THE HAMPTONSHIRE 
 
 EXPERIMENT IN 
 
 EDUCATION
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 THE HAMPTONSHIRE 
 
 EXPERIMENT IN 
 
 EDUCATION
 
 THE HAMPTONSHIRE 
 
 EXPERIMENT IN 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 C. R. ASHBEE 
 
 
 
 LONDON 
 GEORGE ALLEN & COMPANY, LTD, 
 
 44 & 45 RATHBONE PLACE 
 1914 
 
 [All rights reserved]
 
 LflteS 
 
 Printed by BALLANTTNB, HANSON * Co. 
 t th Balltntyne PrtM, Edinburgb
 
 DEDICATED TO 
 
 THE RIGHT HONOURABLE 
 VISCOUNT HALDANE
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION . ix 
 
 I. THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. ... I 
 II. THE SECONDARY SCHOOL . . . .33 
 
 III. WHAT IS MEANT BY HIGHER EDUCA- 
 TION . . ... . . .54 
 
 IV. ON CERTAIN ASPECTS OF EDUCATION 
 
 IN AGRICULTURE 73 
 
 V. ON THE TEACHING OF ART IN THE 
 
 COUNTRYSIDE 97 
 
 VI. THE HAMPTONSHIRE EXPERIMENT . 113 
 
 VII. DIFFICULTIES OF ADMINISTRATION 
 
 AND FINANCE . . . . . .143 
 
 Vll
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE survey presented in the following pages 
 is a record of Education in a country district, 
 of what it has been shown to do, and what 
 it might do with better co-ordination and direc- 
 tion. It claims to be based on experience in 
 the practice and working of English Education, 
 an experience of some twenty-five years alto- 
 gether, of which the last ten have been in the 
 country and the rest in London and elsewhere. 
 It is also claimed that the work to which it calls 
 attention is largely experimental, and that it 
 has grown up side by side with the State-aided 
 Education, by which it has been, or is being, 
 gradually absorbed. 
 
 It lays claim to no particular originality, and 
 the conditions it sets forth are, I believe, those 
 of many other English counties ; but the chief 
 
 point upon which it desires to lay stress is, that 
 
 ix
 
 the area dealt with is rural, and hence industrial 
 conditions, other than those of industry adapted 
 to agriculture, do not apply. The deductions 
 it seeks to draw are that educational ideals and 
 methods suitable to industrial and town con- 
 ditions do not necessarily apply to a country 
 community, and the plea set up is for experi- 
 ment and again experiment. We appear to 
 have no clearly-defined policy as yet for our 
 country Education. The local Education autho- 
 rities, to whom the solution of the problem has 
 been entrusted, are themselves young at the 
 work. Much is being tried, and no doubt 
 tried mistakenly, and many false standards, 
 or standards suitable to town and industrial 
 conditions, are set up before country com- 
 munities. These have to be broken down. 
 The country problem in Education is in cer- 
 tain essentials entirely different from the town 
 problem. It is thought that the record of ten 
 years' not unsuccessful experiment in certain 
 directions, and with a definite educational ob- 
 jective, may have value in determining what 
 these differences are. 
 
 Being an essay in the conduct and experience
 
 of Education, it tries with what success the 
 broad-minded reader must determine to leave 
 politics and sectarian issues severely alone. 
 
 I group what I have to say under the headings 
 "Elementary Education," "Secondary Educa- 
 tion," " Higher Education," and it seems fan- 
 tastic to use the words in this connection 
 "Agriculture" and "Art." Let it be premised 
 at once that this grouping is bizarre, not to say 
 barbarous. Were the classification not strictly 
 departmental and correct, it might very well be 
 regarded as the outcome of some new wander- 
 ings of Alice in Wonderland, but at the present 
 moment in England it is the classification of 
 the State, let that suffice. The finance of 
 Education and all that this implies is ordered 
 under those five headings ; so also is our 
 whole complicated administrative system. 
 
 C. R. ASHBEE. 
 
 MAGPIE AND STUMP HOUSE, 
 37 CHEYNE WALK, S.W. 
 
 XI
 
 The Hamptonshire Experiment 
 in Education 
 
 i 
 
 THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 
 
 $> IN the country the elementary school is the 
 
 1-1 11 IT r i mentary 
 
 pivot upon which the whole life of a district school in 
 
 . n i the country 
 
 turns. This is not so in the town ; all the different 
 
 from what 
 
 people dwelling in a country district are so # w *' the 
 
 town. 
 
 much more neighbours, get to know each other 
 so much more than people in a town, that the 
 school means more to the whole community, 
 and less to the individual family, than it does 
 in the town. This fact should colour all our 
 educational efforts and whatever ideal we 
 may have in our minds for the future of 
 country education. 
 
 To understand what the village school can
 
 do, we have to understand its limitations, and 
 these, as we see them in the English country- 
 side of to-day, we may set under the four 
 following heads they may not be the same 
 in all districts, but they hold good of Hamp- 
 tonshire : the professionalism and timidity of 
 the teacher ; the poverty of the child ; the 
 rigidity of the system of teaching ; the false- 
 ness of the ideal by which industrial and town 
 standards are held up to country children ; 
 and the weakness of the existing bodies of 
 managers as a check upon bureaucracy. It 
 is not through any want of admiration for the 
 splendid work the schools have done or the 
 improvements that have been made in them 
 in the last decade that I thus sum up their 
 limitations at the outset ; it is rather to ask 
 whether of necessity these are inherent in our 
 system of national education. Let us take 
 them in their order and see what they imply. 
 Must our teachers be so professional ; need 
 they be so timid ? The usual answer is, pay 
 
 timidity of 
 
 r. them better. But to this has to be added, 
 train them better ; give them more responsi- 
 bility. Things are not as bad as they were,
 
 but there is a peculiar, and one may almost 
 call it cruel, snobbishness in the custom by 
 which the elementary teacher is segregated 
 kept as a class apart. This segregation, we 
 are beginning to see, is having most unhappy 
 effects upon the children ; moreover, it is anti- 
 democratic. In the eye of democracy, a 
 schoolmaster's calling, whether he teaches the 
 son of the workman, the tradesman, or the 
 gentleman, is equally sacred, his work is to 
 make good citizens. 
 
 No doubt an increase of teachers' salaries 
 would help, but it is by no means all. The 
 Minister of Education, when he foreshadowed 
 this in the spring of 1913, set down two and 
 a half million pounds a year as the cost of 
 improving the standard. But on what did he 
 base it ? Alas ! it was upon the difference be- 
 tween the cost of the "certificated" and the 
 " uncertificated " teacher. But what does this 
 mean ? Does it not imply an unhappy con- 
 fusion in the public mind between "certifica- 
 tion" and "intrinsic value"? Our experience 
 in Hamptonshire goes to show that it is by no 
 means the certified teachers that are always 
 
 3
 
 the best. Sometimes the reverse is the case, 
 and country conditions make the winning and 
 the intrinsic value of a certificate a different 
 thing in the village from what they are in the 
 town. We have even heard it called " the 
 certificate curse." 
 
 This is how we have found it work in Hamp- 
 tonshire. A young schoolmistress showed 
 great skill in drawing ; with proper encourage- 
 ment she would have developed a love for 
 it the getting of the certificate apparently 
 chilled her. Noticing that she had given up 
 her drawing, I made inquiries, and had from 
 her the reply, "Oh, well you see, now I've 
 got my certificate, I shall never need to draw 
 again ! " 
 
 Nor do our foolish methods of certification 
 react only upon the character, they create 
 amazingly false situations. An application 
 was made a year ago for a teacher in "dress- 
 cutting" in the combined domestic subjects 
 centre at Easthampton. The teacher came, 
 and was found a great success. A further 
 application was made for her services in " plain 
 needlework " as well. We were gravely 
 
 4
 
 informed that this would probably not be 
 permitted, as she was not "certified" for that. 
 You may be certified to make a dress, yet not 
 able to do plain needlework. It is rather like 
 Queen Marie Antoinette, "The people have 
 no bread ! Then, can they not eat tarts ? " x 
 
 We have to crack these shells that encase 
 us with a little more common-sense. I recall 
 a fine passage from Mr. Holmes' What Is, and 
 What Might Be. " I honour the teachers as 
 a body, if only because here and there one of 
 them has dared, with splendid courage, to defy 
 the despotism of custom, of tradition, of official- 
 dom, and to follow for himself the path of 
 inwardness and life. . . . Most of the failings 
 of the teachers are wounds and strains which 
 adverse fate has inflicted on them. Most of 
 their virtues are their own." 
 
 When Mr. Holmes' book first came out we 
 organised a discussion of it on two afternoons 
 at the Hamptonshire Summer School. Some 
 thirty teachers came, and they came to fight. 
 They, so to speak, rose in defence of their 
 
 1 This point of view, as in the case of Queen Marie Antoinette^ has 
 since been corrected by the higher powers, 
 
 5
 
 chains. Then it appeared that none of them 
 had read the book, though all of them had 
 read what the newspapers said of an awful 
 thing called the " Holmes Circular." The 
 second day's discussion, after a week's interval, 
 had converted a little band of timid ritualists 
 into healthy protestants, ready to smash the 
 system as soon as the chance offered. We 
 want more of that sort of thing, but it means 
 more freedom for local experiment, more en- 
 couragement to teachers to avail themselves 
 of the higher education of an area, and more 
 unity and consideration among the educational 
 forces in the area at least so it seems to us 
 in Hamptonshire ; but with this I shall deal 
 later under Administration. 
 
 And it is only by feeling their wings a little 
 more that the teachers will give the proper 
 value to methods of education. For what 
 are methods? After having watched many 
 methods in a variety of different constructive 
 arts and crafts for over a quarter of a century, 
 after having observed the extraordinary power 
 a child has of assimilating a method if it 
 wants to, and the equally amazing power of
 
 sloughing off the futilities of its school life 
 how, in other words, it unlearns and recuper- 
 ates I come more and more to the conclusion 
 that we are ever perfecting formulae, but that 
 as soon as a formula is perfected it is time to 
 destroy and begin anew ; to get down to the 
 ground on which the child plays. The analogy 
 is the house of cards. In what here does 
 virtue consist ? The skill with which we 
 slowly and carefully build up, the thrill with 
 which when the last card is set consummately 
 to crown the edifice, then the momentary 
 rapture of fulfilment that we know to be 
 illusive, followed by the real joy does not 
 every child share it of the smash. Down 
 with it all ; let us begin again, simplify, sim- 
 plify, simplify, clear out the systems, away 
 with the sterilised text-books, off with the 
 marginal notes and glosses and cobwebs, out 
 with the pedants, the inspectors, the theorists, 
 even the Whitehall encyclicals ; let us scrap 
 the old used-up machinery, and get back to 
 the real human beings and the facts of life. 
 
 Is the poverty of the child a necessary The 
 
 i i i r poverty of 
 
 limitation to the proper working of our country the child. 
 
 7
 
 school ? It may be so in the town, but need 
 it be in the village ? What strikes us in 
 Hamptonshire, where agricultural wages stand 
 at from 12*. to i$s. a week, is that this funda- 
 mental fact of poverty is not sufficiently re- 
 cognised, and that the standard of teaching 
 could be raised, and the whole education of 
 the area be made more effective if it were. 
 Many of the subjects now dealt with under 
 higher education could be taught more con- 
 sistently in the school itself; many others 
 unloaded or made compulsory continuation 
 subjects after the elementary school age that 
 is to say, exchanged with higher education 
 subjects : of this I shall have more to say in 
 its place. Where a number of the children 
 to be taught are physically below par from 
 want of proper food, all teaching is a 
 mockery that does not first consider the belly, 
 and one of the most effective ways of giving 
 value to our teaching would be first to feed 
 the children as is done in town schools ; and 
 next to show hungry and unfit and dirty 
 children how to put to best service such land 
 
 or such food as is for them obtainable. In 
 
 8
 
 other words, to show them how to make 
 decent living a possibility. For the next ten 
 years that is going to be the first requirement 
 in village education. 
 
 In the county town of Hamptonshire we 
 have one of the best domestic science schools 
 in England ; and we have recently started in 
 the market town of Easthampton a branch 
 centre for combined domestic subjects, where 
 the girls are taken and taught in shifts under 
 a resident housewifery teacher from the county 
 town. It is a step in the right direction. 
 
 If the fact of poverty is a limitation, we have The rig- 
 idity of the 
 to circumvent it by other means than educa- system of 
 
 teaching. 
 
 tional reform. The rigidity of the system of 
 teaching is a matter for reform from within 
 a matter for Whitehall. It turns largely on 
 our first limitation the timid and ultra-pro- 
 fessional teacher. But if we unloaded the 
 many superfluous subjects, and oiled the work- 
 ing parts of the machine ; lubricated the in- 
 spectors as well as the teachers, we should, I 
 think, save much wasted energy. 
 
 Why must there be all this over-much work- 
 ing to schedules and time-tables? It is not 
 
 9
 
 the perfection of the Whitehall check and 
 counter-check that we are aiming at, but the 
 best education of the children. "Is it not 
 mighty foolishness for a man," says Rabelais, 
 in one of his sublimest educational passages, 
 "to guide his way in life by the sound of a 
 bell instead of his own judgment and discre- 
 tion ? " Discipline and rule are well enough, but 
 in our elementary system we are missing the 
 humanity of both teachers and children in the 
 machinery and the bell-ringing of Education, 
 in its over-much method. 
 
 When I was at Seattle, on the Pacific coast, 
 a few years ago, I visited some of the Ameri- 
 can schools. There happened to be a heavy 
 fall of snow. The master of the school 
 promptly changed the time-table and had all 
 the lads out into the carpenter's shop making 
 toboggans. They all brought their own wood, 
 but they were organised in shifts under dif- 
 ferent boy foremen, I never saw children work- 
 ing with more enthusiasm, and I found them not 
 only cutting and planing the timber but discus- 
 sing among themselves the curves and methods 
 
 of construction best adapted to the snow-laden 
 
 10
 
 streets. Why cannot we do more of that sort 
 of thing in England ? Heaven sends the snow 
 and the sunshine, but Whitehall regards it as 
 an impertinent interference with the schedule. 
 I fear that must be so, for when I ask our 
 Hamptonshire teachers why they cannot do 
 likewise, they answer, " But how could we get 
 through the time-table, and what would the 
 inspector say ? " 
 
 In another class-room in this Seattle school, 
 Heaven's fortunate snowfall had in like manner 
 been laid under contribution. The girls were 
 drawn up before the windows with their backs 
 to the room, making black and white or brush- 
 work drawings of the snow on the surround- 
 ing roofs and chimney-stacks. "This is a 
 chance too good to lose," the mistress said 
 to me, and the children were getting most 
 delightful effects primitive and futurist of the 
 masses of snow on laden trees and tiles and 
 eaves. And when I looked at their drawings 
 it seemed to me that she had realised the truth 
 that the object of drawing was to tame wild 
 eyes ; to teach them not to see too much. 
 
 And then I thought right back to Hampton- 
 ii
 
 shire, and sighed as I recalled an estimable 
 schoolmistress who had conscientiously gone 
 out into the fields to pick a simple primrose, 
 had then made a very complicated and, I fear, 
 not good drawing of it on the blackboard, 
 and so told the children to copy this chalk 
 abstraction into their books. Her illusion, for 
 aught I know not unfounded, appeared to be 
 that she was instructing them in what the 
 Board prescribes as " Nature Study." But not 
 even Peter Bell himself in his most insensitive 
 moments would have been quite so perverse 
 as that. This clinging to methods is largely 
 the result of the certificate curse, each new 
 method to a timid teacher implying the threat 
 of lost livelihood. 
 
 False ^ I have already shown how by ignoring or 
 ideals held forgetting the fundamental facts of village life 
 
 before the m 6 
 
 country W e weaken educational effectiveness. If we hold 
 
 child. 
 
 up industrial and town ideals to the country 
 child we merely make matters worse. Until 
 more inducement is offered to the country child 
 to stay on the land the school can only in- 
 directly help. But at least it need not hinder. 
 
 We have only to pick up some of the text- 
 
 12
 
 books in a village class-room to see what slight 
 relation they bear to the mind and surround- 
 ings of the village child. When the books deal 
 with town subjects, or subjects of general in- 
 formation, they are often phrased in quite com- 
 plicated language ; when they deal with country 
 subjects they handle them from the town 
 point of view. It may be quite good for the 
 town child to be shown pictures and given 
 information about cows and horses and sheep ; 
 the country child has probably got his know- 
 ledge already at first hand. The question of 
 how the educational appeal is to be made to 
 the country child has not yet been properly 
 worked out. But one way surely must be 
 through the sentiment of locality, and that is 
 a thing that above all others the Teachers' 
 Training College and the method of certifica- 
 tion tends to discourage. Why, for instance, 
 should we in Hamptonshire not be allowed 
 to retain our beautiful and sympathetic dialect ? 
 Shakespeare spoke it, and when one of his 
 plays is acted to an Easthampton audience, the 
 dialect, as with the shepherds in the forest of 
 Arden, goes straight to their hearts. But No, 
 
 13
 
 it is not the natty, half-cultured English of the 
 training college, with an h only occasionally 
 dropped, instead of frankly surrendered where 
 the music of the sentence demands it. 
 
 Books, dialect, tradition, locality, all these 
 matters want reconsidering from the country 
 point of view, and above all, the eternal ques- 
 tions of times and seasons. I have fought 
 till I am weary the battle for swimming 
 and physical exercises in the summer months. 
 The sacred time-table, and the rigid town 
 system, has to be observed. I plead that 
 in the country where there is a river or 
 a bathing lake, the children should be made 
 to use them on the hot summer days. But 
 No, it interferes with the schedule, and a 
 system suitable to the covered baths and the 
 crowded streets is forced upon the country 
 child. 
 Thewtat. The i as t limitation of the village school 
 
 run of 
 
 txisting i s j n the structure of the Trusts and the 
 
 bodiu of 
 
 managtri way they are linked on to national life. The 
 
 as a cluck 3 ' 
 
 "** real weakness of Mr. Balfour's Education Act 
 
 bureau- 
 
 era?. was t h at jt did not rightly consider this ques- 
 tion of the personnel in the local Committee, 
 
 14
 
 it did not sufficiently give the human element 
 a chance, so that there is often in country 
 districts an unreality about these bodies that is 
 detrimental to the development of local educa- 
 tion. Where they should restrain bureau- 
 cracy with the counter-check of personal 
 enthusiasm they are too feeble to do so, and 
 where they should lead with fresh ideas the 
 stimulus is wanting. Their chief power is 
 in resistance to change ; and it is only where 
 there is locally in existence something with 
 a solidarity of its own, such as a Catholic 
 or a strong High Church Community, that they 
 have real driving force or effectiveness. But 
 was this their intention ? And is it of the 
 essence of Education ? 
 
 Nor was the error remedied by making 
 it possible for the local dissenting minister, 
 the anti-clerical, or what for want of a better 
 term let us call the corrosive unit, to come 
 on to the Committee. It makes neither to- 
 wards peace nor efficiency. For the proper 
 consideration of the big facts in the life 
 of childhood, we want to shake off the in- 
 tellectual and emotional preoccupations of the 
 
 15
 
 adult ; doctrinal bias, for instance, or political 
 opinion. It will, I think, be found to be the 
 case that anyone whose first interest is Educa- 
 tion apart from religious belief, or social 
 position, or politics has no place on an average 
 body of English school managers. Pestalozzi, 
 Froebel, and Montessori, would have had never 
 a chance that is to say, unless they could have 
 agreed simultaneously to hold with decorum 
 the office of church-warden. Roger Ascham 
 might have done it, but then he was a prince's 
 tutor ; John Knox perhaps would have been 
 put on to pacify the dissenters, but I doubt it, 
 and then think what might have happened ! 
 To use words not unbecoming his own live gift 
 of language, he would have " played Hell " 
 with village institutions. 
 
 Nobody will deny but that the sectarian 
 difficulty is not so serious as it was ten years 
 ago. This is due to the fact that we have 
 learned to take its true measure ; the public 
 has, so to say, found it out. During the ten 
 years' working of the Hamptonshire experi- 
 ment, many priests and ministers of religion, 
 
 with many different points of view, have come 
 
 16
 
 and gone in the various villages about East- 
 hampton. 
 
 I have known most of them and, I fear, 
 quarrelled with many. But only one a 
 cynic, who also was a delightful companion 
 was honest enough to speak his mind on 
 the matter. I was pleading for tolerance and 
 co-operation what appeared to me to be the 
 Christian precept of brotherhood applied to 
 Education. " Nonsense," said he, " the Church 
 doesn't want your tolerance. She lives by 
 militancy ; she's got to fight, or she'll die ! " 
 
 And so the village squabbles have to go on, 
 and every now and again a priest of sufficient 
 character comes along and makes his somno- 
 lescent flock feel the urgency of dotting the iota, 
 or fanning up once more the great " bigendian 
 controversy." During those periods it is 
 best for the educationist to do as the camel in 
 the simoom, and wait till the hot wind has 
 passed. When every now and again the 
 breath of it has blown over Easthampton, I 
 have taken comfort with Egeria not Mr. 
 Holmes' Egeria, but one of our own, from 
 
 whom the children have learnt much wisdom, 
 
 17 B
 
 and who once shrugged her shoulders and 
 said : " Well, thank God, there's no call on 
 me to attend them ting tangs ! " 
 
 But let us, as educationists, never forget 
 that it is often those very priests to whom 
 the iota is most important who are the most 
 sincere and free from cant. In Education it 
 is the man who counts before anything else 
 dogma included and if we can find a modus 
 Vivendi with the priest who will die for the 
 eating of his egg at the big rather than the 
 little end ; well ! is it not better for us to 
 find it? Our compromise will not affect the 
 truth. The sectarian question is, as far as 
 Education goes, largely factitious ; it deals 
 with endowments and the social position of a 
 clerical caste. 
 
