Spens (1938)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Analysis, Preface, Introduction
Chapter 1 Development of the secondary curriculum
Chapter 2 The present position
Chapter 3 Physical and mental development of 11-16 year olds
Chapter 4 The curriculum of the grammar school
Chapter 5 Scripture
Chapter 6 English, classics, mathematics, general science
Chapter 7 The School Certificate Examination
Chapter 8 Technical schools
Chapter 9 Administrative problems
Chapter 10 Welsh problems
Chapter 11 Conclusions and recommendations
Appendix I List of witnesses
Appendix II Liberal education (Young)
Appendix III Secondary curriculum (Kandel)
Appendix IV Faculty psychology (Burt)
Appendix V Transfer of training (Hamley)
Appendix VI Curricula in the Dominions (Clarke)
Index

London: HM Stationery Office

Appendix VI Memorandum on some influences affecting secondary curricula in the Dominions
by Mr F Clarke, Professor of Education and Director of the Institute of Education, University of London
[pages 453 - 464]

Prefatory Note

It seems necessary to indicate at the outset the rather severe limits within which this memorandum is conceived. The four Dominions to which it refers, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, offer a field that is wide even for a very cursory survey. An attempt to indicate in any detail what has been happening in recent years in the development of secondary school curricula in these lands - still more any attempt to foreshadow what is likely to happen in the near future - would demand both a large volume and far more of first-hand knowledge than I can claim. Everywhere there are signs of rising ferment and dissatisfaction, and each year brings news from many quarters of significant departures from precedent.

Moreover, from even a detailed analysis of the various prescriptions and of the results of the examinations based on the curricula so framed, one might derive an inadequate and actually misleading idea of what is really happening, if the evidence were derived from the documents alone. Long, intimate and ever-renewed contact with the working of the schools themselves is necessary if one is to understand the real meaning of the new movements, and to estimate rightly the reforms which would bring satisfaction. I know only South Africa and part of Canada at first hand. I left the former nearly seven years, the latter about eighteen months ago. I have visited New Zealand and Australia, but cannot claim any first-hand knowledge of what goes on in the schools of either country. It seems well, therefore, to limit the scope of this memorandum to a very general estimate of the influences which have operated in shaping the Dominion outlook on secondary education, and so on the prescription and working of secondary curricula. Illustrations from the field of practice will be adduced from time to time, but no attempt is here made at anything so ambitious as a comprehensive survey of the facts.

Hazardous as it may be to generalise I think certain broad statements can be made about Dominion education as a whole. It is necessary to have these common features in mind, not only to facilitate comparison between one Dominion and another, but also to bring into relief certain important differences between the Dominions and the mother country in this regard. In all four lands well-developed systems of education are now functioning. So recent are they, however, in their present form, that a considerable number of the very able administrators who did so much to create them are still alive. It is surprising, at first sight, that creations so modern should embody so conservative a spirit. Some reasons for this will be suggested in the sequel. For the present we have to note some outstanding features which all these systems have in common.

They are all popularly controlled, governed by a comprehensive body of legislation, and administered by a permanent official working, as a rule, under a Minister of Education. All the departments really administer often in minute detail, and even where, as in Canada (1), the duty of providing and maintaining the school is thrown preponderantly upon local funds. Curricula are prescribed often with close precision. Little discretion is left to the teacher, even if he desired it, which is by no means always the case. All the systems are highly sensitive to mass demands and to a popular criticism which is often neither well-informed nor concerned directly for educational efficiency. Of late years this mass demand has taken as one of its forms pressure for access to secondary education, and departments everywhere have been much concerned both to meet the demand and to prevent it from having the effect of depressing standards. Usually they have succeeded to such a degree that popular outcry, as in New Zealand and elsewhere recently, takes the form of a complaint that final examinations are too difficult.

In the maintenance of standards much support has been given by the universities. Until recently, in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the universities had a virtual monopoly of the examination of secondary school pupils. In Canada the departments have kept this function in their own hands, the universities prescribing only the subjects of the departmental examination in which candidates for matriculation must pass. Recently, however, the Cape and the Transvaal in South Africa have instituted their own senior examinations. A year or two ago New Zealand followed suit. In Australia the practice is general to conduct the examination in each state through a Board upon which the university is largely represented. More will be said below of efforts to remedy the alleged consequences of excessive university influence in school examinations. ('Alleged' is used advisedly, for the complaint is loud even in Canada where the universities as such play little part in the examining.)

