228 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



tion class, whose students snatch for study a few hours a week from the 

 strain and fatigue of bread- winning. Which is real education ? Which 

 yields the greater return ? 



What, then, should we do ? If we lived in Utopia and could reconstruct 

 education without regard either to its past evolution or its present condition 

 or the needs of the practical world, the ideal plan might be for everyone 

 to leave school at 15, and pass into a system, where a part of the week was 

 allotted to school, part to earning the living in some practical occupation, 

 the proportions of each varying with the intellectual abilities of the pupil 

 and the demands of the subjects which he was studying. Such a contact 

 with the practical world would both sharpen the appreciation of the value 

 and purpose of education, and, especially in the humanistic subjects, 

 make their real meaning far more intelligible. Theory would be illumin- 

 ated by practice, and practice by theory. At present the two are nearly 

 always divorced. We lead a life of action without thought ; or we think 

 in a vacuum, without contact with the realities and problems of the world. 

 Neither form of isolation is satisfactory. 



A revolution of this kind could be made in a Platonic — or a Communist 

 — state. It is impossible in our own. The small section of the community 

 which proceeds through the secondary school, and thence, reduced in 

 numbers, to a University degree, will continue to follow that beaten path. 

 Their studies will still suffer from ignorance of life. The only possible 

 improvement for them is that some of them may interpose a layer of 

 practical experience between school and university by going into an office 

 or doing some practical job for a period when they leave school ; as is 

 now done sometimes by engineers. 



Meanwhile there remains the problem of the greater part of the nation, 

 who in future will leave school at 14 or 15. Unless we establish a com- 

 pulsory part-time continuation system which will carry them on to 18, 

 the education of the earlier years of the youth of the nation will still be 

 largely wasted. If we can establish such a system, they will remain in 

 contact with those subjects to the rudiments of which their elementary 

 education has introduced them, carrying them on to an age when the mind 

 is growing sufficiently mature to begin to appreciate their value and grasp 

 their meaning. Our next step, therefore, should be to retain those who 

 leave school before the age of 18 under some educational control — not 

 involving whole-time school attendance — to that age. We shall thus 

 escape their abrupt and untimely expulsion from educational influences, 

 and we shall take them to the threshold of adult education, where the 

 solution of our educational problem must be found. So long as the 

 education of the vast mass of the population ends at the age of 14 or 15 or 

 16, or even of 17 and 18, so long we shall have, as at present, an uneducated 

 electorate. 



Much has been talked, and something has been done, in adult education. 

 The Handbook of Adult Education, or the second volume of Mr. Yeaxlee's 

 Spiritual Values in Adult Education, give an idea of the large number of 

 bodies concerned in it. Its great success in Britain is the Workers' 