 Professor Sadler, I believe, once pleaded for 
 the maintenance of the definitely sectarian 
 school on the ground that it implied diversity of 
 type and emphasised experiment. We may go 
 further even than that ; the educationist needs 
 the help of the Church or, if the term be 
 preferred, the Churches of sects, of creeds, 
 
 of priests, and of ministers, in the work he has 
 
 18
 
 at heart ; he cannot, in England, at present 
 do without these things. The situation was 
 finely suggested in Granville Barker's cen- 
 sored play, Waste, where Trebell is strik- 
 ing his bargain with Cantelupe for Education 
 on the basis of Church disestablishment. 
 
 It is well to free ourselves of cant, and 
 admit that the real issue in England is one 
 of privilege and property ; it does not directly 
 concern the education of the children. We 
 may very well ask, then, if the Camarina of 
 sectarianism had not better be let alone, and 
 the new Act, when it does come, be so devised 
 as to enable our National Education to expand 
 in other wiser ways ; perhaps gradually slough- 
 ing off the existing Boards of managers or 
 allowing them to be absorbed into more effec- 
 tive working education committees. 
 
 What, then, of the school as it is ? What Sug- 
 
 gestionsfor 
 
 in the country might we do with it r I wanted reform in 
 
 the village 
 
 to clear my mind on those various problems, 
 and so, as was my wont, sought counsel with 
 Egeria her real name is Rebecca Birch her 
 shrewd common-sense I knew to be much safer 
 than my theories. As, fortunately, neither she 
 
 '9
 
 nor I were Government inspectors, I thought 
 that with the Hamptonshire experiment before 
 us we had exceptional advantages for forming 
 a sane and unbiassed judgment. I put my diffi- 
 culties to her. 
 
 " What, then, would you do with the Elemen- 
 tary School here in the county, in Hampton- 
 shire, I mean ? " 
 
 She sighed. " Oh, well, you see, it's all 
 so wrong! That is to say, it's so wrong for 
 the country for us here. It may be right 
 enough in the big towns, but we're thinking 
 first of Hamptonshire, aren't we ? " 
 
 She was unwilling to be drawn. " It's so 
 easy to pull down, but a very different thing 
 to build up again ! " 
 
 " But if you were left a free hand ? " 
 
 "Well, you see, aren't we trying to do 
 in the school, first of all, a lot of things 
 that aren't really wanted, and then a lot of 
 things that oughtn't to be done in the school 
 at all, but in the home ? " 
 
 Well ? " 
 
 11 And having destroyed the home, is it really 
 
 possible to build it up again in the school ? " 
 
 20
 
 " Who knows ! But what would you do ? " 
 Then she let herself go. " Oh, well, I should 
 start on a different tack altogether. You see, 
 the whole show is run too much for the conveni- 
 ence of the inspectors, and the teachers have got 
 to do as they're told or they lose their chances 
 of promotion and get the sack. It's all too 
 much of a system, and there's not enough 
 flesh and blood in it. Whether it's reading 
 or writing, or reckoning, or sewing, or sing- 
 ing, or cooking, or take darning now, one 
 of those genial old gentlemen in gold spectacles 
 comes along, and of course it's inconvenient 
 for him to make Sarah Hedges take of her 
 stockings to see if there's holes in the heels, 
 so it's arranged for bits of stuff to have the 
 holes cut in them so as he can see the patterns 
 comfortably in rows. What's the good of that 
 when all the time Sarah Hedges' feet are 
 dirty, and her stockings full of holes ? Clean- 
 liness and darning are twin sisters, but how's 
 an inspector on ^750 a year, whose woman- 
 kind look after him, to find that out? Or 
 take cooking ; will you tell me why the girls 
 should never learn how to make stews ? No, 
 
 21
 
 being a man, of course you can't ! It's because 
 what's done in the class has to be done in 
 class time, in a two-hours' compass ; and the 
 family stew-pot don't fit into the time-table, 
 it works while the rest of the housework's 
 being done." 
 
 I returned to Sarah Hedges, who was in 
 my service. " She's had lots of sewing 
 prizes ? " 
 
 "I've no doubt she has," said Rebecca 
 grimly ; " but can she sew ? much less knit 
 a stocking you try her. And shall I tell 
 you why ? Because it's arranged for her to 
 do the straight bit which is showy in the 
 class, and when she comes |to the bend, which 
 is harder, the mistress has to take it home to do 
 it herself, because it takes too long to explain 
 in class ; then comes the straight bit over the 
 foot, and Sarah Hedges, she spins along nicely 
 over that till she comes to the turn of the 
 toe, when home goes the stocking again to save 
 time ; you see the inspector doesn't knit him- 
 self, bless him that's characteristic of the 
 whole system." 
 
 I tried a subject with which I myself was 
 22
 
 more familiar. "Of course," said Rebecca, 
 " there's the three R's. But it's part of my com- 
 plaint that we don't teach the three R's. Take 
 reading why, the teachers themselves can't 
 read. What Board School teacher would you 
 trust to get up and read a passage from Huck 
 Finn, or Stevenson's Treasure Island, or Shake- 
 speare's As You Like It, or even the story of 
 Balaam's Ass from the book of Judges with 
 sympathy and imagination, I mean, so as to 
 keep the children spell-bound ? It's not in the 
 system ; it can't be done. I know what good 
 reading is, for my father used to read the 
 Bible aloud to me every night ! " 
 
 "It's one church out of fifty where you 
 hear the Lessons properly read nowadays," 
 I ventured. 
 
 "More shame to them!" said Rebecca; 
 " that's their pie, and they should look to it. 
 I want to hear good English read, and good 
 English told, in our schools ; stories and 
 poetry, in the way children can understand and 
 will like to hear them. I want our children to 
 get to love their own language again ! " 
 
 And I wondered, thinking how right she 
 23
 
 was, had not Biblical exegesis and the Oxford 
 movement between them destroyed the English 
 language in our schools. I interrupted the 
 flow of her words with a story I had been told 
 by the son of Ralph Waldo Emerson at 
 Concord. It is an old Massachusetts tradition, 
 in the practical teaching of our forefathers, 
 those back-wood colonial farmers, many of 
 whom came from Hamptonshire, and kept hard 
 hold on the essentials of Education through 
 what was vital in the English tongue. He 
 showed me the place, too, where it happened. 
 General Burgoyne, if I remember, was riding 
 to his defeat at the head of his troops, when a 
 little colonial urchin of thirteen, brown and 
 barefoot, danced backwards at his horse's head 
 for the boy knew of the trap and as he 
 danced he mocked, reciting from end to end 
 the ballad of " Chevy Chase." 
 
 "Yes," said Rebecca, "it's that sort of 
 thing we might have again, but we've no time 
 for it. Nor is it only the famous English 
 ballads spoken I want to hear again, but sung 
 sung as they used to be. Haven't we hun- 
 dreds of them in Hamptonshire? A few old 
 
 24
 
 people in the Alms- House at Easthampton 
 remember them the quite old ones, I mean, 
 who've escaped the system. Did you ever 
 hear old Sam Bunbury in the Alms House 
 sing the ' Two Jolly Butchers,' or ' The Death 
 of Nelson'? No. Well, it's worth hearing. 
 And now as they're just all dying out, they're 
 coming into fashion again. But you can as 
 soon make a silk purse out of my sow's ear as 
 teach ' The cuckoo she's a pretty bird,' in 
 mixo-lydian mode isn't that what Mr. Cecil 
 Sharpe called it? on that horrid harmonium 
 they keep in the school class-room. It can't 
 be done ! " She looked up at me whimsically. 
 " Do you know, I sometimes think I wouldn't 
 let anybody be a school teacher, male or female, 
 who hadn't an ear for music I mean a gift for 
 proper singing not sentimental songs, or howl- 
 ing hymns, but the real thing that comes with 
 the voice right back from out of the heart 
 the thing that children love. That's what you 
 call Folk-song, isn't it ? " 
 
 " Music has no commercial value, I suppose ; 
 how about reckoning ? " 
 
 11 Of course we must have that, and that's 
 25
 
 probably better taught than anything ; but 
 that's because it's a more or less mechanical 
 thing, and the system is quite good at the 
 mechanical things ; that's where its strength lies. 
 I often think that much too much importance 
 is attached to reckoning, and that it's one of 
 the things you oughtn't to force. There are 
 many occupations, especially in the country, 
 that only need the barest elements of it ; and 
 there are many tricks in quick summing, and 
 adding and dividing, that clever children will 
 pick up for themselves when they once begin 
 to think. Are we training these children for 
 the land or for the counting-house that's the 
 point, isn't it? And don't you ever forget, 
 either, that Jack Plumb, one of the very best 
 carpenters we have in Easthampton, as you've 
 often told me yourself, can't reckon for nuts, 
 and still pays his men by tallies ! " And that 
 also I knew, and took to heart. 
 
 " He has quite good English too," I said, 
 reverting to the previous topic. 
 
 " That's because he's kept his dialect, and 
 doesn't bother much about reading." 
 
 11 You'd have smaller classes, I suppose? " 
 26
 
 "As long as we have to have classes at all, 
 I think it's better to have them big," she said 
 perversely, because it gives so many children a 
 sporting chance of slipping through the net. 
 Jack Plumb slipped through, you see, and how 
 lucky for him. He has the prettiest garden in 
 Easthampton, and his workshop is a joy. Still 
 there are a few things that can be taught in 
 classes Journalese, for instance; they have that 
 in some schools, I believe, and a very good 
 thing, too, in its way ! " 
 
 " What do you mean ? " 
 
 " Newspaper clippings current events the 
 daily picture. It ought to be a part of every 
 school's teaching and is of many. The paper 
 should be read, in its essentials, every day ; the 
 history of our time the life of the world, new 
 inventions, and what men and women are doing. 
 The paper might be discussed in class; so only 
 can the children be shown what so few adults 
 understand how to read it rightly; how to dis- 
 card the 99 per cent, of advertising husk and un- 
 reality. But mind you, I'd do this only on one 
 condition, and that is, that ' English,' as distinct 
 
 from ' Journalese,' is taught at the same time. 
 
 27
 
 If we are to read, let's read literature. If we 
 must have Fleet Street, let's have Dr. Johnson 
 in it!" 
 
 " And writing ? " 
 
 " Tut ! so we call it, by courtesy. But 
 can't you always tell the Board School hand ? 
 I can. Those dreadful scratchy letters and 
 that vile connecting stroke ; what for ? All 
 for the sake of hurry ; to make the poor little 
 chit a better prospective clerk, I suppose. 
 Why should our Hamptonshire children be 
 turned into clerks ? Why shouldn't they be 
 taught to form their letters leisurely and with 
 grace ; there's Johnson's, and Graily Hewitt's, 
 and Florence Kingsford's copies, not to men- 
 tion those thirteenth-century vellums you've 
 hung up in the Technical School ; but oh 
 dear no, we've no time to form our letters 
 properly, much less develop a character of 
 our own. Writing is one of the direct things 
 that shows character we try to obscure it 
 and pervert it. That's part of the method ; 
 all our methods are so complicated, so vision- 
 ary, they're all so" she was searching the 
 
 picture parallel " so like that place in Gullivers 
 
 28
 
 Travels what's its name? the academy, I 
 mean, where they taught the abstruse things 
 and let the real things go." 
 
 " Lagado ! " 
 
 " The academy of Lagado ; that's it ! " 
 
 " And you'd make it more practical ? " 
 
 "Yes," she said simply. "If you under- 
 stand me aright, practical in this sense, that 
 I'd make it all much more imaginative. 
 Let them think out and invent life as they go 
 along. That's what Education is for, isn't it ? 
 It doesn't end at fourteen, does it ? " 
 
 "It doesn't ever end." 
 
 "Ah! If women had the vote!" But I 
 hastily headed her off a dangerous topic. 
 
 "You would have many more women to 
 teach ? " 
 
 " Well, obviously. And I would pay them 
 better. Men are so foolish and so impracticable 
 in these matters. They are well enough at 
 scheming something new dreaming the big 
 dreams but it's the woman that thinks of the 
 details ; and children are the most important 
 details in life. Let the men dream the recon- 
 struction of their Board of Education it seems 
 
 29
 
 to want it ; but the teaching of the funda- 
 mentals, the needs of life in the village and 
 for the child they'd much better leave that 
 to us. Every real woman has a baby in her 
 breast somewhere, you know ! " 
 
 " And the domestic subjects ? How would 
 you teach them if, as you say, they can't be 
 taught in class ? " 
 
 "I should run the school much more like 
 a home, wash and feed the children if need 
 be, and put them in small daily shifts at 
 gardening, catering, cooking, and cleaning 
 up not in classes but in groups. Why, it's 
 all been done, you know, in the industrial 
 schools. In Liverpool, I'm told, the children 
 play truant in order to get into those schools 
 they love it because it's so much more homey, 
 but they have to steal first or commit some 
 crime before they have the privilege of entry." 
 
 "You would feed in the school?" 
 
 "Certainly. One square meal. What the 
 State would lose by feeding the children whose 
 parents could afford to pay, it would gain ten 
 times over by bringing the others about 75 
 
 per cent up to par." 
 
 30
 
 11 And you'd teach the boys cooking too ? " 
 " Why not ? You see, I don't call it cooking 
 I call it understanding life it would be 
 much better for them than doing what they're 
 probably doing now learning the watersheds 
 of India, or committing strings of words to 
 memory. Tut! geography indeed, if it's that 
 you mean, let them begin with the geography 
 of Hamptonshire. Like charity, and a good 
 many other things in good teaching, it begins 
 in the home. I want the teacher to be the 
 link with the home. At present he's much 
 too much the enemy isn't there a sort of 
 armed neutrality between parent and teacher ? 
 In Easthampton, at all events and it's prob- 
 ably the case in most of our Hamptonshire 
 villages the teacher knows to a nicety what 
 the standard and the earning power of every 
 home is. His influence and his teaching 
 should be levered upon that knowledge 
 homeyness should be the peculiar quality of 
 the country school." 
 
 11 Then your ideal for a country school 
 would be something more like the old-fashioned 
 dame's school again ? "
 
 " Not so far off only more intelligent." 
 " But you'd have to have it inspected ? " 
 "Oh yes, of course. I'm afraid we should," 
 and she sighed a little wearily ; " but then, you 
 know, inspectors are capable of improvement 
 just as much as teachers, aren't they ? "
 
 II 
 
 THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 IF the elementary school is the pivot upon 
 which the education of a country district 
 turns, what ought the position of the secondary 
 school to be ? In a democratic state it is 
 inconceivable that the present hard and fast 
 division between primary and secondary edu- 
 cation can be long retained, even if we make 
 the most of their one connecting link, the 
 " free-placer " system. 
 
 Assuming that we are right in our view 
 that the reform of the village school lies in 
 a return to the first principles of sound teach- 
 ing, and a simplification of subject, the effect 
 of this in any given district where the 
 secondary school is centred among a group of 
 elementary schools, must be twofold. First, to 
 perfect where necessary the subjects that have 
 been already taught ; secondly, to keep and 
 
 33 c
 
 teach better those subjects that the elementary 
 school has had to unload. In other words, 
 it is by the simplification of the elementary 
 schools in a country district that we shall take 
 the first step towards establishing the position 
 of the secondary school in that district. 
 wkattk* The Hamptonshire experience shows us 
 
 secondary 
 
 xkooi ' that if in the elementary schools we have 
 
 tttt&ns and 
 
 might failed from trying too much, failure in the 
 Hampton- secondary school has been due to venturing 
 too little. It ought to be axiomatic that the 
 two should be built up together, and it is not 
 right that the one should be developed at 
 the expense of the other, or that there should 
 be a line of rigid class distinction between 
 them. The changes we desire cannot be 
 made in a hurry ; we have local prejudices to 
 consider, many of them quite sound, and the 
 whole question of social status and wages is 
 involved ; but none the less co-ordination, apart 
 from class distinction, must in a democratic 
 state be the educational ideal. If the re- 
 construction of the countryside is to be a 
 real thing, our system of secondary educa- 
 tion must be so devised as to serve in the 
 end this larger purpose. 
 
 34
 
 Now, when I speak of failure in the Hamp- 
 tonshire schools, either secondary or primary, 
 I do not mean failure in any given case ; 
 indeed the Hamptonshire secondary school 
 has, owing to its recent reorganisation, be- 
 come a signal success ; I mean failure in the 
 co-ordination of the area, the larger failure 
 that comes of the fact that the relation of the 
 secondary school to the surrounding village 
 schools has not yet been properly worked out. 
 Here, again, what we want is an educational 
 policy for the countryside. 
 
 But assuming that we have got this relation 
 properly adjusted, and that our secondary 
 school has become one to which all the ele- 
 mentary schools look up, that its net is really 
 " capacity catching," and that all the children 
 of afiner type or better brains can work theirway 
 in to it, what is the next consideration to be ? 
 
 It is here where the larger questions begin, 
 questions of locality, of tradition, of the sort 
 of people we have to deal with, what the 
 county possibilities are, and how we might 
 use them for an altogether higher educational 
 aim than that of mere local co-ordination. 
 What in the end we shall do will depend 
 
 35
 
 upon our headmaster, the staff he creates, 
 and the local committee he has at the back 
 of him. It becomes a question of vision, and 
 in so far a quality that we must evolve 
 ourselves and not expect in the form of dole 
 or encyclicals from the Education Department. 
 It is possible, however, to lay down certain 
 lines for a rural secondary school, and to 
 base upon them an appeal not only to an 
 Education Department able and willing to 
 experiment which in England at present we 
 have not got but to the British parent of a 
 certain type and social standing; for he it is 
 who will be the ultimate judge of our success. 
 A new type When, five years ago, the Easthampton 
 secondary school was in process of recon- 
 struction, a draft was prepared for the chair- 
 man of the local committee, outlining a policy. 
 Many of the suggestions have been acted 
 upon, others were regarded as premature ; 
 and yet others set aside as impracticable for 
 financial or administrative reasons, but I give 
 here the outlines of this policy because it may 
 be taken as typical of what might be done 
 with a secondary school having a tradition 
 and history of its own, and situated in one of
 
 the many beautiful districts of rural England. 
 " Organise your secondary education," said 
 Matthew Arnold, and I believe that if one 
 or two such schools could be developed on 
 the lines indicated, they would form very 
 valuable keystones in that system of secondary 
 schools upon which some of the keener spirits 
 at Whitehall are, not unsuccessfully, engaged ; 
 but for this, money is needed, money for 
 experiment, adventure. 
 
 The draft commences by showing how the 
 old Easthampton foundation had been modi- 
 fied by (a) changes of locomotion in the district, 
 (3) the workings of the Elementary Education 
 Act, and (c) the establishment of the Local 
 Education Authority ; and it shows how the 
 result of this has been that the immediate area 
 of the school's influence has been widened and 
 at the same time defined ; it shows further 
 how a possible competition has been set up 
 with two neighbouring counties, and how an 
 understanding is desirable. A co-operation 
 is suggested between the two other Local 
 Education authorities, who also have "capa- 
 city catching" nets over the same area. The 
 fact is emphasised that the " free place " 
 
 37
 
 must become an "honourable" place, not a 
 democratic dole, the very life of the school 
 depends on this fundamental principle. Our 
 school, the draft then goes on to say, can only 
 become a success as far as the area is con- 
 cerned, if we frankly realise that the old- 
 fashioned type of grammar school that catered 
 for the sons of well-to-do farmers and yeomen 
 is no longer economically possible, having 
 broken down all over England. Our school 
 must meet the needs of all those others who 
 are to live by the land, but who want some- 
 thing better than the elementary school, that 
 growing class, for instance, of small holders 
 and craftsmen, whose boys and girls have in 
 the Hamptonshire district to be provided for. 
 
 The second line of advance is then outlined. 
 There are hundreds of parents all over Eng- 
 land, mostly dwelling in our great cities, and 
 tied to them by economic conditions ; profes- 
 sional men of slender means, minor government 
 officials, tradesmen, and others, who are unable 
 or unwilling to send their boys to expensive 
 public schools, yet who do not want to keep 
 them at home, do not want the Board School, 
 and do not want the purely town training. 
 
 38
 
 These people are on the look-out for good 
 schools in the country where they can send 
 their children as boarders. The work of 
 Baddley, Reddie, Devine, and Hudson is 
 proof enough that such schools are needed, 
 and the Hamptonshire centre is shown to be 
 exceptionally fitted for the purpose. 
 
 It will be found, next, that the sort of 
 teaching these parents desire for their children 
 is very different from what it used to be. 
 They are not merely content with cramming 
 for Oxford and Cambridge locals, or for fitting 
 their boys to fill the position of clerks in 
 offices. They themselves are often thoroughly 
 discontented with the condition of life in the 
 great cities in which they have to live, and 
 they want for their children something healthier 
 and saner, they want other " prospects," even 
 if those imply sometimes a smaller income 
 than can be earned in the town. Our school 
 should meet this want, it should be a place 
 where boys, and also girls, could come, up to 
 the ages of sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, and 
 get a good training in the country. This train- 
 ing, while not ignoring the regulation needs of 
 what one may call the "book exam.," should have 
 
 39
 
 a " country " side and a "technical, or creative " 
 side ; it should point the way to those forms 
 of by-industry in life which are likely in the 
 future to make life in the country more possible. 
 
 It is being increasingly shown all over 
 England, and in Ireland under Sir Horace 
 Plunkett's guidance, in America and in Canada, 
 that there are a number of occupations of 
 the hand, that have until recently, much to 
 the detriment of the countryside, been carried 
 off into factories in large towns. It is being 
 increasingly shown that this was a mistake, 
 and that with proper organisation they can 
 be better pursued in the country and as by- 
 industries, in connection with fundamentally 
 agricultural pursuits. We should make our 
 school a training ground for this new move- 
 ment. Here is a want that needs filling, and 
 we are well placed for filling it. It is quite 
 possible for us with the opportunities at our 
 disposal, to attract to our school 100 boy 
 boarders, with a separate house for girl 
 boarders also. Many reconstructed English 
 grammar schools show how this can be done. 
 
