IIITHE SCHOOLSFuture 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 trainingfor 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-accommodationis 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 standardwill 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 Stateprovides 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 suchdrastic 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 oflearning. 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, oreven 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 thevarious “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 certaintype. 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 apamphlet 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, eitherdirectly 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 willbe 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 largertowns 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 lastthirty 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.
The effective organisation of trade-schools will entail a solution of the problem of apprenticeship. The apprenticeship-system has long been obsolete: it is condemned educationally because it involves the transference of the pupil from the school to the workshop at too early an age,and it is ineffective industrially because under modern factory-conditions there is no certainty that the apprentice will even receive proper technical training. The system is already dead in many trades, and in others it is kept alive only to enable the trade unions to limit the number of entrants into the industry. It cannot be long, however, before common needs force education and industry into some sort of concordat. The industrial firms need skilled workers; the educationists want those skilled workers to be trained in such a way that they may derive educational benefit from their technical pursuits. To meet the difficulty there are two obvious possibilities. The whole apprentice-system might be abolished,and the training of skilled workers might be carried out entirely in technical schools organised on the lines of theécoles professionellesof France, which resemble factories in their equipment and which turn out fully-trained workers after a three years’ course. If, on the other hand, the rule of apprenticeship is retained, it should be possible to substitute education in Junior Technical Schools for the first two years of apprenticeship. Steps of this kind have already been taken in London, where it is usual for young workers to have their apprenticeship shortened by a period corresponding to their training in a trade school. But, of course, further advances in this direction can be taken only with the co-operation of thetrade unions concerned. This may cause difficulty. Somewhat strangely, the educational spokesmen of the trade unions seem so much concerned about securing a university education for the sons of the “workers” that they have little interest in the matter of craft-instruction. But perhaps this attitude of the trade union leaders is no more strange than that of the employers who talk loudly of the need for increased efficiency if British manufacturers are to compete in the markets of the world, and yet do little or nothing to ensure that their young workers shall be given adequate training for the work they are to perform.
But we have still to consider the future of boys and girls of low mentality who, on leaving the primaryschool, will normally enter unskilled or semi-skilled occupations, and who are not likely to profit by full-time vocational training. It is these who present the most difficult problem to the educationist. It is hard to find the right way of approach to such children even under school-conditions; it is far harder to exert effective teaching-influence over them when they have been freed from disciplinary restraints. Yet it is imperative for the health of the community that young workers of this type should not be allowed to pass entirely out of educational control as soon as they leave the elementary school. For them, it would seem, the aid of Mr. Fisher’s Act will once more have to be invoked, and compulsory ContinuationSchools will be established. At these classes the object will be not so much to teach the students any specific subjects as to keep them under disciplinary influences and to develop in them the sense of personal and civic responsibility. The short experience gained from the few continuation schools established immediately after 1918 made it clear that giving much purely cultural teaching to workers of low type in unskilled jobs, however desirable, is actually impracticable. Nor is it generally possible to give much direct vocational instruction. Physical training and handwork must be made important parts of the courses, and good work can be done through the formation of students’ clubs. In fact, those who have chargeof Continuation classes will have to regard themselves less as teachers than as welfare-workers.
The scheme of development which has been mapped out clearly demands the creation of a link between education and industry such as does not at present exist. Boys and girls who, through lack of initiative or of any special predilection, have not found for themselves suitable employment by the time they are due to leave school will not be allowed to drift into the first blind-alley occupation that presents itself. The education authorities will have made full surveys of local industrial and business requirements and will thus be able to indicate suitable openings. Moreover, account will be taken of theapplicant’s special abilities in recommending any particular post to him. The question of vocational guidance has for some years attracted a good deal of attention in America, and a considerable amount of work has been done in this direction. In this country, many local educational authorities (in particular, the London boroughs) are attempting to carry out schemes of juvenile vocational guidance through the After-Care Committees and the Juvenile Advisory Committee of the Employment Bureaux. In London, too, the Headmasters of the Secondary Schools have formed an Employment Committee which puts pupils in touch with firms who have vacancies.
More important in this connectionis the investigation recently carried out by the Industrial Fatigue Research Board in conjunction with the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. Under the direction of Dr Cyril Burt a careful study was made of all the children (to the number of a hundred) due to leave three selected London schools within a period of twelve months. All data obtainable from the schools were collected, the children were subjected to mental tests, the homes were visited, and each child was personally interviewed. In the light of the evidence thus obtained specific vocational recommendations were made. After an interval of two years the investigators again interviewed the children in their homes in order to test the results ofthe recommendations. It appeared that the children who had entered the industries suggested to them had proved more efficient than their fellows, and over 80 per cent. of them declared that they were satisfied with their position and prospects. On the other hand, of those who obtained employment different from the kind recommended, less than 40 per cent. were satisfied. The value of this experiment is, of course, limited by the smallness of its scale, but the results are certainly encouraging. One point that has been made clear is the need for full information as to the requirements of the various trades.
Such efforts at linking the schools with the office and the workshop are at present tentative and sporadic; butthey are significant of future developments,—developments which will be hastened by the growing determination during these years of trade depression to prevent the waste and deterioration of our youths, so far as it can be prevented by better organisation. There can be little doubt that within the next few years we shall be forced, if not by practical wisdom, at least by economic necessity, into creating a universal scheme which shall relieve the employers of the need for haphazard advertisement in recruiting their junior staffs, and which shall ensure that everything possible is done to facilitate the entry of a youth into that particular job in which he can do work of most value to himself and to the community.