English Education as it is

Abstract

THE Education Bill, the main provisions of which have received considerable attention in NATURE, in anticipation of the parliamentary debates, continues to occupy much public attention. The discussion in the House of Commons drags its slow length along, and on the day when the Bill becomes an Act, everything it provides for will remain to be done. Until that day, and in many respects long after that day, English education is unchanged. It is therefore important that all interested persons should know clearly what most people know more or less vaguely—how precisely it stands with English education in its various stages and phases. For that reason we regard it as a happy inspiration on the part of the Royal Society of Arts to secure the services of Mr. P. R. Morris, director of education for Kent, and now in special charge of army education, to lecture on this subject, under the chairmanship of Mr. R. A. Butler. Very few people have the requisite knowledge and experience and vision to describe exactly the present position in regard to elementary and secondary schools, public and private preparatory schools, and the extraordinary variety of 'the adult stage', and Mr. Morris is one of those people. Perhaps his most valuable contribution lies in what he has to say about the adult stage, including first the universities; secondly, "the field known by the rather dreary name of Further Education"; thirdly, the field now known as adult education, with its great achievements in quality and its "appalling inadequacy in quantity"; and lastly, the institutions for the training of teachers, a major issue in the Coming educational revolution. Mr. Morris's paper has been published in full in the December number of the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts.