_Craik_, Education and
the State; _Barnard_, English Pedagogy; _Clark_, The State and
Education; _Gill_, Systems of Education; _Balfour_, Educational Systems
of Great Britain and Ireland; United States Commissioner's Reports for
1889 to 1902.

Nearly a thousand years ago Alfred the Great encouraged education of the
higher classes to the exclusion of the masses--a principle that has
governed education in England until within recent times. Statistics
taken in 1845 showed that only one in six of the inhabitants could read,
one in four write, and one in fifty cipher as far as the Rule of Three.
Since 1870 important changes have been made, and the number of children
in the elementary schools of England has increased from 1,500,000 in
1870 to nearly 6,000,000 in 1902.[179]

"The principal features of the law of 1870 were (1) the obligation
assumed by the government to secure school provision for all children of
ages 5 to 14; (2) the recognition or creation of local agencies (private
or church managers or elected boards) for the execution of this purpose;
(3) provision for securing efficient instruction by means of an annual
grant from the treasury to be distributed to the local managers upon the
results of examination and inspection by government inspectors; (4) the
creation of a central agency to carry out the provisions on the part of
the government and of new local agencies or school boards which every
school district must elect except upon satisfactory evidence that
schools efficient and adequate to the needs of the district were
otherwise provided; (5) the admission of private and public elementary
schools to a share in the government grant upon the same conditions; (6)
the requirements that board schools should be strictly non-sectarian and
the children of private schools protected from enforced sectarian
instruction by a conscience clause."[180]

The most important modifications of this law are the laws of 1899 and
1903. The law of 1899 has reference to the general administration of
education in England and Wales, while that of 1903 entirely changes the
local management of schools and extends the sphere of public education
to secondary as well as elementary schools.

=Administration.= 1. _General._--Under the provisions of the law of 1899
the general administration of educational affairs is committed to a
board of education consisting of a president, appointed by the crown,
lord president of the council, the pri