EDUCATION : A SURVF.Y OF RRCENT EDUCATIONAL THROUY. 161 



6. All the educational agencies of the loca community, of the 

 state and of the nation should be brought to bear upon the post- 

 school education of both adolescents and adults.* 



The proposals of an English expert, Mr. F. J. Gould, are about 

 the same as these, though in one matter they go beyond them. 

 He suggests that all teachers should be made civil servants ; 

 that the entire boarding-school system should be swept away ; 

 and that the community, instead of flinging its young citizens 

 into the streets to go hunting for employment, should discover 

 the capacity of each, and assist each to a definite bench in the 

 vast material and spiritual workshop. f 



These proposals seem decidedly drastic, and the rate at which 

 we are moving may be gauged by the fact that the Continuation 

 Schools which form so notable a feature of Mr. Fisher's Bill are 

 already condemned as inadequate by some American experts, 

 who describe them as palliatives and makeshifts, dealing with 

 conditions which ought not to exist, patching up some defects 

 of the present system, but failing to overcome them. J- 

 Gould's proposals are contained implicitly in that of the Labour 

 Party which has been quoted. The great boarding schools are 

 doomed thereby, because of the costliness of the education which 

 they provide. Everyone cannot have it, therefore no-one 

 should have it. The need for uniformity renders it necessary that 

 all teachers should be government officials : since instruction, 

 like food, has to be rationed, there might otherwise be undesirable 

 differences in quantity and quality. The theory that the State 

 should also find employment for everyone follows logically. 

 The State has bestowed elementary instruction, and this has 

 proved no panacea for either crime or poverty. Indeed some of 

 the results have favoured the opinion of Alison that education 

 is a public danger. A medical writer, whose sincerity is evinced 

 by his impartial recommendation of contradictory counsels, 

 states that the three R's have filled many a prison. Most of the 

 criminals examined have passed average standards ; some have 

 done well.§ In none, he adds, have I found school influence 

 producing any valuable effect. Had" they been in good private 



* New Possibilities in Education, Philadelphia, 1916, p. xii. 

 t British Education after the War, pp. 11, 26, 28. 

 J J. & E. Dewey, Schools of To-morrow, pp. 310, 311. 

 § Andrew Wilson, Education, Personality and Crime (1908), p. 147. 

 Compare W. Clarke Hall, The State and the Child, pp. 4 and 193. 



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