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.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century the Catholics of England entered upon their long struggle to maintain their schools in a condition of material and professional efficiency equal to that of the wholly state-supported schools in the national system. Both in primary and in secondary education the price of monetary aid from the Government has been increased control by the local or central education authority, and in consequence the chief pre-occupation of our struggle has been to safeguard the principle of Catholic teachers in Catholic schools, and to ensure the integrity of the teaching in doctrine and morals given during the hours devoted by law to religious instruction.

In the matter of the curriculum of secular teaching we have been content in past years to follow the lead set by the non-Catholic schools, and have adopted their general educational policy and conformed ourselves as best we could to its varying demands. Even those schools which have always been independent of government control have been forced, during the last forty years, by their acceptance of the external examination system to abandon their autonomy and the traditional system of education which they had inherited from the continental schools of pre-penal days, and to conform their syllabuses and teaching system to the dictates of the external examining boards. Thus it has come about gradually that the curriculum of secular teaching, with its attendant syllabus of books to be read and periods or matter to be studied, has ceased to be chosen by the authorities of the school and has been imposed by an impersonal external authority which has little or no understanding of the purpose and needs of Catholic education.

To live in the country and partake of the life of the country is in itself an education, partly because natural phenomena, experienced by the countryman at first hand, are educative, and partly because craftsmen abound everywhere practising their crafts in the open for all to see. These characteristics of the country provide two fundamentals of education : opportunity to study the relations of God with man, and the opportunity to learn through imitation (the only way that one human being learns, from another) the essential crafts of life.

Observation of nature is like looking at the illustrations of a history book. It offers visible examples of life and the way life is ordered. The pictures may be wrongly interpreted—as can be seen by the origin of the word paganism—but, given true philosophy, the countryside is a constant reminder of the ultimate things of life.

As regards the second educational advantage that the country possesses, almost every activity that a child watches—and is everywhere able to watch—explains itself. No one is likely to make a mistake about the purpose and method of milking a cow; the cutting, making and carrying of hay are their own text-book; the hedger, the thatcher, the ploughman, the blacksmith, the cobbler, each teaches a lesson to the passer-by, as do the manifold processes of cultivation in the fields.

‘A child above all other gifts brings hope with it and forwardlooking thoughts,’ but to entertain hope means to recognise fear, and standing as we do at present on the brink of an unknown future, both hope and fear imperatively urge us to do now what we can to make that future safe for the child.

Of all the groups into which every Christian child is born, the family is the most divinely natural and the most fundamentally important. It is through the family that he becomes a member of that wider, more self-sufficing society, the State, whose function it is to provide for the temporal well-being of the community. Through the family also he becomes a member of that supra-natural society by whose instrumentality he is enabled to attain to full development and to his appointed supernatural end. In his encyclical letter on ‘The Christian Education of Youth,’ His Holiness Pius XI sets forth with authority and uncompromising clarity the respective rights and duties (as educators) of these three societies, ‘distinct from one another yet harmoniously combined by God into which man is born. The family holds directly from the Creator the mission, and hence the right, to educate the offspring ... It is the right and duty of the State to protect and foster but by no means to absorb the family and the individual or to substitute itself for them. It also belongs to the State ... to supplement the work of the family whenever this falls short of what is necessary . . . and to provide suitable means (e.g. education) ... in conformity with the rights of the child and the supernatural pre-eminent rights of the Church.’