ABSTRACT

There is one feature of this growing concern of the State with education which must not here be overlooked. The growth has not been either continuous or coherent; i.e. it does not represent a series of logical or even connected sequences. Each one of the agencies whose origin has been described was called into being, not merely independently of the others, but with little or no regard to their existence. Each has remained in its working isolated and unconnected with the rest. The problems which Secondary Education present have been approached from different sides, at different times, and with different views and aims. The Charity Commissioners have had little to do with the Education Department and still less with the Science and Art Department. Even the borough councils have, to a large extent, acted independently of the school boards, and have, in some instances, made their technical instruction grants with too little regard to the parallel grants which were being made by the Science and Art Department. Endowments which, because applied to elementary education, were exempted from the operation of the Endowed Schools Acts, have still been left exempt; though the public provision of elementary education in 1870 and the grant of universal free elementary education in 1891 have wholly altered their position. The University Colleges, though their growth is one of the most striking and hopeful features of the last thirty years, remain without any regular organic relation either to elementary or to Secondary Education, either to school boards or to county councils. This isolation and this independence, if they may seem to witness to the rich variety of our educational life, and to the active spirit which pervades it, will nevertheless prepare the observer to expect the usual results of dispersed and unconnected forces, needless competition between the different agencies and a frequency overlapping of effort, with much consequent waste of money, of time and of labour.