

 language teaching, teaching to read, teaching to write clearly, basic 

 mathematical work, drawing, various forms of manual training, music 

 and so forth. A certain amount of information may be mixed in with 

 these subjects but not very much. They are not what I mean by in- 

 formative subjects. By the time we are through with these non-informa- 

 tive subjects, I doubt if at the most generous estimate we can apportion 

 more than six hours a week to essentially informative work. Then let us, 

 still erring on the side of generosity, assume that there are 40 weeks of 

 schooling in the year. That gives us a maximum of 240 hours in the 

 year. And if we take ten years of schooling as an average human being's 

 preparation for life and if we disregard the ravages made upon our school 

 time by measles, chicken-pox, whooping-cough, coronations and occasions 

 of public rejoicing, we are given 2,400 hours as all that we can hope for 

 as our time allowance for building up a coherent picture of the world, 

 the essential foundation of knowledge and ideas, in the minds of our 

 people. The complete framework of knowledge has to be established in 



