Problems of National Education

Abstract

THE extension of the school age from fourteen to fifteen, with compulsory education in continuation classes to eighteen years of age, which is the main provision of recent educational legislation, adds four additional years of schooling at the most critical and formative period of life. It is to be hoped rather than expected that better use may be made in the future than has been made in this country of the school period- in the past. One opens this book on “Problems of National Education,” a collection of twelve essays by Scottish educationists, expecting some, assurance at least that the stale old stock-in-trade of the schoolmaster derived from the Middle Ages had, in public education at least, been finally discredited. Then Latin was the universal written language, and it has been handed on as a ready-made means of disciplining youth to distasteful tasks, after all intelligible reason has ceased and me manifold activities of a rapidly expanding and luxuriant scientific civilisation have made it unsuitable. But, alas! in education the vicious circle besets one at every turn. It is idle to expect the child to be put au fait with the modern world, of which already he probably knows far more in certain ways than his teachers, until the letter have caught up with it and the subjects of their training in the ancient universities and the training institutions been fundamentally recast. But in this book every and any aspect of education is discussed exhaustively rather than this central problem.

Problems of National Education.

By Twelve Scottish Educationists. With Prefatory Note by the Right Hon. Robert Munro. Edited by John Clarke. Pp. xxvi + 368. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1919.) Price 12s. net.