 The draft then goes on to show how the 
 
 Easthampton Technical School, with its even- 
 
 40
 
 ing classes, its centre for combined domestic 
 subjects, its art and craft rooms, its gardens, its 
 advisory committee of the farmers of the district, 
 should be utilised by the secondary school ; 
 the folly and waste of reduplicating plant 
 and class-rooms and appliances and teachers 
 should be abandoned ; and all that is best of 
 the higher education work could and should 
 become the heritage of the secondary school. 
 
 The last line of advance for our secondary 
 school is one that made a strong appeal to many 
 who looked to a greater future for English 
 education. There is a growing need in 
 England for a secondary school not on 
 the public school model that shall train 
 children who are to go out to the colonies. 
 It is admitted by Colonial and Emigration 
 Authorities that the " old country stock " of 
 English colonist is rapidly disappearing, 
 and that nothing is taking its place. This 
 is not only the outcome of our industrial 
 system, but also of planning all our educa- 
 tion on the hypothesis that the " town " is 
 everything, and the country merely a milch- 
 cow. But such a state of affairs cannot go 
 on, and it is evident the reaction has already
 
 begun. Our school should take advantage 
 of it 
 
 It is then suggested that a leaf should be 
 borrowed from the book of Dr. Grey at 
 Bradfield College, and that the school should 
 aim at the establishment of a colonial ranch 
 say in Canada where boys who had passed 
 through the Hamptonshire training might be 
 drafted if they so desired. The Rhodes 
 Trustees, with whom some members of the 
 Committee were in touch, were to be ap- 
 proached with a definite scheme, and their 
 financial assistance asked for it. The Board 
 of Education and the Local Education 
 Authority might, it was thought, co-oper- 
 ate in its formation, for behind it lay the 
 idea that Education and Emigration, from the 
 point of view at least of the greater England, 
 should be co-ordinated, and that the latter 
 should not be managed by the State, but 
 guided and aided by the County. 
 
 Now this idea was not so wild and vague 
 as at first sight appeared ; indeed it had states- 
 manship in it : for not only was the county 
 link in emigration an old and historic one, but 
 
 Hamptonshire families had been emigrating 
 
 42
 
 to one colony or another fairly steadily for 
 the last 200 years; moreover, it was still a 
 living idea ; Canada was in the mind of 
 these people, and there had been a steady 
 stream from the district in the last ten years, 
 as many as forty, or four per cent, of the popula- 
 tion, having been known to have left East- 
 hampton in the year 1900. Members of the 
 Education Committee had watched the careers 
 and kept in touch with many of the boys and girls 
 that had gone out. Some of them had passed 
 through the Technical School, and had gained 
 much in so doing, but those who had thus 
 watched had also noted the want of method and 
 the wastefulness of the present system if sys- 
 tem it can be called. Were such a colonial link 
 to be formed with an English rural secondary 
 school such as ours in Hamptonshire, it would 
 not only give a fine national distinction to the 
 work of the county, but intelligent direction to 
 what many individuals are now doing in a 
 manner haphazard and often disastrous. 
 
 Such was the policy with its appeal first 
 to the area, secondly to the parent of the anti- 
 industrial England, thirdly to some senti- 
 ment of a greater England that is in the 
 
 43
 
 hearts of many, but that they have not yet 
 been able to express. No idea is ever effective 
 until some one comes along and tries it, but 
 many members of the Hamptonshire committee 
 are quietly at work. 
 
 Hamp. Passing from questions of policy, we come 
 intonns- to those of teaching methods and subjects 
 to be taught. Of these I do not propose 
 to say much here, beyond drawing two deduc- 
 tions from our Hamptonshire experience. The 
 first is, that many subjects needed by our school 
 were found to be better taught in the ele- 
 mentary school or continuation classes than 
 they were in the secondary school itself; the 
 next, that the question of method and sub- 
 ject is the headmaster's job, and given the 
 policy it is for him to work it out. 
 
 But those two deductions must be taken 
 together. We found that the labourer's child 
 during and after the school age was often 
 getting the use of better brains and better 
 methods of education, however wastefully 
 applied, than the boy or girl in the secondary 
 school, and we found that the headmaster 
 had no proper means placed at his disposal 
 for remedying this anomaly. In the great 
 
 44
 
 Education Muddle, which we in Hampton- 
 shire are trying in our way to worry through, 
 the deductions from our secondary school ex- 
 perience are clear enough. The elementary, 
 secondary and technical work must be so co- 
 ordinated that the secondary school shall be 
 able to pick and to keep the best, both of 
 equipment and teaching. Town department- 
 alising is not possible in a country district, 
 and so for the sake of economy and efficiency 
 one good staff should be created that should 
 serve all the local needs in such subjects as 
 art, technology, hygiene, physical and domestic 
 science. In the staffing of the rural secondary 
 school the future of the district must be looked 
 to ; there are other considerations than the 
 immediate needs of the school from term to 
 term ; we should look ahead, and to this purpose 
 the headmaster should also be actively in- 
 terested in those other forms of Education that 
 are not secondary. Lastly, some way must 
 be found at present Whitehall gives us a 
 blind lead of getting the different branches 
 of the Inspectorate to work together. 
 
 The Whitehall " water-tight compartment " 
 methods are as damaging to the interests of 
 
 45
 
 secondary, as they are to those of any other 
 type of teaching. I could give a number of 
 instances, but one will suffice. It was found 
 that in the same village where technological 
 teaching was being given there was a class of 
 elementary school children of from eleven to 
 thirteen, and a class of secondary school children 
 of from thirteen to sixteen. The former were 
 sent to the technical school, where, with a good 
 equipment, they were given a systematic course 
 under a highly qualified instructor from the City 
 and Guilds Institute. The latter had to jog along 
 as best they could under the cheaper instruction 
 of an apprentice of one of the village carpenters. 
 No one grudged the village school children their 
 better instruction, and no one wanted to belittle 
 the teaching given by the boy apprentice, who, 
 be it added, was himself still attending classes at 
 the technical school ; it took some years before 
 this anomally could be righted ; and when it 
 was traced to its source, it was found to be due 
 to want of co-ordination at Whitehall. The 
 secondary, the elementary, the technical in- 
 spectors were working, not together, but each 
 in his own sphere, and without any due regard 
 
 to local educational need. Further, as two 
 
 46
 
 equipments had been forced upon the village, 
 which was hardly able to afford one, the natural 
 consequence was debt, and what the Committee 
 is now threatened with is a reduction of its 
 technological grant, so that the result will be 
 unless Whitehall can somehow right the 
 muddle it has made that the services of the 
 qualified teacher will have to be dispensed 
 with by both schools, for he will leave the 
 village altogether. 
 
 I have said that many of the proposals in 
 the draft above referred to have been since 
 carried out ; but it is perhaps worth putting on 
 record the arguments at the time used against 
 them, many of which are still used, and some 
 of which, under existing administrative con- 
 ditions, not only in Hamptonshire but in 
 England generally, have weight. I shall not 
 give them all, nor will I give them in detail ; 
 boiled down they resolve themselves into five. 
 
 The first we may call the argument of Little The 
 
 Pedlington. It is not the business of Harnp* M** y 
 
 i i i - . T- i -1 Liiile 
 
 tonshire to do anything in Education that might Pediing- 
 
 benefit Oxfordshire or Gloucestershire. Educa- 
 tion as between county and county is competitive. 
 Rather than that the Hamptonshire rate should 
 
 47
 
 in any way assist any adjoining county, it is 
 better to cut off our own nose, and do nothing 
 at all. If by any chance we find that we are 
 benefiting the boys and girls of adjoining 
 counties by the education we give, we ought 
 to put on so high a charge as to freeze them 
 out, unless, which is improbable, we find the 
 fees they are willing to pay will be of real 
 benefit to Hamptonshire. 
 
 The The second argument is more dignified and 
 
 Mrffl i less commercial. It has more of an old-world 
 
 saHfe." urbanity about it. It was often urged by an 
 ancient Don from one of the Cambridge 
 Colleges to which the Easthampton secondary 
 school was linked by a scholarship endowment. 
 He pressed his point with conviction and he 
 has since been gathered ta his fathers, but 
 conviction, especially if it have the weight of 
 university tradition behind it, lives on. The 
 argument which we may call the argument of 
 the Renaissance was somewhat as follows. It 
 may be true that English secondary schools 
 are and have for the last fifty years been in 
 a bad way ; but why should we mind that. 
 We know what is right, we know what the 
 founders wished and what they meant. All the
 
 matters proposed in this draft are not for us, 
 they are hypothetical, they are the unclean 
 thing. A grammar school is a grammar 
 school, remember the Oxford and Cambridge 
 locals. Edward VI was a founder of pious 
 memory, and, in fine has Erasmus lived in 
 vain? This argument would sometimes be 
 rounded off with a definition of humanism 
 and a graceful peroration in favour of Latin 
 as a dead language. 
 
 The third argument is neither commercial The 
 
 "Little 
 
 nor academic ; we may call it the Little Eng- England 
 
 argu- 
 
 land argument. It ran thus. This talk about 
 the Colonies is bombastic foolishness ; it is 
 worse, it is wild. If, as has been rightly argued, 
 it is not the business of a Hamptonshire school 
 to help the neighbouring counties, how much 
 less is it called upon to help the English 
 Colonies. It is true that whole families have 
 in recent years been emigrating from Hampton- 
 shire to Canada ; it may be that the children 
 are found to be poorly equipped when they get 
 there, but what business is that of ours? It 
 is not the concern of England, much less 
 of Hamptonshire, to equip English children 
 with a Colonial education. English individual - 
 
 49 D
 
 ism is a sacred thing. Did the Puritan Fathers, 
 the makers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, 
 have any special Colonial education ? Go to ! 
 The"eco- The fourth argument we may call the 
 
 nomic . *! 
 
 argu- economic argument our old friend the em- 
 ployer of labour speaking as the oracle of 
 education. We ought not to encourage the 
 teaching of anything that is likely to make 
 these boys and girls discontented with their 
 position in life (mem. for this we have the 
 authority of the Anglican catechism). We 
 ought not as guardians of county education 
 to do anything that is likely to raise wages. 
 Wages in this county are low. This is good 
 for the employers of agricultural labour. 
 Hence if we introduce a number of subjects, 
 or so improve our Education as to make it 
 possible for the young men and women to 
 command a better wage elsewhere, we injure 
 the labour market. The object of a county 
 school is to educate labour in the county 
 if indeed it needs educating, which some of 
 us doubt certainly to keep county labour 
 in the county. Any plan that prevents county 
 labour from remaining in the county is bad for 
 county education. And this argument I once 
 
 50
 
 heard clinched from the disastrous example of a 
 youth who had so benefited by the instruction 
 I believe it was farriery he had received 
 in Hamptonshire, that he threw up his occupa- 
 tion with the farmer who urged the argument 
 and went away to Wiltshire for a higher wage. 
 
 The last group of arguments which are The " tu 
 
 , , feminist 
 
 worth recording we may call the neo-femimst. argu- u 
 The Board of Education have forced this dual 
 system upon us. Alas, we could not help 
 ourselves. We don't know yet whither it 
 is going to lead us. We don't like it and 
 we don't understand it. It is desirable, of 
 course, that women should know how to cook 
 and sew. But why should this be done in 
 the school ; why not in the home ? At least 
 we have ladies now upon the Committee. And 
 with a touch of old-world gallantry the user 
 of the argument would add : " Perhaps the 
 ladies can help us ! " 
 
 Perhaps they can. For what do we deduce 
 from this ; that we must do away with the 
 old standard of the " genteel " that haunted the 
 young ladies' academy. We must discriminate 
 in the older teaching. Some of the subjects, 
 such as " deportment," witness its revival in
 
 the Dalcroze Eurythmics had much good in 
 them ; others, such as stippling from the 
 antique and the making of showy drawings, 
 are not needed. Thus again there is much 
 in the study of a second language, but not 
 much if English literature be neglected. Some 
 preparation again for the higher occupations 
 of women's labour is desirable, but not so if 
 no provision has been made for the funda- 
 mentals of citizenship for the woman what 
 is meant on the one hand by healthy mother- 
 hood, on the other by anaemic children. For 
 lip woman may we not test our secondary 
 school by this test, that through it she shall 
 learn to manage her own home and rear 
 healthy children for the State ? We made, 
 when we reconstructed the Easthampton secon- 
 dary school, two significant discoveries : that 
 the girls were less good or interested in cook- 
 ing and the domestic subjects than the ele- 
 mentary schoolgirls, and that they objected 
 to a uniform. Why was this? They were 
 still obessed by the old standard of the genteel. 
 If our Hamptonshire Egeria was right 
 in her diagnosis of the elementary school, 
 if its reform lies in its simplification, the 
 
 52
 
 objective of the secondary school is the creation 
 of a higher standard in character and teaching. 
 It becomes a question of an ideal. We want 
 something better than Henry James' school 
 marm " who viewed her little pupils as so many 
 small slices cut from the loaf of life, on which 
 she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and 
 spelling, accompanied, by way of jam, with a 
 light application of the practice of prize-giving." 
 
 For us it has got to be the consistency of the 
 slice itself, the substance and comeliness of the 
 coat. Rebecca Birch has no children of her 
 own, but I asked her, " Would you send a child 
 of yours to our secondary school ? " " Yes if 
 it was a boy," she said. " And the girl ? " "I 
 think I'd wait and see first." 
 
 She is not a very ardent suffragette, and I 
 found she had been reading Baden-Powell's 
 rules for scouts in the Parents Review. 
 
 " After all, what more do we need ? " she 
 said. "If we could put them into force we 
 might pack up the Board of Education, bag 
 and baggage, for you see it wouldn't be wanted 
 any more, and what a lot of money we might 
 save for the real education ! " A grossly unfair 
 criticism, and I told her so. 
 
 53
 
 Ill 
 
 WHAT IS MEANT BY HIGHER 
 EDUCATION 
 
 Higher WHAT is at present known in England under 
 a eom- the arbitrary and fantastic term of Higher 
 
 plexity of 
 
 tubjuts. education is quite as important as the other 
 two. It receives least assistance from the 
 State and it is least organised, but its im- 
 portance lies in this, that it is the means by 
 which in a country district the other branches 
 of Education can be co-ordinated. It is also 
 the means by which new experiments may 
 be tried. 
 
 In Hamptonshire it will be seen that through 
 the machinery of higher education there have 
 been provided the school gardens and orchard 
 for elementary and secondary schools, as well 
 as for those who come under neither of these 
 headings, an experimental engineering shop 
 for the farmers, metal shop and craft rooms 
 
 54
 
 for summer school and evening classes, a 
 school of combined domestic subjects for girls, 
 with a house for the itinerant teachers to live 
 in. Through the same machinery have been 
 given facilities for lectures of all sorts, from 
 the anatomy of the horse, and farriery in the 
 blacksmith's shop, hedging and ditching and 
 potato trials on the farms, to history, literature, 
 humanistic and university extension work in 
 the central school building. It provides classes 
 of the usual gamut, from cobbling, weaving, 
 spinning, butter-making, and laundry, to fine 
 silversmithing, enamelling, and glass-work in 
 lead light. It embraces music, elocution, and 
 drama ; indeed the people of Easthampton dis- 
 covered for themselves the truth of some of 
 the Holmes- Montessori theories several years 
 before these broke upon a rather incredulous 
 world, when they gave a series of revivals 
 in Elizabethan drama in the winter months. 
 In these performances, which lasted over eight 
 years, specific plays were taken right through 
 and performed in the manner and on some occa- 
 sions with the help of William Poel. Elemen- 
 tary and secondary school children, as well as 
 young men and women from the village, were 
 
 55
 
 worked into these plays, and they included, to 
 give examples, Shakespeare's As You Like 
 It, Ben Jonson's New Inn, Dekker's Shoe- 
 makers' Holiday, Fletcher's Elder Brother, 
 Hey wood's Fair Maid of the West, Beaumont 
 and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, 
 and Sheridan's Critic and School for Scandal. 
 There are few forms of study so stimulating, 
 so absorbing, or that touch life in such a 
 variety of ways as the rendering in costume, 
 but without expensive stage trappings, of the 
 work of the English classic dramatists. At 
 Easthampton the study of the plays was passed 
 by the Board of Education for grant under 
 the heading of Elizabethan drama and elocution. 
 Into the details of all the various subjects 
 above referred to I can, of course, not enter, 
 and to those that come under the more specific 
 heading of Art and Agriculture I devote the 
 next two chapters ; but before giving our 
 Hamptonshire deductions on Higher educa- 
 tion, what it can be made to do in the villages, 
 and where it may lead us, there is perhaps 
 this to say : through the technical or higher 
 education centre at Easthampton has been 
 created in the locality something like an 
 
 56
 
 educational enthusiasm. The existence of 
 this little centre has meant that to Hampton- 
 shire have come from time to time speakers 
 and lecturers of such widely different interests 
 as John Masefield, G. Lowes Dickinson, 
 Edward Carpenter, Abbot Gasquet, Granville 
 Barker, Prof. Ainsworth Davis, Walter Crane, 
 Lord Redesdale, J. C. Hudson, Prof. Patrick 
 Geddes, F. E. Green, Christopher Turner, 
 Maud Royden, Miss Miakawa Sumi. That 
 these men and women should come from town 
 or from distant parts to a rather remote village, 
 that they should find a sympathetic, often 
 an enthusiastic audience there to receive them, 
 is proof not only that the work done was 
 good, but that there was a demand for it. 
 
 Now it has often seemed to me, as I watch Lines of 
 what happens to the boys and girls after 
 they leave school, and to the young men and 
 women as they grow up, that the right line 
 of development for higher education in a 
 country district should be something of this sort : 
 
 (i) Certain subjects should be carried on 
 compulsorily after the elementary school age, 
 and side by side with whatever occupation 
 the boy or girl had chosen in life. 
 
 57
 
 (2) Arrangements should be made for certain 
 forms of physical drill, and with this the 
 organising or directing of some kinds of sport. 
 
 (3) The child's hours of labour should be 
 restricted in the interest of physique or mental 
 development. 
 
 (4) We should preserve a continuity of 
 interest among adults in any local educational 
 venture by as many different methods of appeal 
 as possible ; whether by debate, lecture, drama, 
 sport. There should always be something in 
 any higher education centre that attracts the 
 adult and makes him realise that Education 
 is a thing of no finality, that there is always 
 something for him too to learn and to enjoy. 
 He should learn to say with Montesquieu, 
 "Quesai'je?" 
 
 (5) We should through our higher educa- 
 tion provide an outlet for those needs in man 
 that are aesthetic and humanistic. In them 
 are the qualities that refine and ennoble, in 
 them are the safeguards against what is petty, 
 what is sordid, what is commercial. No Higher 
 education, however modest, if in our villages 
 it ignores these things, is worth its name. 
 George Russell, writing with fine insight of the 
 
 58
 
 Irish land revival, from which we in England 
 have so much to learn, puts it thus nobly : 
 " I hate to hear of stagnant societies who 
 think because they have made butter well 
 they have crowned their parochial generation 
 with a halo of glory and they can rest content 
 with the fame of it all, listening to the whirr 
 of the steam separators and pouching in peace 
 of mind the extra penny a gallon for their 
 milk." 
 
 It is unnecessary for me to go into detail in The need 
 regard to these five lines of development, \x& strict** 
 
 , . , and super- 
 
 they suggest certain necessary changes in QMfvisimof 
 
 -, , . t-r i T the child's 
 
 way of looking at life m the country. It grows hours of 
 
 , , ... . . labour. 
 
 ever clearer that under existing competitive 
 conditions there must be more supervision 
 and restriction of the hours of child-labour after 
 the elementary school age. From the point of 
 view of Education, it is mechanism and the blind- 
 alley occupation that make this necessary. 
 Hard work in old days such, for instance, as is 
 revealed in Gambier Parry's Spirit of the Old 
 Folk had its compensations. It is different 
 now when the crafts are no longer properly 
 taught. We can never make a real man out 
 of a casual, and this applies to the country just 
 
 59
 
 as much as to the town. It would be to the 
 benefit of our country education if we could 
 extend the principle of the Labour Exchange 
 and link it up more with the school register. I 
 have urged this course upon the Hamptonshire 
 County Council, but as yet they have no 
 machinery for doing it, although its justice has 
 been admitted. At the same time, we should 
 through our local committees watch the careers 
 of all boys and girls for at least three years 
 after the elementary school age, and see that a 
 portion at least of their young life is given to 
 the subjects that develop the brain or discipline 
 the body. 
 inappiic- For this we not only need fresh legislation, 
 
 ability of . . . . 
 
 the rigid we have to go at our educational problem in a 
 system to different way. The rigid class system and the 
 
 conditions . . . r 
 
 of country present machinery is too perfunctory, it will not 
 
 education. . , A . . . 
 
 serve us much longer. Also it is too amateur- 
 ish and too dependent on the whim and caprice 
 of the pupil. Why should no Higher educa- 
 tion be regarded as worth giving money to 
 unless it can be presented cut and dried in the 
 form of classes? When in the country we 
 come to watch the young people, we find that 
 
 many of them often get something much better 
 
 60
 
 than we at the school or the evening class can 
 give them. The son of a small-holder, for in- 
 stance, working with his father in the garden, or 
 a maid-servant in a good house, are probably 
 learning much more than they would from the 
 county expert lecturer or the domestic economy 
 class. Still, if we start with the premise that 
 every county higher education centre should 
 supply something for everybody, and that the 
 hours of labour should be supervised, it might 
 lie with the local committee, acting where 
 necessary under advice from the medical officer, 
 to say whether the course of study for boy or 
 girl should be mainly physical or mental. After 
 that they should choose themselves, and once 
 having chosen there should be some method of 
 compulsion. For all this we need money and 
 new legislation, but our Hamptonshire experi- 
 ence leads us to the conclusion that if half the 
 money spent on the too arbitrary and the too 
 wasteful teaching of infants could be devoted 
 to the higher education of boys and girls after 
 the elementary school age, much greater results 
 would be obtained. If Rebecca Birch was right 
 in her diagnosis of the elementary school, 
 
 this follows as a logical consequence, and 
 
 61
 
 nothing is more certain here in Hamptonshire, 
 than that half the excellent work of our school- 
 masters and mistresses is thrown away and 
 unlearned during the three years that follow 
 the school period. I have known charming 
 and well-mannered children forced by economic 
 conditions into idleness, or overwork, or the 
 listless indifference of the casual. 
 Higher Let us take another aspect of the work of 
 
 education 
 
 as a means our Higher education in the country. We shall 
 
 of uniting 
 
 elementary see how the rigid methods of Whitehall have 
 
 teat hers in 
 
 a common once again stood in the way of an enlightened 
 
 objective. 
 
 development. Much of the best work done in 
 Hamptonshire has had no pecuniary help from 
 the State at all, and this is because there was 
 no means of getting it under any grant-earning 
 classification. When the " block grant " barely 
 covers administrative charges, and nothing is 
 recognised for grant except the rigid class on 
 set lines, this is necessarily so. But among 
 the work of more far-reaching influence which 
 we may set to the credit of higher education in 
 Hamptonshire, is the work done from time to 
 time among the elementary teachers. How 
 far-reaching the influence has been I know 
 
 from the many letters I have received from 
 
 62
 
 schoolmasters and mistresses to whom the 
 Hamptonshire experiment had come as a new 
 idea something that has opened for them a 
 door out of the dull routine of life. 
 
