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PART II
The Study and Practice of
Citizenship in the Schools
9. INTRODUCTORY
In Section 6 of Part I a few brief references were made to social studies in the school curriculum. It was suggested there that the study and practice of Citizenship in the schools were interdependent and that, of the two, practice was the more important. Of the study of citizenship, it was suggested that methods would vary from school to school, that the separate study of public affairs might sometimes be successful but that, on the whole, it was preferable that the principles of good citizenship and the study of man in society should permeate the matter of all organised studies and should constitute a unifying factor in the curriculum. The aim of the present part is to take these suggestions a little further for the benefit of teachers and others who may be interested. The more purely educational issues will now be examined at greater length.
10. GENERAL AND SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES IN THE CURRICULUM
There is wide agreement in this country that one essential purpose of education is to nurture the development of the future democratic citizen. But there is less agreement about the proportions which education of this kind should assume, and the methods which it should employ. There are those who fear that citizenship may come to be the sole aim of education. There are also some who suspect that the purpose is to "condition" the pupil so that, when he is mature, he shall serve the purpose of the state. Those who share these fears and suspicions are inclined to join forces with those who argue that social studies are essentially adult, and to urge that "politics should be kept out of the schools".
These criticisms are certainly not uppermost in the minds of most of us to-day. What is conspicuous at the present time is the strong and growing feeling that education in citizenship is necessary. But it would be unwise to ignore the suspicions or the fears which such education is liable to provoke. In this field of study we are concerned with man in his political and social relationship, rather than as an independent individual or as a spiritual being answerable to God or to his conscience,
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There is also a real danger lest we become so preoccupied with the problems that confront our society to-day, both at home and abroad, that we carry with us into the classroom matters which are beyond the understanding, and fail to arouse the interest of children. There has always been a temptation to introduce too early to children what preoccupies ourselves, and the danger is no less to-day merely because we have abandoned the dogmatic controversies which interested pedants in earlier ages and perplexed their pupils, and have put in their place economic and political problems which may seem to us of greater relevance, but may be equally beyond the range and interest of children.
These dangers should be recognised. But after recognising them, let us recognise also that teachers, on the whole, have nevertheless come to feel that we cannot and should not ignore in our education the political and social environment of to-day, for the compelling reasons that we have evolved a society which needs the co-operation of all of us, and in which a share in controlling our fate belongs to each one of us. No realistic education which seeks to secure some relation between school and the needs of adult life can any longer ignore these things. It would be as unreasonable as it would be unwise to exclude to-day from the school curriculum information about these institutions, local and national, through which we govern ourselves, earn our living, and manage our affairs. And so we find that secondary schools to-day very generally recognise a need for introducing at least their older pupils to the political, social and economic life of our times and to the institutions through which that life finds expression; while adult education, in all its forms, is very naturally even more deeply concerned with these things.
Clearly we are concerned with out-of-school activities as well as with formal instruction: these are further discussed in Sections 12 and 17 following. Similarly, since it is a matter of influence and example, citizenship is bound up with the characters of teachers and taught, and with the tone of school life. It is really an integral part of the whole underlying purpose of education. It would not be correct to draw any sharp distinction in respect of it between the formal "subjects" of education and out-of-school activities. The good student, who applies himself, is likely also to become the useful citizen. And each "subject" contains within itself its own "discipline" and thus contributes to the development of character and intellect and to the widening of the understanding. It was, for long, the legitimate boast of the old classical studies that by their very nature they trained a man for the wide and varied responsibilities of later life - a boast which the careers and achievements of many great figures in our national history, brought up on the classics, went far to justify. The classics play a smaller part in education to-day, but newer subjects, such as English, modern languages and history, make something of the same claim, while the sciences and mathematics - most evidently mental "disciplines" in the traditional sense of that word - are not without similar apologists. All school subjects should contribute to developing the character as well as the intellect, and should thus indirectly prepare
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for citizenship. There are no water-tight compartments in education, and least of all can citizenship, which rests upon character, be prepared for by one means, alone.
