Amid paeans of applause from the greater part of the press, Sir Eric Geddes, Lord Inchcape, and their colleagues have at length produced their much-advertised report. Instantaneous approval of Ôthe Report, the whole Report, and nothing but the ReportÕ is preached as almost the first of patriotic duties. The judicious reader, who has passed the stage of swallowing documents whole because they appear in blue covers, will begin his examination of the Report by distinguishing critically between its different elements.
Life in the twentieth century for the children of the poor is still a dangerous business: how dangerous the figures of child mortality and, still more, of child sickness, reveal. Now, up to six, in colliery village and factory town, in overcrowded tenement and foetid slum, they are to scramble along unaided. All the delicate skill which was gradually laying the foundations of a new way of life for young children is, so far as any but the rich are concerned, to be suddenly demobilised. All the recent improvements in the primary schools Ñ nearly all in the direction of one form or another of Ôauto-education,Õ of freedom, responsibility, initiative for the individual child Ñ are to be swept away. The abolition of all free places above 25 per cent in secondary schools will ruin the pioneer work of Durham and Bradford and a score of other enlightened authorities. That, with higher fees and fewer schools, will go far to make secondary education what it was before 1902 Ñ the privilege of the rich. Nor, once the programme is put into force, will matters stop there. Education is not a  machine which can be taken to pieces and then re-assembled. It is a living organism. When it is starved it dies, and when it dies Sir Eric Geddes himself could not recall it to life. The whole moral of public education will run down.
The Report confronts the nation with a moral issue of a very searching character, and more than is commonly realised depends upon the response to it. For consider the philosophy behind its proposals. It does not actually state, in so many words, that the
children of the workers, like anthropoid apes, have fewer convolutions in their brains than the children of the rich. It does not state it because it assumes it. Its authors cry aloud that Ôthe condition of things when taxes and local rates were drawn on only to pay for the elementary education of the children of the working classes has been abandoned.Õ They lament, without adducing a shadow of evidence to prove their contention, that Ôchildren whose mental capabilities do not justify higher education are receiving itÕ Ñ though I do not observe that they propose to reserve endowed schools and universities for Ôchildren whose mental calibre justifies it.Õ While most decent men have viewed with satisfaction the recent considerable development of secondary education, they deplore it as a public catastrophe, and are indignant that education, unlike the services supplied by Sir Eric Geddes and Lord Inchcape, is sold Ôbelow actual cost.Õ They think it preposterous that the reduction in the size of classes Ñ how rarely, alas! carried out Ñ should give common children the chance of individual attention. They propose to increase them, to raise fees, to convert what are now grant-aided secondary schools into private schools reserved for Ôchildren whose parents can well afford to defray the whole expense themselves,Õ to abolish the system of state scholarships which has recently made it possible for a slightly increased Ñ though still very small Ñ number of working-class children to pass on to the universities. Their programme in short is Ôback to 1870.Õ Their aim is to re-establish and perpetuate the organisation of education upon lines of class which has been the tragedy of the English educational system, as of English society, since its inception, and from which it was just beginning to escape.
Swift once suggested killing babies and tanning their skins, which, he shrewdly observed, would make excellent leather, and could be sold by business men at a profit. Is it much more humane to ÔsaveÕ money by reducing height, weight, vitality, and mental development of children between 5 and I4?