IITHE SCHOOLSPresent-Day Problems and Tendencies
A survey of present tendencies makes it clear that the next few years will witness a general overhaul of the educational machine. Among both the general public and the teaching profession the feeling is becoming widespread that, quite apart from its obvious incompleteness, our present system suffers from certain fundamental defects. Damaging criticisms of the work of the schools are by no means infrequent in press-articles.The proceedings of the various teachers’ organizations are eloquent of the need for radical reforms. Business men are giving public expression to their concern about the inadequacy of school-training for economic requirements: the Association of British Chambers of Commerce, for instance, has recently passed a resolution containing a sweeping condemnation of the methods and aims of the elementary schools. Already an official enquiry is being conducted into the relationship between the schools and industry. These signs of an impending revision of our educational programme derive added importance from the consideration that for some years to come Chancellors of the Exchequer will be very unwilling tosanction increases in public expenditure. Education ministers will therefore have to make out a very good case for any new developments and will have to satisfy public opinion that they are not merely increasing material and personnel but are also promoting increased efficiency.
The inevitable enquiry into the working of our present system will necessarily concern itself mainly with post-primary training since it is in this direction that development is most urgently needed. It is almost universally admitted that the time is overdue for a largely increased provision of further education of children beyond the age of fourteen; for though the secondary schools, owing to faulty methods of admission, atpresent contain many pupils who are unfit for the training they receive, there are also outside these schools numbers of children who reach the required standard of ability but who are denied entry simply because there is no room for them.
Public educational policy during the last quarter of a century has provided for higher education mainly by the foundation of secondary schools of a single type, controlled by the local authorities; and those who demand more secondary education generally mean more schools of this kind. The secondary schools are filled partly by scholarship-holders who represent the cream of the elementary schools, and partly by fee-payers who, as they do not usually have to pass a stringententrance-examination, may represent all grades of ability. Thus only a proportion (now up to 40 per cent.) of the pupils are specially selected; the remainder are doing more advanced work simply because their parents wish it and can pay part of the cost.
When the activities of these schools come under a critical review, certain facts will be difficult to explain away. In the first place, it will be noticed that, although the pupils are intended to remain at school until the age of sixteen at least, a relatively large proportion leave before that age. According to the “London Statistics” for 1923–24, there were present at the end of 1923 in the aided and maintained secondary schools of London,9,118 pupils who were twelve or thirteen years of age, 8,700 who were fourteen or fifteen, 3,280 who were sixteen or seventeen, and 342 who were eighteen or over. In other words, only about one-third remained until the age of sixteen or more, and this in spite of the fact that parents give undertakings to keep their children at school until sixteen. Again, the curriculum of these schools is largely determined by the First School Examination (equivalent to University Matriculation), and every pupil who remains at school sufficiently long should normally take this examination. Now the report of the Board of Education for 1923–24 shows that in each of the last five years an average of 78,000 childrenhave entered the grant-earning secondary schools of England and the highest number that has taken the First School Examination in any one year is roughly 35,000, of whom about a third failed. That is to say, about two-thirds of the pupils either fail to complete the school course or fail to reach the standard of intellectual attainment necessary to pass an external test.
When all allowance has been made for the fact that a certain number of pupils are withdrawn at an early age purely on account of economic circumstances, we have still to face the failure of the schools to retain the pupils and to enable them to pass what is presumably a fair test of the kind of training given. The conclusioncan scarcely be avoided that there are some radical defects in the aims and methods of the schools.
It is often urged that the secondary schools are not at present getting the best material, that owing to economic circumstances or to the insufficient provision of secondary school accommodation many children who are fit to profit by higher instruction are at present excluded in favour of fee-payers who are not fit. But this is merely begging the question. We are still confronted with the problem of what we are to do with those pupils who do not take kindly to the secondary school curriculum but who, by their very presence in secondary schools, show their readiness to undergo some form of higher instruction.And what are we to do with the many children in the primary schools who, under a scheme of more extended financial assistance, might also remain at school until sixteen or later, and would also be square pegs in round holes in the ordinary secondary school?
We are forced, therefore, to ask whether the present secondary school curriculum is adapted to the needs of the varied types of pupils who enter or are likely to enter the schools. What are the aims? At present the secondary school’s main function is to give sufficient training in the humanities, in mathematics and science, to enable pupils to pass the entrance examination of a university. (We may for the purpose of the presentargument disregard the social activities of the school.) In other words, its business is to produce scholars of the intellectual type fitted for university training. It is true that art, handicraft, domestic science, and physical exercises appear in the curriculum but they occupy more or less subordinate places. The secondary school course, on its academic side, is directed to one main end, and any pupil who enters such a school is regarded, irrespective of his natural aptitudes, as a prospective candidate for matriculation. Teachers may demur to the suggestion that their horizon is dominated by an examination: they may talk hopefully about a test which their pupils can take “in their stride.” But the fact remains that the workof the upper part of the school is determined by requirements of an external body. There is a conventional list of “subjects” which the pupil must study, and if his individuality does not fit in with this scheme so much the worse for him.