Recognising this, we should no doubt also be cautious in suggesting that any one of the traditional subjects ought so to adapt itself to prepare directly and consciously for civic responsibility, thereby assuming a purely didactic role. There are always dangers besetting these attempts and reference was made, at the beginning of this chapter to some of them. A selection, for example, of literature for school reading which is made solely with the purpose of portraying social or patriotic virtue will soon defeat its purpose by provoking the opposite reaction to that intended. And the same may be said of a history syllabus which is so preoccupied with explaining the social, political and, economic set-up of the present day that it ignores the fact that history is a story. The main branches of human study will not bear distortion of this kind; moreover, to attempt it is to thwart the true purpose of a liberal education which must concern itself with the individual child and with his spiritual, imaginative and intellectual welfare, and must not push prematurely before his eyes social concepts for which he is unready.
But to say this is not to say that in planning the ordinary work of the school teachers should eschew the inclusion, within the different "subjects", of material which will lead to some understanding of contemporary life. Indeed, it is likely that more can be accomplished by awareness, on the part of the whole staff in their teaching, of the claims of citizenship, than can be accomplished by the isolated weekly lesson in public affairs. taken by one particular teacher. In several of the normal school subjects it is possible for the teacher to include material with a practical bearing upon citizenship, and to do so logically and naturally with no distortion. It is, after all, necessary for a teacher to consider many different values in selecting the materials of his syllabus. He will no doubt have in mind his pupils' natural interests, the logical progression and build-up of the work from term to term and from year to year, and the value of the work selected in advancing his pupils' mental development. But one, at least, of the values he will want to consider is whether the work selected is going to improve his pupils understanding of their own neighbourhood, of their own, country, and of the role which one day they will play in both as citizens.
There are, for example, in English literature, many different children's tastes to cater, for, and much treasure to be extracted from a mine of wonderful wealth and variety: But amongst the many benefits which children derive from reading and from being read to, one of the richest is an ennobling of the sentiments of loyalty and service which are latent within them. Literature does not cease to be literature because it was written or spoken with this purpose and because it has had this effect. Whether the educational value of reading of this kind should be described as literary or whether as a "training in civic virtue" is, no doubt, a nice point, but it is one in which close definition seems unprofitable. And the
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same is true of other subjects in which the æsthetic or spiritual element is predominant; of art, of music, or of religious instruction. It is unwise and often impossible to "separate off" the social value in this education, or to obtrude it upon the children's attention; that value is certainly present, even though the material must be chosen and treated for its æsthetic or spiritual worth.
But it is the work in geography and in history (or the local study and project work which combines these subjects) which gives the most direct opportunity for providing the future citizen with the information and understanding he should possess. It is here that the pupil will find the subject matter which needs to be explored; for, while in his school life as a whole and in his, home life he will develop the qualities of character without which knowledge is either useless or dangerous, it is more particularly through his work in history and geography that he will acquire the knowledge itself. This is widely recognised by the teachers of these subjects. In many schools they combine their efforts to enable children to discover the character of the life of their locality and of the nation into which they have been born. The work takes a number of different forms, but the local study, which has won much favour, may be taken as exemplifying it. In one of its most fruitful forms this work proceeds by encouraging each child to find out all he can about some particular aspect of the neighbourhood - its roads, its architecture, its local industry or agriculture, its sanitation system, its church - and to proceed by a chain of questions and answers until, between them, the children have built up a real picture of the life of their locality. They will not have failed to map it, or to trace its history. But no locality - especially to-day - is self-contained. At many points (the election of Trade Union representatives, the election of Members of Parliament) the enquiry will have led on to the central organs of the nation. The roads and railways are obviously parts of a national system of transport. The products of local industry or agriculture are being transported elsewhere - where? and why? What is being brought into the locality in exchange, and where is it coming from?
