222 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



That examination paper indicates the gap — the bottomless pit, I had 

 almost said — in our national education and the task of the next twenty 

 years. We have left the vast majority of the population without any kind 

 of liberal education. * We have provided for the minority who attend 

 secondary school and university. We have shown the rest a glimpse of 

 the promised land, and left them outside it. Aristotle may have gone too 

 far when he said that the object of education was to help men to use their 

 leisure rightly. But we have treated the majority as if they were to have 

 no leisure, or as if it did not matter how they used what leisure they had. 

 Art, music, science, literature were for the few. The rest were dis- 

 inherited from some of the purest and highest pleasures. They might 

 be machines or animals ; men in the Shakespearean sense they could not 

 be. That is the type of democracy with which we have been, and are, 

 content. 



It mattered, perhaps, the less in the past. When the working-man had 

 no leisure, why educate him to use something that he would never have ? 

 The question barely arose. But to-day it is arising, and in the near 

 future it is likely to be urgent. In 1900 most men had enough to do to 

 earn a living. In 1940 or 1950 they will probably have the opportunity 

 to be more than bread-winners. But if the leisure of the future is to be 

 entirely devoted to the fil-is and the dogs, civilisation will not have gained 

 much by it. Fifty years ago the employment of leisure was no problem 

 for any but the well-to-do, who mostly wasted it. To-day it is becoming 

 a commonplace of education. 



What, then, would you say of a nation which believed this, and which 

 then acquiesced in the greater part of its people leaving school at the age 

 of 14 and being thrown straight into the deep waters of life. Would not 

 the old proverb rise to your mind, Parturiunt monies, nascetur ridiculus 

 mus. In this matter our attitude has been as complacent and unthinking, 

 if not as disastrous and cruel, as that of our ancestors who acquiesced in 

 social iniquities which seem incredible to us. We have accepted it 

 with the equanimity with which they accepted the slave-trade, child- 

 labour and debtor's prisons. For consider what a child has learnt by 

 the age of 14. He can read and write and do arithmetic. He has made a 

 beginning in many subjects, and received a training which enables him 

 to use an opportunity of learning more. But of history, except in a 

 superficial sense, he knows nothing ; of the forces that affect the fortunes 

 of the country, which as a voter he will help to determine, he knows 

 nothing ; economics, historical traditions, political theories are a closed 

 mystery to him ; he will have opened the great book of literature but he 

 has had little time to turn its pages ; of science he is even more ignorant. 

 Most of my audience probably did not leave school at 14 ; many have gone 

 to the University. Let them ask themselves how it would have fared with 

 their intellectual and spiritual life if their education had ceased at 14. 

 Would they be willing that their own children should leave school at that 

 age ? Yet that is the lot of the great majority of children in this country. 

 And we have been singularly complacent about it. The task of the future 

 is clear. It is to meet the needs of those who now leave school at 14, 15 



