systematically and do paperwork and take an active part in discussion; that they should give such leisure as remains from other duties to teaching their fellows, and should spend their holidays, as some of them do, in further educational work at summer schools; these things, still no doubt the exception, but an exception which becomes daily more common, seem to us evidence of a belief in education which most of those who have obtained it more easily would be reluctant, and many would be unable, to offer.

82. It is not only by the attitude of the students that the reality of the forces behind adult education must be judged. We would point out, in the third place, that it is a voluntary movement, and that it has both the defects and the merits of voluntaryism. The defects are obvious; they are lack of system and continuity. The merits are initiative, energy and devotion to a cause, because without these qualities a movement which relies upon the conviction of its supporters, and is not propped by endowments, cannot survive. All continuous educational effort implies some continuous organisation to inspire, maintain and direct it. The progress of adult education, which is carried on predominately in classes and reading circles scattered throughout the country, and which has neither endowments, nor (if we except the small number of colleges for adult students) the machinery of corporate life, nor the support which comes from connection with a continuous and localised institution, depends, to an extent which can hardly be exaggerated, upon the willingness of those who believe in it to give the practical support which alone. can make its continuance possible.

83. It is not merely, or chiefly, a question of money, though that aspect of the matter is not without its importance. Except in the case of university extension lectures, students who take advantage of facilities for adult education do not usually pay directly the full value of the education which they receive Nor can they be expected to do so, since, like other forms of higher education, adult education cannot be self-supporting except at the cost of excluding the larger proportion of those who ought to benefit by it. At the Working Men's College in London the income from students' fees appears to amount to about £464 out of a total revenue of £2,580, at the Vaughan Memorial College in Leicester to £231 out of £1,190, at Morley College to £289 out of £1,738. The fee paid by a member of a tutorial class amounts, normally, to about 2s. 6d. per session of 24 meetings. On the other hand, they, or movements to which they belong, contribute indirectly a considerable sum. Thus, to give only a few examples, the Workers' Educational Association, which is responsible for organising the university tutorial classes and a large number of other classes, lectures and reading circles, is supported by the fees of the organisations affiliated to it, as well as by the contributions of individual members, and without the aid thus given to its work as a pioneer and an organiser its educational work could not come into existence. In addition to the sum, amounting probably to about £105,000, or 8s. 4d. per member, spent in 1913-14 on educational activities of one kind or another by individual co-operative societies, the Co-operative Union maintains at its headquarters in Manchester the nucleus of a centralised educational organisation, and contributes considerable sums to other educational movements. It has recently made a donation of £100 to the Workers' Educational Association and £20 to the Working Men's College, and it subscribes annually £20 to the former and it also subscribes to Ruskin College, in addition to contributions made by individual societies. Trade Unions contribute annually about £750 to Ruskin College. The Labour

College is financed by the National Union of Railwaymen and the South Wales Miners' Federation.

84. But, important as is the financial aspect of organisation, even more vital to the success of adult education is the personal effort which is devoted to maintaining and developing it. The intra-mural work of a university depends mainly upon the presence of a group of salaried teachers and officials. Their work is to keep educational machinery running smoothly for the benefit of those who desire to use it, not to induce students to use it who have not yet done so. The problem of extra-mural education is widely different. Each new class or course of lectures involves a new effort of propaganda and organisation. Before the educational work is started interest must be aroused by missionary work among all who are likely to be interested. Conferences must be held; correspondence must be conducted; personal efforts must be made to enlist the support of organisations and of individuals. When a class is in existence, its value and, indeed, its continuance depend largely upon the creation of a corporate spirit among its members, which will lead them to regard it seriously, to make it one of the first claims upon their time, and to persist in the face of difficulties and discouragement. Not only, in the case of a grant-earning class, must the simple work of official correspondence be conducted in a businesslike manner, but old students must be encouraged; new students must be found; backward students must be assisted; those whose interest seems likely to flag must be inspired. A social spirit must, in short, be created, which will unite the students by a feeling of mutual comradeship and loyalty. In the case of intra-mural education that spirit is partly supplied by long traditions and by close contact with the life of an institution. In the case of extramural education all the work of propaganda and organisation, which is not less vital to its full success than that of the teacher, must be performed, normally by busy men, in the intervals of their ordinary occupations. On the whole, it is performed successfully and with judgment as well as zeal. Nor is voluntary effort confined to the field of propaganda and organisation. At the present time, in several different parts of the country, there are classes which are conducted by men and women who are themselves taking part as students in one type or another of adult education, and who, in addition, give up one evening or more a week to bringing to their fellows the education which practical experience has taught them to value for themselves. There are types of education which continue even if the interest of the students be little more than a polite acquiescence in the efforts of their teachers. Adult education must develop through the determined efforts of the students themselves, or it will not develop at all. We think that the persistence and seriousness which it evokes are a proof that the interest in it is not merely superficial. It has many defects: some we have already touched upon, and of others we shall speak later. But the demand for it is undoubtedly widespread and growing, and, on the whole, is genuine. It produces solid and persevering work on the part of not, indeed, all, but a considerable proportion of those concerned with adult education, and not a mere irresponsible dilettantism.