 Any higher education centre in a county, 
 such as is the Easthampton centre, should be 
 made a place of special meeting, not alone for 
 the teachers of the district, but a place where 
 they can meet men and women of ideas who 
 are not teachers. We have found that if the 
 distance has not been too great, they have been 
 most responsive to any such foregathering, 
 and where the hint has been given that the 
 light of the inspector's countenance would shine 
 upon it, the gathering has been quite a great 
 one. These men and women are, and often 
 know themselves to be in a rut, and one of the 
 best services any higher education centre can 
 perform is to light them out of it to turn a 
 trade into a calling. "I'm offering you," as 
 Trebell says in the great play I quoted before, 
 "the foundation of a new order of men and 
 women who'll serve God by teaching His 
 children." It is not fair to blame the teacher 
 for thinking too little of the calling and too 
 much of the trade. There was for me a touch- 
 
 63
 
 ing significance in the request made some five 
 years ago by the master of the elementary 
 school of Bilberry Dene that he might have 
 the use of one of the class-rooms of the 
 technical school for two terms for the 
 "study of the Code" with a group of young 
 masters, mistresses, and assistants. Here 
 was a thing that had, like the serpents of 
 Laocoon, to be wrestled with, but they got 
 out alive. 
 
 Physic* Let us take yet another aspect of Higher 
 national education. Lord Haldane has appealed to us 
 finely on the need for " Sittlichkeit " the social 
 ideal in the new State. Where at present do 
 we find it ? The educationist who has studied 
 his subject will reply in the "public schools," 
 in the "services," in the "trade unions"; he 
 will add a little also in the " secondary schools," 
 and perhaps the bare beginnings of it in the 
 "elementary schools." In my view it is 
 through the higher education centres in our 
 country districts, and the corporate unity at 
 which they should aim, that the ideal as Lord 
 Haldane defined it for us may most readily 
 be achieved. The Education Act of 1870 
 
 has meant for us that " Sittlichkeit " may no 
 
 64
 
 longer remain the exclusive privilege of the 
 gentleman. 
 
 The gentleman in the past, at least in 
 Hamptonshire, has stood for the military spirit 
 and the sporting side of life the sentiment of 
 discipline. It is a tradition that has its roots 
 far back in the Middle Ages. When we try to 
 link on to it our modern educational ideals, two 
 topics of the day present themselves the one 
 National Service, the other Sport. The real 
 argument for National Service is that itwill disci- 
 pline the boys, stiffen their spines, square their 
 shoulders, teach them how to handle the rifle 
 and how to obey. There is just as much cant in 
 the argument of the German invasion, by which 
 one political party seeks to frighten the country 
 into National Service, as there is in that obsolete 
 Quakerism which urges us to disarm because 
 theoretically all fighting is inconsistent with the 
 Sermon on the Mount. We should look upon 
 drill and discipline as matters of education. 
 
 It was, I believe, von Blilow who once laid 
 it down that the commercial success of modern 
 Germany was due to her army. The waste 
 on armaments, the barrack life, the using up 
 
 the best years of national youth these matters 
 
 65 E
 
 were not to the point ; the point, said he, was 
 the training and discipline the young citizen 
 got, and this training fitted him in the highest 
 sense for life. Englishmen need not accept the 
 German Chancellor's deductions, but the educa- 
 tional core of them is sound, and their truth may 
 be shown as fairly proven by modern Germany. 
 There- The question of discipline leads us in our 
 spornl higher education to that of sport. Why should 
 
 higher . i i 
 
 education, we not organise our sports a little better and 
 use their great educative power for the build- 
 ing up of the countryside? Why should 
 our sports be so much a matter of class? It 
 seems to be accepted that at the universities, 
 and at the public and secondary schools, sports, 
 and all they stand for, may be treated as an 
 educative force, but for the Democracy : No ; 
 or at least not yet. The result is hooliganism 
 and howling at league matches. There was 
 a great deal more in Kipling's gibe at the 
 British public than they ever gave him credit 
 for, but if the " flannelled fools at the wicket " 
 were over-drilled, the " muddied oafs at the 
 goal" were not drilled enough. The former 
 have never forgiven him : the latter, so far, 
 
 have been too ignorant to understand. 
 
 66
 
 The whole athletic question should be in- 
 telligently taken up as a part of the education 
 of Democracy in " sittlichkeit." There seems to 
 be a chance of this coming socially from above, 
 but it is part of the old Puritan tradition, not yet 
 entirely shaken off, that there must be a hard 
 and fast line between teaching and games ; that 
 the one should be an unpleasant corrective, 
 and the other a thing belonging on the whole 
 to the Devil, or at least not to be counten- 
 anced on Sundays. 
 
 If I were asked to point to an example 
 of sport intelligently studied and organised, 
 treated as a scientific part of the higher educa- 
 tion, I should pick out the University of 
 Pennsylvania and the work of Dr. Tait 
 Mackenzie. Here is a man of fine distinc- 
 tion, who is not only a doctor, but also a 
 practical artist. To appreciate what is done 
 in Philadelphia, one must see him in his human 
 laboratory, and watch him not only measuring, 
 weighing, and drilling the athletes, but also 
 modelling them in clay for subsequent casting 
 in bronze. I do not say that we in Hampton- 
 shire should follow Pennsylvanian methods, 
 
 but there is much for us to learn in what 
 
 67
 
 is sometimes called the polytechnic spirit in 
 sport, especially when it is made a systematic 
 part of Education. 
 
 Here again country conditions are quite 
 
 cational 
 
 value of distinct from those of the town. In Hamp- 
 
 our early 
 
 county tonshire we have as fine and classic a tra- 
 
 sports that 
 
 disap- dition of local sport as any in England, a 
 with "en- tradition that came down from the Middle 
 
 closure. 
 
 Ages, survived the Puritan onslaught, and 
 only ended with the industrial period and the 
 enclosure of commons in the mid nineteenth 
 century. But these sports were not limited 
 to ball play, with hunting and shooting for 
 those who could afford it ; they included run- 
 ning, wrestling, leaping, boxing, quarterstaff, 
 single-stick, hurling, music, dancing, the morris, 
 recitations and chess ; they were for girls 
 as well as boys, and they were magnificently 
 organised. Both the sportsman and the educa- 
 tionist want to see them revived, but social 
 and industrial conditions for the moment make 
 it impossible. There is only one way in which 
 it might be done, and that is through the 
 intelligent enterprise of the local education 
 committee. In a tentative way this has been 
 
 tried, but though we have had object lessons in 
 
 68
 
 wrestling and boxing, and have introduced 
 swimming and life-saving into our curriculum, 
 we have never yet succeeded in getting either 
 the Board or the local education authority 
 to look seriously at the question of athletics 
 and physical drill. 
 
 What is wanted, and what in our higher Physical 
 
 education 
 
 education we should consistently aim at, is and auto- 
 
 . matte be- 
 
 to make certain actions and a certain carriage haviour. 
 
 . A London 
 
 and behaviour automatic. Here is an example School 
 
 Board 
 
 of what I mean. Last summer I was watching example. 
 some children bathing on the South Coast. 
 There were eight boys and girls together, be- 
 tween the ages of twelve and sixteen, and the 
 particular action it was my privilege to wit- 
 ness may be set to the everlasting credit of the 
 London Board School teachers and that splen- 
 did organisation of theirs, the London Schools 
 Swimming Association. The Coastguard, notic- 
 ing that the children were about to go into 
 a sea that was too strong for them, came up 
 and said to one of the smallest of the party, 
 " Have you anybody looking after you ? " 
 And with that nonchalant patronage the 
 cockney bestows upon the countryman who 
 
 presumes to advise him, the boy replied, 
 
 69
 
 " Right oh ! besides, we can all of us swim ! " 
 The Coastguard having delivered his warning 
 and been put in his place, made as if to dis- 
 appear. Perhaps too he noticed that there was 
 something admirable about the boy despite his 
 insolence. The children dived in, the youngest 
 leading, some taking headers through waves 
 twice their height, the others diving off the 
 breakwater. It was easy to see where they 
 had been trained, and their stroke was masterly ; 
 but the difficulties began when they tried to 
 get back to shore. The smallest of the girls 
 in trying to clamber on to the breakwater 
 missed her grip, for it was slippery, and 
 was immediately sucked under the surf and 
 crumpled up. The boy of thirteen who had 
 already reached haven dived in, put his 
 arm underneath her, watched for the next in- 
 coming wave and hoisted himself and her on to 
 the breakwater. The action was automatic and 
 instantaneous, but in another minute the child 
 would have been flung with her head against 
 the teak groin and probably stunned. The 
 Coastguard reappeared, like some tutelary 
 deity from the bosom of the earth, and there 
 
 and then ordered the children off. He and I 
 
 70
 
 compared notes together as a merry little crowd 
 ran home to dinner, quite unaware that an act 
 of heroism had been performed or a life saved. 
 
 There are various ways of arriving at 
 " sittlichkeit," but those I have pointed out 
 seem good and possible. One of my young 
 workmen once committed a breach of manners. 
 " That's not a thing a gentleman would do," I 
 said ; but I got the swift reply, " Oh, but I don't 
 want to be a gentleman ! " His subsequent 
 failures in life might serve as a sermon to the 
 text, but they are not germane to the subject, 
 which we might call the training of the Demo- 
 cracy in the social ideal through the medium of 
 our higher education. 
 
 An experiment in the country is fortunate in Higher 
 this : that there is less possibility of fluidity, and in Hamp- 
 the human influence of those who compose it has meant 
 is necessarily more stable. That influence, once nation; 
 recognised, becomes more and more effective ment. 
 educationally ; we should use it to the utmost. 
 To do this, moreover, our methods in a country 
 district must become more direct, more pictorial, 
 more a matter of the hand, less a matter of the 
 brain, the book, and the machine. We need 
 new methods of presentation ; we have to look
 
 for what is of educational value. That is the 
 moral of the illustrated halfpenny paper, the 
 picture palace, the cinema, of the craving for 
 games of all sorts, of the many new inventions 
 that take the popular fancy. Young people 
 are beginning to want other ways of approach 
 to reality, they are tiring of the formal methods 
 of the Mandarins. It is the business of the 
 educationist to satisfy this want. But they will 
 always want what is human and direct. I plead 
 then for keeping Higher education an open way 
 for what is practical and what is imaginative. 
 It is through Higher education that we may 
 supply those wants of Democracy which the 
 schools cannot fill. I plead for more freedom 
 from bureaucratic restraint, more scope for 
 experiment. So far we in Hamptonshire have 
 found that it is through Higher education that 
 co-ordination has become, however slightly, a 
 possibility ; through it most of our experiments 
 have been tried. It is a hopeful sign that both 
 in the elementary and the secondary schools 
 the chances of greater flexibility are being 
 given, and the Hamptonshire results will, I 
 think, show in what direction more is possible. 
 
 72
 
 IV 
 
 ON CERTAIN ASPECTS OF 
 EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURE 
 
 IT is for the farmer to say what sort of educa- The 
 
 , , country- 
 
 tion is needed for his work of farming. As in man, and 
 
 i r i i notthe 
 
 any other craft or occupation, it is only the townsman, 
 
 must guidt 
 
 contribution of the man who himself practises country 
 
 education. 
 
 that is vital, and the statements that follow 
 are of value only in so far as they have been 
 gathered from those whose experience is first 
 hand. The county of Hamptonshire will be 
 found to have done more than many other 
 English counties in the direction of agricultural 
 teaching, and those who are concerned with 
 the experiment of which I write have made 
 good use of what the county authorities have 
 with unfailing goodwill set at their disposal. 
 
 I want to try in this chapter to set down 
 what appears to be the opinion about the 
 teaching in the district, and what as a conse- 
 
 73
 
 quence we may deduce for its extension or its 
 improvement. How may we make it more 
 useful. This local opinion we get from two 
 sources from the farmer and from the small- 
 holder, or the labourer who has hopes of be- 
 coming a small-holder either for himself or 
 his children. Now, the opinion of these critics, 
 as far as it is definitely expressed, appears to 
 be that the teaching is too theoretical, that it 
 is too aristocratic, or serving the use of the 
 superior type of man or of a landed system 
 from which the little man is seeking to emanci- 
 pate himself, and that it is not sufficiently 
 static. Let us examine these three criticisms. 
 Criticism When the young farmer says the teaching 
 
 of Hamp- . . i i .... 
 
 totuhire is too theoretical, he means that it is imparted 
 
 methods by . i t r 
 
 (a) the too much on paper or too much in the form 
 (bhe' of lectures. Often, too, his criticism implies 
 
 small- ii ... . 
 
 holder and that his own previous training in the secondary 
 school has not been sufficiently scientific, or 
 sufficiently sound to enable him to understand 
 the terms in which the expert teacher presents 
 his knowledge. 
 
 When the little holder criticises the county 
 teaching as being too aristocratic, he means 
 not that he envies the young farmer the ^50 
 
 74
 
 Scholarship at Swanley or Cirencester that 
 the instruction has enabled him to win, but 
 that economic conditions being what they are, 
 his own children have little use for it, while 
 the improvement of the mere allotment under 
 county expert advice does not much interest 
 him. He considers that to be a thing of the 
 past ; he wants something better than an im- 
 proved allotment. 
 
 Lastly, both farmer and little holder appear 
 to be agreed that the peripatetic teaching is 
 wanting in a quality that it is hard to define. 
 It is wasteful of human energy; it has no 
 sufficient grip upon the district ; it is good to 
 stimulate and brighten up, but it does not 
 wear well. Ardent, active and intelligent as 
 these peripatetic instructors are, something 
 more is now wanted than the monthly or 
 quarterly visitant, however skilled. Arguing 
 again from the analogy of industrial educa- 
 tion, 1 teachers also are wanted who are not 
 teachers only, but men continuously engaged 
 in getting their living by agriculture. It 
 appears, then, that something is needed im- 
 plying a special knowledge of locality, a study 
 
 1 See the London County Council Report, 1912. 
 
 75
 
 of markets, of co-operative methods, of local 
 labour, and what is, to use a phrase that is con- 
 stantly cropping up in the various conditions 
 of life, "the custom of the county" in short, 
 a type of teaching more static than that of 
 the travelling "county expert" in agriculture, 
 horticulture, farriery, hedging, bee-keeping, 
 &c., as we are at present acquainted with him. 
 " What a pity it is," said one of the small- 
 holders to me of one of those county teachers, 
 " that we haven't got him living here to keep 
 us straight, and that the county wastes half 
 his time in travelling." No finer compliment 
 could have been made to the instructor, and 
 no shrewder comment on the method of 
 instruction. 
 
 More per- May we not say this, then, as far as 
 andean- Hamptonshire is concerned, a stage has been 
 needed to reached in the agricultural teaching when 
 
 make agri- ..... 
 
 cultural something more permanent and effective is 
 
 teaching ... 
 
 effective, needed, something in more direct and general 
 touch with life ; for it is not alone teaching 
 in agriculture as a specific craft or occupation 
 that we need the old agriculturist is passing 
 away, if indeed he has not already passed, even 
 
 as the old handicraftsman. We need teaching 
 
 76
 
 in agriculture as a branch of modern life, the 
 life not only of industrial England, but of 
 England conceived as a unit in the Imperial 
 and colonial chain, a factor in Western civi- 
 lisation. 
 
 Now we are here concerned with Hamp- Hamp- 
 
 . tonshire 
 
 tonshire and the Hamptonshire experiment, uius- 
 and admitting the excellent work that is done the peasant 
 by the great county agricultural colleges, and cow. 
 the standard they attain, I want to try and 
 find out what the next need is for us. Let 
 us by way of practical illustration, then, take 
 the cow and the pig. As we noted before, 
 when dealing with the elementary school, 
 educational theorists do not sufficiently realise 
 that the English peasant is insufficiently fed, 
 and in some districts of England half-starved. 
 This becomes evident when we take such an 
 apparently simple question as that of the milk- 
 supply. Cases of death among children from 
 want of milk have been known in Hampton- 
 shire. Two years ago one of the members 
 of the Education Committee saved the life of 
 a baby that had been given up by the local 
 doctor. All the child needed was milk, sent 
 in and given at stated times under medical 
 
 77
 
 supervision. The mother herself had been too 
 over-worked and worried ; she could not 
 breast-feed it, and this, coupled with an east 
 wind, had resulted in pneumonia. The timely 
 milk-supply saved the situation. In a neigh- 
 bouring village of the Easthampton group there 
 is what is known as a cow charity, an admirable 
 institution, started by a far-sighted lord of 
 the manor at the time of the enclosure, by 
 which certain lands are fortunately charged 
 with the maintenance, not of an additional 
 curate, as is so often the case, but of a couple 
 of cows, to whose milk the children in the 
 parish are entitled in rotation and subject to 
 certain rules. A recent lord of the manor, less 
 far-sighted than his predecessor, tried a short 
 time ago, at the instance of the tenant farmer, 
 to commute this into the usual cash payment. 
 The mothers of the parish, headed, to his great 
 honour, by the parson, rose in rebellion and 
 defeated the very formidable combination of 
 the lord of the manor, the farmers, and the 
 Charity Commission. The mothers of the 
 parish were wise, and they knew they had 
 an object lesson in Education and physical 
 fitness worth a dozen county experts in agri- 
 
 78
 
 culture, and a hundred Board of Education 
 encyclicals. But might not what in the village 
 of Stanton-in-Gordano is a cow charity be 
 used over the whole area as a model for social 
 service and communal order. And why, it 
 may not unreasonably be asked, should starva- 
 tion and infant mortality any longer be held 
 at bay by " charity " when the method by 
 which it could be avoided might so easily be 
 incorporated into our system of agricultural 
 education. In the village of Floss, where the 
 child's life was saved to which I referred just 
 now by the timely coming of milk, the anti- 
 quarian can trace the old communal pasture ; 
 the village herdsman's house and pound still 
 stand, and the cottages and farmsteads built 
 around the Common before the days of en- 
 closure, at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century. Many of the houses are Elizabethan 
 in character and type, and he recalls the wise 
 seventeenth century law by which no cottage 
 was allowed to be built without the necessary 
 land adjoining. We cannot go back, but 
 when we are dealing with country education, 
 we have to bear in mind that the new order 
 must inevitably mean the proper nourishment 
 
 79
 
 of the children. It would be quite possible by 
 means of combination, with a little intelligent 
 leadership, to acquire a little common pasture. 
 This could, I think, be effected through the 
 newer type of farm school I would like to see 
 created in the country. 
 
 May we not here draw a parallel with what 
 is going on in the education of the industrial 
 child. What is the meaning of school meals? 
 And did not Rebecca Birch show us in the 
 elementary school that the education of the 
 mind was of no avail unless the belly had been 
 first provided ? Conditions in the country are 
 different, but the parallel from industrial edu- 
 cation holds good, and it is one of the cases 
 where we can with advantage copy the town 
 schools. The question of milk is fundamental ; 
 moreover, it postulates a different sort of teach- 
 ing in an agricultural district, a teaching in 
 combination, and in the production of food, 
 first for purposes of life, and only after this is 
 satisfied, for purposes of sale. The cow, indeed, 
 with its common pasture, may bring to our vil- 
 lages again that power to combine they so 
 much need. 
 
