EDUCATION FOR THE BRITISH
Cranston, Maurice
Education For The British By MAURICE CRANSTON London WITH the British Government's new Education Bill now passing into law, England should not in the future be the world's most backward democracy...
...They are housed almost invariably in tumbledown buildings and staffed with under-paid, overworked teachers...
...For has not even Mr...
...Education For The British By MAURICE CRANSTON London WITH the British Government's new Education Bill now passing into law, England should not in the future be the world's most backward democracy in her system of schools...
...The compulsory school-leaving age is to be raised from 14 to 16, which means effectively that there will be secondary education for all (it is now the preserve of the lower middle classes...
...He proposes to build young people's colleges for the part-time education of adolescents after they have left school at 16...
...To this end he urges the introduction of the system of Folk Colleges which Grundt-vig began in Denmark in the last century and which have played so great a part in making that tiny kingdom the most civilized country in the world...
...there they will learn non-academic subjects so that they will not be, in Sir Geoffrey Shakespeare's words, "Well versed in Homer and Thucydides but totally ignorant of carpentry and mending a fuse...
...By most sections of the community, though, it is accepted as a very substantial and very necessary measure of social reform...
...The Catholics find themselves in the unhappy dilemma of either finding the money to educate their children properly themselves or sending them to non-seetarian schools...
...Its great opponent is the Roman Catholic Church...
...there will still be the expensive ($800 a year upwards) "Public" Schools and the ancient ($1,000 a year upwards) universities of Oxford and Cambridge...
...Education for adults is quite as important, Sir Richard believes, as education for children...
...Centralized Control Sought English elementary schools ("English" in this sense embraces Wales but excludes Scotland, where there is a democratic but much more rigorous system of education), which are her only free schools, are run today by local authorities and by churches under various mixed and muddled arrangements...
...Butler demands without a heavier subsidy from the state than the promised 50 per cent...
...This New Deal in English education is, inevitably, opposed and criticized...
...But apart from this thin uppercrust, the threadbare structure of education is thoroughly to be reformed...
...Perhaps the most cogent comes from Sir Richard Livingstone, master of an Oxford college...
...R. A. Butler, president of the Board of Education, intends after the war —Land, of course, all these reforms cannot be introduced before then—that the equivalent of more than 170 million dollars shall be spent on technical education alone...
...Churchill said of himself that he was not interested in learning until he was 23...
...The Catholic Church, they say, is too poor to give its children as good an education as Mr...
...His answer is, broadly speaking, for citizenship and an authentic culture...
...Sir Richard asks the question: "Education—for what...
...Butler wants to centralize the control of the schools and to raise the status of the teachers...
...Education will still be on a class basis...
...Education For Adults Criticism of the educational reforms—on the score that they are not big enough—comes from other quarters...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 14
