17 
EDUCATION AND NATIONAL 
EFFICIENCY. 
By A. R. PICKLES, M.A. October 12 th, 1915. 
Mr. Pickles first of all stated that no great national upheaval 
could fail to touch more closely the great problem of the 
educational needs of our homes ; and of all domestic subjects 
brought into prominence by the war, that of education was 
easily foremost. Optimists had declared that education had 
saved the State, while, on the other hand, pessimists pro- 
claimed that there was much lacking in our educational 
system. Still it was beginning to be recognised that it was 
foolish to allow education to be crippled. Public opinion 
was more surely grasping that British tenacity significant 
of the people of the nation. The latter numbers were small 
compared with our world-wide interests, and we must there- 
fore make up in the quality of our people what we lacked 
in numbers, by developing every individual to the height of 
his capacity. It would be unwarrantably foolish in this 
great national crisis to confuse the personnel of education 
with economy. Next to the actual necessaries of life and 
ammunition of war, education ought to be our very first 
concern. 
Mr. Pickles then went on to give examples of the success 
which had attended education in the last fifty years, and he also 
gave some startling examples, from various sources, of educa- 
tional shortcomings. We had, he said, made great educational 
progress since 1870, and this progress had given us some 
fine new material in our people. We had, however, lost in 
carefulness and accuracy and commonsense, because we had 
dulled the sense of responsibility in the parent and the sense 
of effort in the child. To say that our education as a whole 
had failed was a kernel of truth covered with a thick husk 
of fallacy. Mr. Pickles followed with a strong plea for more 
efficient and more effective physical training in the school. 
We had not yet given half the attention to physical training 
which it deserved. At the time of the Boer War, 8,000 out 
of 11,000 Manchester men who offered themselves for the 
Army were rejected, and quite recently the Lord Mayor had 
said that if all had been able to pass, Manchester would have 
sent 200,000 men to the new Army instead of 90,000. There 