The general picture, then, is one of highly centralised, popularly controlled and popularly responsive state systems, increasingly pressed upon by equalitarian demands, and increasingly called upon both to extend and to diversify the provision for secondary education that has been offered hitherto.

But there are also important differences and of these, since they concern vitally the attitude adopted towards secondary education, something must now be said.

Reference has already been made to one of these, that which concerns the structure of the administrative system. Only in Canada are there to be found local authorities for education with powers of local taxation. In every Canadian province considerably more than half the cost of maintaining schools is borne by the local school boards. What may be called vestigial remains of school boards survive in the South African provinces (except Natal), and in New Zealand. But, elective as they are, they have no real powers of initiative in policy nor any financial resources of their own. In effect they are little more than advisory bodies to the central authority, and local agents to do its bidding. Australia has never taken kindly to school boards, though some states, such as Victoria, have experimented with school committees having a very limited range of purely local duties.

Even in Canada, where a vigorous school board in a large city will sometimes assert itself with effect on questions of purely educational policy, the threads of control and the statutory monopoly of prescription are in the hands of the central provincial department. Thus in most of the provinces the prescription of textbooks to be used in the schools is a function reserved to the department, often under severe penalty upon a teacher for permitting the use of unauthorised books. This is typical. There is a good historical explanation of the practice which need not be entered into here.

But while the existence and functioning of local school boards in Canada does not seriously break the uniformity of the picture of central prescription which is presented by the Dominions, it does influence directly the content and effectiveness of secondary education. So tenacious is the small local unit, so deeply rooted is it in the customs and traditions of the people, pointing back as it does through the New England village to the English Tudor parish (minus squire and parson), that all attempts by enlightened administrators to introduce a larger unit, more adequate at least to the needs of secondary education, have been shattered on this rock of tradition. Yet, compared with many a Canadian school board an English 'Part III' Authority is a vast organisation.

The result is a diffusing of provision for secondary education (or at least of authority to teach the secondary curriculum) which militates seriously against both efficiency and elasticity, and goes far to account for the continuance of minute prescription from the centre. In some parts of Canada, it is the practice to allow 'secondary' courses to be taught in one-teacher schools. It is conditions such as this which serve to perpetuate minute and narrow prescription.

Even in the other Dominions the same essential factor operates though not so extensively and so harmfully as, in the special conditions, it does in Canada. The people of sparsely populated areas demand increasingly for their children facilities analogous to those enjoyed by their fellow citizens in the towns, and where concentration is not feasible, some makeshift must be provided. Not every community can afford the elaborate system of boarding bursaries by means of which Southern Rhodesia solves this problem.

Facts such as these, operating, be it remembered, in communities which are deeply imbued with an equalitarian spirit, must be kept in mind if we are to judge fairly the practice of centralised prescription that characterises every Dominion. If sheer administrative form be taken as a basis of distinction among the four Dominions, Canada would stand by itself, while Australia, New Zealand and South Africa would constitute the 'centralised' group. But, as we have seen, this distinction on the basis of administrative form cuts less deep than might have been expected. There is another distinction to be drawn which is, perhaps, more significant of deep-seated differences of attitude and spirit, and may become even more significant in the future. On this basis the classification would be Australia and New Zealand in one group, Canada and South Africa in the other. The first two have developed their secondary education mainly on 'English' lines, the other two on lines which can be called 'Scottish' only if a whole genus is confused with one of its species.

In Australia and New Zealand, until the early years of the present century, democratic impulse took the form of a demand that the state should concern itself mainly with elementary education, at a high level of efficiency for all, under a system so planned that the child in the country should be under no disadvantage as compared with his fellow in the town. That teachers in these lands should have become civil servants, at the disposal of the department to go where they are sent, is in some degree a result of this demand.

Secondary education was regarded in a light which is very well expressed by a definition of it recently put forward by the head of one of the large public schools of Australia (i.e. 'public' in the English sense). 'Secondary education', he says, 'is that extra training to the mind and body which a parent is willing to give his son if he can afford it, or which a state will try to give to its citizens under similar or even without similar qualifications.'

The import of the latter part of this definition is not very clear. The really illuminating phrase is that of 'extra training'. If it be thought strange that societies so thoroughly equalitarian as those of Australia and New Zealand should have acquiesced for so long in such an idea, it might also be recalled that there was the same acquiescence in the United States until near the end of last century.

