Vocational preparation finds no place in the program but will probably be provided in an extension of the number of junior and senior technical schools.

Up to this point Mr. Fisher encountered no difficulty in piloting his measure thru the House of Commons. The storm centre proved to be the provision for compulsory attendance at continuation schools for young persons between the ages of fourteen and eighteen for eight hours a week for forty weeks in the year between the hours of seven in the morning and eight in the evening. Employers are required not only to allow the time off necessary for attending school but such additional time up to two hours as may be necessary to secure that a young person "is in a fit mental and bodily condition to receive full benefit from the attendance at school." The young person, his parents and his employers may be liable to a fine if he fails to attend regularly. Exemptions from attendance are granted only to those who have attended a full-time day school to sixteen or are in attendance at such school or are attending parttime continuation or "works" schools established by employers in connection with their factories and open to inspection by the Board and the local education authority. The chief opposition came from a small group of employers who feared that their supply of labor would be cut off. These were ready to suggest all kinds of compromiseshalf-time attendance for twenty hours a week between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, special intensified and advanced courses for pupils between twelve and fourteen, and increased opportunities for secondary and university education for brighter pupils. But as Mr. Fisher eloquently pointed out, "there is nothing sacrosanct itself about industry. The real interests of the State do not consist in the maintenance of this or that industry, but in the maintenance of the welfare of all its citizens." To the surprize of the opposition no less than his supporters, Mr. Fisher agreed to postpone the full operation of the compulsory provision as it affects young persons between sixteen and eighteen for seven years from the appointed day, that is, the

day on which the whole section is declared by the Board to become operative. In addition he agreed to reduce the required attendance from eight hours a week to seven hours. The opposition was now satisfied, but many of the ardent supporters of the Bill charged Mr. Fisher with betraying the cause. As a matter of fact, Mr. Fisher bas sacrificed nothing that he was not fully aware could be sacrificed. It is obvious that at this crisis, when the building of new schools is suspended, when the existing schools have the greatest difficulty in maintaining even a minimum supply of teachers, and when the industrial demands for labor are urgent, the full operation of the law, affecting more than two and a half million adolescents, would have been impossible. Mr. Fisher's compromise means that a start can soon be made and that the public will be educated to the full significance of the measure when the seven years are completed. A number of education authorities and a number of the larger industrial establishments have already adopted schemes that have the approval of the Board, thus disproving the contention that only the bare minimum required by Mr. Fisher's concession will be provided. The probability is that after seven years of experimentation local authorities will be ready to do more than the Act requires.

As in the case of the advanced courses in elementary schools the function of the continuation schools is broadly defined as schools "in which suitable courses of study, instruction, and physical training are provided without payment of fees." The provisions for social training and medical inspection will also apply to these schools. It is probable that the courses of study will be liberal and general in character. Indeed, guarantees were asked and assurances were given in the course of the debates that specific vocational training would not be given in these schools, but Mr. Fisher pointed out that "It would not be to the interest of an educated democracy that there should be no connection between the education they were seeking in the schools and the lives they were to lead. At the same time he felt that education should be a great liberating force, that it should

provide compensation against the sordid monotony which attached to so much of industrial life of the country by lifting the workers to a more elevated and purer atmosphere, and the Board would be false to the purpose for which the Bill was framed if it were to sanction a system in continuation schools in which due attention was not paid to the liberal aspects of education." Under the freedom permitted by the procedure thru schemes considerable latitude will be permitted to local authorities to adapt the courses to local conditions. The vocations will no doubt furnish a startingpoint for such courses of instruction. Steps have already been taken as, for example, at the University of Manchester, to furnish special courses for training teachers for continuation schools. For the present there is some danger that a false start may be made by appointing teachers whose sole experience has been in elementary or secondary schools. However that may be, the point that needs to be emphasized here is that the criticism that has been leveled against Mr. Fisher's compromise is not valid, and that the continuation school with compulsory attendance required up to the age of eighteen will be an accomplished fact at the close of the seven years of the postponement.

The Act has been variously hailed as the children's charter and as the nation's charter. Certainly it inaugurates a new era as embodying "the first real attempt ever made in this country (England) to lay broad and deep the foundations of a scheme of education which would be truly national." Of much greater significance for the future of English democracy is the fact that the Act is an attempt to provide the foundations of an education for the great mass of young citizens which, to quote Mr. Fisher, is "adequate to the new, serious and enduring liabilities which the development of this great world war creates for our Empire or to the new civic burdens which we are imposing upon millions of our people." But whatever the merits of the Act may be, it should not escape the attention of educators in this country that the English government and the English people have not considered it incompatible with the successful conduct

of the war to divert some attention to the more pressing domestic problems of the present and the immediate future. Education is but part of the broader program for reconstruction after the war that is already being considered in England and whose scope is defined in the following words by the War Cabinet in its Report for 1917: "It is, indeed, becoming more and more apparent that reconstruction is not so much a question of rebuilding society as it was before the war, but of moulding a better world out of the social and economic conditions which have come into being during the war."

TEACHERS College COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

I. L. KANDEL

II

THE NATION AND THE CRISIS IN ITS SCHOOLS'

Apart from the prosecution of the war itself, there is no more urgent problem now before the American people than that created by the threatened collapse of the teaching profession. Collapse is an extreme word; but so is the emergency it describes. The drafting into other work of large numbers of the most capable teachers, the continual opening of new doors of opportunity to thousands of others, the utterly inadequate financial provision for the majority of the remainder; these are no longer matters for debate. They are facts. And they are facts ominous with disaster for the nation. If the American people can not be made to see the situation and to supply an early and drastic remedy, we shall run the risk, even tho we win the war, of losing all that makes the war worth winning. Our schools are the spring and origin of our democracy. Of what avail will it be to spend our blood in defending the forms of democratic society, if the life that is to fill and energize them is lost? And if our schools suffer it will be lost. It is futile to declare that this is a matter for the future. If the war has taught us anything, it ought to have taught us that the future becomes the present with fatal rapidity and that failure to provide for that future in advance is criminal. Foresight, then, is what is wanted, and again, foresight, and yet again, foresight. The American people now have a supreme opportunity to exercise foresight in the matter of their schools. Will they exercise it? Or will they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?

Fortunately there are a few departments of education which even the man who can see only what is just under his nose can realize are not only indispensable to the life of

1 Read at the meeting of the National Education Association at Pittsburgh, Pa., on June 11, 1918.