Part 2

Realising the difficulty of finding suitable employment for their pupils, and sensitive about the accusation that they aim at producing “black-coated workers” only, the Headmasters have considered the possibility of finding openings in industry. In 1924 the Council of the Headmasters’ Association sent a deputation to the Federation of British Industries on the matter. The deputation was told quite plainly that manufacturers, and particularly engineers, made a regular practice of taking boys at fourteen: they had very little opportunity to offer to the boy who remained at school long enough to take the First School Examination, and still less to the boy who passed a Higher School Examination. There is little prospect that manufacturers will be able to alter their practice in this respect. Obviously, therefore, with our present lack of co-ordination between our educational and industrial systems, a boy deprives himself of many chances of employment by staying at school beyond fourteen.

There can be little doubt that this particular aspect of the educational problem will attract much official attention in the near future. There is even a chance that the issue may not be unduly obscured by political controversy, for leading politicians of both sides agree in their diagnosis. The President of the Board of Education, Lord Eustace Percy, has recently told a meeting that the desire of the working man to-day is to use the school to get his son into some black-coated job and to keep him away from skilled manual labour. This he regarded as a most extraordinary mistake. We should never get any real success until we re-created the pride of skilled manual work. In another speech he said that the danger of the secondary school system was that, when we should be using these schools for training leaders for all the professions and industries and businesses, we are in fact using them to train the subordinates in a few “respectable” industries. Such remarks might pass with many people for an expression of reactionary Toryism, if their attention were not called to the fact that Mr. Philip Snowden has recently written to the same effect in a Sunday newspaper――“A scholastic education is apt to make a youth despise useful mechanical work. The products of our secondary schools and universities are crowding the black-coated professions and occupations. Education is a failure unless it inculcates the idea that all useful work is honourable, and that the working engineer, or carpenter, or weaver is a more useful member of society than a ‘commission agent’. Society needs men and women with the highest scholastic attainments. But the number of such will always be small. The main part of the education problem is to fit the average person for the work of the average person.” The practical urgency of these views is indicated by the fact that the President of the Board of Education and the Minister of Labour have now jointly appointed a committee to inquire into the public system of education in relation to the requirements of trade and industry.

Idealists of a certain sort, however, will brush aside the sordid controversy about commercial values and will put up a hard fight for the principle of a Liberal Education,――an All-round Training that will provide an Outfit for Life. They will continue to maintain that the traditional modicum of the classics, mathematics, science, and the modern tongues, provides the best training for a lad, whether he is to become a clerk, an engineer, a company-promoter, or a pork-butcher. They will recoil in horror from the mere mention of “vocational training.”

But this “liberal education” theory involves several fallacies,――fallacies which are now being perceived in many quarters, and which will be completely exposed in the next few years. In the first place, an education completely divorced from the requirements of a vocation is a luxury appropriate only to a leisured class, or a class free from economic pressure: it is, in fact, a legacy from the independent families of the upper classes or the well-to-do middle classes who sent their children to the public schools and the old grammar schools, knowing that the question of bread and butter was not an urgent one. Now, in the changed conditions of the twentieth century, we still complacently take boys from working-class homes, give them a “liberal” education until they are sixteen or eighteen, and then turn many of them adrift to become clerks or grocers’ assistants, laying the flattering unction to our soul, as we say farewell, that they will add their figures or cut their rashers all the better for having tasted the sweets of poetry or wrestled with the problems of geometry. Of course, some of the boys concerned may find their true niche in clerking or in the grocery line; in which case their intellectual ability is such that training in the more abstruse mathematical or linguistic processes has been wasted on them. But if we give a boy of ability in any direction a prolonged education and then fail to find him a position in life which gives scope for his ability, we are surely conferring on him a very doubtful blessing. The major portion of his time after his leaving school will be spent in earning a livelihood; and the way in which he spends that time will have an enormous effect on his happiness. The frustrated and disgruntled man of culture is socially objectionable and politically dangerous. The dictum that education should teach a man how to use his leisure is one of those half-truths whose easy acceptance is so dangerous; in the future we shall have to learn the complementary half-truth that education must fit the individual for his life’s work.