'Post-primary' provision was made alongside the largely private provision for 'secondary' education, in the shape of higher elementary, central and junior technical schools. The twentieth century was well advanced before the state, influenced perhaps by the English example of 1902, concerned itself seriously with secondary education. The large state secondary schools and the assimilation of existing post-primary forms to the secondary type are a product almost entirely of this century. Australia and New Zealand are thus faced by a problem of 'Hadowisation' not unlike that which is presented in England. We shall have occasion to note later one valuable result of this history in that it served to secure the fixing of standards in secondary education proper at a high level.

Canada and South Africa present a very different picture. A sharp distinction between elementary and secondary as anything more than stages in a common course of education has never been popular in these lands. The single school providing for both levels has been the desired and customary type, though schools modelled on English public schools have long existed, and their numbers tend to increase in recent years. Canadian and South African systems of today are thus of the 'single-track' type, a continuous series of grades or standards grouped in sections the limits of which are still matter for experiment. Using American terminology we may say broadly that Canada has had the 8-4 (or 7-5) type which it is now trying to convert into the 6-3-3 type (interposing thus the junior high school), while South Africa has what may be called a 2-6-4 type, the initial 2 standing for what are known as the 'sub-standards', and the final 4 (secondary) tending to subdivide as 2 + 2.

Such a system, revealing as it does a marked social ethos, is too narrowly described if it is called just 'Scottish'. For in South Africa its main determinant has been the social philosophy of the Dutch-speaking Afrikander, rooted historically in the Calvinist Reformation and the Dutch War of Liberation against Spain. In Canada another species of the same genus has been at work, in this case the spirit of New England, with its historic roots in English Calvinism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, brought into Canada by the Loyalists and other settlers from the South who came in after the Revolutionary War. Later, Scottish emigrants coming to either land, found a social and religious temper which was highly congenial to them, and so were able to make a whole-hearted and immensely valuable contribution to its educational expression. Everywhere they did work of the highest value as teachers and organisers and determinants of standards. But that upon which they worked was, in its origins, Dutch Calvinist or Puritan English and not Scottish at all.

It has been left to the twentieth century, with its flood-tide of equalitarian democracy, to formulate the demand that such a system shall now develop its full implications of 'secondary education for all'. In meeting this demand South Africa and Canada may encounter more difficulties and dangers than Australia and New Zealand, with their wider diversity of provision, may have to face.

There is the problem, in the first place, of maintaining standards against the flood. Canada has difficulties here, since the tendency in that country has been to construe the term 'secondary' as meaning certain courses of study (which might be pursued in a one-teacher school or even by correspondence without a school), rather than as a certain type of school with minimum standards of equipment and organisation. Constantly increasing pressure for access to the universities accentuates the danger of emasculation of standards and a descent into mediocrity, and the absence of a scholarship system contributes in the same direction. But the danger is realised and universities and departments are combining to meet it by distinguishing sharply between school leaving and university entrance, and by encouraging in the secondary schools work of the sixth form type. 'Senior Matriculation' is still, in some areas, accepted as exempting the holder from the first year of the university course, but the tendency is strongly towards bringing the normal standard of university entrance up to this level. The institution in Ontario of 'Honours Matriculation', like 'Leaving Honours' in Australia, is an intermediate step in this direction.

South Africa is, perhaps, better equipped to face the problem. There the education departments do set required minima of staffing and equipment for the recognition of schools as 'secondary', and reserve the right to determine the level up to which any school may work. Also the Statutory Joint Matriculation Board exercises its powers, not always without friction, to maintain standards both in its own examinations and in those of the Cape and the Transvaal, the two provinces which have instituted senior examinations of their own.

In respect of another difficulty, that of diversifying the forms of provision for secondary education, the relative advantage as between the two countries is reversed. Canada is better placed than South Africa. In both the problem may be indicated as the converse to that with which England is faced today. In England we have to devise some means of integrating, with the main structure of 'secondary' education eo nomine, forms of post-primary education which have grown up quite independently. In Canada and South Africa the problem is to discriminate diversified forms of secondary or post-primary education (particularly for younger adolescents) from the single-track continuum. Canada's effort in this direction has consisted partly in the provision of vocational forms of a secondary school course, and partly in the attempt to establish the junior high school. This latter effort has proceeded farthest in British Columbia, Manitoba and Nova Scotia. The British Columbia form of the new departure is, perhaps, the most radical and the most interesting. It well repays study. But everywhere the difficulty of giving to the junior high school a distinctive identity, quite apart from any 'grade' nomenclature, is enormous. The school is only too easily thought of as just three steps of the common ladder - usually Grades VII, VIII and IX - with some special offerings of curricula.

