The Children: Some Educational Problems

by Alexander Darroch

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION—THE PRESENT UNREST IN EDUCATION

The problems as to the end or ends at which our educational agencies should aim in the training and instruction of the children of the nation, and of the right methods of attaining these ends once they have been definitely and clearly recognised, are at the present day receiving greater and greater attention not only from professed educationalists, but also from statesmen and the public generally. For, in spite of all that has been done during the past thirty years to increase the facilities for education and to improve the means of instruction, there is a deep-seated and widely spread feeling that, somehow or other, matters educationally are not well with us, as a nation, and that in this particular line of social development other countries have pushed forward, whilst we have been content to lag behind in the educational rear.

The faults in our present educational structure are many, and in some cases obvious to all. In the first place, it is said, and with much truth, that there is no systematic coherence between the different parts of our educational machinery, and no thorough-going correlation between the various aims which the separate parts of the system are intended to realise. As Mr. De Montmorency has recently pointed out, we have always had a national group of educational facilities, more or less efficient, but we have never had, nor do we yet possess, a national system of education so differentiated in its aims and so correlated as to its parts as to form "an organic part of the life of the nation."[1] An educational system should subserve and foster the life of the whole: it should be so organised as to maintain a sufficient and efficient supply of all the services which a nation requires at the hands of its adult members. For it is only in so far as the educational system of any country fulfils this end that it can be "organic," and can be entitled to the claim of being called a national system.

This lack of coherence between the different parts of our educational system and the want of any systematic plan or unity running through the whole is due to many causes. As a nation, we are little inclined to system-making, and as a consequence the problem of education as a whole and in its total relation to the life and well-being of the State has received but scant attention from politicians. Educational questions, in this country, are rarely treated on their own merits and apart from considerations of a party, political, or denominational character, and hence the problems which have received attention in the past and evoke discussion at the present are concerned with the nature of the constitution, and limits of the power of the bodies to whom should be entrusted the local control of the educational agencies of the country, rather than with the problems as to the aims which we should seek to realise through our educational organisation, and of the methods by which these aims may be best realised. Hence, as a nation, we have rarely considered for its own sake and as a whole the problem of the education of the children. And until we have done so—until we have made clear to ourselves the kind of future citizen which as a State we desire to rear up—our educational agencies must manifest a like indefiniteness, a like inconsistency, and a like want of connection as do our educational aims and ideals.

Again, closely connected with this first-named defect in our educational organisation, and in fact following from it as a logical consequence, is our fatal method of developing this or that part of our educational system and of leaving the other parts to develop, if at all, without any central guidance or control, until at length we realise that the neglected parts also require attention, and must somehow or other be refitted into the whole. E.g., since 1870 there has been a great advance in the extent and intent of elementary education in both England and Scotland, but this progress has been of a one-sided nature, and there has been no corresponding advance either in the perfecting of the educational system as a whole, or in the co-ordination of the various grades of education. In Scotland, since the passing into law of the Education Bill of 1872, the means of elementary education have been widely extended and the methods of teaching have been greatly improved, but there has been no corresponding advance in the provision of the means of higher education, and as a consequence, at the present day, we find many districts without adequate provision for carrying on the education of the youth of the country beyond the Primary School stage. Secondary education has been provided in some centres by means of endowments; in others through the extension of the term "elementary" so as to include education of a more extended nature than was originally intended to be covered by that term. In England until 1902, very much the same conditions prevailed, but since then, mainly in order to remedy the state of things created by the judgment in the Cockerton Case, the control of primary, secondary, and technical education has been placed in the hands of the County and Borough Councils, who are empowered "to consider the educational needs of their area, and to take such steps as seem to them desirable, after consultation with the Board of Education, to supply or aid the supply of education other than elementary, and to promote the general co-ordination of all forms of education." Tinder the powers so granted much has been done throughout England during the past few years to extend and make efficient the means of higher education; to erect schools which shall provide training for the future services required by the community and the State of the more highly gifted of its members, and to co-ordinate the work of the various agencies entrusted with the care and education of the children of the nation.

Through the failure of the Education Bills of 1904 and 1905 to pass into law, Scotland still awaits the creation of local authorities charged with the control and direction of all grades of education, and in this respect her educational organisation is much more loosely compacted than the system which now exists in England.

Further, in Scotland, on account of the absence of one controlling authority, we often find in those districts in which the provision for higher education is ample, imperfect co-ordination between the aims and work, on the one hand, of the Primary School, and on the other, of schools providing higher education. From this cause also it follows that, unlike our German neighbours, we have made little progress in determining the different functions which each particular type of Higher School shall perform in the social organism, and have not assigned the particular services which the State requires of each particular type of Higher School. It is surely manifest that the service which the modern industrial State looks for from its members is not the same in kind and is much more complex in its nature than that which was required during the mediæval period, and that if this service is to be efficiently supplied, then there is need for Higher Schools varied in type and having various aims.

This want of unity between the various parts of our educational system manifests itself again in the indefiniteness of aim of many of our Higher Schools, and in the lack of co-ordination between the Higher School on the one hand, and institutions providing university and advanced instruction on the other. Up till quite recently, the sole aim of our Secondary Schools was to provide students for the Universities and to supply the needs of the learned professions. But with the economic development of the country, and as a consequence of the keen international competition between nation and nation in the economic sphere, there has arisen a demand for a higher education different in kind from that provided by the older Universities, and a need for a type of Secondary School different in aim and curriculum from that which looks mainly to the provision of students intending to enter upon some one or other of the so-called well recognised learned professions. It is here, when compared and contrasted with the educational systems of some of our Continental neighbours, that we find the weakest point in our own system, and at the present time our most urgent need is for the extension and better equipment of the central institutions of the country which provide higher technical and commercial instruction.

This unsatisfactory condition of things is due in large measure, as we have already pointed out, to our innate dislike as a nation of all system-making, and to the distrust felt by many minds of any and every form of State control of education. Hence, partly from these causes, partly as a result of historical conditions, it has followed that various authorities have in this country the guidance and control of education, with the usual result of want of unity of aim, of lack of correlation of means, and in some cases of overlapping and waste of the means of higher education.