Sir William Anson, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of
Education, made an admirable speech on our educa- tional needs at Manchester on Wednesday. Sir Norman Lockyer, be said, had advocated the founding and endowment of Universities specially designed to meet the trade rivalry of other countries, and to provide us with scientific training to defeat the attempts of other nations to outdo us in the commercial world. Against this battleship theory of educa- tion Sir William delivered a weighty protest. For himself, he did not like to see essentially learned bodies created in order to meet the rivalry of other countries. There ought to be, and he believed there was, some sort of brotherhood of learning among the Universities of the world. Sir Norman Lockyer was beginning at the wrong end. Unless we built up an intelligent population and got a more widely diffused desire for education, such Universities would not achieve their end. He strongly combated the view that only students of science could acquire knowledge at first hand, and invoked the high authority of Mr. Acland, who had put in a claim for greater attention to historical and literary study. In a word, what we want, according to Sir William Anson, is to promote the notion that knowledge is an instrument of national well- being, not an engine of international retaliation.
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