In history and geography, broadly understood, is to be found the answer to the how and the why of the local corporate life and of the national corporate life which is the subject matter of citizenship. The question which teachers of these subjects have to ask themselves to-day is how far they will make this civic value their sole value and criterion in their syllabus and presentation. Many history and geography teachers have taken up advanced positions in this respect, and the older subject names have sometimes in such cases given place to "social studies" - an indication of the change in point of view. Bur others are reluctant to allow the illumination of the contemporary scene to become the sole purpose in this range of work, and hold to the more traditional approach, which proceeds historically through the centuries and geographically through: the regions of the world. Between these two extremes lie many different methods, governed by many different purposes.
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It is not the intention here to recommend a specific method in the teaching of history or geography. Most teachers of these subjects feel that to them belongs the task of introducing the pupil to the political, economic and social life in which he is about to share. Many find this duty so compelling, that, abandoning traditions, they seize firmly upon those local realities which are within children's own experience, or to which they can easily introduce them, and from these work outwards in space and backwards in time in their attempt to explain the less known and the less obvious. Such is usually the method of those who favour local studies or projects of various kinds. But those who prefer to adopt a more formal or traditional approach need not, for that reason, divorce this work from the purpose of explaining contemporary life, and it is quite possible for them to feel as strongly as their "realistic" colleagues the important duty which they have in throwing light upon the local and central institutions of our life to-day. We may take, as an example, the role of the more traditional history teacher who feels, not without justice, that history, like all good stories, moves forward rather than backwards, and who is determined to show its development by pursuing it chronologically rather than by making a series of plunges back in order to explain a series, of contemporary phenomena. His method of explaining our life to-day will not be to wait until his story has reached the eighteen-eighties before he discusses the county councils, or the Act of 1911 and the Bill of 1947 before he discusses the modern powers of the House of Lords. Nor will he wait till he reaches recent times in order to discuss trade unions or nationalisation. He will be discussing trade unions when he is discussing their medieval equivalent, the guilds, by constant comparison, back and forth, which will serve to illuminate both - the past throwing light upon the present and the present throwing light upon the past. He will discuss nationalisation when he is discussing the medieval Statute of Labourers, and again when he is discussing Queen Elizabeth's or Cromwell's economic legislation, and again by contrast - when he is discussing the unchecked individualism of the Industrial Revolution. Whatever approach he chooses to adopt, if he feels he has a conspicuous duty in the field of citizenship, then it is not necessary that he should pursue one method rather than another; the light which he wants to shed upon the present he will shed.
Something has been said already of the danger of trying to introduce adult concepts into children's education, and there is much in our modern political, and still more in our modern economic machinery, which is neither interesting nor digestible for children, though it may be suitable for students in institutions of further education. But there is one positive asset which is always available to the teacher who seeks to explain the present: he is talking about something the children already know something about. Whether he starts with the trains and the trolley-buses or with the cows and the cabbages; with the latest newsreel or with the latest talk in Children's Hour, he can start with something that is within his pupils' experience. And as he moves on to what
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is not within their present experiences he can at least show them that he is talking about what will, in due Course, become their life, and that, again, is a real asset. He can always be sure, if he is at all wise in his selection, that he will meet with a response, and that he will fulfil a great purpose.
11. SOCIAL STUDIES: SOME FURTHER SUGGESTIONS
Reference was made in the last section to social and environmental studies such as are now popular in many schools. It has already been said that these are not the only ways of teaching citizenship. But they do undoubtedly offer rich opportunities and it may be worth while to say a little more about them. Their advantages are not limited to the training they afford in social understanding. Pursued at the highest level, with the help of local records, studies of this kind have a direct bearing on historical scholarship and are one of the surest ways of implanting in young people a real understanding of the systematic interpretation of historical data. So much is recognised in the growing use of "sources" by examining bodies as well as by teachers. It may well be that certain kinds of environmental study contribute equally to scholarly work in geography; geology and natural history quite apart from their interest and usefulness to the future "man in the street" or "man in the fields". It is, however, as a branch of social training that these studies bear on the present pamphlet and for this purpose one of their main advantages is that they appeal to children of all ages and are equally applicable to town and country conditions. In addition, they involve activity and field work of a kind that stimulates the curiosity of many pupils who are not at their best in the classroom. Two examples may be quoted as samples of what has been found possible on occasions where there were no particular advantages of resources or environment.
