The Schools of England - A Study in Renaissance Book

THE SCHOOLS OF ENGLAND THE SCHOOLS OF ENGLAND A STUDY IN RENAISSANCE EDITED BY J. DOVER WILSON, Lrrr. D. PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, KINGS COLLEGE WITH A PREFACE BY LORD EUSTACE PERCY PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION CHAPEL HILL THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS 1929 Lords and Commons of England consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit acute to invent, subtik and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. . . . What wants there to such a tawardly and pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies MILTON, Areopagitica, 1644. Published in Great Britain by Sidgwick f Jackson, Ltd. PREFACE BY THE RIGHT HON. LORD EUSTACE PERCY, M. P., PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION THIS book is based on a course of lectures given at Kings College, London, during the Michaelmas term of 1927. It appears at the right time and will, I hope, serve the purpose which Professor Dover Wilson and his collaborators have evidently had in mind. What our national education chiefly needs just now is focus. During the last quarter of a century we have been so busy building up its various parts, criticising its defects in detail, and preparing plans for repairs here and extensions there, that we have had little time to stand back and view the structure as a whole. Moreover, we have been reminded so often of our lack of system, of our habit of developing our national institutions bit by bit to meet the needs of the moment, that we have been apt to assume that no compre hensive view of it is possible. When foreign inquirers have asked us plaintively where they can get an account of English education, we have usually been content to explain to them the futility of any such request and have expatiated rather smugly on our national genius for incoherence. Our immediate neighbours in Europe do not perhaps take our evasions very seriously, for the countrymen of de Tocque ville, Gneist and Redlich have long ago discovered that there is usually more method in the madness of our institu tions than we are prepared to admit but we can hardly wonder if our admirers in remoter regions, such as South vi PREFACE America, often come regretfully to the conclusion that the English do not care about education. What matters more is that the man in the street at home, who has an instinct for order but no natural liking for uniformity the sort of person who has the irritating but salutary habit of asking exactly where he is, but does not necessarily want to be informed that he is in the same boat with every one else is sometimes driven to seek refuge from our vagueness in schemes for unity of control which he would never advocate if he did not feel that education must be tidied up somehow. In fact, of course, our education is no more incoherent than our constitution, and its apparent shapelessness has been mainly due to our habit of leaving it surrounded with a scaffolding of statutory distinctions, administrative regula tions, and pedagogic terms of art, long after these have ceased to serve their original purpose. Since the war a good deal has been done to remove the administrative planks and poles in this scaffolding. The first step in that process was, perhaps, the simplification of the grant system under the Act of 1918 the latest has been the re-organisa tion of the Boards inspectorate. We can now see that our division of what is known as the public service of educa tion into elementary, secondary, and technical, with all the ingenious sub-divisions which we have invented to correct an originally faulty classification, cannot be regarded as part of the foundations of our system, but only as an incidental aid in the work of construction...Read More