ABSTRACT
Among the infinite variety of books and pamphlets that were consulted in the preparation of this chapter the amount of opinion was extensive but information was rare. To simple quantitative questions that administrators have asked continuously since Bentham (and intermittently before), the 'how much?' and 'how many?' that necessarily precede any policy pronouncement, there are few answers. We do not know how many children have been privately educated during our period. We do not know whether their maintenance was more or less expensive than the maintenance of children at public expense. That the typical privately educated child was at a day school we may reasonably guess, but whether the proportion of boarders was as high or lower than that in the public system is a matter of doubt. And yet it is on the answers to questions of this kind that public policy about the private system must depend. How much would it cost to exempt school fees from direct taxation? How many more children would have been thrown into the public system if the minimum standards there commonly prevailing had been enforced in the private schools-would it have been many or would it have been negligible because parents were buying a better article than the public service provided for them? Nobody knows.
