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Rh to the County Councils throughout the country for the purpose of encouraging technical education. This money was and is awarded to the secondary schools by way of grants in recognition of successful results achieved by the school in technical education. These grants have proved so necessary to the various secondary schools that such schools have been compelled to start an efficient system of technical education in order to earn them. In this respect competition with the primary schools has done good. It has forced the secondary schools to find a new source of income beyond endowment and fees and has thus brought the ancient secondary or grammar school system of England into relationship with the state. The state has not been slow to recognize the relationship. In addition to. the technical education grants it now makes special grants to all secondary schools that are prepared to attain a certain standard of efficiency in certain subjects—scientific and literary—named by the Board of Education. It is not, however, difficult to see how confused and conflicting was the whole system. It was in fact gradually becoming impossible to differentiate between primary, higher elementary and secondary education. The Cockerton case at last, by restricting the board schools to strictly elementary education, made it necessary for the legislature to review the whole position. It was evident that the Cockerton case could not be allowed to lower the standard of national education; it was equally evident that a glorified school board system meant the ultimate ruin of all forms of tertiary or university education so far as the masses were concerned. These aspects of the problem were obvious to all who were not blinded by hatred to the established church into refusing aid to the voluntary schools, or who were not members of school boards and believers in the eternal fitness of a higher elementary cul de sac training.

In order to place national education upon a sound basis it was necessary that every possible grade of education from the infant classes of elementary schools to the post-graduate classes of the universities should form one continuous system, and that there should be no competitive overlapping between its various parts. It was also necessary that the system should in no way run contrary to the almost universal national belief that christian religious teaching in some form or another, denominational or undenominational, must take a definite place in the education of children. The Board of Education act, 1899, to some extent paved the way for the elaborate national system that is now, under the act of 1902, in a fair way to become effective. The act of 1899 established a board of education to take the place both of the education committee of the Privy Council (known as the Education Department) and the South Kensington Department of Science and Art. It gave to this new board the power to inspect all secondary