ABSTRACT
THE multilateral principle offers an obvious challenge to the grammar school and its traditional superiority, and it is the recognition of this threat which has provoked much of the hostility towards the multilateral idea. Another challenge of a somewhat different nature has come from the idea of the technical secondary school, or the technical high school, as the Spens Report called it. The advocacy of this new type of school sprang, in the main, from a dissatisfaction with the grammar schools, which were accused of failing to prepare their pupils for industrial employment, and even of prejudicing them against a career calling for black hands rather than a black coat.
