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XIV. CONCLUSION--THE PRESENT PROBLEMS IN EDUCATION 131

THE CHILDREN

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION--THE PRESENT UNREST IN EDUCATION

The problems as to the end or ends at which our educational agencies
should aim in the training and instruction of the children of the
nation, and of the right methods of attaining these ends once they have
been definitely and clearly recognised, are at the present day receiving
greater and greater attention not only from professed educationalists,
but also from statesmen and the public generally. For, in spite of all
that has been done during the past thirty years to increase the
facilities for education and to improve the means of instruction, there
is a deep-seated and widely spread feeling that, somehow or other,
matters educationally are not well with us, as a nation, and that in
this particular line of social development other countries have pushed
forward, whilst we have been content to lag behind in the educational
rear.

The faults in our present educational structure are many, and in some
cases obvious to all. In the first place, it is said, and with much
truth, that there is no systematic coherence between the different parts
of our educational machinery, and no thorough-going correlation between
the various aims which the separate parts of the system are intended to
realise. As Mr. De Montmorency has recently pointed out, we have always
had a national group of educational facilities, more or less efficient,
but we have never had, nor do we yet possess, a national system of
education so differentiated in its aims and so correlated as to its
parts as to form "an organic part of the life of the nation."[1] An
educational system should subserve and foster the life of the whole: it
should be so organised as to maintain a sufficient and efficient supply
of all the services which a nation requires at the hands of its adult
members. For it is only in so far as the educational system of any
country fulfils this end that it can be "organic," and can be entitled
to the claim of being called a national system.

This lack of coherence between the different parts of our educational
system and the want of any systematic plan or unity running through the
whole is due to many causes. As a nation, we are little inclined to
system-making, and as a consequence the problem of education as a whole
and in its total relation to the life and well-being of the State