Most research workers in education (as opposed to experimenters) about whom we don't propose to talk) arrive after the event in order to interpret what has happened, and hopefully to learn for the future.1 Like most of us they assume we can only understand anything by identifying what it was before it becomes what it will presently cease to be. Another assumption, schools exist to provide jobs for graduates, lay behind the first specifically educational questionnaire ever issued from a university. It justifies the adjective tercentenary in my talk for it was abandoned in 1676 because its administrator Christopher Wase of Oxford had raised the bishops, whom we are told, unwilling to disoblige Gentlemen who had got the lands given to these Scholes, into their hands and possession.2 So Wase dropped the scheme and published a book two years later urging the number of schools should be increased to accommodate graduates.3 Yet there were others at time who regarded schools as the agents for social change. They were the searchers (we would call them researchers) for a means of perpetual motion, and one of their other targets was a way to shorten the long and arduous processes of learning.4 Ironically enough, though, they founded the Royal Society to institutionalise the quest process, but their educational enthusiasm5 so cooled when confronted by the hostility of the universities the Society's defender hastened to declare that all the various manners of Education, will remain undisturb'd. He did however confess the minds of children might with more profit be exercis'd in the consideration of visible and sensible things rather than loading them with Doctrines and Precepts, to apprehend which they are most unfit.6 Stables rather than schools were the main interest of the Royal Society's Royal patron, and Newmarket the place where he built a palace now destroyed. For Newmarket was where he stabled the Royal Mares he imported to improve the breed of British horses, whose breeding did 5 affect the education of children more than the Royal Society has done: the RS.P.C.A. was founded sixty years before the N.S.P.C.C. and even lent the younger society its boardrooms to get started.7 To spur or to curb, like school colours, scholarship stakes, examination hurdles, and kicking over the traces still survive, showing the stable world ruled by our own dear Queen is still very much alive and, if I may say so, kicking. It was to cover ground quickly and effectively and convey the results of races at Newmarket to Hare Hatch -that induced Richard Lovell Edgeworth to invent the first telegraph. Here too a friend of his, Thomas Day essayed his famous experiment of rearing two human fillies: a blond twelve year old Sabrina from the Shrewsbury asylum and the brunette Lucretia from the Foundling hospital in London. He later rejected Lucretia as invincibly stupid and Sabrina was saved for further experiments like firing pistols at her petticoats. Little wonder he should have been painted (by Wright of Derby) as meditating in a thunderstorm.8 Edgeworth had nineteen children of his own so he experimented on them, rearing his son on Rousseauistic lines and collaborating with his eldest daughter on a remarkable report entitled Practical Education (1798). Their theories were later applied by her in a whole series of books for children9 All this was done in Ireland where the horses of the ascendancy English ate oats in stables but the peasants ate potatoes in turf huts. Since the Irish population was half (4 million) of Britain (8 million) with little social infrastructure except of the Catholic Church to buffer them from famine, they emigrated to London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, and America: creating a social problem on arrival. It is no accident therefore the author of one of the best statistical studies of Ireland (1812), Edward Wakefield, should, four years later have made an analysis of the social and educational needs of the Drury Lane district of London in 1816. The Irish were even thicker on if not under the ground in Manchester than in Drury Lane. Here a doctor who had to cope with them groaned over the so called investigative committees of the House of Commons. He described the labours of Members of Parliament as too multifarious as to afford them time for little else than the investigation of those supposed to be most conversant with the subject. An approximation to truth may thus be obtained from statistical investigations, and, as they are generally deduced from a comparison of opposing testimonies, and sometimes from partial evidence, they frequently utterly fail in one most important respect, namely in convincing the public of the facts which they proclaim.1 0 When Dr. James Kay wrote these words the amount of money spent on the Queen's stables was greater than spent on schooling the poor. Kay's warning was ignored by both societies receiving government help. Thus the National Society issued a questionnaire to all areas affected by the Chartist troubles in 1842 to see how far the influence of the Church and church schools had checked the spirit of anarchy. Analysis of the 150 replies received indicated where the church instruction was best provided, there the effects of the disaffected were least successful.1 1 Nor were the chapels too low for such sharp practice. For when, in the 1851 Census, details about attendance of schools and places of public worship were collected for the first time the nonconformists were arcused of driving specially mobile congregations on the Census Sunday to I