The first comes from a village school in Devon. In this particular school, a large-scale map of the locality was made by the children and set out on the floor of the main classroom. Having made the map, the children got to work finding out the crops grown in the various fields. From this they proceeded to the more ambitious work of making large-scale models of the buildings in the village. The measuring provided them with excellent opportunities for practical arithmetic, and making the models in wood set problems of craftsmanship which they tackled resolutely and with interest. Unusual happenings in a village school soon get known and it was not long before the villagers were showing interest in what was going on and, indeed, were offering their own help. The children are now accustomed to using the map for tracing the routes to their own homes, the habitats of the rarer flowers, the site of the heronry, and the position of the hamlets and farms, all with surprising accuracy and speed. The study of living things has had a central position in the scheme of work. The headmistress has succeeded in passing on to the
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children her own interest in wild flowers, and in this school children of nine and ten can be heard identifying the flowers of the neighbourhood not only by their common British names, but without affectation by their Latin names also. They show an equal interest in wild animals and birds, and the school nature table always has something fresh on view. Attention has also been paid to local crafts. The thatcher has already paid a visit to the school and the children have been to the blacksmiths shop. Finally, a permanent record of the children's investigations has been made in the form of a "Village Book". The children themselves decided what form it should take and each pupil made a contribution.
This kind of work is not so easy for town children as for country, but a brief reference to some local study work done in York recently during a teachers' course shows what can be done. The teachers worked in groups, some specialising in activities suited to infants, others in junior activities, and others in secondary. They took as their terrain a popular suburb of the city which has grown from a small "ridge" village in less than a hundred years.
The "infants group" made a picture frieze of a lane on the outskirts of the suburb, showing the people, animals and trees seen there on a spring morning. Suitable reading material was collected to use with the frieze. The "junior groups" made maps, models and scrap books of the same lane, illustrating the roads, hedgerows, ditches and fields. Transects of the lane were made at four points showing the distribution of plant life. The transects were illustrated by a nature table, an aquarium and a miniature garden, all stocked entirely with specimens drawn from the area survey. The "secondary groups" made a historical record of the suburb in the form of an illustrated time chart together with a series of maps based on local records showing the history of nearby farms from medieval times. Several well-known nurseries and market gardens were visited and studied over the last hundred years of their development. This gave an interesting glimpse of how progressive urbanisation had affected the size and economy of the gardens and the type of produce grown. The manager, the landscape gardening artist and their foreman assisted with the necessary information. Visits were also made to a brush factory, again in co-operation with the manager, and surveys were made, illustrated by maps, of houses, shops, postal services and public buildings, all In relation to their development since 1850. The vicar assisted with the history of the church and the parish, and several farmers, some retired, some active, gave talks on the history and development of their fields. The borough engineer and other officials co-operated in the study of public services. The ordinary human element was not forgotten and some of the raciest material was gathered from local craftsmen and from the reminiscences of old inhabitants. The city library and one of the local newspapers made invaluable contributions.