The exponents of the “liberal education” theory are usually those who are most urgent in pleading that the aim of the school should be the formation of character. They maintain that the pupil’s personality can be developed and modified by the influences brought to bear on him in the school environment. Holding such views, they cannot ignore the need for providing a suitable career for the pupil after he leaves school. The process of forming his character does not cease as soon as he enters business; on the contrary, the nature of his occupation――its suitability or unsuitability to his temperament――will profoundly influence him for good or for evil. The school cannot, therefore, ignore the duty imposed on it of guiding its pupils as far as possible into the vocations for which they are naturally fitted.

The theoretical considerations just mentioned are reinforced by others of the most practical importance. For Great Britain, and indeed for the whole of Europe, the economic struggle during the next few years will be most intense. Conditions will be such that this country, in particular, will have to make the most of its human as well as its material resources. It will not be able to afford the wastage of human ability either through failure to find out and cultivate the best brains or through neglect to fit the man to the job. It will be forced to adopt a system of training which will provide an education at once liberal and adapted to economic needs. And it will be useless for the more narrow idealist to bewail the intrusion of economics into the domain of education. After all, literature, the arts, and the study of pure science flourish only so long as economic conditions permit. Just as the man who is constantly toiling for bread is debarred from purely cultural pursuits, so the nation whose economic position is unsound can spare its children neither the money nor the time for any education beyond the most elementary.

Nor is there any real antagonism between the claims of culture and those of economics. The State which seeks economic health must demand that each citizen shall do his best work. He will do his best work in the vocation for which he has a natural aptitude. The business of the school is to discover and foster natural aptitudes. The business of the State as an economic entity is to contrive by all possible means to guide its children into suitable vocations. In a state with a proper economic organisation there must, therefore, of necessity be a vital connection between a child’s school-training and his future career.

But this statement of the essential relationship between aptitudes, education, and vocation does not mean that schools should become merely training-establishments to act as feeders to particular professions or industries: it does not mean that the schoolmaster or a government official should examine every pupil at the age of twelve or fourteen and decide that he must be an engineer or a draper’s assistant and proceed to train him for that purpose and draft him into a post in due course. It does mean, however, that the boy, for instance, who wants to use his hands, and may eventually become an engineer, should not be given a bookish education which takes little or no account of his abilities and interests; it does mean that such a boy should pass through a course of instruction which will at once give scope for his native powers and through them develop his whole mentality; it does mean, also, that the school and the State should not dismiss that boy at a given age and allow him to drift into a clerkship merely because of some accidental financial considerations or because conditions of entrance to the engineering trade clash with academic arrangements. In short, it means that the school-system should be adapted to the boy and not the boy to the system, and, further, that education authorities should regard it as part of their function to guide into proper channels the special abilities which the teachers have reared.

Presented in this way, the case for some sort of correlation between education and vocation should convince even those obstinate opponents of “vocational training” who are apt to see in such a proposal nothing but a device of the devil (in the guise of the Federation of British Industries) for the more efficient production of “wage-slaves.” As ever increasing numbers of boys and girls pass into places of higher education, teachers are realising more and more the need for reform on the lines indicated. They see the waste of effort involved in passing boys and girls wholesale through a system which takes little account of individual differences or even of broad differences of type. They see that for many children a “liberal education” is not necessarily one which follows the traditional academic curriculum, but rather one which suits itself to individual needs and which seeks to develop the pupil’s powers by setting him to do what he can do, instead of forcing him to try to do what he can never do with success.