South Africa might almost be described as hamstrung for any effort to meet the problem satisfactorily. For while the provinces have control of education that is 'secondary' in the traditional sense, the Union Department of Education controls vocational and technical education. Thus a wholly artificial attempt is made to divide the seamless vesture; or, as one commentator has put it, the attempt is like trying to use a ray of moonshine for a garden fence. The result is to force the provincial schools back upon 'academic' courses, and to restrict severely that fruitful cooperation among widely diversified institutions which experience is proving to be so essential to the securing of real elasticity and actuality in the devising and adaptation of secondary curricula.

Moreover, South African universities, exerting powerful influence through the Joint Matriculation Board and through their degree courses, have cast an unfriendly eye upon efforts to establish genuine sixth form work in the schools. The result is that schooling ends, for all but a negligible handful, with the passing of the matriculation examination, and thus opportunities for diversification are still further restricted.

Owing to the play of such factors it has to be said that, so far as the provincial systems are concerned. South Africa is the most backward of all the Dominions in respect of the healthy diversification of provision for secondary curricula.

It has seemed well to place some emphasis upon these factors of habit, social ethos and administrative method which determine the general background, in order that the spirit in which secondary curricula are framed and applied may be set in the right perspective. We turn now to some characteristic features of the curricula themselves.

At first sight it would seem a surprising thing to say that the most conspicuous feature of secondary curricula in the Dominions is their marked conservatism. But it is true, nevertheless. The conservative spirit, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, is certainly stronger than it is in England. Some reasons which may account for this will be adduced presently; the fact itself is borne in irrefutably upon any observer who studies the situation sufficiently closely. Mathematics with the traditional content are still taught in the traditional divisions. Generally in Canada, any one of arithmetic, algebra and geometry may be taken apart from the rest, and everywhere the textbook plays a dominant part. General science is becoming more and more common in the early stages, but after that physics and chemistry, with the customary content, reign almost unquestioned. Biology, however, is beginning to appear, particularly in schools with an agricultural bias.

Detailed prescription of texts in English literature is practically universal, and in some parts of Canada 'The Lady of the Lake' has had an unbroken run for many years. In Canada again the practice is general (and not unknown elsewhere) of prescribing in detail the passages of verse and prose which have to be committed to memory.

Latin, though showing signs of decline, is still studied by great masses of pupils, by many of them, it is to be feared, for a short time and with little profit. Two thirds of the pupils in the secondary schools of New Brunswick are recorded as doing Latin. In Ontario in 1933 the numbers recorded as taking Latin in the 'lower school' course (junior) are 31,524 as against English - which may be regarded as compulsory - 35,880. In the middle school (senior) for the same year the numbers for Latin are 17,151. It would seem that very many pupils are studying Latin for not more than about two years.

The State of Victoria has recently determined that Latin shall be the first language to be taken up in secondary schools.

Some universities still demand Latin for matriculation at least into the Faculty of Arts, but the tendency to relax the requirement seems to be growing. In South Africa pupils may matriculate with no languages but the two official ones, English and Afrikaans, and there Latin is being displaced in the schools in favour of German. Similarly in Canada it may yield more and more to French.

Examinations present the same picture of prescription and uniformity. Entrance examinations for high school are being relaxed, though at least one Australian state holds a full-dress examination of all pupils at the end of the elementary course. In Canada the practice of examining pupils for 'grade-promotion' in the secondary stage is dying out, and in Ontario and the state of Victoria much progress has been made in the 'accrediting' of schools for matriculation purposes so as to dispense even with the matriculation examination. Tentative moves in the same direction are being made elsewhere.