Not much imagination is needed to suggest similar work in other areas, even the built-up areas that witnessed the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution. The Derbyshire Coalfield, for instance, and the
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Potteries, are rich in opportunities for tracing a social and environmental story which, however unlovely in some respects, is full of human interest and is closely associated with local achievements in literature and music. London and the great sea-ports offer other striking opportunities, and so, in different ways, do Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Cotswolds. There is scarcely any patch of town or country that is not full of treasure of this kind and much of it is still neglected in the schools. In planning and conducting such work, many teachers will wish to exploit contrast as well as similarity. Parties of children are often taken, for example, to Stratford-on-Avon, from schools in the Black Country and South Wales, but it is interesting to note that one school at Stratford-on-Avon now sends parties of pupils to Manchester for systematic study of the Lancashire cotton industry and its social setting. Town and country are the most obvious pair of contrasting environments, but North and South, inland and sea-port are also beginning to be linked by the growing practice of interchanging school camping parties. Much more is involved than a mere dose of "antidote". It is not difficult to assess what the town child gets from a spell of country air and exercise and some familiarity with the life of the countryside and the opportunity of learning good, country manners. But the chief good is that he should come back to his urban home with his eyes opened and his standards raised, determined to help in his small way to make his own city a decent and comely place to live in, as a city can be even in modern industrial conditions. What was possible in Cologne or Dusseldorf before the war and is still possible, in spite of war damage, in Antwerp, Merz or Bristol, ought to be possible also in other heavily industrialised areas, both in Britain and abroad.
The converse is equally important. Many who were brought up in the country remember the excited delight of their first taste of metropolitan splendour, maybe St. Paul's or the Abbey, Lord's cricket ground on the occasion of a big match, trooping the colour, Wren's churches or the Temple before the bombing, the inside of a great West End store, Versailles or the Champs Elysées, Princes Street, the Grand'Place in Brussels. The village child reacts to these as excitedly and with as much educational profit as does his town cousin to the hills, the fields and the sea.
12. ACTIVITIES
One of the characteristic features of modern educational method is the importance attached to what are often called "activities". This is not the place to discuss the merits or psychological assumptions of so-called "activity methods". But all teachers are agreed that, to a greater or less extent, book learning needs to be illustrated and supplemented by some kind of practice; "practical work" is no new thing in natural science, art, music and handicraft. It has been, for some time, a normal feature of geography teaching and is not unknown, even in the most orthodox schools, in mathematics. No very revolutionary jump is necessary to see
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the possibilities of "field work" in history and social studies; indeed, it is difficult to see how the latter can very well be taught without a great deal of practical activity outside the school building. The still growing popularity of activity work ought, therefore, to be a great help in the teaching of citizenship since the progressive teacher will be swimming with the tide. School journeys, visits and camps and other forms of contact between schools and the outside world are now widespread in all types of secondary schools and other less ambitious outside activities are often undertaken by primary schools also. The co-operation of local libraries and museums is invaluable.
So general are these activities that it is unnecessary, and would be difficult to enumerate them all here. They include not only organised journeys, but also systematic school work and correspondence, such as that concerned with the "adoption" of farms by schools which are anxious to undertake a more practical study of crops and animal husbandry than is possible in a school smallholding. The "adoption" of ships is now undertaken by hundreds of schools in all parts of the country, most of them now formally linked in the British Ship Adoption Society; here is an activity that contributes equally to knowledge and to the spirit of service and citizenship. Much admirable work is done also for hospitals and nurseries, work that brings to the girls who do it a practical training for their own futures, a first-hand knowledge of other people's lives and the opportunity to help the community. The one general point that possibly ought to be made here is the need to treat these outside activities seriously, to prepare thoroughly for them and to use them as material for enriching the content of the rest of the work in school. The same need for preparation and "follow-up" applies also to the visits of outside speakers to talk to school children about work and experiences in the outside world.
