L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 231 



pleasant buildings of a Danish High School, with its gardens, its pictures, 

 its music, its corporate life. Few Women's Institutes are so well housed, 

 but there is in them that social, corporate element, which exists in a 

 residential university and which both educates and makes education 

 attractive. Here also this country has the germ of the future in Summer 

 Schools, and in such institutions as Woodbroke, Fircroft, Coleg Harlech 

 and Newbattle. These are pointers to the adult education of to-morrow. 

 The arguments for adult education are overwhelming ; its difficulties 

 will be great. The Danes have had a comparatively easy task. An 

 agricultural people with seasonal work and slack periods have more 

 opportunities for adult education than an industrial country. In Denmark 

 the small holder or farm-worker can escape from his work for a winter. 

 In England a man who leaves his job will probably lose it, and while he 

 holds it finds his time and energies fully occupied. The Danish Folk 

 High School, so successful in the country, has been a comparative failure 

 in Copenhagen. In fact, unless we really believe in adult education, 

 there will be convincing reasons for doing nothing. If we do believe, we 

 shall remember that Continental nations do not hesitate to take two and 

 three years of their citizens' lives for military service, and we shall be 

 capable of a lesser effort in a greater cause. 



The future, if we are wise enough to see it, lies with adult education. 

 In this paper I have spoken of its importance to the masses. But it has 

 other, hardly less important, possibilities. At present life is so arranged 

 that most of us do our thinking in youth at an age when we are not best 

 fitted for it, and having left the University think, systematically, no more. 

 What wonder that middle life finds so many men unaware of recent progress 

 in their own field, unapt for new experiments and ideas, deeply embedded 

 in their rut, while progress waits impatiently for their death and the 

 arrival of the next generation ! The time, I believe, will come when men 

 will return to the Universities in middle life, to study systematically the 

 newer developments in their own field, to review and revise their own 

 attitudes and habits of thought. That, incidentally, will be very good for 

 the Universities. These revenants will bring their practical experience 

 from the world of action to the world of theory and knowledge ; and both 

 theorist and practical man will gain by the contact. It is not so Utopian 

 as it sounds. Doctors, in the busiest of all professions, find time for 

 ' refresher courses.' Teachers do the same ; and a former Principal 

 Secretary of the Board of Education once said that in his opinion the outlay 

 on these courses gave the best return of any money spent by the Board. 

 The Colonial Office second men from their Service for study at the 

 Universities. There is no reason why the same should not be done for 

 Members of the Home, Indian and Municipal Services — to mention no 

 others. Politicians, too, might take the opportunity for systematic 

 thought about their problems. If they did so, they would be following 

 the advice of Plato, whose statesmen were alternately retired from political 

 life for study, and returned to govern their country in the light of their 

 studies. Plato was the first to see that the work of education was not com- 



