Scotland
Tax new Local Government Bill is being regarded with some anxiety as to its effects on Scottish education. The agricultural colleges, for example, are concerned because they are to be increasingly dependent on local contributions, and the transfer of part of their work from the Education Authorities to the County Councils affects their financial future. Opinion however, at those colleges, differs widely as to whether the change will increase or reduce the county contributions to their funds. There appears more reason to fear the effect of the new Bill on the representation of education; for although interest in the elections for the Education Authorities has been confined to comparatively few, they probably gave a more intelligent vote than may be obtained under the new system in which educational issues may be swamped by municipal politics.
Alarm has been expressed as to the result on religious education. The existing system secures an effective clerical representation on the educational boards. Some clergy under the new Bill must be co-opted on to the education committees ; but where such co-option is most necessary it may be least usefully employed. It has been predicted that the increasing Irish and Catholic vote will by alliance with the Labour Party secure a secularist-Catholic majority in the industrial areas. The Irish and Catholic proportion in the population is apparently increasing, not by present immigration, but owing to the higher birth rate of the Irish residents. Statistical proof is not easily obtained. The roll of Glasgow University provides a useful illustration. Irish names on it are now very numerous ; nevertheless, of the 894 students who graduated at the University in 1928 only five were born in Ireland, and they came one each from Belfast, Londonderry, Cork, Dublin, and Co. Dublin. Students of the Irish race are numerous but Scottish born.
The new Local Government Bill does not materially affect the universities except as regards bursary regulation, and their most serious difficulties are due to the great increase in number of students. The conditions are drifting back to those of the time when the universities had more students than they could accommodate. From that plight they were released by the half of the Carnegie Endowment which was devoted to equipment and staffing. The universities are again faced with such serious overcrowding and increase in size of many classes that the arrangements require readjust- ment to the new conditions. Thus the issue of class tickets, which dates from the time when the classes were small and the students' work easily supervised, tends to become formal, and does not play its expected part in the university system. Overcrowding has rendered difficult the maintenance of the pre-War standards established after the Carnegie Endowment had enabled the universities to improve their laboratories, increase the numbers of the teaching staffs and of tutorial classes, and establish research posts and post-graduate fellowships.
Some subjects, such as geography, are making satisfactory progress alike at the University of Glasgow, where it is mainly Science, of Edinburgh, where it is solely Arts, and of Aberdeen, which has a vigorous school in both faculties ; but geographical education in Scotland has still much headway to make
before it recovers from its inferiority to that in England. There is not yet a Professor of Geography in any Scottish university; The biological sciences at the university have lost ground in recent years. The need for larger honours ,schools in- biology for service in agriculture, public health, and colonial development, is being widely proclaimed ; but their place in secondary and university education has been weakened, despite the distinction of the Scottish Universities biological staffs, owing to the strong position and vested interests of chemistry and physics and a widespread faith in the superior educational value of physical science. These influences in Scotland have been aided by various university regulations, such as in Glasgow the present Science Ordinance. Its enactment has been followed by the honours school in science at the University having become a school of Chemistry. Thus, in the six years 1921-6 the number of honours students at Glasgow were 246 in chemistry against 106 in all the rest of the science subjects. The numbers in other subjects were : Botany 27, natural philosophy 22, geography 14, mathematics 18, geology 13, zoology 6, pathology 4, physiology 3, astronomy 4, anatomy 0. The numbers in physical science amounted to 285 ; in geology and geography, in which most of the students are from the physical side, 27 ; and in the biological subjects 40, of which 27 were in botany. The preference for physical science has doubtless various causes, but is not surprising since the regulations ensure a better co-ordinated course in the physical than in the biological sciences.
The present bias has been strengthened by a regulation of the Universities Entrance Board which has been recently revised ; it placed the natural history subjects in such inferiority to physics and mathematics as to threaten the complete abandonment of the teaching in botany in the Glasgow schools, and that at a time when the Ministry of Agriculture is recommending that biological training should be begun at school.
The call for more biologists should improve the position, but without change in the regulations under the Science Ordinance, the poor position of the biological subjects will probably continue, to use the Scottish phrase, in the meantime " ; and the meantime is often a long time.
J. W. GREGORY.
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