13. EDUCATION FOR HOMELIFE
Homecraft forms an important part of education for the family life of a good citizen. Most girls, and, to a less extent, most boys also, need some training in the duties and responsibility of owning or renting a house or flat and conducting a home or helping parents to conduct a home. Nearly every girl will need, and most will wish, to understand the arts and skill that furnish and provision a home and clothe its members. The important, and often neglected, part that can be played by the men and boys of the household is not forgotten. But the main weight of the shopping, the cooking, the making and mending, the furnishing, the minor household repairs, the fuelling and heating, and even the gardening and the poultry keeping, above all, the budgeting and catering, is likely to fall on the housewife. There are, doubtless, households of which this is completely untrue, and probably most households are exceptions in some respects. But the situation has sufficient general truth to call for some systematic domestic training for all but the girl with very excep-
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tional tastes, and this probably applies whatever kind of school they attend, and whether, on leaving school, they are likely to enter a shop, an office, a hospital, a studio, a training college or a university. This is not the same as claiming for every girl a lavish attention to needlework and cookery on an ambitious scale. The kind of course needed is both more and less than an intensive treatment of domestic science in the traditional sense: more, because it should not be confined to needlework, cookery and laundry alone; less, because its treatment should be rapid and practical, leaving the higher branches of the separate domestic crafts, together with their theory and science, for specialist teaching when needed. Short intensive courses might perhaps be tried more commonly than at present.
It is now accepted that homecraft - whether cooking, laundry, dressmaking, house repairs - should be taught in such a way as to be of practical use in different kinds of homes. The tasks involved are manifold, and their relationship to life kaleidoscopic; they involve far more than knowing how to make and wash clothes and cook food. They depend, for instance, on some understanding of a sensible balance of household expenditure, and might Include the study and criticism of sample budgets for different incomes. They involve repairs even more than the making of new garments and appliances, and this calls for some knowledge of the properties of common household materials and articles of clothing. They include, also, or ought to include at the present time, some knowledge of where our different items of food, clothing and household equipment come from, so that we may not only appreciate what we have, but also understand what we cannot have, or can have only for sparing and occasional use. Then comes the whole range of household science which cannot, nowadays, be handed over to the plumber or the electrician. Then the garden, the poultry and the family pets, and, most of all, perhaps, some guidance at least in those difficult and personal questions of style, taste and design that determine very largely the material quality of a family's life, and at the present time may also determine (e.g., the design of fire-places and stoves) the economical use of commodities.
Much of this, as with so many other school "subjects", may be most profitably absorbed incidentally, and linked up through practical illustrations with geography, art, social history, mathematics and general science. Sensibly approached, the teaching of housecraft in its wider aspects, may do something to dispel the sense of isolation which is often one of the main burdens of the busy suburban housewife. It is important, too, not to suggest that home management is something which is entirely divorced from "general education". The efficient running of a home needs intelligence, common-sense, imagination and the capacity every now and then to question the value of established routines.
These simple practical, material tasks are well within the understanding of all girls, and probably within their interests, too, and yet, controlling as they do the physical conditions of home life, are not
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beneath the notice of the most intelligent girl and not outside the time that even future university students could give to domestic training if the course were well-planned and briskly conducted. Of course, training of this kind is not a matter for full-time education alone, though it is suggested that such basic household training ought to run right through every secondary school course. It will be equally a matter for the County Colleges where, indeed, for many girls, and even boys, it might become the core of the whole course, with the study of the deeper personal and social responsibilities built round it.
At some co-educational schools the boys learn cookery, and this is probably a good thing, though it is not easy to manage in a school for boys only. But with the possible, though by no means certain, exception of cookery and needlework, much of the household training already mentioned would be suitable and useful for boys as well as for girls: certainly this would apply to the science of water supply, electric circuits and hot water systems, to the principles of budgeting, to household economics and geography, the study of design, gardening, the care of pets and even laundry. For all these features of household management there should be ample opportunity for joint work by both sexes in co-educational secondary schools and County Colleges, and in voluntary out-of-school organisations, and it may well be that, even in boys' schools, some such work might find a place in the schemes of handicraft, general science, art or geography. The popularity of the courses known as "Handyman's" or "Householder's" among the men in the Forces in the Release Period Education Scheme, is encouraging evidence that, for most Englishmen, "helping Mum" is not a distasteful or derogatory role.