But, in general, the official examiner still rules the scene with a rigour of standards that is still commendably high. (2) And the practice is quite common of indicating passages in a prescribed textbook which are 'not required for examination'. It is to be feared that, in some parts of Canada especially, the study of 'science' consists in not much more than learning certain essentials from a textbook. The examination is often the only means of guaranteeing that there has been serious study at all, and it is inevitable that, on the one hand, modes of study should adapt themselves to the recognised modes of testing, and that, on the other hand, prescriptions by authority should be laid down with the examination in view. It is only in the more developed and densely-populated areas that experiment with more flexible forms of guarantee is at all safe or even practicable. Yet the man on the land, little disposed to forego his rights, demands a fair chance for his children, remote from the large centres as they may be. In such circumstances uniform prescription and uniform examination assume the character of the equalitarian instrument which they so often are.

A 'halfway' examination at the end of a stage (usually two years) which is variously called junior or intermediate or lower has a place in three of the four Dominions. In Australia it comes appropriately at the point where the older post-primary courses 'engage' with the system both of the newer state secondary and the earlier private secondary schools. Transfer to a full secondary school on the completion of a junior (or intermediate) stage appears to be common in Australia.

In South Africa where there is no post-primary system parallel to the lower stages of the secondary, the junior examination tends to fall into disuse, except as a final examination for pupils who do not propose to go beyond Standard VIII.

In Canada, by reason of the working of the traditional 8-4 system, the Grade VIII, or High School Entrance Examination, has discharged the function of a junior examination. With the introduction of the 6 - 3 - 3 plan and with it the junior high school, Canada is moving nearer to the Australian pattern.

Everywhere junior curricula are somewhat closely prescribed, with a very narrow range of options. Further, the desire to have a common junior course, and the difficulty of meeting varied needs in a sparse population, involves sometimes undue postponement of work in foreign languages. In at least one Canadian province a plan is about to be put into effect whereby the language cannot be begun until Grade X.

At the senior level the opposite difficulty arises, that of a considerable variety of options to be equated in a common certificate. New South Wales, for instance, it would appear, has tended to reduce the value of its certificate as a guarantee of general education in the effort to cover a wide range of options in one examination scheme. (3)

Canada endeavours to organise distinctive curricula such as academic, general, commercial, agricultural and industrial, and to mark the certificate accordingly. Everywhere, however, in spite of all that has been done, the pressure is toward the academic form, whatever the more direct needs of the pupil may be. Australia, perhaps, has gone farthest in the successful encouragement of courses other than that for matriculation.

Generally then the conservatism that has been noted as a conspicuous quality of the practice of Dominion systems of secondary education refuses to yield. Efforts to relax the rigidity of prescriptions and examinations, to emancipate teaching, and to heighten relevance and actuality in studies generally, have met with only a limited degree of success. One would suspect, therefore, that there must be operating, to produce such tenacity, certain powerful factors inherent in the situation in which the Dominions find themselves. This does actually seem to be the case. Something in the very situation of a 'new' country forces it to cling to established ways with a quite special tenacity - at least in education. It may be worth while to suggest very cursorily some of the influences which may be contributory to an effect so different from what might have been expected.

In the first place, operating with overwhelming power in the formative stages of Dominion history, there is the great force of cultural self-respect and cultural loyalty. The danger that children brought up in the new land may fall below the cultural standards of the land from which their progenitors come is a very real one during the pioneer stages. There persists also, in great strength even today, a profound loyalty to western culture, even if not necessarily to the British form of it. And as schools and universities become well established, the desire to win and to retain recognition and standing performs the same function as that discharged by fear of degeneration in the pioneer days. One must at all costs continue to stand well with the academic world outside, and so one must resist all risky tinkerings with the respectable and time-honoured in the curriculum. The powerful influence of the universities has been very strongly exerted in this direction, and it has been reinforced by the influence of immigrant teachers - not from Britain alone - who from vanity, prejudice, cultural insight, or whatever reason, have been disposed to impress their own inherited standards and pattern. Once set, as the result of such forces, the pattern finds prescriptive powers enough to maintain itself. For a long time, and especially when economic development is proceeding apace, good teachers are not easy to secure and still harder to keep. And in days when population and desire for advanced schooling are both expanding rapidly, the difficulty becomes acute. Hence the task of maintaining standards and of holding together the essential structure of a cultural education is thrown back upon a central authority. Not able as yet to shift the burden on to individual schools and teachers, it must carry the load by the only methods open to it, those of rigorous bureaucratic prescription. Practically every system which is producing real results today has had to pass through the 'martinet' period, and the marks of that are strong upon every one of them. Yet even now the great and necessary service that was performed by the martinets is not always fully appreciated.