 The pig perhaps implies more individualism. 
 80
 
 In the matter of the pig, I take my cue from 
 
 ant and 
 
 one of the local grocers, a pillar of Consei 
 vatism and the Establishment in [the village 
 of Milton-on-the-Mire, who, in a moment of 
 expansiveness his friends called him market- 
 peart declared that since the coming of the 
 small-holder his bacon business had dropped 
 by 75 per cent. Further inquiry elicited the 
 fact that upon such cuts of bacon as he 
 found it still to his ad vantage 'to supply at 8^. 
 a pound, there was an immediate run by the 
 less provident and less intelligent of the 
 labourers. This means that the return of the 
 pig has started something like a revolution in 
 the countryside, and what the pig has begun 
 the cow may complete. When we examine 
 it, does it not mean that the peasant is begin- 
 ning to free himself from some of the extreme 
 benefits of Free Trade ? Free trade and the 
 mechanical industry that goes with it, brought 
 him the questionable privilege of getting his 
 pig canned from Chicago, or cut up in a 
 factory, his cheese from Denmark, his eggs 
 from Russia that is to say, provided his small 
 wage, less the substantial percentage he has to 
 
 pay to the local grocer or gombeen man, en- 
 Si F
 
 ables him to have these luxuries at all, which 
 is unlikely. It means that he is beginning 
 again to produce these things for himself to 
 eat, and not for other people to sell. It means, 
 as a consequence, that he prefers to simplify, 
 to do without the packing tins, the silver 
 paper wrappings, and the cold storage, that 
 are so useful to the townsman. 
 Exchange But it means something more still and this 
 
 value and 
 
 intrinsic perhaps the most important of all it means 
 
 value as 
 
 applied to that we are giving up our rigid ideas of value 
 
 agri- 
 
 culture, in exchange as being inapplicable to agri- 
 cultural conditions. It is well enough to argue 
 that bacon can be more economically and more 
 efficiently produced in the Chicago or the 
 Wiltshire factory, and milk more scientifically 
 provided in the Danish or the Hampstead 
 model dairy : we know all that, but it is beside 
 the point as far as the Hamptonshire peasant 
 is concerned. He has to have milk and bacon 
 for his children, and manure for his little hold- 
 ing, and if he is to go on living we have to 
 devise a system of life and education that will 
 make these things possible for him. For him 
 and his family the important fact is the healthy 
 
 life process that has to do with the rearing of 
 
 82
 
 the pig and the cow, and the meaning of the 
 pig and the cow in the economy of the holding. 
 All the hygienic refinements of his model dairy, 
 or all the mechanical developments of the 
 bacon factory are as nothing compared to the 
 fundamental needs of life for the little holder. 
 It is better for him to have the milk at his door, 
 even if there are a few microbes thrown in. 
 The great factory and the model dairy have 
 over-shot the mark as far as he is concerned. 
 They have to do merely with exchange values, 
 whereas he says, " We can think about all 
 that later, but the agriculture I am concerned 
 with is one of real or intrinsic values ; we will 
 see first what these things will do for the main- 
 tenance of life. He adds, " Give me a system 
 of education that shall be a little more helpful 
 to me and mine in that direction." " Un- 
 fortunately for the children of agricultural 
 labourers," says R. E. Prothero, in his History 
 of English Farming, "little or nothing is done 
 which does not unfit them for their father's 
 industry. They cannot afford to attend col- 
 leges and institutes. Continuation and night 
 schools do not begin till the mischief is really 
 done. What is most wanted is some form of 
 
 83
 
 elementary instruction in rural schools adapted 
 
 to the need of agriculturists." 
 
 The pro- A part of the Hamptonshire experiment 
 Hamp. consists in a small estate of some 75 acres 
 
 tonskire 
 
 farm with a pasture farm and arable, held by 
 
 school and J 
 
 small- trustees for the benefit of craftsmanship in 
 
 holders 
 
 centre. the county. Connected with this are a 
 number of small holdings and allotments, 
 worked by a number of different holders 
 and labourers. The county experts make 
 regular visits and report upon these holdings, 
 and try little experiments in them, potato 
 and seed trials, fruit - farming, &c. The 
 trustees give prizes or rebates of rent to the 
 best kept holdings, on the County Instructor's 
 awards. The hope of the trustees is that 
 when the great powers that preside over 
 agricultural education have grown sufficiently 
 clear in their vision as to the significance of 
 all this, they will accept the scheme that is at 
 present being worked out for linking it up 
 with the life and the education of the locality. 
 This scheme, which is at present before the 
 Development Commissioners, is roughly as 
 follows. The twenty or thirty small-holders 
 shall be regarded as a colony. Scattered
 
 among their various plots shall be observation 
 plots directed, but not worked, by the county 
 experts, and results shall be carefully recorded. 
 All the small-holders of the area, of whom 
 there are many hundreds, shall be allowed the 
 benefit of these results, and the curriculum of 
 the elementary schools, and the Easthampton 
 secondary school, to which a rural bias is to 
 be given, is to be specially modified to adapt 
 them to the workings of the farm and the 
 holdings. In the case of one of the element- 
 ary schools, it is suggested that cows shall be 
 kept in the manner of the Stanton-in-Gordano 
 cow charity, which might be ear-marked for 
 the school, and the children become practically 
 acquainted with the dairying process. As for 
 the cost of it all, where the land is already 
 provided it is little enough. The County 
 Instructor's estimates of the expenditure on 
 the holdings resolve themselves into a margin 
 of protection against loss if the season in any 
 year be unfavourable. For obviously one 
 little holder, here or there, who offers his land 
 and his labour for experiment, cannot be asked 
 to stand a loss that may benefit all the others. 
 The guarantee asked for is ^"50 a year for five 
 
 85
 
 years. Unfortunately the simplicity of an ex- 
 periment in education does not appeal to the 
 official mind which is often more impressed 
 by large and costly ventures with high-sound- 
 ing scientific names. Those, however, who 
 have watched for some years now the working 
 of these small-holders on their lands, are con- 
 vinced that the only thing of real value is the 
 practical object lesson brought home to the 
 man on the actual plot, and not prepared in 
 any county office or set forth in typewritten 
 statements or elegant language Moreover, it 
 needs a period of time, a number of seasons 
 over which to mature, and to do it properly 
 brings us up against all the old fetishes of the 
 Education Department ; the class system, the 
 water-tight compartment, the register, the 
 time-table, the convenience of the inspectorate. 
 If we are seriously to build up such a farm 
 school, or small-holders' school, or rural 
 secondary or primary school it matters little 
 by what name we call it we have to face the 
 fundamentals ; the seed must be sown and 
 tended, the grafted tree must be watched, the 
 harvest must be reaped, the crop must be 
 
 marketed, or, better still, eaten. 
 
 86
 
 Easthampton, then, seems the very place for 
 such a practical farm school. For several years 
 the proposal has been urged, not only by 
 private individuals, but by Government officials, 
 yet so far it seems impossible to carry through. 
 Private enterprise has gone as far as it can go, 
 the Board of Education have no powers, the 
 Local Education Authority has no money, the 
 Board of Agriculture are not ready, the De- 
 velopment Commissioners are either in doubt 
 or their machinery is so complicated as to be 
 inapplicable to the case ; and yet here is precisely 
 such a case as seems to justify what we are 
 ever pleading for, experiment. We are not 
 in Hamptonshire asking for any new thing, but 
 merely for the consistent development of 
 what has already been proved to be successful 
 experiment. What we want is something akin 
 to the Danish small-holders' school, 1 where I 
 believe in some cases a substantial profit is 
 made out of the land for the benefit of Educa- 
 tion, and this experimental holding or farm 
 should be available alike for the elementary, the 
 secondary, the higher education, just as the 
 
 1 Cf. The Kareha-ve School. See H. D. Harben, Draft Report 
 for the Land and Rural Ref. Com. of the Fabian Society. 
 
 87
 
 gardens, orchards, craft-rooms, lecture hall and 
 farm machinery shop in the Hamptonshire 
 experiment are now the common privilege 
 of the co-ordinated teaching of the district. 
 The two I have not laid down any precise course or 
 
 essential 
 
 needs are plan of teaching, because I do not believe this 
 
 (a) the 
 
 recording can be done. We want to be able to change 
 
 ofexperi- 
 
 ment.and from year to year, to try this or that, to get 
 
 (b) adjust- J J J 
 
 ment of results. Two things only are essential : that 
 
 grant to e ' 
 
 exigencies all experiments should be carefully recorded 
 
 of season. 
 
 as they relate to local conditions, and next that 
 the period of trial should, in accordance with 
 the physical and economic forces that control 
 them, be given a term of years, say ten or at the 
 outside not less than five. During this term, 
 the available annual subsidy should not be liable 
 to fluctuation, and if it was not all used during 
 one year it should be treated as a reserve fund 
 against seasonal losses, but not surcharged or 
 whittled away in reduction of block grant by 
 the Local Education Authority. The Hamp- 
 tonshire county instructors put the practical 
 issue thus. " These little holders are going 
 wastefully and ignorantly to work, the only way 
 to convince them of this, is to set before them 
 
 practical object lessons in better methods. It 
 
 88
 
 is only those whose employment gives them a 
 sense of permanence who can afford not to 
 starve the land. For the county to run its 
 own institute and control its own labour would 
 be wasteful. Let us, then, select one or two 
 holders here and there, who may be willing to 
 carry out our instructions, but if we say to 
 John Smith, you shall plant certain trial seeds 
 here and test certain manures there, and next 
 year's drought or rainfall destroys several months 
 of his labour, the experience may have been 
 gained, but who is to compensate John Smith ? 
 Give us therefore ^50 a year for this co-ordi- 
 nated group of small-holders and allotment 
 workers ; give us this for five years and we will 
 give you results that may be very great indeed." 
 
 But there is a line which agricultural ex- second- 
 periment may take that is still nearer to hand 
 
 and even more direct. I have touched on i 
 already when dealing with the elementary and C 
 
 secondary school, and the precedents are al- c 
 ready to hand in industrial education. I refer 
 to the primary and secondary technical 
 schools conducted by the London County 
 Council ; the Northampton Institute, the S.W. 
 Polytechnic, and Battersea, Shoreditch, Brix-
 
 ton and Hackney. 1 What can be done for 
 other industries can be done with the necessary 
 modification for agriculture and the allied crafts 
 capable of being practised with agriculture. 
 And why not begin with the Easthampton 
 secondary school, devoting a side of it to more 
 scientific and special training. Then one of 
 the elementary schools in the Hamptonshire 
 group, preferably the Easthampton school itself, 
 could be taken, as the staff and teachers are 
 concentrated in the little market town, while 
 the technical school, with its existing machinery 
 and extensive day and evening class work, 
 could be further developed. Everything is 
 ready to hand ; it has only got to be intelligently 
 used and adapted on the one hand, while on 
 the other, the great Government machine has 
 got to be tenderly stirred and in certain direc- 
 tions lubricated. 
 
 The Perhaps it will be said that our educational 
 
 shirl' '" interests are taking us too far afield and out- 
 side the legitimate sphere of Education, that 
 we must wait till the larger will of the com- 
 munity carries Hamptonshire along with it on 
 the general tide of advance. That may be so. 
 
 1 See L.C.C. Rtport, 1912, pp. 39, 40. 
 90
 
 But it is well to bear in mind that Education 
 cannot be imposed ; to be effective it must be 
 spontaneous. It must be wanted as well as 
 needed. We get back then to the human 
 unit, the personality of the man or of the child 
 with whom we are experimenting. James 
 Bryce, the North Country ploughman, writing 
 of our Hamptonshire labourers with that shrewd 
 and tender insight of his, says of them, 1 
 " These natives, so different from our northern 
 ploughmen, began to interest me much as 
 strange animals might have done. Slow of 
 speech and movement, they seemed at first to 
 know nothing, to be fit for nothing ; give them 
 time and you found they knew and could do 
 all things in their province, though to explain 
 their operation in words was beyond them. 
 Horses, cattle, sheep, they understood better 
 than I did ; their sluggish patience, maybe, 
 was the secret of the sympathy. At their 
 work they used antiquated implements, and 
 their methods were often cumbrous ; but the 
 fault was their masters', who had no enter- 
 prise. They were undoubtedly slower than 
 the ploughmen I had known ; yet with this 
 
 1 The Story of a Ploughboy* 
 91
 
 again their masters had to do. A Hampton- 
 shire farmer might have learned much from 
 the Lowis tenantry on the art of driving his 
 workers on. After allowing for all their 
 defects, I was humbled to find that these 
 lumbering, inarticulate figures had so much 
 practical knowledge in their heads, and could 
 pass so much useful work through their 
 clumsy-looking hands. Knowledge of the 
 showier sort they did not own. They read 
 with difficulty and could hardly write. 
 
 "How did they continue to exist? I asked 
 myself. Their wage had fallen almost as low 
 as in pre-Union days. Fourteen shillings a 
 week was the average, and out of this a 
 cottage rent had to come. About Craig- 
 kenneth a fully-qualified ploughman could 
 command at least a pound a week and free 
 housing. That the rural labourers of Hamp- 
 tonshire felt they had no future, was shown by 
 this : the sons were not brought up to their 
 father's calling. All the young men migrated 
 to the Black Country to earn big money in 
 mines and iron-works. The labourers did not 
 appear to blame the squire or the farmer for 
 
 their poverty ; they understood, I suppose, 
 
 92
 
 that the value of land was down, and they 
 would charge the fault on circumstances. 
 
 " It happens sometimes a reason could be 
 given if one had time that mute and helpless 
 sufferers draw our sympathy more than others 
 that murmur and resist. I found myself 
 thinking a good deal about those dumb, stolid 
 toilers, and wondering if their poverty was 
 inevitable. For it was their poverty that 
 exercised me first. Could they not get a 
 decenter wage ? live in a little more comfort ? 
 Then their helplessness appealed to me. A 
 farmer or a squire was the god that ruled their 
 lot ; he kept them in poverty ; with a word he 
 could bring them to destitution. I saw this, 
 but with pity only ; I did not for an instant 
 question its justice." 
 
 There is no indictment here, merely a state- 
 ment of fact, and this tremendous power over 
 human life, which is of very little value to 
 those that wield it, is an unspeakable evil to 
 the community. Nor has the North Country 
 ploughboy exaggerated. I have known cases 
 where the wages have fallen to twelve shillings 
 or ten shillings a week ( with possibly a tied 
 cottage thrown in. Seebohm Rowntree's 
 
 93
 
 budgets 1 may be consulted, and many of them 
 are drawn from Hamptonshire. And yet the 
 resulting evil is less in the conditions of 
 poverty and partial starvation than in the 
 type of citizenship produced. The relation 
 between master and man under such condi- 
 tions is a wrong relation. However humanly 
 or kindly exercised, it is in our day unjustifi- 
 able. Nor is there mitigation in pleading that 
 kindliness is the rule, cruelty or tyranny the 
 rarest exception. One seldom hears of any 
 abuse of power ; nearly all farmers I have 
 known are kindly and humane men, but still 
 there the power is, greater than that of any 
 other employers of labour, and it lies like a 
 shadow across the path of progress. 
 
 About two years ago, as a demand had 
 grown up for new cottages, a speaker from 
 the " Land and Home League " was invited 
 into a Hamptonshire village. He had been 
 asked to give a talk with lantern slides on rural 
 housing. At the close of the talk he invited 
 any labourers who wanted to join the League, 
 with a view to improving the local housing 
 conditions, to hold up their hands. Not a 
 
 1 How the Labourer lives. 
 
 94
 
 single hand was held up, but forty labourers 
 gave in their names privately afterwards. I 
 asked one of the men why this was so, and 
 I got the reply, " Ah, don't you see, there 
 was too many farmers' narks in the room ! " 
 And by that he meant espionage. 
 
 I dwell upon this because it so intimately Personal 
 
 1-1 T- i- freedom 
 
 affects the educational question. For vitality needed for 
 
 . , educa- 
 
 m Education we need a free community ; and tumai 
 
 , -11 r TT i vitality. 
 
 the agricultural community 01 Hamptonshire 
 is in the fullest the generally accepted 
 English sense of the word not free. And 
 yet no one who has studied the workings of 
 the Hamptonshire experiment, who has known 
 the kindly and sympathetic encouragement 
 given to it by the local farmers, the personal 
 sacrifices they have made, and their consistent 
 endeavour to help in the agricultural teaching 
 of the district, but will admit that, as far as 
 the farmers were concerned, the labourers' 
 criticism was unfair. In all probability it 
 could not have been substantiated. It repre- 
 sented a mood, an attitude of suspicion, and 
 shall we say resentfulness, which is char- 
 acteristic of the Hamptonshire labourer, and 
 which perhaps has behind it many generations 
 
 95
 
 of misunderstanding. Yet such as it is, we 
 have to take it into account, and if we want 
 our Education to be effective we have to get 
 rid of it. For does it not, like many other 
 forms of ignorance, hit us back. The party 
 politician who watches the swing of the pen- 
 dulum will probably tell us that it is this 
 suspicion and resentfulness which made the 
 Hamptonshire labourers for with them lies 
 the casting vote politically throw out the Con- 
 servative in the election of 1906 because he 
 gave them no hope, and throw out the Radical 
 in the election of 1910 because he gave them 
 hopes that turned out to be false. 
 
 My plea, then, is that the time has come 
 when we should adapt our Education so as 
 to give the little man the labourer, the crafts- 
 man, the small-holder, a sense that he too is 
 taking an intelligent share in it. I do not 
 suggest that this should as yet be done by 
 direct representation on governing bodies, but 
 that it should become an objective. 
 
 96
 
 V 
 
 ON THE TEACHING OF ART IN 
 THE COUNTRYSIDE 
 
 THE Education Officer of the London County change in 
 Council, writing of the technical and art teach- as to 
 
 <( A r t" 
 
 ing of London in the past eight years, tells an d"tech- 
 us that : " It has unfolded new problems such teaching. 
 as that of the occupation for scholars at the 
 close of their school or college career whose 
 solution, seeing that they will profoundly affect 
 the whole educational edifice, will demand 
 earnest attention." 1 
 
 It is satisfactory to observe that eminent 
 officials are coming of themselves to see the 
 danger urged for so long by many practising 
 artists that there may be a limit to the multi- 
 plication of great schools and colleges, that 
 the perfection of standard in the Arts is not 
 accomplished only in this way, and that it 
 may possibly be the wrong way if it defeats 
 
 1 London County Coiindl Report, 1912, p. 8. 
 
 97 G
 
 its own end ; and that if the livelihood of the 
 producer is not considered, much of the edu- 
 cational edifice may be built upon sand. 
 
 With the question of the Arts I am not in 
 this book directly concerned, having dealt 
 with it elsewhere, but one or two points, as 
 they affect my subject, I wish to make clear ; 
 for the Arts, as I understand them, are not 
 only germane to it, but underlie much of what 
 is best in the Hamptonshire experiment. 
 
 The coming into the country of a body of 
 practical craftsmen, brought not only a new 
 standard of life and wage ; it brought a new 
 outlook upon life, and a new way of dealing 
 locally with the education question. Both the 
 Board and the Local Education Authority re- 
 cognised this, and wisely availed themselves 
 of the skill of these men, and, as will be seen 
 in the following chapter, used it to fill up 
 many of the gaps in the three branches of 
 State education which we have already re- 
 viewed. 
 
 I do not know what at Whitehall may be 
 the present official definition of Art official 
 definitions are almost as susceptible to change 
 as the policies of statesmen when they are
 
 no longer found to command votes but it will 
 be as well to say what we here mean by Art. 
 
 Art is not merely picture-painting, or indeed what we 
 
 ntean 
 
 i i r 1 c 1 A T 
 
 any kind of social irmge-work. Art, as 1 the 
 
 " Arts " 
 
 understand it, is the doing well of all such 
 of the imaginative things in life that are not 
 scientific, mechanical, nor literary ; and thus 
 it shades off at a hundred different points into 
 craftsmanship the functions in life where brain 
 and hand work together. Carpenter, joiner, 
 mason, metal worker, thatcher, hedger, dress- 
 maker, milliner, basket-maker, and dozens of 
 other occupations have each of them a point 
 where Art may be touched. Each of them, 
 when done by the hand and directed by the 
 imagination, can become Art, and the measure 
 of those things is life. A generation ago we 
 called them the " Arts and Crafts," but it does 
 not seem much to matter what we call them. 
 Suffice it that we need them, and need them 
 in our National Education. 
 
 The utterly false position and the over- 
 production of the picture painter the only 
 person who is now popularly called an artist 
 is due to the temporary and abnormal develop- 
 ment of mechanism, which has closed most of 
 
 99
 
 the avenues of human labour where imagination 
 and manual skill are needed in conjunction, 
 while at the same time it has freed thousands 
 of young men and women to practise the craft 
 of painting who might be better employed. 
 Worse than this, it has created an educational 
 system of which the " Art Master " is the 
 centre a system that has brought the teaching 
 of the Arts to an almost hopeless impasse. 
 The Art education of the country, as I have 
 already shown elsewhere, has got to be re- 
 organised on an entirely new basis to bring 
 it into line with modern needs. 
 
 The Arts In the nineteenth century the objective of 
 chanicai what is known as Art education was twofold. 
 
 industry. _ _ . . 
 
 It was, first, to tram painters, and, secondly, 
 to produce young men and women who, while 
 dependent on mechanical conditions, should 
 do work and designs that might put fresh in- 
 vention and imagination into industry. These 
 objectives may have had reason enough in 
 their day, but we are no longer in the nine- 
 teenth century ; the community is beginning 
 now to question seriously whether both may 
 not have failed, or at least whether they are 
 
 still vital. A new, or perhaps we should say 
 
 100
 
 a third, objective must now be given to the 
 Art education of the country, and that is to 
 create a type of man who shall be independent 
 of mechanical conditions, and do work and 
 designs because he himself thinks them good 
 and likes to produce them. This is the claim 
 of the Arts of all the ages, the only claim that 
 has ever justified itself, or that has succeeded 
 in creating living schools or periods of Art, 
 in painting or any other material. It postulates 
 the freedom of the individual to invent and 
 imagine. 
 
 As for mechanical industry, it needs no 
 state buttressing of the Arts, it is strong 
 enough to look after itself, and it will always 
 be able to use and apply the invention and the 
 imagination of the men and women that cross 
 its path. What a state system of Art teaching 
 has in the twentieth century to aim at is to 
 prevent the individual from being destroyed 
 by mechanical industry, to free him from its 
 deadening influences, to give him room to 
 invent. At present our English system merely 
 ties him to the steel wheels of the great 
 mechanical order. It takes away his freedom 
 
 of invention, it unfits him for a livelihood, and 
 
 101
 
 then we who have brought him to this pass 
 turn round and mock him, and ask why he is 
 of so little use to the community. 
 
