L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 247 



we are to build a real modern civilisation we must go on with definite 

 informative instruction into and even beyond adolescence. Children 

 and young people are likely to be less numerous proportionally in the 

 years ahead of us in all the more civilised populations and we cannot afford 

 to consume them in premature employment after the fashion of the pre- 

 ceding centuries. The average age of our population is rising and this 

 involves an upward extension of education. And so you will see I suggest 

 what I call an undergraduate or continuation school, Grade D, the upper 

 adolescent stage, which I presume will extend at last to every class in the 

 population, in which at least half the knowledge acquired will be 

 specialised in relation to interest, aptitude and the social needs of the indi- 

 vidual. But the other half will have to be unspecialised, it will have to be 

 general political education. Here particularly comes in that education 

 for citizenship to which this educational section is to give attention later. 

 It seems to me altogether preposterous that nowadays our educational 

 organisation should turn out new citizens who are blankly ignorant of the 

 history of the world during the last twenty-five years, who know nothing 

 of the causes and phases of the Great War and are left to the tender mercies 

 of freakish newspaper proprietors and party organisers for their ideas about 

 the world outlook, upon which their collective wills and actions must play 

 a decisive part. 



Social organisation is equally a matter for definite information. ' We 

 are all socialists nowadays.' Everybody has been repeating that after the 

 late Lord Rosebery for years and years. Each for all and all for each. 

 We are all agreed upon the desirability of the spirit of Christianity and of 

 the spirit of Democracy, and that the general interest of the community 

 should not be sacrificed to Private Profit. Yes — beautiful, but what is 

 not realised is that Socialism in itself is little more than a generalisation 

 about the undesirability of irresponsible ownership and that the major 

 problem before the world is to devise some form of administrative organisa- 

 tion that will work better than the scramble of irresponsible owners. That 

 form of administrative organisation has not yet been devised. You cannot 

 expropriate the private adventurer until you have devised a competent 

 receiver for the expropriated industry or service. This complex problem 

 of the competent receiver is the underlying problem of most of our con- 

 structive politics. It is imperative that every voter should have some 

 conception of the experiments in economic control that are in progress 

 in Great Britain, the United States of America, Italy, Germany, Russia 

 and elsewhere. Such experiments are going to affect the whole of his or 

 her life profoundly. So, too, are the experiments in monetary and financial 

 organisation. Many of the issues involved go further than general 

 principles. They are quantitative issues, questions of balance and more 

 or less. A certain elementary training in statistical method is becoming 

 as necessary for anyone living in this world of to-day as reading and writing. 

 I am asking for this much contemporary history as the crowning phase, 

 the graduation phase of our knowledge-giving. Afcer that much founda- 

 tion, the informative side of education may well be left to look after itself. 



Speaking as a teacher of sorts myself, to a gathering in which teachers 

 probably predominate, I need scarcely dilate upon the fascination of 

 diagram drawing. You will understand how reluctant I was to finish off 