The influence of the professions, desiring to have a qualification that would be recognised in other lands, has worked in the same direction. So, too, has a very general aversion from the large multi-bias school that is so common in the United States. The 'academic' tradition has thus been kept clear and free even in Canada, where, although there are some large high schools, the great central core of traditional studies has been kept largely intact. 'Technical' education, even when provided by the same authority as that which provides secondary, has usually been treated as a thing apart, and secondary schools have sniffed at it even more forcibly than have those in England. In Canada, where the Dominion government provides much of the cost of technical education, and in South Africa, where the Union government has the rights of control, there are additional factors making for segregation. No one can doubt that, in the long run, it is secondary rather than technical education which suffers more from this detachment. Where a school for adolescents works with a curriculum having a vocational colour, there is a curious aversion from calling it secondary at all. Even if the title 'high school' is conceded, it must be preceded by a qualifying epithet as though to save the purity of the real thing. It is a technical, vocational, commercial or agricultural school rather than just plain secondary. In South Africa a claim might even be raised for transferring such a school from the control of a province to that of the Union!

Thus do elements which might enrich the normal secondary curriculum come to be regarded almost as a kind of contamination, so that culture, it would seem, is to remain unhandy, and practical skill to be considered uncultural. Not until the Dominions feel fully assured of the security of the replanted culture in its new home, and more clear than they are today as to the distinctive qualities of their own culture, will they feel it safe to break down this curious segregation.

It may be relevant to add that the Dominions are still dependent upon Great Britain for much of their current literature and for their ideas about science, though everywhere there are signs of a growth of a native point of view, and of native cultural products. The influence of the United States is growing, as is to be expected in the nature of the case, but even in Canada it has made very little impression on the central tradition of the secondary curricula. This is due, no doubt, not so much to influence directly exerted from Britain, as to strong persistence of the old 'Loyalist' attitude towards culture, brought mainly from New England after the Revolutionary War.

The general impression of a sturdy conservatism must not be allowed to obscure the very real fact that each Dominion is beginning to feel its way towards a distinctive outlook of its own upon secondary curricula. Perhaps it is to be expected that this disposition would find its strongest reflection in the history courses. In some parts of Australia there is a tendency to restrict history teaching proper to British and Australian history. But generally there is strong evidence in the courses provided, especially those for the later years of the secondary school, of a desire to send pupils out with a well-compacted knowledge of modern history as a whole. The intention is evidently to equip the adolescent with the necessary historical keys for the interpretation of the modern world as viewed from the standpoint of his native land. Canada, in particular, has devoted much thought and experiment to the task of selecting and organising relevant historical material for this purpose. The subject appears usually under the heading of 'social studies', and includes some civics and elementary economics. But the material is mainly historical. British Columbia, in particular, has worked out elaborate schemes for the presentation of history in a series of 'units' designed to shape a balanced perspective. English teachers might learn much from such schemes, especially those teachers who are dissatisfied with what they regard as the undue provincialism and limitation of some English schemes of teaching.

Canada, too, has gone far in the development and use of school libraries, and this will, in due course, react on the still-continuing disposition towards minute prescription of studies in literature.

Some Australian states are experimenting with economics and economic history as secondary school courses. One even allows for logic! New South Wales offers Japanese, and South Africa includes the Bantu languages in its lists. A South Australian report (1934) remarks that: 'A marked departure from the traditional course of study is gradually taking shape in some of the country high schools.' Reference is made particularly to agricultural science, biology, increased practical work, and the growing demand for arts and crafts.

Australia again, particularly in Victoria, has made a real success of its schools of domestic arts for girls. Elsewhere one hears increasingly of pressure from pupils and parents alike for more relevant and realistic courses. This is a good sign, for if tradition and orthodoxy have been overdone, the blame must not be laid on the shoulders of the universities and the administrators alone. Public opinion has its responsibility also for, frequently enough, the administrators are ready to move but public opinion checks them. The following from a recent report of the Superintendent of one of the maritime provinces of Canada is typical:

'I wish to recommend and even urge that a curriculum committee be appointed to study the whole matter of courses of study and textbooks with a view to improving the courses by making them less rigid and more elastic, that there may be fewer compulsory and more elective subject in high school. Agriculture, social studies, art, music might be added, the amount of classics and mathematics reduced, and the amount of science increased. Above all the course in English should be improved by having less formal grammar and more practice in both speaking and writing, a wider range of general reading, a less intensive study of prose and poetry, more extensive reading for enjoyment and appreciation.'

