16 JUNE 1917, Page 21

Higher Education after the War. By John Burnet. (Maemillan and

Co. 4s. 6d. not.)—This very able essay on higher education in Great Britain and Germany should be road and digested by our public men, and especially by those who are always praising German achievements in organized research and in science as applied to industry. Professor Burnet is perfectly frank about the merits of their system and the defects in our own, but he makes it clear that while wo aim at educating the whole people and at opening a career to the humblest boy if he has talent, the Gorman Government are mainly concerned with the training of a small ruling class. Only the sons of well-to-do parents, who can send thorn to a Gymnasium or High School between the ages of ton and nineteen or twenty, are eligible for the professions and the higher Civil Service and for responsible posts in groat industries. There is no side-gate by which the poor man's clever son may enter this close preserve. His chapter on "Tho Seamy Side " is a weighty criticism of tho German Highs School. He shows that the German University has ceased to give a general education ; the Faculty of Arts has virtually disappeared, and the specialist reigns supremo. He institutes an interesting comparison between Scottish and Prussian educational methods, and ho declares that " there is enough W issenschaft in Oxford and Cambridge to set up three or four German universities,"