A Crusading Educationist
Secondary Education for All. By H. C. Dent. (Routledge and Kegan Paul. 8s. 6d.) MR. Darr positively prances with his belief in education as a panacea for all society's ills. His idealism and passionate sincerity make him a crusader who commands affection as well as respect. He welcomes the Education Act of 1944 despite the fact that it was introduced at a time when there was a risk that lack of books, beaks and buildings would disappoint the hopes it raised. It is already notorious that the Act's, provisions for the parents' choice of school for their child are too often a dead letter because of lack of accom- modation.
Mr. Dent has two major quarrels with the Act. He regards as a fundamental fallacy the assumption that " the secondary education of the non-academic child should be shorter than that of the academically minded," and would apparently insist on a.continued education which many young people neither desire nor deserve. His suggestions for this extended period, whereby " it would be just as possible for a boy or girl to return from part-time employment to full-time school as to go from full-time school to part-time employ- ment," involve what seem to a practising schoolmaster insuperable difficulties of organisation. This is child-centred education with a vengeance when the school is apparently never certain of the clientele for which it has to plan a curriculum. Mr. Dent admits that the interlocking of school with employment would involve " prolonged and delicate negotiations." By whom are these to be conducted ? Is a public relations officer to be added to the staff, or is the head- master to encounter one more obstacle to what used to be a not unimportant part of his job—teaching ? If financial retrenchment compels the country to cut its educational cost according to its cloth, it may save education for a time from the well-meant excesses of our Utopians.
Mr. Dent is rightly dismayed that the Education Act fixed the age of eleven rather than thirteen for the beginning of secondary education. " Progressive opinion " perhaps found it difficult to swallow the later and natural age because the public schools had always found it to work well in the past. Mr. Dznt's solution is that children from eleven to thirteen should attend diagnostic schools Which would be staffed with "a doctor, a qualified child psychologist, and a number of ' tutor-counsellors '," who would determine for ivhich type of school a child was suited. Despite this expert and extravagant staffing, we are told later that " all conclusions reached there would be regarded as tentative " and subject to revision throughout the child's school life. It is difficult to see how for many children the school life could be anything but an ambulatory process, subject to personal whim and prejudice, and destructive of that continuity of environment which used to be regarded as a strength in schools.
The author holds correctly that secondary education for all is an entirely new concept in this country. Its aim and content need thinking out from first principles. Adaptation of grammar-school methods for modern schools is not good enough. In what is a useful and stimulating book Mr. Dent analyses the reports of official com- missions and Ministry pamphlets, a process which makes it tragically clear that confusion still obtains in defining either the aim or the curricula of the newly extended education. Until this is achieved there can be no certainty that the taxpayer will get a reasonable dividend on the prodigious sums invested in bringing. about
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