L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 221 



Education Act of 1870 and the 1891 Act the country organised elementary 

 education. The Balfour Act of 1902 began a new era in the organisation 

 of secondary education. In the early years of the twentieth century 

 universities were created throughout the country. * Since 1889 technical 

 instruction has been developed thoroughly and effectively. That is a 

 great achievement. In all these fields — university, secondary, technical, 

 elementary — the problem has been faced and roughly solved. Improve- 

 ments and developments will come ; but the main lines have been well 

 laid and are not likely to be altered. We have the tools, even if we may 

 often use them ineffectively. In the future they may be improved and 

 elaborated, 1 but perhaps the chief improvement necessary is that we should 

 learn more of their use and purpose, and our worst failures are due to the 

 fact that we drift into and through education in a mechanical, automatic, 

 unthinking way, instead of clearly defining to our own minds what we 

 wish education to do for us and asking whether it is doing it and, if not, 

 why not. Like religion, education quickly degenerates into a routine ; 

 then its meaning and its effects are lost. Still the late nineteenth and 

 early twentieth centuries have done a great and solid work in it. So far, 

 so good. But are we an educated nation ? 



An English officer in Italy during the war, having to give an instruction 

 course to his men, set as a preliminary test a general paper in which occurred 

 the question : ' What do you know of any of the following persons ? ' 

 The persons in the question are here set out in the order indicating which 

 of them were most familiar to the candidates, and the figures after each 

 name show the number of candidates who identified each person : Charles 

 Peace 19, George Stephenson 16, Von Tirpitz 15, Nat Gould 14, C. B. 

 Fry 11, Sir H. Plumer 9, Woodrow Wilson 8, Clemenceau 7, Michael 

 Angelo 6, Sir R. Borden 6, Milton 4, Havelock Wilson 4, Lord Milner 2, 

 Sir Henry Havelock 1. 



There are several striking features in the result. Nineteen men had 

 heard of Charles Peace to two who had heard of Lord Milner. Though 

 the paper was set in the summer of 1918, when names like Wilson and 

 Clemenceau were on everyone's lips, there is a surprising ignorance of 

 statesmen who played a decisive part in the war. Even the name of their 

 own army commander, Sir Henry Plumer (as he then was), was un- 

 familiar to his men. Yet, as the unexpected knowledge of Michael 

 Angelo shows, they were quite capable of ' high-brow ' interests. Six, 

 at any rate, of the men had during the months spent in Italy learnt some- 

 thing of a great Italian. But the most interesting point for our purposes 

 is the light thrown on the results of our elementary education. The 

 examinees, men of a war-time regiment, were a fair sample of the average 

 man. They were neither half-witted nor wholly ignorant. But their 

 teachers had been the cheap press, their reading its sporting news and 

 murder reports, their politics learnt from its headlines. The result is 

 not adequate to an expenditure on elementary education of over seventy 

 millions. 



1 Post-primary education, for instance, is likely to become, at least for the 

 many, more practical and less literary. 



