The Children: Some Educational Problems | Page 5

result of universal compulsory
education has not been realised, and the feeling is growing that there is

something defective in the aims of our Primary School system, and that
it fails, and has failed, to develop in the individual the moral and social
qualities required by a State such as ours, which is becoming
increasingly democratic in character. Further, we are learning, partly
through experience, partly from the example of other countries, that the
period during which our children must be under the regulated control of
the school and of society must be lengthened, if we are to realise the
final aim of all education, which is to enable the individual on the
intellectual side to apply the knowledge gained to the furtherance and
extension of the various purposes of life, and on the moral side to
enable him to use his freedom rightly.
Lastly, as a nation, we are beginning to discover that without the better
technical training of our workmen, and especially of those to whom in
after-life will be entrusted the control and direction of our industries
and commerce, we are likely to fall behind the other advanced nations
in the race for economic supremacy.
But, in addition to these negative forces at work, tending to produce
dissatisfaction with our educational position, the opinion is growing
stronger and clearer that the education, physical, intellectual, and moral,
of the children of the nation is a matter of supreme importance for the
future well-being and the future supremacy of the nation, and that it is
the duty of the State to see that the opportunity is furnished to each
individual to realise to the full all the potentialities of his nature which
make for good, so that he may be enabled to render that service to the
community for which by nature he is best fitted. Compulsory
elementary education is but one stage in the process. We must, as a
nation, at least see that no insuperable obstacles are placed in the path
of those who have the requisite ability and desire to advance farther in
the development of their powers. Moreover, if need be, we must, in the
words of Rousseau, compel those who from various causes are
unwilling to realise themselves, to attain their full freedom.
This demand for the better and fuller education of the children of the
nation is motived partly by the growing conviction that the freedom,
political, civil, and religious, which we as a nation enjoy, can only be

maintained, furthered, and strengthened in so far as we have educated
our children rightly to understand and rightly to use this freedom to
which they are heirs. Democracy, as a form of government and as a
power for good, is only possible when the mass of the people have been
wisely and fully educated, so that they are enabled to take an intelligent
and comprehensive interest in all that pertains to the good and future
welfare of the State. A democracy of ill or partially educated people
sooner or later becomes an ochlocracy,[2] ruled not by the best, but by
those who can work upon the self-interest of the badly or one-sidedly
educated. A true democracy is in fact ever aristocratic, in the original
sense of that term. A false democracy ever tends to become ochlocratic,
and the only safeguard against such a state of conditions arising in a
country where representative government exists is the spread of higher
education, and the inculcation of a right conception of the nature and
functions of the State and of the duties of citizenship.
But further, the demand for increased facilities for higher and technical
education is motived largely by the conviction that in the education of
our children we must in the future more than we have done in the past
take means to secure the fitness of the individual to perform efficiently
some specific function in the economic organisation of society. And the
demand proceeds, not from any desire to narrow down the aims of
education, to place it on a purely utilitarian basis, but from the belief
that the securing of the physical and economic efficiency of the
individual is of fundamental and primary importance both for his own
welfare and the well-being and progress of the State, and that in
proportion as we secure the higher economic efficiency of a larger and
larger number of the people we also secure the essential condition for
the development and extension of those other goods of life which can
be attained by the majority of a nation only after a certain measure of
economic prosperity and economic security is assured.
The social evils of our own or of any time cannot, of course, be
removed by any one remedy, but an education which endeavours to
secure that each