Some unlucky star must have presided over the birth of State compulsory schooling in England; or perhaps we English secretly disbelieve in formal education altogether. It is over seventy years now since the beginning was made, with a special brand of education for the lower orders called ‘elementary,’ having as little vital connection as possible with religion, and staffed by teachers similarly segregated from any of the true educational influences of the country.

The results have been better in some respects than the nation deserved ; the shortcomings have been still more evident, but from 1870 onwards it seems that nothing less than a war will induce England to take a passing interest in educational reform. The Boer War coincided with the 1902 Act which initiated free secondary schools for some at least of the ‘elementary’ children, and made it possible for voluntary schools to survive and teach religion, at the same time handing over educational responsibility to the elected councils of town and county which dealt with the usual local affairs. The First Great War was another time of heart-searching, and resulted in the Fisher Act of 1918, an attempt to widen the narrow ‘ladder’ which was the only way out of the ‘elementary’ system, and to do a little more for the vast majority of boys and girls who would still be thrown into the industrial system at fourteen. It was a very modest bit of planning, but it proved too ambitious for the post-war mood of England; not much of it ever came into action, though the patient administrators managed in time to set going the process called ‘reorganisation,’ designed to produce, within the elementary system, a substitute for secondary schooling.