IJNGLISH education reflects strikingly the society of which it is a part. The same contrasts between wealth and poverty are well represented by the expenditure on the children of Boston, Lines., or Falmouth, whose schooling costs £ 9 6s. 2d. a year, and those at Eton on whom at least £315 1-general ly much more-is lavished annually. There are the same extremes of comfort, as seen in the comparison between all that modern planning can provide in a Cambridgeshire village college or in the latest secondary school, and the slum elementary schools which are the dismal relics of Victorianism. The general standard, too, is still typically drab and depressing. Thus, according to Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, in his recent survey of social conditions in York (Poverty and Progress), all but one of the voluntary schools in that city were built between 1834 and 1890, and all but two of the council schools between 1891 and 1916. Again, there are the same wide differences of opportunity. Though many students from working-class homes now reach the universities and distinguish themselves there, the road is steep and admission is highly competit ive-but only for those who are not well off. And, in spite of all the difference that the scholarship system has made in the last generation, recent research has shown that, for seven fee-paying students who receive a higher education, only one free pupil of equal ability is so favoured.2 Finally, the chances of life and health are widely different. Sir John Orr has shown that the boys at Christ’s Hospital –a public boarding-school-were on the average two

inches taller at the age of 13 and four inches taller at 17 than a similar sample of boys from elementary schools ; and one in six of the children who enter our infant schools at the age of 5 start their school careers handicapped by largely preventible physical defects.