SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.— L. 439 



Mrs. Elsie Parker. — Education for the community in England. 

 The simple purpose of education. Schooling due to a conscious need for 

 social cohesion. The emergence of England's three-fold system of schools ; 

 does this system promote social cohesion ? The distribution of opportunity ; 

 retrogression in recent years ; the survival of reluctance to articulate the 

 structure. Selection or exclusion ? The notion of the ' multilateral school.' 

 Immediate needs and practical reforms. The r61e of the administrator, the 

 teacher and the parent. The need for a restatement of purpose and the 

 stirring of social conscience. 



Mens. A. Desclos. 



Dr. Graefer. 



Monday, September 6. 



Discussion on The educational function of the university (lo.o). 



Sir Richard Livingstone. 



If in our swiftly changing world education ceases at the age of twenty-two 

 or twenty-three, there is every probability that a man by forty will lose 

 intellectual energy and fail to keep up with the advancing knowledge. It is 

 a national problem how to keep the middle-aged mentally young. Only 

 one regimen can do this — Adult Education of a new type — and it is especially 

 desirable for anyone holding directing posts. This is already recognised 

 in the case of doctors' and teachers' ' Refresher ' and Vacation Courses. 

 But there is no occupation or profession in which the resumption of system- 

 atic education in later life would not be profitable ; it is especially desirable 

 and quite feasible in the Civil, Municipal and Local Authority Services. 

 Among interesting experiments in this direction are the grant of Common- 

 wealth Fellowships for study in the U.S.A. to Civil Servants and the recent 

 Summer School for Colonial Civil Servants at Oxford, but they need to be 

 widely developed. But little can be effected in this field unless the Civil 

 Service and the Local Authorities encourage and make possible regular 

 periods of study for their officials. The Universities' task is to encourage 

 and make systematic provision for such study. 



The return of adult students from practical life to the University should 

 help the study of the Social Sciences which are still very backward. They 

 cannot be so well studied by purely academic investigators as the Natural 

 Sciences. Civil Servants and Municipal officials, business men, doctors 

 and others, in their different fields, are more in touch with the actual problems 

 than is the academic researcher, and often possess a large amount of data 

 which he cannot have. Combination in the work of research by the Uni- 

 versity investigator and the practical man could achieve results which 

 neither can achieve separately. 



Prof. M. Ginsberg. — Social science and social philosophy in the 

 universities. 



The function of the Universities in the field of social studies is clearly to 

 equip students with the power not only of marshalling and correlating social 

 facts but also of interpreting and evaluating them. To achieve this end 

 social philosophy and social science must be effectively linked. Unfortun- 

 ately this is rarely if ever systematically attempted. The social sciences, 

 no doubt in the interests of objectivity and detachment, claim to be ethically 