III

THE SCHOOLS

Future Developments

From the considerations adduced and the trend of opinion indicated in the previous chapter, we are able to give a reasonable forecast of practical developments in the next few years. In general terms we may say that our educational system will be made purposive where it is now haphazard, and that it will be brought into definite connection with the economic life of the country. Education will be regarded as a preparation for livelihood as well as for life,――as a training for working citizens rather than for a leisured class. Further, the waste of human effort will be avoided as far as possible by constantly observing the individual child and guiding him along lines which offer him the best chance of intellectual progress, and which give the best opportunities for a career in life. This, of course, implies that the types of instruction available will be much more numerous and varied than they are at present. No pupil whose schooling is provided wholly or partly at public expense will be allowed to proceed to courses for which, in the opinion of the competent authority, he is unfitted, though no obstacles will be placed in the way of a transfer from one course to another if circumstances warrant it. The individual capacity of the pupil will be made the starting-point for the teacher: the heresy which gives our present system the character of a Chicago canned-meat factory will be abandoned. As a corollary we shall give less exclusive reverence to purely bookish attainments and we shall realise that training in craftsmanship may be as productive to one individual, and hence to the State, as training in the differential calculus is to another.

We may assume that in the not too remote future every child of the required mental capacity will receive education to the age of sixteen at least. Of course, financial stringency will delay progress for some years. When the necessary school-accommodation is available every pupil in an institution under public control will be tested at a suitable age, probably at eleven plus. The results of the carefully devised examination will be collated with the report of his teachers and it will be decided whether he is fit to be given further instruction of a secondary character, and, if so, what form of training will suit his special needs. Methods of examination will be so far improved that few serious mistakes will be made in assessing the capacity of pupils. In any case, this regular test will not be regarded as final and irrevocable; the boy or girl who at a later age gives evidence of the need for a revised judgment will receive special treatment.

Pupils of the required standard will be drafted into the secondary schools at eleven plus. Those who remain in the primary schools until fourteen will be of roughly two grades; those whose ability fits them for work of some skill in trades or in the humbler ranks of business, and those of very low intelligence who are naturally destined for unskilled occupations. The former will pass from the elementary schools into some form of vocational training; the latter will go straight into industry and will receive no further teaching other than what may be given in some kind of continuation class.

Thus the principle of excluding all children of low mentality from secondary education in institutions under public control will be definitely accepted. This step will not be taken, of course, without much opposition. Political irrelevancies will come into play as soon as it is suggested. The cry will go up that, whereas the rich child, no matter what his capacity, will continue to be given a public school education, the poor child of the same mental capacity will be deprived of such an indulgence. Of course, the children of the two classes will not receive equal treatment. But so long as the State allows the existence of schools which it does not control, so long as it allows parents to contract out of the educational system, it will not be able to prevent wealthy people from spending their money on their brainless children, if they choose to do so. Clearly, however, if the State provides a costly system of free, or largely free, education, it will have the right to exercise its power of excluding from some or all of the benefits of that system, children (of whatever social position) who will not profit by it. Moreover, by requiring the same standard of ability from both scholarship-holders and fee-payers the authorities will remove the present iniquity by which, owing to insufficient free places, able children of poor parents are debarred from secondary schools while incompetent children of parents who can afford to pay a fraction of the cost secure admission.

Another objection likely to be put forward is that geniuses who blossom late will be lost to the world, if such drastic methods of exclusion are adopted. It is urged that the potentiality of a boy or girl cannot always be finally determined at the age of fourteen. This may be true; but it is also true that in at least ninety-nine per cent. of cases a competent teacher who has observed a child for some years can gauge his capacity sufficiently accurately at that age; and, in any case, the child has by that time been given the tools of learning in the ability to read and write. Moreover, your genius frequently does not take kindly to academic routine, and not seldom he looks with amused contempt at the efforts of the mediocre pedagogue to keep him in the recognised paths of learning. The biographers have been at pains to establish the fact that Shakespeare attended the Grammar School at Stratford. But we cannot doubt that “Hamlet” would have been written even if Shakespeare had never suffered the ferule and the Latin grammar of the Stratford dominie. The knowledge of people and places which Dickens picked up while running the streets was of more service to him as a novelist than anything he might have learned under the eye of a master who should have tried, with doubtful success, to instil into him a proper respect for history and a right appreciation of poetry. In fact, it may be reasonably doubted whether any child of latent genius, or even talent, will be blighted for ever through failure to receive the blessings of the academic course.

