EDUCATION

Waipa Post, Volume 44, Issue 3178, 14 May 1932, Page 6

EDUCATION

AN INTERESTING YEAR BOOK. FIRST BRITISH PUBLICATION. “ In the last seventy years or more we have been so busily engaged in the erection of an educational edifice to house a whole people that we have sometimes been in danger of neglecting to consider sufficiently whether the lines on which we are building are sound and appropriate. The present economic circumstances have, unfortunately, necessitated some slow-ing-up of this work, but the interval will not be wasted if we use it to take stock of the position and to satisfy ourselves of the soundness of the lines on which we are proceeding.” With this foreword a group of British educationists, with Lord Eustace Percy, M.P. (former President of the Board of Education), as editor in chief, presents the first “ Year Book of Education ” ever published in Great Britain. The book, a stout volume of more than 1000 pages, contains an amazing amount of historical, descriptive and statistical information on current systems of education in all parts of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and, for comparative purposes, surveys of the educational systems prevailing in eleven foreign countries. In its closely filled pages one may read of the growth of British and Continental educational systems, early education and the infant school, elementary and secondary education, the public school system, religious education, technical and commercial schools, universities, training of teachers, physical training, health services in schools, provision of school meals, training of defective children, and so on through the whole maze of physical, mental and spiritual activities that make up the world's system of education. The book is published by Evans Brothers Ltd., London. In an introductory reference to the English educational policy it is stated that England is obviously engaged in an effort to effect what may be called an integration of her whole educational system. Her system has this peculiarity, that for fifty years at least she developed her elementary education not as a means to an end of higher education, but almost as an end in itself. And it is added that in this respect England may, perhaps, be said to have resembled Australia, in contrast to Scotland and Canada, where elementary and secondary education had been derived from a common origin, shading more naturally into, and growing more naturally out of, each other. England tended to attract Scotland and Wales into the orbit of her elementary-school policy, and having done so she found that in creating, so to speak, a little nine-year kingdom of elementary education, enisled in a broad moat of elaborately administered statutory compulsion, she was in danger of building an artificial prison whose inmates could escape in one directiofi, across the drawbridge of an entrance examination into a particular type of secondary school—a type not originally designed for their reception, though greatly enlarged during the last twenty-five years for their accommodation.

The chapter devoted to the Public Schools is full of interest to the educationist. The glamour and romance associated with England’s public schools is introduced with a reference to Dr Blimber, Mr Creakle and Mr Squeers, and a reminder that there is no need to inform readers of Dickens and Meredith that one hundred years ago secondary education in England was in the hands of private school masters. Besides the privatelyowned schools there were the old grammar schools, mainly serving the need of some particular locality. Schools which were neither private property nor local in character were called public schools, and the Act of 1864 gave this name to Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Charterhouse, St. Paul’s and Merchant Taylor’s. “If we wish to be pedantic,” the chapter runs, “we may say that no other school has the right to use the name, but in popular speech it has been widely extended to include old grammar schools, such as Uppingham and Sedbergh, developed by vigorous and ambitious head masters, and the many institutions founded by the wealth, the religious zeal, and the educational ardor of the Victorian age.” Part 2 of the book is devoted to education in the British Commonwealth of Nations, and opens i with a chapter on Australia’s educational systems, written by Mr F. Tate, former Director of Education in Victoria, and now president of the Australian Council of Educational Research. Part 3, dealing with education in foreign countries contains comprehensive reviews of instructional methods adopted in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Czecho-Slovakia, Turkey, Egypt, China, U.S.A., Argentine Republic, and on technical education in Russia.