 Funda Now this system is so important to us here 
 kinship because, as will be shown in the sequel, the 
 
 between . . 
 
 the Arts Arts and Crafts and the pursuit of agriculture 
 country have so much in common. Not only this, they 
 are implicit. Each needs the other. Neither 
 can accept the canon imposed on society by 
 mechanical conditions. Both demand that 
 greater freedom of the individual to work in 
 his own sphere and at his own times and 
 seasons. Both insist that regulation, employ- 
 ment, conditions of labour, and all the human 
 values suitable to the conditions of industry, 
 the great factory and its organisation, are un- 
 suitable to the work they have to do. Both 
 demand a different educational objective. The 
 question of Art teaching in the country is of 
 the utmost importance then, because it deals 
 with those subjects whose values are not 
 merely values in exchange but real values. 
 It deals with all those subjects we may set 
 painting on one side which are non-literary, 
 non-scientific, non-mechanical, and yet which 
 
 are wanted in life and demand other life con- 
 
 102
 
 ditions than those at present supplied by 
 mechanical industry. 
 
 If we are to reform effectively our Art Thtpossi- 
 
 . . bilitits of 
 
 teaching, we must start again at the beginning apprentue- 
 with the livelihood of the teacher and the country 
 
 conditions. 
 
 pupil. We must link it up with country pur- 
 suits and the real values of life ; we must set 
 it in the country where the life values are 
 suitable to its environment ; we must do this 
 again by a proper system of apprenticeship, 
 such as is not only suitable to the Arts and 
 Crafts, but such as they cannot do without. 
 We must, except in a few special instances, 
 give up the idea of the great central schools 
 with their phalanxes of classes, their superb 
 appliances, and their fine regimentation. We 
 must give up the obsession that everything is 
 better done in the factory, and create again the 
 human values implied in the petty relationship 
 of old between master and man a relation- 
 ship unsuitable to mechanical industry and the 
 great town, but entirely suitable to the Arts 
 in the country. The educational truth in this 
 great life problem, the "how" and "why" of 
 the teaching of the Arts, has never been better 
 
 put than by Samuel Butler. 
 
 103
 
 " The old masters taught, not because they 
 liked teaching, nor yet from any idea of serving 
 the cause of Art, nor yet because they were 
 paid to teach by the parents of the pupils. 
 The parents probably paid no money at first. 
 The masters took pupils and taught them 
 because they had more work to do than they 
 could get through and wanted someone to 
 help them. They sold the pupil's work as 
 their own, just as people do now who take 
 apprentices. When people can sell a pupil's 
 work, they will teach the pupil all they know 
 and will see he learns it. This is the secret 
 of the whole matter." 
 
 And how simple it is! If we could only rid 
 ourselves of cant. The Art school cant, and 
 the Whitehall cant, the cant that we are teach- 
 ing the theory of a subject while its practice 
 and livelihood must be left to economic and 
 commercial agencies, the cant that apprentice- 
 ship can be replaced by the technical school, 
 the cant of the masters of industry that the 
 object is to encourage the Arts when what 
 they are really after is to buy and sell the 
 human product of the art schools, the cant that 
 
 as we are helping the Arts with public money 
 
 104
 
 we must, as a State department, do what the 
 masters of industry want to do, and greatest 
 of all, the cant that public money may be used 
 for teaching but must not be used for selling 
 or for organising the livelihood of those whom 
 we want to see taught. 
 
 There is only one justification for the spend- Public 
 
 money and 
 
 ing of public money on the teaching of Art, Art teach- 
 and that is for us to encourage the imagina- need for 
 
 a more 
 
 tion ; and this apart from all commercial or intelligent 
 
 policy. 
 
 other considerations whatever. If we can en- 
 courage the imagination by insuring the liveli- 
 hood, such method as we adopt is its own 
 justification. Fortunate, indeed, are those 
 callings that are free from the particular kind 
 of cant that handicaps our Art teaching. When 
 we teach our young surgeons to operate, do we 
 say to them " You may learn the theory of the 
 subject, but you must not help in hospital, or 
 expect to make a livelihood out of your 
 practice ? " When we teach our seamen how 
 to shoot, do we say to them " You must study 
 the theory but you must not handle the gun ? " 
 On the contrary, we wisely pay them for their 
 good gunnery. 
 
 For the pursuit and teaching of the Arts 
 105
 
 we need again the creative guild, and the 
 sooner the process is commenced of transform- 
 ing our existing Art schools into such organisms 
 the better. For the Arts indeed it is, under 
 the conditions of mechanical Industry, the only 
 hope. Soon after the appearance of my last 
 book, 1 in which I tried to show how such a 
 devolution of our Art schools into creative 
 guilds might take place how the new form 
 might be crystallised out of the old, I met my 
 friend Professor Lethaby in the street. With 
 that grave and caustic humour which is so 
 becoming in him, he asked : " Ashbee, what 
 price will you take to do it?" And I replied, 
 " The price of your Royal College of Art." 
 There was no more to be said and we parted 
 the best of friends, each dreaming his dream. 
 But this might be added now to mine : that 
 the price I asked was needlessly high, and 
 that I should like to be allowed to try the 
 experiment in a small way, in one or two parts 
 of England first perhaps just in Hampton- 
 shire, where it already exists in embryo, but 
 in most effective working. I feel sure great 
 results could be obtained ; for it would be a 
 
 1 Should we Stop Teaching Art? 1911. 
 I O6
 
 live venture in Education : little by little it could 
 be incorporated into the general system. 
 
 Possibly some day some minister conserva- 
 tive, liberal, socialistic I should not at all mind 
 what his politics were as long as he had the 
 vision will clip the departmental barbed wire 
 with the pincers of experiment and allow the new 
 venture to be tried ; who knows ? But when 
 that day comes it will mean a properly-thought- 
 out system of apprenticeship in the country, not 
 alone of country but of town children, in the 
 homes of properly qualified craftsmen and small- 
 holders, and practising all those pursuits which 
 can and should be practised in the country. Is 
 it not significant that where in our replanning 
 of Art and the conditions of country life we are 
 beginning again at the very beginning, the 
 latest school of aesthetics, the Futurists, are 
 demanding a clean sweep of all the old methods 
 and canons ? We need not accept all Professor 
 Marinetti's deductions, but they have a pro- 
 found social significance. " There is no way," 
 as Samuel Butler observed concerning the ap- 
 pearance and reappearance of the Arts among 
 the people of Erewhon, and fifty years before 
 
 the coming of the Futurists, "of making an 
 
 107
 
 aged art young again ; it must be born anew 
 and grow up from infancy as a new thing, 
 working out its own salvation from effort to 
 effort in all fear and trembling." Butler was 
 himself a practising artist of no mean order ; 
 had the Futurists come to Erewhon during 
 his lifetime he would have brought his moral 
 home. 
 Manual But there is yet another side to the question, 
 
 teaching 
 
 and the and one which our Hamptonshire experiment 
 
 develop- 
 ment of has made clear. The development of the ima- 
 
 imagin- 
 
 ation as gination through the teaching of Art as a liveli- 
 the Hamp- hood that may well be practised in the country 
 
 tonshire 
 
 results, is one thing ; the development of character 
 through the imagination of the child is another. 
 This also implies Art, and some understanding 
 of it in the schools on the lines I have laid 
 down. " No education," says Henry James 
 of his own boyhood, " avails for the intelli- 
 gence that doesn't stir in it some subjective 
 passion, and on the other hand almost anything 
 that does so act is largely educative, however 
 small a figure the process might make in a 
 scheme of training. Strange indeed, further- 
 more, are some of the things that have stirred 
 
 a subjective passion stirred, I mean, in young 
 
 1 08
 
 persons predisposed to a more or less fine 
 inspired application." 
 
 Now the majority of children have just this 
 quality, or some of this quality of inspired appli- 
 cation, if they are allowed to express it with 
 their hands. My experience shows me and 
 this applies particularly to the Hamptonshire 
 results that most manual teaching as soon 
 as it becomes definitely creative is subjective. 
 Babies and young children are interested 
 in the process only, but adolescence needs 
 the thing achieved as well. That is to say, 
 that towards the end and immediately after 
 the elementary school age the creative desire 
 begins. There is a desire for self-expression 
 through the hands. Not once but a hundred 
 times have I tested and proved the truth of 
 Henry James's statement. I have in my house 
 a number of different things a candlestick, an 
 ash-tray, silver salt-cellars and mustard-pots, 
 pieces of niello inlay, stools and tables all of 
 them serviceable things and not mere orna- 
 ments, that have been made for me by youths or 
 boys after their school times or in the evening 
 class. But the charm and interest of these 
 
 things lies not only in the fact that the makers 
 
 109
 
 have been fond of me, but that the things and the 
 making of them have stirred just that subjective 
 passion which means so much in the shaping of 
 the character. Perhaps the best illustration I 
 could give is that of a Hamptonshire lad now 
 earning high wages in London he has carried 
 off prizes and scholarships at the Central School 
 of Arts and Crafts who when he was put at 
 the age of sixteen into the little experimental 
 metal shop at Easthampton, started with another 
 boy to make a model steamboat propelled by 
 methylated spirits, with a condensed milk tin 
 for a boiler. The lads worked at her for many 
 months in winter evenings, and she finally made 
 several successful cruises across the bathing 
 lake. The subjective passion had been stirred 
 by the handling of metals in the evening class, 
 but the special virtue of the achievement lay in 
 the fact that neither of the lads had ever seen 
 a ship or been out of Hamptonshire. 
 
 The maker of my toy boat may possibly end 
 by some brilliant feat in aviation. While I was 
 thinking of Art he was thinking of mechanics, 
 but it is perhaps worth while to remember that 
 their origin the child's imagination is the 
 
 same. It is somewhere in this wonderland 
 
 1 10
 
 that Art lives ; from out of it the real things 
 come, the permanent things, and you will find 
 in the cottages of country folk and labourers 
 in Easthampton things made in the last ten 
 years, not by machinery, but by the hand, things 
 such as I have described, for the home, the 
 table, the garden, crude enough of their kind, 
 but often not ill-designed and made in the 
 little experimental shop or the craft rooms 
 where the boys spend their evenings after 
 their day's work is done. 
 
 A great Italian artist of the Renaissance 
 was once appraising a piece of craftsmanship ; 
 " Good enough in its way," he said, " but it is 
 such stuff as peasants make ! " He could have 
 paid the work no greater honour. 
 
 It will, I think, be found that the recon- The 
 
 i Tr -11 i structed 
 
 structed country life will give us the key to countryiif 
 the problem we have just left. How are we revival of 
 
 .... . the Arts. 
 
 to make possible again the personal avoca- 
 tions, the things whose virtue lies, not in any 
 further development of mechanical industry, 
 but in the human quality and the freeing 
 of the individual to work with his hands. 
 Peasant Art in England, except in a few out- 
 of-the-way places here and there, no longer 
 
 in
 
 exists, and the majority of people actually 
 prefer the ugly machine-made gimcrack to the 
 beautiful piece made by hand. It is not alone 
 a matter of cost : it has become a matter of 
 preference, but that also means that it may be 
 corrected. If, as I believe, the reconstructed 
 country life and the reorganisation of the Arts 
 are two aspects of the same problem, if they 
 interlock, then this side of Education, the 
 training of the imagination in the young, is 
 the key to both. 
 
 I 12
 
 VI 
 
 THE HAMPTONSHIRE 
 EXPERIMENT 
 
 WHAT, then, is the Hamptonshire 1 experiment ? 
 What does it rest on ? What is its object ? 
 What may its future be? How might it 
 be developed ? What is its significance in 
 English constructive education in the imme- 
 diate future ? Those are the questions I want 
 now to try and answer. I am pulled up at 
 the outset with the difficulty of exact defini- 
 tion. It is so hard to say what precisely 
 the Hamptonshire experiment is. A correct 
 answer mio-ht have to include much more than 
 
 O 
 
 what is now known as Education or than is 
 embraced by one English county ; for, as the 
 White Knight said in introducing Alice to 
 
 the legend of the inscrutable countryman, 
 
 113 H
 
 "that's not its name, you know; that's only 
 what it's called." 
 
 I once asked one of the Hamptonshire 
 farmers, to whose enthusiasm and single- 
 mindedness the whole district owes a great 
 deal more than he is usually given credit for, 
 to let me have his ideas on an educational 
 issue. "You've come to the wrong shop," 
 he said, bluntly ; " I don't deal in ideas." 
 " Your practical suggestions, then ! " " Ah," 
 he replied, "now you're talking!" and gave 
 me what I was searching for. We work 
 along the line of least resistance, and the 
 illusive idea at least in the problems of 
 Education is often to be found in what our 
 right hand next findeth to do. 
 what n The Hamptonshire experiment, then, is an 
 
 has tried . . 
 
 to do, idea, but it is also a practical attempt to 
 
 what it 
 
 rests on, arrive at an educational policy for a given 
 
 and what 
 
 area, and that mainly agricultural. It is an 
 effort at the co-ordination of the different 
 existing agencies that have anything to do 
 with Education. As each of them moves 
 within an orbit of its own, it is an effort to 
 
 create something new that shall link them 
 
 114
 
 together. It is an endeavour to encourage 
 the working units of a district to combine in 
 spite of what one might call the centripetal 
 and centrifugal forces of Bureaucracy. And 
 it is an attempt to do this with some sort of 
 educational ideal. The Hamptonshire experi- 
 ment is not the work of one man, nor yet of 
 any specific Committee ; it is the work of a 
 number of people who are, little by little, 
 growing conscious that certain things have 
 become possible in Education, that they may 
 be done in one way or another, that on the 
 whole they are worth doing or have got to 
 be done, and that the people in question see 
 their way to doing them. 
 
 So much for the idea : now for what we 
 may call the educational constituents. In the 
 area with which the Hamptonshire experiment 
 has to do about as big as the county of 
 London there are some twenty villages (I 
 give their names in the curriculum and on 
 p. 1 20 below) with their elementary schools. 
 In the little market town of Easthampton, in 
 the centre of the district, there are two ele- 
 mentary schools, one good secondary school for
 
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 Drawing 
 Drawing 
 Kindergarten Methods a
 
 boys and girls with some sixty scholars, and a 
 well-equipped technical school which not only 
 serves the needs of elementary or secondary 
 scholars in certain subjects, but which supplies 
 the wants of the Higher education of the im- 
 mediate neighbourhood, and whose classes are 
 attended by some 300 students. There are, 
 then, what are called the sub-centres, in the 
 twenty outlying villages referred to, which are 
 largely supplied from this central school, and 
 where all sorts of continuation and agricultural 
 work is done. The total number of scholars 
 on the register in the whole area is between 
 600 and 700. A part of the technical school 
 is the Combined Domestic Subjects Centre, 
 where various forms of home craft are taught ; 
 another part of it are the craft rooms, where 
 the various Art classes are carried on ; another, 
 again, is the farmers' engineering shop and 
 smithy for farm machinery, and close by are 
 the gardens and orchard for combined use. 
 About a mile off are the farm and holdings 
 referred to in the previous chapter, and which 
 it is hoped some time to utilise for educational 
 
 purposes. 
 
 118
 
 On pp. 116 and 117 is given a typical cur- 
 riculum for a winter session, and on p. 122 
 a typical curriculum for the summer school. 
 
 At the foot of the winter curriculum, which 
 is circulated round the area, appear the follow- 
 ing notes : 
 
 i. English Literature. This is a Course of fifteen 
 
 Lectures and Readings, with Debates, on some of 
 
 the chief works of representative writers. Those 
 
 selected for the Course are Dickens, Shakespeare, 
 
 Robert Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
 5 and 6. The Classes in Millinery and Needlework are 
 
 provisionally arranged to commence after Christmas. 
 
 The Class in the Care of Farm Machinery is arranged 
 
 for those employed on the land, and provision is 
 
 made for teaching the practical side of the subject. 
 
 The Class in Agriculture is arranged for Farmers and 
 
 Allotment-Holders. 
 
 Intending Gardening Students should give in their names 
 before Christmas, in order to carry out the neces- 
 sary Winter digging of their plots. 
 Mr. John Peel, M.F.H., has again kindly given 5 for 
 
 prizes to students attending Subjects 3, 8, and 9. 
 Students joining Classes in Craft subjects are also ad- 
 vised to join a Drawing and Modelling Class, to en- 
 able them to study, and work out their designs. 
 Art work having a reasonable chance of gaining awards 
 at the National Competition will be forwarded to 
 South Kensington on April ist.
 
 An exhibition of School Work will be held at the end of 
 the Session. 
 
 Students wishing to prepare themselvesjfor the Board of 
 Education's Examinations in Art subjects should 
 first make themselves familiar with the new Regula- 
 tions, which may be seen at the School. 
 
 Of the twenty Hamptonshire villages, it 
 will be seen that twelve are recprded in the 
 above curriculum as having availed themselves 
 of the teaching during the session in question, 
 the remaining eight are still asleep or perhaps 
 sceptical of the educational advantages offered. 
 They are respectively Easthampton Parva, 
 Barton St. Nicholas, Abbot's Scorpion, Valle 
 St. Mary, Drowsing- in -the -Hollow, Little 
 Pippington, Slatterly and Broom. It is almost 
 always a question of personal enthusiasm, 
 but who knows, Lucifer may arrive at any 
 moment ! 
 
 The summer school curriculum is divided 
 into Part I, appealing to the Art student, 
 or the master in town, technical, or Art 
 schools; Part II, appealing to the Elementary 
 schoolmaster in Hamptonshire. In either case 
 
 the curriculum sets forth the names of in- 
 
 120
 
 structors and lecturers in some cases men of 
 special distinction. There is next a detailed 
 setting forth of the amenities and the history 
 of the Easthampton area, and the necessary 
 data as to lodgings, recreation, and train 
 services, all of which I omit. 
 
 SUMMER SCHOOL CURRICULUM 
 
 PART I 
 
 * 
 
 TIME TABLE 
 
 The Classes will meet for instruction during the forenoons 
 from 9 to i. No instruction will be given on Saturdays. 
 
 V 
 
 FEES 
 
 The fee for the course is 2, or 12s. 6d. weekly, and is pay- 
 able in advance. This fee covers all classes and lectures. 
 Students will be expected to pay for their own material, which 
 can be obtained at the school, provide the smaller personal 
 tools, and pay for the gas for the enamelling furnace if used. 
 
 121
 
 I. GOLDSMITHING, SILVERSMITHING, JEWEL- 
 LERY AND ENAMELLING, AND OTHER 
 ALLIED METAL WORK 
 
 OUTLINE OF COURSE 
 
 Preparatory designing or modelling will be taught if required, 
 but students may bring, and submit for the' teacher's approval, 
 their own designs. 
 
 Practical work will be divided into three parts : 
 
 1 . Raising, Chasing, and Repousse ; 
 
 2. Engraving, Enamelling (limoges, champleve', and cloi- 
 
 sonne) ; 
 
 3. Mounting, Polishing, &c. 
 
 N.B. The instruction in Engraving and Enamelling will 
 be given during the 3rd week of the course only. This will 
 enable students to prepare their work during ist two weeks 
 for enamelling, and for the fitting, &c., during the 4th week. 
 
 The above course will be recognised by the City and Guilds 
 of London Institute for students engaged in the trades. 
 
 122
 
 II. WOOD AND STONE CARVING 
 
 (a) DESIGN. Instruction and advice as to designs and 
 models in relation to the above will be given. Such study 
 will include drawing from nature and designing on the lines 
 of Mediaeval and Renaissance work. 
 
 (b) PRACTICAL LESSONS will be given on Elementary car- 
 ving, and on more advanced work in high relief and in the round. 
 
 Instruction will be given on the different treatments of work 
 in wood or stone relative to position, scale, &c., and should 
 advanced students desire it, special study will be given to 
 figure carving in relief, and in the round. 
 
 Advice will also be given on workshop equipment, cost, and 
 proper upkeep of tools, &c., and students will have the oppor- 
 tunity of inspecting the workshops where the instructors pursue 
 their crafts. 
 
 The aim in both the above Courses is to teach the subjects, 
 not as a means of decorating bric-a-brac, or making " fancy " 
 metal work, but rather in each case as an art capable of wider 
 development and individual expression. 
 
 A collection of photographs and reproductions of mediaeval 
 and other work in wood, stone, and metal will be available at 
 the school for study. 
 
 For the purpose of giving students every facility for private 
 study and practice at their work, the school will be open from 
 9 A.M. to sunset on every day excepting Sundays. 
 
 123
 
 SUMMER SCHOOL CURRICULUM 
 PART II 
 
 In order to afford Day School Teachers facilities for becoming 
 acquainted with Gardening and Rural Woodwork, Nature 
 Study, Drawing and Modelling, subjects such as are suitable for 
 teaching in the Day Schools, the following courses have been 
 arranged at the Summer School : 
 
 I. GARDENING 
 OUTLINE OF COURSE 
 
 Practical lessons bearing on the principles of horticulture as 
 applied to School Gardening Treatment of the Soil ; Digging ; 
 Trenching and Surface Cultivation ; Methods of Seed Sowing ; 
 Planting ; Thinning, &c. ; Habits and Requirements of Garden 
 Crops ; The Arrangement of School Gardens, &c. Fruit The 
 Principles of Propagation by Cuttings, Runners, &c ; The 
 Uses of Stocks ; Propagation by Budding ; Summer Pruning 
 and its uses ; Types of Fruit Trees for different purposes ; 
 Comparisons of Varieties showing different Habits of Growth 
 and Fruit Production ; Observation Lessons on Insect Pests, &c. 
 
 II. ALLIED WOODWORK 
 OUTLINE OF COURSE 
 
 The teaching will be adapted to rural needs, and instruction 
 will be given in : 
 
 (a) The Making of Useful Gardening and Agricultural 
 Appliances. 
 
 (b) Drawing: Plans, Elevations, Isometric and Working 
 Drawings, &c. 
 
 (c) Timber: Its growth and structure, properties, seasoning, 
 
 preservation and uses, &c. 
 
 (it) Equipment of Class Rooms, Tools, Means of Sharpening, 
 and Uses. 
 
 124
 
 III. NATURE STUDY, DRAWING AND 
 MODELLING 
 
 As far as possible the Drawing will be conducted out of 
 doors direct from growing plants and related objects. Allied 
 modelling in clay will be conducted in the classroom. 
 