To come to details of the various types of schools in the future. With regard to secondary education, we may anticipate that to meet varied needs three different courses will be provided. A curriculum of roughly the same type as the present will be retained for those boys and girls of the highest grades of intelligence; that is to say, those who have the ability to proceed to university studies and who, in favourable circumstances, intend to do so. This curriculum will, however, be relieved of some of the subjects which at present overcrowd it through the attempt to provide an “omnibus” course by grafting the various “modern” studies on the old classical and mathematical courses.

Side by side with instruction of this type there will be at least two other types provided for pupils who can profit by full-time higher training until the age of sixteen or beyond. One course will be of a definitely practical character designed for the needs of those who are fitted to occupy leading positions in industry. Handwork will form a prominent feature, and a broad technical training will be given on cultural lines. The work will not be directly vocational in intention, nor will book-learning of the usual kind be entirely neglected: the object will be to provide a training of the greatest educational value for students of a certain type. The syllabus will be determined to some extent by the nature of local industries. In the big towns it will be a fairly simple matter to relate the technical teaching to the dominant manufacturing processes carried on in the area. In country districts it will be the business of these courses to foster that interest in rural industries which is at present so disastrously lacking. Already a certain number of secondary schools in the country are making a definite attempt to organise their teaching on lines intended to be of the greatest value to those pupils who intend to take up occupations connected with agriculture or horticulture. The fact that more has not been done in this direction is explained in a significant sentence in a pamphlet issued by the Board of Education on the subject.――“Hitherto the majority of parents have unfortunately been inclined to regard entry into commerce or into some clerical occupation as the only fitting sequel to a secondary school training, and there has been, therefore, little or no demand on their part that the education given to their children in the secondary school should be related to rural life and needs.” As a preliminary to the successful establishment of secondary schools with a technical bias it will thus be necessary to convince parents that suitable careers exist for their children in industry. Such schools must be recognised as the normal stepping-stones to the higher industrial positions, either directly or by way of the Technical or Agricultural College of university rank.

A third course will be designed for pupils who are likely to benefit from continued education after fourteen, but who are not suited to the purely academic studies and have no marked practical bent: they are probably destined for the fairly skilled commercial posts. The work in this course will be largely of a concrete character and will be definitely connected with economic life; but again it will not be directly vocational. The syllabus will consist in the main of what are known as the “ordinary school subjects”; but the pupils will concentrate on fewer subjects than is customary at present, and emphasis will be laid on those aspects which are most within the grasp of boys and girls who lack any great interest in ideas as such.

Pupils will be drafted into one or other of the various courses not primarily because they intend to enter this or that profession or business (though this might be given due consideration at the wish of the parent), but because their previous school-history will have shown that their all-round development can be best assured in one of these courses rather than in the others.

Will pupils following the various curricula remain side by side in the same school, or will they be separated into different institutions? It is possible that in London and the larger towns separate technical and commercial schools of secondary grade will be created to work side by side with the secondary schools of the present type. The anomalous Central Schools of to-day can scarcely remain a permanent feature of our system: they might well be converted into schools of fully secondary character with either a commercial or a technical bias. In the smaller areas which can support only a single institution for higher training the varied courses will be pursued in the same building. Such an arrangement will, no doubt, present difficulties in organisation, but it will have a considerable advantage in the fact that free transfer of pupils from one course to another will be possible.

What of the pupils who are judged unfit for education of a secondary type? Those who are likely to profit by some sort of further teaching will not be dismissed at the age of fourteen to the workshop or the office; but it will be recognised that their interests can be best served by giving them training of a frankly vocational character. To meet the needs of those who propose to enter trades there will be organised large numbers of trade schools in conjunction with local industries. Here, for two years or more, students will be prepared for a definite occupation, and will remain under cultural and disciplinary influences. Junior Technical Schools of this nature have already been firmly established during the last thirty years, and in London trade-classes exist for silversmithing, book-production, furnishing, dressmaking, tailoring, engineering, and so on. At present, however, half the total number of Junior Technical School places provided by the county boroughs throughout the country are in London: we may look forward to a wide extension of technical school facilities in the other industrial areas during the next few years.