(III) THE RELATION OF ADULT EDUCATION TO OTHER MOVEMENTS AND ORGANISATIONS.

85. The growth of educational work among adult men and women is the more significant because of the relations which exist between such work and other educational and social developments. Adult education is not, as is sometimes suggested, an attempt to achieve by an educational

tour de force results which can be produced only by patient effort wisely directed from the years of childhood. Nor is its aim merely to compensate for the manifold imperfections of higher education by offering to adult men and women the educational opportunities which the deficiencies of our educational system, or their own economic circumstances, have prevented them from receiving in youth. It is, on the contrary, the natural outcome both of the wider diffusion of intellectual interests and of the simultaneous development of other movements which are not the less educative because the promotion of education is not their primary object. It is not a temporary makeshift or stop-gap, but a normal part of the educational provision of a democratic community. Though its intellectual level would be raised by the progress of other kinds of education, the need for it would remain even if full-time secondary and university education were, as in the Dominions, far more accessible to the mass of the population than they are at present in this country.

86. The connection of the growth of educational work among adults with the improvements which have taken place in the earlier stages of education and with a keener sensitiveness to the appeal of the intellect is too obvious to require more than a passing comment. In these respects the last generation has probably seen a greater change than the whole of the preceding century. Men and women who are now fifty years of age or over spent their childhood at a time when a national system of elementary education was painfully being brought into existence. Educational methods in the elementary schools, with certain shining exceptions, were usually crude and ill-conceived. Teachers were underpaid, ill-trained and overworked. Classes were too large to permit of serious education. Child-labour was rampant. Except in a few large cities continued education was almost non-existent. It was not till 1876 that attendance at an elementary school was made obligatory throughout the whole country; not till 1899 that the minimum age of leaving school was raised to 12; not till 1903 that some check was imposed upon the labour of school children out of school hours by the Employment of Children Act; not till 1907 that the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act laid the foundations of a school medical service. Many of these evils, the underpayment and overwork of teachers, the overcrowding of classes, juvenile labour and the neglect of adolescence, survive to-day. But they survive in a modified form; and the boy or girl who attended an elementary school from 1903 to 1911, and who is now in young manhood or womanhood, has passed his or her childhood amid influences more likely to stimulate a desire for further study than did the child of an earlier generation.

87. He steps, too, into a more stimulating world. For, after all, important as is the quality of the school, the school is only one among many influences which mould character and awaken intellectual interests. What determines the attitude of young men and women towards education is partly their previous experience of it; but it is even more their present environment, and if it is such as to stir the appetite for knowledge, its influence steals into their minds through countless invisible channels. That environment is more conducive to mental curiosity than it was. It is not only that education plays a far larger part in the life of the community than it did 30 years ago, that it is respected, if not yet loved, where previously it was derided, that a larger number of individuals come directly under its influence and are more deeply affected by it, and that evening schools and public secondary schools give boys and girls in increasing, though still in very small, numbers, a glimpse of the meaning of higher education. It is that the

intellectual atmosphere of the society into which children are born has changed. Thirty years ago the press was a power with Governments; to-day, for good or evil, it is a popular institution; and, if the Press does not increase knowledge, it at least increases the desire for it. The fathers of the present generation bought few books, for books were too expensive to allow of them buying many. To-day cheap books by living authors, and cheap editions of classical authors-on their present scale a development which is comparatively modern and which is significant of the appetite for reading-have made part, at least, of the world of literature and history and physical science accessible to all but the poorest. The first Public Libraries Act did not come into force until 1850; to-day there is a public library in every considerable town. The growing application of science to industry, and still more the tendency another example of the same movement-to substitute some organization, whether good or bad, based on reasons which can be explained and criticized, for a rough and ready empiricism, has given thousands of men in the course of their daily work a demonstration of the power of thought to modify the practical arrangements of life. The establishment in the course of the last two generations of a public teaching profession, numbering well over a quarter of a million members, has ensured that most households are, directly or indirectly, in touch with some person whose main function is the dissemination of knowledge. The growth in the number of public secondary schools and the increase in the number of universities during the last quarter of a century have resulted in educational activities being diffused over a wider geographical area, instead of being concentrated, as thirty years ago was still the case, in a few centres which were little more than names to the mass of the population. If those who pass to them from the elementary schools are still an insignificant fraction of the elementary school population, their mere existence nevertheless influences opinion by reminding it of the world of thought.