 Instruction in Rural Zoology and Botany will be given in 
 connection with the above. 
 
 The Zoology will be studied in the mornings, and will em- 
 brace the character, general structure, and life history of insects, 
 their mouth parts, wings, and transformation ; the chief kinds 
 of larvae and pupae, their destructive qualities, their prevention 
 and remedies, together with a brief description of the chief 
 animal parasites. 
 
 The Botany will be studied in the afternoon during rambles. 
 
 Instruction will also be given in Bee-keeping. 
 
 TIME TABLE 
 FORENOONS, 9.30 12.30 
 
 FEES. The fee for the course is i, and is payable in 
 advance, and covers all classes specified above that may be 
 taken. 
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 Here follows the usual dreadful lure, the 
 test, the certificate ! 
 
 125
 
 Hampton- Now, apart from administrative and financial 
 ptrietue as questions, with which I shall deal in the next 
 
 revealed in . 
 
 a foal chapter, what do the ten years' experience as 
 
 Commit- .... _,, 
 
 tees re- given m the printed reports show us? The 
 
 commenda- . 
 
 fums, over practical needs from year to year are well seen 
 
 a period of . 
 
 ten years, m a summary of the Committees annual 
 recommendations ; I give some of them. 
 
 1904- In 1904 the social and humanistic needs 
 
 were thus outlined. "A school like ours has 
 other functions to fulfil than the merely techni- 
 cal; it has a social and humanising function also. 
 It must always be remembered that the want 
 which Higher education has to meet in our time 
 is the want created by industrialism and 
 machinery. All old handicrafts had education- 
 ally their humanising influence. Whether the 
 craft were agriculture, or whether it were jewel- 
 lery, the influence was the same; the type of 
 man produced was a type more complete, a man 
 of more compass, than the average creation 
 of modern industrialism. The social condition 
 and the craft reacted upon each other. In old 
 days the school was not needed, because the 
 craft and the social condition in which it was 
 set, together supplied the want. In our days 
 
 the want is a double one, and the little county 
 
 126
 
 schools under our Higher education scheme can 
 and should supply both, or help to supply 
 both. They should be social and humanistic, 
 as well as technical. It is men and women we 
 want for citizenship, not tools. That is why 
 such things as swimming, gymnastics, rifle 
 shooting, singing, literature, elocution and 
 history especially national history should be 
 included in the curriculum." 
 
 It was found impossible to separate the 
 question of wages from the question of educa- 
 tion, life and the finer interests of life. The 
 report of that year has some interesting statistics 
 and it put a question which gave to those who 
 govern in Hamptonshire much to think about. 
 
 " ' Why do the people leave the fields to go 
 into the towns?' Because there is not, or 
 does not appear to them to be, much scope or 
 future in remaining in the fields. They may 
 be wrong, but their migration is a fact. The 
 population of Easthampton alone has dropped 
 25 per cent, in thirty years, while in the neigh- 
 bouring village of Compton Regis of the forty- 
 three names of labourers and small-holders 
 appearing in the enclosure award of 1852, 
 
 only eight can now be traced, representing 
 
 127
 
 fifteen families in all. Other Hamptonshire 
 villages would tell the same story, and the 
 little roofless houses and empty cottages to be 
 seen on the countryside are the practical 
 illustration of the economic fact. Set side by 
 side with this there are large farmers in this 
 district who employ one ' signed on ' man per 
 hundred acres, while the rest of their labour is 
 casually employed at rates varying from los. 
 to iSs. a week." 
 
 The moral of all this, for Education, was 
 brought home by the plan of a small-holders' 
 farm. " There should be," the report went on to 
 say, in connection with any flourishing county 
 educational centre, "a county farm planned 
 upon a small-holding basis, with the definite 
 objective of training, and encouraging small- 
 holders to work together. Given the piece 
 of land near an existing educational centre in 
 the county . . . the experiment could be con- 
 ducted successfully and with comparatively no 
 tax upon the county exchequer." 
 
 This farm, as we saw in Chapter IV, has 
 since been added ; but, as we also saw, the 
 higher powers in Education have not yet found 
 
 out the way of utilising it. They are too much 
 
 128
 
 cumbered with the machinery of adminis- 
 tration. 
 
 In 1905 considerable progress was made, 190$. 
 and the principles that were to guide the 
 Hamptonshire experiment definitely laid down. 
 "We are," said the report of that year, "in a 
 period of transition; we have before us a number 
 of different educational agencies, some of them 
 antiquated, some of them imperfectly developed, 
 and on the top of this a highly complex and 
 continually changing State machinery for cor- 
 relating the whole. There is great danger 
 lest the real education at which we aim 
 shall be encumbered with detail, starved, or 
 paralysed. 
 
 "As educationists, we have certain leading 
 principles to observe. What are they ? 
 
 " i. The first is to correlate as far as possible 
 all the existing educational agencies, and get 
 them to work, if not together, at least identi- 
 cally, and so that they do not overlap nor 
 work wastefully. 
 
 "2. The second is to make our Higher educa- 
 tion centres, centres of local life. They should 
 provide something for everybody, for nobody 
 
 except the most conceited or the most foolish 
 129 i
 
 is incapable of learning. Hence they should 
 be tolerant of all forms of teaching, and entirely 
 free of all religious or political bias. 
 
 "3. Our Higher education centre should, in 
 the third place, be planned so as to link 
 technical and humanistic teaching in every 
 possible way. Technical teaching by itself is 
 narrow ; humanistic teaching is often unprac- 
 tical. Our purpose should be to get people to 
 see the connection between the two. 
 
 "4. Every possible opportunity should be 
 given for the physical development of the 
 young. The growth of machinery, overcrowd- 
 ing in small houses, and the unhygienic 
 conditions of life among a large proportion of 
 the population, make every form of physical 
 culture increasingly necessary at every Higher 
 education centre. 
 
 " 5. Our fifth study should be the educative 
 purposes of handicraft. In an age of machinery 
 and sub-division of labour, handicraft becomes 
 a necessity in itself. Boys and girls are taught 
 much more readily to think by using their 
 hands and eyes than by learning lessons out 
 of books. This is well illustrated by the 
 
 complaints we often hear of farmers that the 
 
 130
 
 old ' uneducated ' labourer was a more valu- 
 able man than the ' hand ' of a later generation 
 who has learned to read and write. There is 
 much truth in this. The book-learning of the 
 elementary school has often been of little 
 service. The object of our Higher education 
 centre should be to fill the want of handicraft, 
 both in the elementary school and in the more 
 mechanical conditions of modern life. 
 
 " 6. We should form definite and direct links 
 with the elementary school, and arrangements 
 should be made by which the more intelligent 
 children should be drafted into the Higher 
 education work even before their standards are 
 passed. It is to be hoped that the Board of 
 Education will soon remove the unwise regu- 
 lations by which elementary children are 
 discouraged from attending secondary schools. 
 This may be fitting for large towns ; it acts 
 very unfairly in country places. 
 
 " 7. The seventh point that should be em- 
 phasised is the need for the element of sport 
 and recreation in any such school as the one 
 we are dealing with. Where we have a 
 voluntary system and have to attract our 
 students, this is necessary. In countries like
 
 Germany, where conscription acts as a rod 
 over the back, it is more easy to compel 
 attendances ; but the English system has its 
 advantages in stimulating interest without the 
 threat of compulsion. To this end many 
 subjects could be developed on their recreative 
 as well as their strictly educative sides such 
 subjects as singing, reciting, wrestling, boxing, 
 shooting, swimming." 
 
 1906. In 1906 a further advance was made in the 
 formation of an Advisory Committee of the 
 local farmers. The co-operation was invited, 
 and cordially given, of the Hamptonshire 
 Agricultural Society, the largest employers of 
 labour collectively, in the county. 
 
 1907. This led in the following year to an extensive 
 development of the school garden, and the 
 planting of an orchard, and the outlining of a 
 scheme of teaching for young farmers and 
 farm hands in agricultural engineering or 
 how to handle farm machinery. 
 
 igos. In 1908, the Committee were for the first 
 
 time brought face to face with the difficult 
 question of the employment of child labour 
 after the elementary school age. They were 
 
 asked to institute and to report upon a new 
 
 132
 
 system of issuing cards to children leaving 
 school, and to encourage their attendance at 
 the evening classes. They reported thus : 
 " The experiment is a good one, but so far it 
 is but a questionable success. Until more 
 effective legislation shall compel employers to 
 send their boys to school, and stop the overwork 
 and sweating of small boys, between the ages 
 of fourteen and seventeen, ' earning,' is likely 
 to be of more importance than, ' learning ' in 
 the eyes of children who have just left school, 
 and also of their parents." 
 
 The Committee's practical recommendations 
 for the year were : 
 
 " (a) The continuance of all existing forms of 
 education carried out during the current year. 
 
 " (b) The extension of the work of the 
 summer school. 
 
 " (c) An active propaganda of the centres 
 within the area that have not yet taken up 
 any educational work. 
 
 " (cT) The resumption of the music-teaching 
 (which had been dropped on the ground of 
 expense), and if possible the engagement of 
 a professional musician, as before, to assist 
 the ladies who gave their services. 
 
 133
 
 " (e) The formation of a special drawing 
 class for the teachers of the district. 
 
 "(/) The development of drill for boys." 
 1909. All these recommendations except the last 
 
 were carried out, but in 1909 the Committee 
 again reported on the continuation class 
 system and the difficulty of linking the 
 higher on to the elementary work. " The 
 Board of Education's ' Card System,' " they 
 said, " recently instituted by the Hamptonshire 
 County Council, for boys and girls leaving 
 elementary schools, cannot be of real value, 
 unless attendance at continuation schools is 
 made compulsory for boys and girls between 
 the ages of thirteen and sixteen." 
 
 Their further recommendations for the year 
 to come are significant as showing what a 
 country district was needing. 
 
 " i. That the University Extension lectures 
 be suspended for a year, and that in their 
 place be held a series of lectures on educa- 
 tional subjects, to be given on Saturday 
 mornings (and possibly also Friday evenings) 
 such as would appeal to schoolmasters and 
 mistresses throughout the district. Various 
 educationists have already offered their 
 
 134
 
 services, and the following subjects have been 
 suggested : Geology and Local Geography, 
 Building in Hamptonshire, American Educa- 
 tional Methods, How to properly Equip Class- 
 rooms ; Folk-Song and Poetry in Schools ; 
 Nature Study in Schools ; Drawing and 
 Colouring. 
 
 "2. That handicraft classes, especially in 
 relation to agriculture, be more encouraged in 
 the villages of the area, and that this be done 
 by arrangement with local carpenters or crafts- 
 men, by paying them a small rent for the 
 temporary use of their workshops, and lending 
 to them school kits of tools, which could be 
 circulated in the same way as University 
 Extension libraries are circulated. 
 
 " 3. That the Board of Education be pressed 
 to give more practical effect to the recom- 
 mendations of its inspectors for correlating 
 the higher, secondary and elementary educa- 
 tion of the area. The opinion of the Com- 
 mittee is that a good deal of overlapping and 
 consequent waste of public money could be 
 saved in country districts if this were done, 
 and further that it would conduce to educa- 
 tional efficiency. 
 
 135
 
 "4. That the Board of Education and the 
 Hamptonshire County Council be urged to 
 make of Easthampton, more practically a 
 centre for the instruction of teachers from 
 Hamptonshire and the two adjoining counties. 
 The town has exceptional advantages for this, 
 and the subjects of instruction suggested to 
 commence with are gardening, handicraft, and 
 drawing. All these could be well taught here 
 on the lines of the Board's syllabuses. The 
 instructors are on the spot, all that is needed is 
 to assist students with fares." 
 
 , 9 , , In 1910 the Committee urged the County 
 
 Council, not unsuccessfully, to start a series of 
 teachers' courses, thus making the Central 
 School at Easthampton more of a training 
 centre for teachers in such subjects as drawing, 
 hygiene, physical training, household manage- 
 ment, and manual training. 
 
 At the same time they intimated their regret 
 that the county had let slip a unique oppor- 
 tunity for developing the summer school. A 
 group of educationists from Manchester and 
 its University had offered to combine forces, 
 bring its staff of teachers and its students, 
 
 some seventy schoolmasters and others for a 
 
 136
 
 month or six weeks and go shares in the 
 Easthampton summer school. These towns- 
 people were willing to live in tents if houses 
 or barns were unavailable. They wanted the 
 country craftsmanship and the amenities. Also, 
 Hamptonshire had by that time an educational 
 record of its own. On the other hand, they 
 had a good deal to offer in exchange, and the 
 association of town and country schoolmasters 
 at an educational symposium would have been 
 of great value. But the county was timid. 
 The Manchester people undertook to defray 
 all expenses and meet all fees, but they 
 wanted a guarantee of ^100 against loss, and, 
 as not more than half could be found locally, 
 the plan was dropped. 
 
 In 1911 the Committee reported that they 
 had built their new farm machinery shop, with 
 a smithy for farriery dignified by some of the 
 radical and "advanced" papers as the "first 
 municipal smithy in England," and that the 
 Hamptonshire Farmers Association had ap- 
 pointed a permanent advisory Committee for 
 agricultural work. Also they formed in the 
 central school building a combined domestic 
 subjects centre, with a set of rooms for resident 
 
 137
 
 teachers who could travel about from village 
 to village. 
 
 During the year, however, it had become 
 increasingly evident that the Committee had, 
 so to speak, got ahead of the county in educa- 
 tional policy, the Committee was interested in 
 Education, the county in cutting down expenses. 
 People were not drinking so much whisky, and 
 therefore the county thought it necessary to 
 curtail its Education. The Committee pro- 
 tested. "We consider it unfair," they said, 
 " that grants should be reduced by the County 
 Authority if attendances fall and work de- 
 creases, and at the same time be withheld 
 if attendances rise and work increases." Their 
 recommendations involved a great cutting 
 down of the schools' work to meet the 
 financial shrinkage. They had to abandon 
 much of their humanistic work. At the same 
 time, they advised " greater co-operation among 
 existing social institutions," and urged the in- 
 troduction of a definite rural bias into the 
 curriculum of the secondary school ; the reason 
 given was significant: "The Committee find 
 that the young farmers who have attended 
 the secondary school come to the technical
 
 school agricultural classes unprepared to take 
 full advantage of the teaching given by the 
 county instructors." 
 
 In 1912 the Committee warned the County 
 that with the increasing pressure of administra- 
 tion work put upon the locality by both the 
 Board of Education and the County in short 
 by bureaucracy it would be impossible to con- 
 tinue the work of Education if further financial 
 reductions were made, and finally in 1913, as 
 still further reductions were threatened, they 
 notified the Board and the County that unless 
 between them the necessary money was found 
 the whole of the local education work con- 
 ducted by them would be closed down in March 
 1914: that is to say, after eleven years' successful 
 work. 
 
 It seems, then, that in Hamptonshire we are Thepart- 
 at the parting of the ways. We have reached ways m 
 a point where we can do our work with know- 
 
 . , , . , . r , enterprise 
 
 ledge and constructive purpose do it, further, i 
 
 ... . . /- 1 T 1 tf>n ' aU( 
 
 with the sympathetic support of the Local the possible 
 Education Authority, but when to do it effec- tktHamp. 
 
 . , . , ton shire 
 
 tively and permanently we must have more ex p e ri- 
 stable Government help. Hitherto it has been 
 a support held out one year, withdrawn the 
 
 139
 
 next, burdened with all sorts of conditions, 
 penalties and threats, and subject to the con- 
 stant change of a vacillating central authority 
 acting with little apparent constructive purpose. 
 The efficient working of an education committee 
 is not possible under such conditions, nor is 
 private enterprise. There are indeed two im- 
 portant principles involved in all this : that of 
 intelligent local government in Education as 
 against bureaucratic control, and that of State 
 support for pioneering work. The two go 
 together. 
 
 In most experiments of the kind we have 
 been considering there comes a point when the 
 question has to be asked : Are private enterprise 
 and public support any longer compatible ? 
 The question indeed might be put in another 
 form : Has the experiment grown out of the 
 stage of local into that of national significance, 
 and if so should it not receive national as dis- 
 tinct from local subsidy ? In Hamptonshire it 
 has become a question whether this stage has 
 not been reached. There is a sublimated folly 
 in the condition of affairs to which the logic of 
 events has brought the County. The reduc- 
 tion of the whisky money owing to the increasing 
 
 140
 
 temperance of the community threatens the 
 extinction of a large part of its public educa- 
 tion, and on the other hand the increase of 
 bureaucracy threatens the extinction of the 
 only possible alternative private enterprise. 
 
 What is true of Hamptonshire is true of Lord 
 many other parts of rural England. The effort " unit of 
 and the achievement has been to create a local partially 
 enthusiasm in Education, to do what Lord 
 Haldane outlined in his Education and Em- 
 pire, when he said : "I should like to see every 
 parish have its unit of culture as well as its 
 unit of local government." In most English 
 villages we are a long way yet from realising 
 such a unit of culture where the doctor, the 
 priest, and the minister work together to an 
 educational end, but at Easthampton and some 
 of its affiliated villages it has been known. 
 The success of the Hamptonshire experiment 
 has been largely due to the combination. The 
 threat of present failure lies in the difficulties 
 of administration and finance. The vast 
 machinery of the Board weighs too heavily 
 upon us, and county administration, developing 
 as a consequence into a secondary bureaucracy, 
 
 has not yet learned how to rear the bantling. 
 
 141
 
 We have indeed brought the child happily to 
 birth ; we are in danger now of overlaying it, 
 or starving it from want of proper nurture. 
 These conditions of a democracy that has not 
 yet found itself they have to do with adminis- 
 tration and finance we will now examine. 
 
 142
 
 VII 
 
 DIFFICULTIES OF ADMINISTRA- 
 TION AND FINANCE 
 
 How are we to convert our local education what 
 
 , . r T- i -\ 
 
 committee into a real committee of Education r education 
 
 ,.-. .. .. _ committee 
 
 I think the answer to this question is, "&y should and 
 
 ... . r T-- ITT should not 
 
 making it less a committee of r mance. We be. 
 want less of the local grocer, less of the 
 checker of rates, less also of what has been 
 called the " sub-clerical class," the hangers- 
 on of ecclesiastical establishments, and we 
 want those who are primarily interested in 
 Education for its own sake. We want more 
 of the bona fide workman, more also of the 
 gentleman, the scholar, and the genial sports- 
 man of these three latter, that is to say, 
 provided they will really work ; and, above 
 all, we want what modern Liberalism seems 
 to be so nervous about more intelligent 
 
 143
 
 women. The question of personnel is vital : 
 the difficulty is how to get it right. 
 
 And when we have got it, what should be 
 the province of a local Education Committee ? 
 The answer is equally clear : to check bureau- 
 cracy, to create and interpret local educational 
 ideals, to watch human and personal interests ; 
 not, as so often at present, merely to register 
 the decrees, whether of the inspectors or the 
 county Education Office. The work of the 
 local committee should be to save bureaucracy 
 from itself. 
 
 I once had occasion to consult the late Mr. 
 Pierpont Morgan on a question of administra- 
 tion. It concerned the " National Trust." 
 The question arose as to the American organi- 
 sation we were trying to form. 1 What was 
 the best way of making it succeed, and where 
 were we to put it ? The organising committee 
 were much exercised with matters that seemed 
 very important what local magnates were to 
 be co-opted, whether it should be centred 
 in Washington because that was the official 
 capital, or in New York because it was the 
 business centre, or in Boston because of the 
 
 1 See " Report, to the Council of the National Trust," 1901. 
 144
 
 traditions of culture hours were spent in 
 discussing where it should be put. " Put it 
 where your man is," said Mr. Morgan; "it's 
 your only chance of making it succeed ! " 
 
 We cannot shift the administrative centre The per- 
 
 . sonnet and 
 
 of gravity in hnglish country districts to the human 
 where our man happens to be, but we ought 
 to be able so to build up our local committees 
 as to get the right men on to them and to give 
 those men a certain educational effectiveness, 
 to make it possible for them to experiment 
 and use them as a check upon bureaucracy. 
 This question of the personnel, indeed, of how 
 to get the idealism into the actual life, is of 
 the utmost importance to our subject. On 
 the right distribution of the idealism will 
 depend whether we shall ever get any vital 
 educational experiment tried at all. Let us 
 ask ourselves then, with our eyes always fixed 
 upon the little area with which we are con- 
 cerned the Hamptonshire district upon which 
 the rays of educational light are to be focused 
 where at present are we to look for the men 
 through whom they are to pass. The lens is 
 fourfold. There is Whitehall with its officials, 
 many of them individually most helpful if their 
 
 145 K
 
 tenure of office were not often too short ; there 
 is the local education authority, with many keen 
 educationists, tangled though they often are 
 in the political web ; there are the local com- 
 mittees or boards of managers ; and last, but 
 not least, there are the teachers. 
 
 As the question we are now considering is 
 administration, we are not concerned with 
 teachers nor with inspectors, except in so far 
 as they affect that issue. But we may ask 
 ourselves what in ten years has been the 
 Hamptonshire experience ? Two facts of the 
 utmost importance emerge, and both of them 
 intimately affect the administrative problem. 
 The The first is, that a very large proportion 
 
 won ~PTO~ 
 
 ftuionai \ would almost say the most valuable part 
 of the good work done, has been done by 
 the outside or non-professional teacher, and 
 by this I mean the man who is still practising 
 his subject and has not given up practising it 
 in order to teach it, the craftsman, the county 
 expert, the professional man, the men or 
 women who have come in to help because 
 they have been keen on their subject and 
 willing to impart it. We may call them 
 
 amateur if we like, but this " uncertificated " 
 
 146
 
 teaching of theirs has been worth whole terms 
 full of regulation teaching done for "grant." 
 From which we may deduce, not that the 
 professional teacher is less good, but that as 
 much freedom as possible should be allowed 
 for the employment of the non-professional, 
 and the administrative net be thrown as wide 
 as possible so as to catch him. 
 
