upidity or the poverty of their parents, into the ranks of untrained
labour, and who in the course of two or three years go to swell the
ranks of the unskilled, casual workers, and become in many cases, in the
course of time, the unemployed and the unemployable. In the second
place, we must endeavour to secure the better technical training of the
youth during their years of apprenticeship, and so tend to raise the
general efficiency of the workers of the nation whatever the
nature--manual or mental--of their employment. In the third place, we
must endeavour, by means of our system of education, to increase the
mobility of labour. In the modern State, where changes in the industrial
organisation are frequent, the worker who can most easily adapt himself
to changing circumstances is best assured of constant employment, and a
great part of the social evils of our time may be traced to this want of
mobility on the part of a large number of our workers.

The mobility of labour is of course always determined within certain
limits, but much may and could be done by pursuing from the beginning a
right method in educating the child to develop its power of
self-adaptation to the needs of a changing environment.

If these results are to be attained, then we shall have, as a nation, to
make clear to ourselves the real meaning and purpose of education; we
shall have to make explicit the nature of the ends which we desire to
secure as the result of our educational efforts, and we shall have to
organise our educational agencies so that the ends desired shall be
secured.

Let us now consider the question of the meaning, purpose, and ends of
education.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _National Education and National Life_, p. 1.

[2] _Ochlos_, a mob.

CHAPTER II

THE MEANING AND PROCESS OF EDUCATION

"Of all the animals with which the globe is peopled, there is none
towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercised more
cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with
which she has loaded him, and in the slender means which she affords to
the relieving of these necessities. In other creatures these two
particulars generally compensate each other. If we consider the lion as
a voracious and carnivorous animal, we shall easily discover him to be
very necessitous, but if we turn our eye to his make and temper, his
agility, his courage, his arms, and his force, we shall find that his
advantages hold prop