The secondary schools are therefore designed, in so far as they are designed for any specific purpose, as a training-ground for university students. But only three per cent. of the pupils ever reach the universities. And the statistics already given indicate that a large proportion show themselves to be unfitted for university training. Teachers in secondary schools do not, of course, need these statistics to bring home to them the fact that a considerable proportion ofthe pupils with whom they have to deal are misfits. They realise that there are other sorts of capacity besides those which enable pupils to pass the usual examinations. They constantly see in their pupils special interests and aptitudes which find little or no outlet in the ordinary academic routine. They so often have to shake hands with old boys or old girls who were duffers at ordinary school subjects, but who have since achieved success in business or industry that it has become a commonplace with them that failure at school does not necessarily mean failure in life. But this commonplace surely implies the tragic fact that school has not discovered what the “duffer” can do, but has consistently tried to make him dothings for which he has no aptitude.
The fact is that the ordinary secondary school is attempting—unsuccessfully, of course—to give the same treatment to pupils of various types who, owing to lack of sufficiently varied provision for higher education, now find themselves herded together. In any such school there is a certain number of pupils of good general ability who are capable of proceeding with credit to advanced work in the humanities or in science. These are the pupils for whom the secondary course is really intended. At the other extreme there is a certain number who are simply not profiting by academic training. Between these extremes there are, no doubt, a few who have a natural bent towards oneof the arts; there are a good many of very pedestrian abilities who can by industry just keep abreast of their studies, though they are not attracted by academic ideals; and there are still others who are in difficulties because they are interested not in abstract ideas but in things. Pupils of these three classes are all, to a greater or less degree, misfits in the ordinary secondary school. The few intending to follow the arts and lacking wide intellectual interests should be devoting more time than is generally available to acquiring the technique of their art. The many of a little less than average capacity who have no real enthusiasm for things of the mind gain something, no doubt, from the course they pursue, but theywould gain more from a practical curriculum containing fewer subjects and having a more direct bearing on their probable future careers. The remaining class, which includes those who think with their hands, is the one for which we now most conspicuously fail to make adequate provision. In this category is to be found the boy who is bored by the theory of electricity while being thoroughly interested in making a piece of electrical apparatus, and who will not willingly learn any more of the theory than is necessary to make the apparatus work. When we consider that a large proportion of people in the world have no bookish interests and are not attracted by pure science and yet are capable of bringing sound intelligence to bear on practicalproblems concerning concrete things, it is strange that educationists have done so little to meet their needs.
Another question arises. What is to be the occupation of the pupils leaving the secondary schools? Those who have remained at these schools until sixteen or more acquire a certain social tone which causes them to despise manual toil, and so they aim at the professions, the Civil Service, posts in banks and stores, and, failing all else, the perennially respectable junior clerkship in any kind of office. Clearly, boys who have at seventeen or eighteen successfully completed a course of literary and scientific training should be fitted for posts of responsibility in business or the professions. But the professions are alreadyovercrowded, and positions are difficult to obtain. We are taking children from the homes of artisans, small tradespeople, and even unskilled workers, and giving them an education which makes them unwilling to take up the same occupation as their parents follow, but which leads to no certainty of better employment in the end. We are thus rapidly being brought face to face with the difficulty which confronted Germany before the War. The advantages attaching to scholastic attainment were such that every parent who could possibly do so gave his child a higher education so that he might obtain the coveted passport to the professions. The result was that the competition for the higher professional and officialposts became intolerably keen, and the universities were turning out numbers of fully qualified men for whom they could find no suitable employment.
There would be less theoretical objection to the process of raising the pupils out of the economic class of their families into another class, if they were all of high capacity and suitable for administrative posts. But, actually, many of those who at present receive higher education are by no means fitted by native ability for important administrative work. In fact, the investigations of the psychologists go to show that out of the whole child population only a small proportion have the grade of intelligence needed for the highest posts. Dr Cyril Burt has carried out a survey of Londonschool children, by means of intelligence-tests, to provide evidence for use in vocational guidance. He finds that the few children of the type who win scholarships to secondary schools and thence to the universities, and who are fitted to seek higher professional and Civil Service posts form about one per thousand of the child population. About two per cent. come into the second grade, which includes those who win scholarships to the secondary school but not to the university, and who are suitable for lower professional posts: they may become, for instance, elementary teachers, clerks holding responsible posts, or successful tradespeople. The third grade is composed of about ten percent. of the children, and includes those who are suited to become, say, clerks doing work of an intelligent but moderately routine character, or manual workers engaged in highly skilled work. Below this comes a body of children of moderate ability forming about four-fifths of the whole. These may enter many of the ordinary commercial posts,—they may become small tradespeople, or shop-assistants: skilled manual-workers also belong to this group. The remaining children have an intelligence which fits them only for unskilled work. This classification is, admittedly, only tentative; but if it has any validity, it is clear that the percentage of children really fitted for professional work isrelatively very low, and account must be taken of this fact in framing secondary courses.
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 FirstSchool 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 attentionwere 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 theaverage 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, acompany-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 abilityin 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 onit 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 atonce 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 bestwork. 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 examineevery 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 ofsome 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.