SECTION L—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 
EDUCATION AND FREEDOM 
ADDRESS BY 
A. W. PICKARD-CAMBRIDGE, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
Ir has not been unusual at the meetings of the British Association to 
discuss questions which have a peculiar practical interest and I venture to 
offer some observations on the connection between education and freedom, 
in the belief that the subject is one of critical importance to-day and that it 
is essential that those who are concerned with education should determine 
their attitude to it. 
No one with any power of discernment can have failed to note two 
opposite tendencies at work in the present day: the one, a tendency 
antagonistic, both in intention and in fact, to freedom; the other, a 
tendency to lay claim to freedom in ways which it is not always possible 
to defend. Of the second of these tendencies I do not intend to say much 
to-day, though I shall refer to it incidentally later on. It is seen in a 
number of educational theories which would so far as possible exclude 
discipline from life in the supposed interests of free development ; and 
also in a certain impatience with all forms of authority, of which those who 
are associated with young people have been more conscious in recent 
years than (for instance) before the war. But the other tendency we 
can see writ large in the recent history and present condition of nations 
and also reflected in the smaller letters of individual mentalities. In 
Germany, Italy and Russia we are watching the complete subordination of 
the individual to the State, not only in his external life and action, but 
also, so far as education and propaganda can achieve it, in thought and 
will. In all three countries the methods adopted have been essentially 
the same—the ruthless exercise of force, the extermination of persons who 
seemed likely to be irreconcileable, and thereafter the continuing threat 
of death, imprisonment and loss of goods, the employment of espionage 
in its most inhuman and revolting forms, creating distrust between 
members of the same family and between friends who seemed inseparably 
united, and the enforcement of methods of education and psychological 
manipulation calculated to mould impressionable minds into one and the 
same rigid and uniform shape, and to permit no independence of judg- 
ment or of action. The suppression of truth and the propagation of 
convenient falsehoods have been regular elements in the system. Any 