88. The growth of movements which have as their aim the creation of a better social order is not less important than the progress of education itself. In some ways it is more important, for such movements create the background of aspiration and endeavour which is the foundation of more directly educational work, and suggest the questions for which men and women seek in study to find an answer. We discuss at a later point in this chapter the relation which exists between adult education and other popular movements; and we do not desire to anticipate here what is said below. But we think that the extent to which the demand for education has been stimulated by a growing realization of the inspiration and guidance which it can offer to a better social life can hardly be overestimated. That motive for seeking education has its dangers; what motive, indeed, has not? It may lead to sectarianism and one-sidedness, to a lack of detachment and an undue preoccupation with immediate practical issues, such as, for other reasons, have been the faults of some educational movements, both in the past and to-day. On the other hand, it widens the appeal of education by reinforcing the desire for knowledge with a social impulse. It is a matter for congratulation, and all in the tradition of education in this country, that changes in the structure of society and in social thought should be reflected in the sphere of educational effort. As we have already suggested in Chapter I of this Report, most new departures in education have, in the past, been the expression of some such social ferment. Education has been revivified because men sought to reinterpret the world in which they lived, or to find a rational solution

for the problems of their practical life. Such experiments have often been crude and hasty; but their crudity has been softened by the lapse of time, while the impulse which they added has been permanent. In its conection of education with a keen social interest adult education is, therefore, quite in the spirit of earlier educational movements. As democracy has passed from a system of political machinery into a practical influence in the daily life of society, it has awakened a consciousness of new powers and new responsibilities. Men and women who a generation ago would have accepted without criticism the first opinion offered them, desire now to use their own minds and to form an independent judgment. They seek education because they believe that it will enable them to do so. They feel that without it they lack something of

the dignity of human beings.

They

89. Adult education, then, has developed not per saltum, but as the natural concomitant of other educational and social developments. It is the native, and often struggling, growth of a fruitful soil, not a hot-house plant. Children leave school with faculties heightened by an improved system of elementary education. Though many are dulled by premature and excessive labour, many retain the germs of intellectual interests implanted in the schools, and in still more their interests expand when adolescence is over. Young men and women read, and criticize and discuss. They seek for something to appease their curiosity, to resolve their doubts, or to feed their aspirations. communicate their interest to others. They meet to satisfy it by exchanging opinions or to seek light on the problems which press upon their minds. They find that one problem leads to another, and that simple issues are unintelligible without some knowledge of their background. From discussing practical questions of industry they turn to pure science. Surprise or indignation at social conditions leads them to social history, or political science, or economics. The convulsion of a European war turns their minds to European history, or geography, or foreign languages. Some poet has laid his spell upon them, and they wish to read more widely in English literature. As they achieve all that can be achieved by desultory reading and discussion many drop off. But some remain; and those who remain desire something more deliberate and systematic. The result is a reading circle, or a class, or a course of lectures. It is in fact the beginning of adult education. When the class further systematizes its work and voluntarily imposes upon itself certain conditions of study, when it decides that it has derived all the benefit it can from a course of lectures and determines to give some years to going more thoroughly into one subject, when it organizes itself so as to combine study with something of the social spirit of a college, when it puts itself in touch with the best sources of instruction in its locality and welcomes inspection to keep it at the level at which it has aimed, it turns the informal, though educative, discussion of a group of inquirers into a definite branch of educational effort.

we

90. Not all educational experiments, of course, pass through all these stages, and it is a question of some nicety, which discuss later, to determine at what point it is desirable for public bodies to offer them assistance, if they desire to receive it. But the fact that vague intellectual interests are increasingly converted into a definite plan of study is made possible by the widespread existence of interests which are not. If the more conspicuous efforts sometimes reach a higher level than formerly, it is because the foundations of