The writer of this passage may have been influenced by the achievement of a neighbouring province which, after exhaustive study, produced a stout handbook of over 600 pages, giving not only courses of study primary and secondary, but much admirable advice to teachers, and much enlightened comment on the grounds for including given material in the courses of study.

Among the influences making for reform is a growing sense of the high educational value of training in arts and crafts, of the special need that young countries have of citizens thus trained, and of the deleterious effect which examination emphasis on the orthodox 'academic' curriculum has upon arts and crafts in the school. Expense and the large number of small schools interpose serious obstacles in the way of reform, but neither is so serious as the swollen state of the 'academic' subjects, fed as they are on a diet of examination prestige, and encouraging, as they tend to do, an over-valuation of facile verbalism.

Such work as is done in the arts is apt to be perfunctory, formal and old-fashioned, though there are schools in Canada which are doing really distinguished work in art and music and drama. Speech, on the whole, is seriously neglected, and all the emphasis on physical training seems to issue in more vigour than grace. Genuine and significant artistic movements, such as are gathering strength in Canada and Australia for instance, seem to have little or no connection with the schools. But the ferment of dissatisfaction is working, and the Australian Director of Education, recently returned from England, who gave utterance to the following downright opinion, would, doubtless, find his opinion echoed by colleagues elsewhere in the Dominions. He is reported as having said: 'I doubt if one pupil in a hundred in the schools of Britain could pass our Scholarship Examination at the age of 13½ years. But these same boys can draw plans of a reasonably complicated article, make it out of wood, hammer it out of bronze or some other metal, carve or otherwise form on it some neat design, which has been previously worked out on paper. They can fashion an article out of clay, paint a design on it, glaze it and bake it in a kiln. The girls can spin and weave, draw and paint, design and put their designs to practical use. They can cook, make garments, arrange the furniture in the rooms of a house or flat, model in clay and fashion toys. Both boys and girls at 13½ have, in the great majority of cases, a good knowledge of science acquired practically and experimentally. No one will deny that skill in wood and metal work, in art and design, with a good general science knowledge, is a greater asset to a youth today than a knowledge of the history or geography required for the examination in question.'

But no change from orthodoxy has proceeded very far yet. It would appear that the Dominion communities are not yet sufficiently sure of themselves, not ready to follow political with cultural autonomy, afraid of the consequences of a too-hasty casting off of a dependence which they feel rather than openly admit. Thus they have not yet faced squarely the question of Latin, to discover what specific value it can have for them in their special situation, and how it should be taught and handled to achieve that value. Up to the present the disposition has been one either of drift or of uncritical orthodoxy. There are signs now of an awakening to the essential task of reinterpretation. Some investigators may even come to the conclusion that if the criterion is to be purely cultural values relevant to the needs of new democracies oversea, Greek may have more to offer than Latin. But little systematic thought has been given to the matter so far.

Thus the general picture is still one of conservative acquiescence in a tradition, the tradition being maintained by a rather rigorous use of prescription and examination. But the days are coming when the Dominions, each in its own peculiar situation, so different from that of the mother country, will feel ready to offer and to take firm stand upon that variant reading of western culture which, with an increasing awareness of what they are doing, they are now working out. For the present the initiative is still with Britain; Britain is still the land of intellectual and educational adventure, one of 'those tradition-ridden centres where men are adventurously thinking' of which an Australian writer speaks. But it will not always be so. Interchange will, at least, become more equal, and there are abundant signs that this new epoch is beginning. The creative possibilities of British education can no longer be adequately known by concentration solely upon what is achieved in this country.

Footnotes

(1) The appearance of decentralisation in Canada - with nearly 24,000 school boards, one for every 450 of the population - is largely illusory. In all that concerns the day to day procedure of the school and the action of the teacher, the administration is as highly centralised as that of an Australian state where the teacher is a civil servant and the whole cost of education is borne by central government funds.

(2) Though there are some indications that a high standard in the setting of papers is not always accompanied by a high standard of marking.

(3) See 'Secondary Education in New South Wales' by WJ Elliott, Educational Research Series No. 38, Australian Council for Educational Research, Melbourne.