 The second is that the inspectorate is not The in- 
 spectorate. 
 at present organised so as to make it most 
 
 serviceable to country education. The men 
 are admirable, but the way in which their 
 provinces and their services are marked out 
 is- wasteful and harmful. The Whitehall 
 " water-tight compartment " method, which 
 may have something to say for it in the con- 
 centrated and specialised town area, does not 
 work well in country districts. The inspector 
 neither gets his deserts, nor is he sufficiently 
 in touch with the local committees to make 
 felt his influence for good, and he does not 
 
 o ' 
 
 fully understand local problems. This weak- 
 ness under the present system of inspection 
 is inevitable. What we want for a country 
 district is not six different inspectors without 
 
 a head or a policy, each interested in one of 
 
 147
 
 the water-tight compartments, and liable to be 
 promoted as a good civil servant just when 
 he has begun to learn his job, but one 
 inspector in whose care is the Education of 
 the whole district. This man's subject should 
 be Education as a whole ; he should represent 
 Whitehall, and act on the advice of his various 
 specialists in elementary, secondary, or art 
 teaching, in technology, in agriculture, in 
 music, in physical drill, or in hygiene. His 
 functions, as beside those of the local com- 
 mittee, should be properly defined, and against 
 his decisions there should, if necessary, be an 
 appeal. The picture presented to the mind 
 of those in search of analogy for the existing 
 system is that of a superior power spinning 
 tops ; the tops are all of different colours and 
 spin delightfully in carefully marked squares- 
 five, eight, or ten in a square. If they slacken 
 in their gyrations, or bump up against each 
 other, we shift them to another square and 
 quickly put fresh ones in their places, for the 
 object of the game is to keep the colours 
 sorted, and each little unit spinning on its axis 
 as long as energy is in it. Thus do we main- 
 tain the whole machine in fine equilibrium. 
 
 148
 
 But to return to our local education com- The local 
 
 , , . r , 11- committee 
 
 mittee and its personnel, if they believe in and 
 Education and know what they want, we may cracy. 
 trust them to command the right teachers, 
 and the machinery of Whitehall will probably 
 respond to the demand. In what way, then, 
 should they check bureaucracy ? Here is once 
 more an illustration of the way bureaucracy 
 works in Hamptonshire I take it from one 
 of the school gardens. We have in East- 
 hampton an acre and a quarter of land ; a 
 third of it is devoted to orchard, the rest 
 divided into some thirty plots, where, under 
 carefully graded courses, men and boys are 
 trained and the horticultural experiments of 
 the county experts systematically studied ; the 
 elementary, the secondary, and the " evening 
 class " or technical students, each in their 
 separate classes and times, have access to this 
 garden ; the plots are separate, but the course 
 is systematic and arranged according to the 
 local need. From the bureaucratic point of 
 view, the ideal method (we have so far 
 successfully fought against this ideal) would be 
 for the Committee to establish three entirely 
 
 separate gardens, orchards, and courses of 
 
 149
 
 study for the three separate Whitehall depart- 
 ments, elementary, secondary, and technical, 
 or, better still, for the fruit to bear three 
 harvests and the tree to be thrice pruned and 
 grafted once in the morning for the elementary 
 school children, the second time for the more 
 exclusive requirements of the secondary school, 
 and, lastly, for the technical students at some 
 later hour they were "evening class" students 
 until Sir Robert Morant made the fortunate 
 discovery that the phrase was an "accidental 
 expression." The committee circumvented 
 the bureaucracy to the extent of concentrating 
 the garden and its instruction in one area 
 and under one expert teacher ; the plots are 
 worked separately and at different times, but 
 the pruning and grafting demonstrations are 
 given collectively, and thus the benefit of the 
 experiment is reaped year by year. So far so 
 good, but suddenly a new difficulty has arisen, 
 bureaucracy has once again reduplicated itself 
 by fissure. Agricultural education, hitherto 
 managed by the Board of Education, is now 
 to be managed by the Board of Agriculture ; 
 and it appears that all teaching of lads under 
 the age of sixteen is to come under the Board
 
 of Education, and all teaching above that age 
 under the Board of Agriculture. The practical 
 effect of this is, that where there are two lads 
 working side by side, but of whom the one is 
 sixteen, the other a few weeks younger, two 
 different sets of registers have to be made 
 out, two financial statements sent in, and the 
 whole course of instruction is liable to the 
 supervision of two different departmental in- 
 spectors, who may have quite different theories 
 as to how the same piece of land is to be 
 administered or the same class conducted. But 
 I dare say the quiet common-sense of the 
 locality will circumvent even this rednctio ad 
 absiirdum. The trouble is that so much 
 labour has to be employed locally in undoing 
 the costly tangle ; and how gladly would we 
 have for teaching a little more of the money 
 that has to be spent, not only in administration, 
 but in checking the administrators. 
 
 Bureaucracy is merely government from an The local 
 
 rr ,. T . . . Organis- 
 
 ornce at a distance. It is sometimes very wise ing 
 
 . Secretary. 
 
 and very necessary, and yet in Hamptonshire, 
 ten years ago, before it had come to be the 
 young Gargantua it is, everything was much 
 simpler and easier. In those days the village
 
 sub-centres had not yet been drawn into the 
 scheme, and, as far as Higher education was 
 concerned, I acted as honorary secretary for 
 the area, and to a committee I was invited 
 myself to create. Checking or attending to 
 registers was a comparatively trifling labour 
 of love. There were no penalties attached to 
 it, and if there was a deficit I made it up out 
 of my own pocket. But now, not only have 
 the classes increased from 5 to 60, the students 
 to 700, the attendances to 14,000; a local in- 
 terest in Education has grown up the whole 
 system of registration, of checks and counter- 
 checks, of timing and entering, has become 
 so complicated, the correspondence with officials 
 so great, that it takes hours of a highly skilled, 
 paid man's time every week to do it conscien- 
 tiously and honestly. The ultimate weight 
 of bureaucracy falls locally, as in the case 
 of the garden plot just referred to. Twenty-five 
 pounds one-fifth for administration, out of a 
 block grant of 125 per annum, seems at the 
 outset to be a good deal, especially when the 
 county office has already taken its administrative 
 fifth from the block grant received from the 
 Board. There seems wisdom in the order we 
 
 152
 
 occasionally get from the Local Education 
 Authority, or from those who have not looked 
 into the details : " You must cut down your 
 administrative expenses." But how, locally, is 
 it to be done ? The local Committee who 
 have to find the man have gone very carefully 
 into this matter, and they have come to the 
 conclusion that the particular work required 
 cannot be done for ^25 or .30 a year. That, 
 indeed, they grossly underpay their secretary, 
 and are themselves largely dependent on his 
 personal enthusiasm. For what actually is the 
 work, and what the type of man needed to 
 do it ? Classes, instructors, lecturers have 
 to be looked after ; innumerable registers to 
 be kept ; difficult local village committees, 
 schoolmasters, and correspondents have to be 
 looked up, and every now and again visited 
 this may mean a ten-miles' bicycle ride and 
 an afternoon's time. Statistics over the whole 
 area have to be got out : Whitehall hungers 
 for statistics. The Secretary has to keep in 
 sympathetic personal touch with as many 
 students as possible. The data I gave in the 
 last chapter show how vital this is if real con- 
 tinuation between the elementary and the 
 
 153
 
 higher teaching is to be maintained. But, 
 more than all this, he has to watch the con- 
 tinually changing mood of a district in its 
 young people. And here it is where the 
 vitality of an educational experiment is best 
 tested. Are we constantly inventing, trying 
 some new thing ? Do subjects grow stale ? 
 Then present them in another way. Do 
 classes or lecture attendances fall off? Close 
 them and start anew. The thing to maintain 
 is the interest of the pupil in his own develop- 
 ment, the interest of a community in its edu- 
 cational ideal. Nothing is so soon systematised 
 or run in a groove as Education ; nothing 
 so soon tends to formulas ; and this deadness 
 is encouraged by the rigid " class system " 
 at present favoured at Whitehall for statistical 
 and audit purposes, but which is unsuitable for 
 fifty per cent, of the subjects that it is desirable 
 for young people in the country to know about 
 subjects, for instance, that depend upon the 
 weather, or the seasons, or that are interfered 
 with by crops or harvest, or, what is still more 
 important, by the temperament, the leisure, 
 the skill, and the application of the individual. 
 In the Hamptonshire experiment we have 
 154
 
 been singularly fortunate in our organising 
 Secretary ; he is not only a sympathetic teacher 
 in several technical subjects, but has shown 
 great administrative ability, and, what is worth 
 even more still, educational enthusiasm. Here 
 again it is the man and not the subject or the 
 method that is the important thing. It appears 
 then that the local Committee, even if its 
 sphere of influence is only 150 square miles, 
 with twenty different villages, must have its 
 own officer through whom it must exercise a 
 human influence, and who must be its eyes and 
 ears. The County education officer cannot 
 "attend to the human details, much less can his 
 clerks ; he has many hundred schools and a 
 large organisation to deal with ; his office is 
 but a Whitehall in petto. 
 
 What, then, of the Committee itself? It is Education 
 
 r >ii i i committees 
 
 often said that what we need is more money, should not 
 That is only partially true. Security of income of 
 
 , r , i /-, finance- 
 
 is often quite as important, and that a Com- 
 mittee should know at the beginning of a year, 
 or several years ahead, what it is going to 
 receive at the end of the time. Also, there 
 should be confidence between the voluntary 
 agents and the grant-giving authority, so that 
 
 155
 
 the former should feel that if they put their 
 hands in their pockets their little enterprise 
 will not have its block grants reduced to save 
 county finance ; next, there should be a margin 
 for experiment to encourage them to spend 
 money of their own ; and, lastly, there should 
 be a greater freedom for those who are work- 
 ing out the actual problems of Education from 
 the check and scrutiny of too many busy- 
 bodies. As things are organised at present, 
 a local education Committee tends to become 
 a committee of finance, a committee that says 
 not, " How shall we best see that the Education 
 of an area is carried out ? " but that says, " How 
 shall we best see that the money we are going 
 to receive from the State is not exceeded ? " 
 
 This is how it works in Hamptonshire. A 
 representative committee is formed, let us say, 
 of fifteen members. These are appointed, 
 perhaps, by the County Council, the District 
 Council, the Parish Council, and possibly by 
 some local trusts or charities that may be 
 working under schemes. The result is un- 
 doubtedly representative, but it does not follow 
 that the representatives are primarily interested 
 in educational questions. I have known the 
 
 156
 
 most fantastic appointments made by parish 
 or district councils, or the trustees of ancient 
 schemes. A good vicar's warden may postulate 
 an educationist, or a quarrel between two 
 members of a parish council result in the 
 appointment of some " dead head " ; and I 
 sometimes think that it would be a wise plan, 
 when the time for appointments draws near, 
 for the County Council or the Board to draw 
 up a few general principles that might at least 
 serve to guide a blind and somewhat confused, 
 but not altogether unintelligent Democracy in 
 selecting those who are to direct its Education. 
 But let us assume our Committee has come 
 into being, a much greater difficulty arises 
 after election. If seven out of the fifteen 
 a large proportion should be really keen 
 educationists and have clear in their minds 
 what the district needs, the remaining eight 
 have to be led. The existing method makes 
 this as difficult as' possible ; it converts these 
 eight, from possible allies of Education, into 
 grim custodians of the purse. Little or no 
 financial security is given in advance, final 
 payments of grant are not made until almost a 
 year after the Committee has involved itself in 
 
 157
 
 obligations and disbursements, State and County 
 audits are required, and sometimes what were 
 interpreted as promises are rescinded by depart- 
 mental ukase. As rent, instructors' wages, 
 and tradesmen's bills have, for the most part, 
 to be paid in cash, the Committee may have 
 to incur a bank overdraft which somebody has 
 to underwrite, and its members have the un- 
 comfortable feeling that if at any moment the 
 higher powers should decide to bankrupt their 
 little venture in Education, they may each 
 individually be called upon for a five-pound 
 note. Now the village postmaster, the local 
 grocer, the farmer who is fighting the many- 
 headed hydra of rates, the parson who wants 
 every penny for his church, or the dissenting 
 minister who takes the opposite view, may be 
 excellent educationists, but it is not fair to put 
 them into this position, and it is not good for 
 Education. It makes experiment impossible. 
 It converts a committee of Education into 
 one of financial restraint, also it is a needless 
 duplication, one may say triplication, of func- 
 tions. Is not the Board already there with its 
 legion of inspectors and its grim auditor ever 
 waiting, like the eunuch Sabyh in the house of 
 
 158
 
 Lokman, to destroy at the critical moment? 
 The local education Authority also is there, 
 with its second system of inspectors and audit, 
 and its county representatives, who come down 
 from time to time and say, " We are here to 
 see that you spend your money properly." It 
 is surely not necessary to have a third set of 
 auditors, made all the sharper because in the 
 end their pockets may be touched. 
 
 I have watched carefully the agenda and 
 the discussions at one of these committees for 
 several years, and I have found that the real 
 educational questions become less and less 
 important, and tend to be squeezed out alto- 
 gether. We have to remember that admini- 
 stration, especially in a country area, is a 
 very difficult matter. Representative com- 
 mittees themselves have to be educated. They 
 are made up of men and women who come 
 long distances and have a limited time, usually 
 between train and train, at their disposal. A 
 couple of hours every two or three months is 
 the allotted span, and all has to be done and 
 learnt in that compass of time. The central 
 Authority should relieve the local Committee 
 of the needless burden of this scrutiny, and 
 
 159
 
 should rather help to define for them their real 
 purpose, which should be a human one. It 
 should remove the financial instability. Local 
 experiment in Education should be their 
 peculiar function not finance. Finance is not 
 Education. 
 
 What the financial instability has meant for 
 the Hamptonshire experiment is best seen in 
 the following table prepared in 1913 by the 
 local Committee to show the fluctuation and 
 fall of their Higher education grants. The 
 table is calculated in percentages upon hours 
 of attendance the actual Education done 
 from the year 1906, and it should be read in 
 conjunction with the recommendations given on 
 page 139, and the Committee's final statement 
 that the financial insecurity and the adminis- 
 trative burdens imposed on them by the 
 County and the Board would make it im- 
 possible for them to carry on their work after 
 April 1914. 
 
 For 1906-7 grants were received at a rate of ^3 16 o per cent. 
 1907-8 2 18 io| 
 
 1908-9 3 5 7$ ,. 
 
 1909-10 2 o n| 
 
 1910-11 I 18 2} 
 
 1911-12 i 14 5l H 
 
 1 60
 
 If we could get the financial difficulty Expert- 
 cleared out of the way, there would be more 
 chance for experiment. There should be some 
 sort of reserve fund to help and back fresh 
 experiment, if a committee was willing to try 
 it and the experiment proved a success. 
 Present administrative methods check ex- 
 periment and check private enterprise. Let 
 me once again give some Hamptonshire 
 illustrations. In 1911 we wanted to test the 
 educational use of the cinema in the Hamp- 
 tonshire villages. Its use in Education has 
 been questioned, but there is little doubt as 
 to its value if properly controlled, in such 
 subjects as the action of growing plants, the 
 life and nature of animals, or in historical or 
 geographical illustration. In the town the 
 financial success of the cinema is due to the 
 continuous run with a succession of fresh 
 audiences ; in a group of scattered villages 
 this is impossible. So we made arrangements 
 with the makers of the films to show in six 
 of our co-ordinated villages so many thousand 
 feet of selected films week by week on stated 
 rounds, and we got from the villages a collec- 
 tive guarantee of ^50, covering the estimated 
 
 161 L
 
 cost over a period of ten weeks. The cost 
 was calculated too fine, because of transit to 
 the remoter villages, the village guarantors 
 would not risk any more, and as the possible 
 deficit of ,10 or 20 would have fallen on 
 the central grant the whole experiment had to 
 be abandoned. The general feeling was that 
 ^50 of local money a generous offer was 
 thrown away that might have been put to 
 educational service. 
 
 Here is another example. I give it to 
 show how necessary it is that the system of 
 administration and public finance should be 
 so constructed as to inspire confidence among 
 possible local donors. Some members of the 
 Hamptonshire committee raised among them- 
 selves a fund for a definite educational purpose. 
 Then the question arose as to how this should 
 appear in the annual accounts. It was decided 
 that it should not appear at all, but be kept 
 as a sort of secret service fund, and when the 
 reason why was asked, it was replied that it 
 might tempt the County to make a reduction 
 in the block grant. Since then further dona- 
 tions have been promised, and the establish- 
 ment of a scholarship fund has been suggested 
 
 162
 
 to enable elementary scholarship winners to 
 hold their scholarships at the secondary school, 
 and this also is to be put into the secret 
 service. It does not seem to me that such 
 a condition is healthy for educational develop- 
 ment, nor is the administration sound that 
 induces it, 
 
 If experiment is one of the vital functions of Co-ordina- 
 a local Committee, equally so is co-ordination. 
 The Committee should have power to co- 
 ordinate the various educational units in the 
 district over which it has sway. The present 
 want of co-ordination is illustrated by an 
 episode that occurred last year at the village 
 of Drowsing-in-the-Hollow. The chairman of 
 the education Committee was collecting some 
 data that necessitated a visit to some of the 
 elementary schools. He got the necessary 
 permission from the vicar of the school in 
 question to enter the school. One of the 
 school managers, hearing afterwards that a 
 stranger who was not a Government inspector 
 had been visiting the school, asked who it 
 was, and on being told that it was the chair- 
 man of the local Education Committee, said, 
 
 11 Why, what's that got to do with it, any 
 
 163
 
 way ? That's no concern of ours ! " He was, 
 of course, perfectly right. The local Educa- 
 tion Committee is not supposed to have any- 
 thing to do with the elementary school, and 
 vital questions of Education are no concern 
 of the elementary school managers. 
 
 Obviously, if we are to make the higher, the 
 technical, the secondary education of a district 
 effective, after or even during the elementary 
 school age, there must be some means of 
 directly influencing the schools and bringing 
 them more into line with the whole educa- 
 tional development of the area. At present 
 in Hamptonshire there is no means of doing 
 this. 
 
 party There is still one administrative pitfall we 
 
 have to avoid, and the present transition from 
 old to new forms of county government makes 
 it a very dangerous one. An educational 
 venture must not be entangled in party politics. 
 Here Whitehall may come to our help, for the 
 bigger bureaucratic bully can keep the lesser 
 one in his place. I have known a committee's 
 educational work all but wrecked, not from 
 any ill-will to Education, but because it was 
 
 necessary to do certain things in the interest 
 
 164
 
 of the party machinery which necessitated 
 wrecking. To use educational means for 
 furthering party politics is almost as bad as 
 using them for a sectarian objective, and yet, 
 though this is impossible in Hamptonshire, 
 there are still counties in England, I believe, 
 where it is done. Few things are more 
 mischievous. To men and women who take 
 the great questions of citizenship seriously, it 
 is the unclean thing. It is like waltzing to 
 "God save the King," or wearing the Union 
 Jack as a party badge at elections. Politics 
 just as much as sectarianism must be kept 
 outside, for what shall it serve us if, having 
 escaped the Scylla of religion, we fall into the 
 Charybdis of party politics. 
 
 To those who have followed me so far, more 
 still to those who have themselves experimented 
 in country education, it will be evident that the 
 administrative and financial difficulties that for 
 the moment make experiment so hard are not 
 causal. They are themselves due to the want 
 of any clear intention at Whitehall as to what 
 Education in the countryside should mean or 
 how it should be furthered, and then to the 
 rapid disintegration of the life of the country- 
 
 165
 
 side itself. If this record of the Hamptonshire 
 experiment affords a clue to the shaping of such 
 a policy, or shows how Education may be an 
 aid in building up the new country life, it will 
 not have been offered in vain. 
 
 FINIS 
 
 I'rinted by BALLANTYME, HANSON * Co. 
 at Paul'* Work, Edinburgh
 
 OTHER WORKS BY 
 C. R. ASHBEE, F.R.I.B.A. 
 
 THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE GUILD AND SCHOOL 
 
 OF HANDICRAFT. 
 THE TREATISES OF BENVENUTO CELLINI ON METAL 
 
 WORK AND SCULPTURE. 
 THE TRINITY HOSPITAL IN MILE END. 
 TABLES OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS OF THE i6TH, 
 
 I7TH, AND i8TH CENTURIES. 
 CHAPTERS IN WORKSHOP RECONSTRUCTION AND 
 
 CITIZENSHIP. 
 AN ENDEAVOUR TOWARD THE TEACHING OF JOHN 
 
 RUSKIN AND WM. MORRIS. 
 A REPORT TO THE NATIONAL TRUST for Places of Historic 
 
 Interest and Natural Beauty of similar undertakings in the 
 
 United States. 1901. 
 
 AMERICAN SHEAVES AND ENGLISH SEEDCORN. 
 THE MASQUE OF THE EDWARDS OF ENGLAND. 
 THE LAST RECORDS OF A COTSWOLD COMMUNITY. 
 THE ESSEX HOUSE SONG BOOK. 
 
 ECHOES FROM THE CITY OF THE SUN : A Book of Poems. 
 A BOOK OF COTTAGES AND LITTLE HOUSES. 
 ON THE NEED FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF COUNTRY 
 
 SCHOOLS OF ARTS AND CRAFTS. 
 SOCIALISM AND POLITICS. 1906. 
 
 CRAFTSMANSHIP IN COMPETITIVE INDUSTRY. 1908. 
 CONRADIN; A Ballad. 
 
 THE BUILDING OF THELEMA: A Romance of the Workshops. 
 MODERN ENGLISH SILVERWORK. 
 THE PRIVATE PRESS: A Study in Idealism. 
 THE TRUST DEED OF THE GUILD OF HANDICRAFT. 
 SHOULD WE STOP TEACHING ART. 
 
 Some of the above, printed at the Author's private press (The 
 Essex House Press}, are obtainable by direct application to the Secre- 
 tary of the Essex Hoitse Press, 37 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London, S. W.
 
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