PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Evening Post, Issue 113, 10 November 1930, Page 9

PUBLIC SCHOOLS

A STEIKINfe CEITICISM

ENDS OF EDUCATION

(From "The Post's" Representative.) j LONDON, sth September. Lord Eustace Percy, M.P., an exMinister of Education, enlivened the British Association by his criticism of the public school education of this country. In a paper on "A policy of higher education/.' read before the Educational Section, he referred to "the superstitions for full-time schooling," which he said we owed to an hereditary governing class. This reverence, he maintained, was one of three unhealthy influences by which our attitude towards higher education was being vitiated. "The public school boy of to-day surely tends to weary of school at an earlier age than did his father, and an increasing i umber of 'upper' and 'middle' class parents: must experience an uncomfortable feeling that, after all, this or that one among their sons. might have developed much, stronger intellectual appetites if _he had gone through a workshop apprenticeship at a comparatively early age. Yet this is the monient we choose for compelling all parents to burn incense to this aristocratic idol of indiscriminate full-time schooling." Any public school man could draw up a deplorably long list o£ misfits of which he had personal knowledge among his contemporaries. The number of these misfits was growing as the old hierarchical social system of the nation crumbled. . "The second unhealthy influence is a corollary of this superstition, the assumption that all' education must take the form o£ a continuous school and university life; that if a boy leaves school he abandons definitely all hope of pursuing any connected course of education. The idea that the value and continuity of education depends upon the number of hours spent in school has no basis except the bureaucratic love of a tidy system. "The third unhealthy influence, to which we are particularly exposed at the present moment, is the unnatural connection between the ideal of popular education and the idea of statutory compulsion. MEANING OF HIGHER EDUCATION. "Higher education" meant the guidance required by all normal boys and girls at a certain stage in their mental development through which they all passed; but it meant also advanced studies for which only a minority were fit, or a certain refinement and tempering of the powers of the mind which was not generally necessary for salvation, and might even be harmful to many minds. "Confusion between these two meanings of 'higher education' led, either, as in America, to the degradation of university education, or, as in England, to the treatment of secondary education as if it were primarily a preparatory training for the university. "The organic defect in our higher education is that, like our Government, it is not harnessed to the life of the society it claims to serve, to the new power and the new opportunities which society is constantly generating from new knowledge. This lack of touch is most clearly seen in our traditional attitude towards industry. "The 'upper classes/ though deeply affected by changing economic conditions, stilPthink in terms of the 'liberal professions/ The choice before their sons, in their view, is either to enter a 'liberal profession' in order to serve the community and make a career, or to 'go into business' in order to make money. "The 'working classes/ imitating as best, they can this aristocratic superstition, assume that their sons must as a rule submit to the drudgery of industry, but their great ambition is that as many as possible should escape from this bondage and become teachers, Civil servants, or trade union organisers. This is still the atmosphere of both the public school and the. secondary, school/