Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/115

Rh organising schools of a humbler quality than the secondary schools, where boys and girls, immediately after leaving the elementary school, may be trained practically in their future businesses, or to instituting evening schools, which may present some useful education after industrial life is already begun, or art schools, where the young may be taught to apply art to mechanical processes, or, again, technical institutions proper.

Here, again, even the most pronounced optimist must realise our painful deficiencies. The minister explains that in technology, as compared with the Continent, "we have most leeway to make up." And indeed, if, to the full-time students in our eleven modern Universities, be added the undergraduates and post-graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, it will be found that England and Wales possess 16,600 students only, against the army of 63,000 students possessed by Germany in similar institutions.

Thus, is it too much to say that our system is still inchoate after the efforts of fifty years? Let us believe that in another fifty years a definite organisation will have finally won its way amid the press of educational controversies. Growth is slow; prejudice and counter-interests are oppressive; the calls of life are insistent; and this powerful race has some innate and profound distrust of knowledge for its own sake, agreeing with Epictetus that education is a surgery to which we go not for pleasure, but for pain. Will not the