The teaching of parentcraft needs to be developed in many more schools than at present. There is, it is true, some difference of opinion as to the best stage at which it should be started. There are many who think that 13 or 14 is too young, since much of what is learnt at that age is forgotten by the time a girl marries, and that this training can best be given in later years. But others hold that girls at this stage are mostly interested in small children, while at the age of 16 or thereabouts their interest tends to shift to boys and young men. There is urgent need for much more experiment. But although it may be true that practical details of child care if learnt too young may be forgotten, an understanding of the right attitude to children should remain. Indeed, from the age of 14 onwards both girls and boys should understand enough about the rudiments of child development to give them a basis for the best ways of bringing up children. It is strongly urged that opportunities for homecraft and parentcraft should be made for girls of every age in all types of schools.
14. ART AND ENVIRONMENT
The topics considered in this section are not peculiar to this section alone. They have, in fact, appeared at various times throughout the pamphlet. Environment includes not only scenery and buildings, but other people.
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It includes, also, the outward and visible forms of social institutions and the apparatus of daily work. This section is concerned only with that special part of the environment which we usually think of as "our surroundings", that is the relatively fixed background of natural and manmade things against which our lives are lived. Some of these are in close and continual contact with our persons: - clothes, furnishing and household utensils, books and pictures, the interior decoration and, architecture, of our homes, offices, factories and schools. Others include the natural phenomena and the larger works of men's hands which determine, to some extent, the quality of our lives out of doors: - gardens and parks, fields, woods, streams and hills, the sea and the sea shore, public buildings, streets and squares, cathedrals and churches, historical monuments. Education can do something to encourage each of us to take a livelier interest in "our surroundings", to make us impatient of low standards, appreciative of good ones, more familiar with other people's accomplishments and conventions and more ready to exchange experience, without prejudice, with other nations and, through books and pictures, with other periods of history.
This is not the place for theories of art or for detailed advice on the teaching of appreciation. There is probably wide agreement that such training is not the business only of teachers of arts and crafts. It is a matter in which all teachers, parents and employers can have a share, since beauty and design are common to the worlds of home, school, work and entertainment; it is not only a matter for public authorities charged with the maintenance and improvement of local or national buildings and open spaces. There would probably be wide agreement also, that appreciation involves practice as well as study and understanding. Athens and Florence in their prime were the homes of citizen-artists whose cities reflected the individual creative gifts of their inhabitants. Appreciation is a matter also of the loving understanding of nature which is for some people the most permanent and powerful influence on the mind and feelings. Equally, however, it involves a better understanding of the secrets of civilised urban life. Nine-tenths of the people in this country live in towns, and it is partly our national ignorance of how to make town life comely and agreeable which is responsible for the mess created by the English Industrial Revolution and for the sterile wildernesses built between the wars as new dormitory suburbs. None of this introduces anything new into our consideration of citizenship. Most of these matters have been touched on already at various points in the pamphlet or will be raised in other sections following this. In Section 13, for instance, it was suggested that boys, as well as girls, but girls especially, need more and better training in the planning and furnishing of a home and in personal questions of style, dress and appearance. In Section 11, the influence of natural scenery and of fine civic architecture was mentioned. There is no need to cover this ground again.
The truth is that there are few boys and girls who have not some feeling for design in one sphere or another. It may come out in making
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a garden or a picture, a clay figure, a poem, a puppet show, a rabbit hutch, a model aeroplane, a dress or an iced cake. The pleasure may be mainly in the making or mainly in the contemplation. The appreciation may be fully conscious or partly unconscious. It may be crude or refined. It may be a permanent and developing passion or it may be a passing phase that needs to be gently encouraged and then left to appear again spontaneously in a different form years afterwards. But the experience of beauty makes some print on the personality, and this lasts after the experience is over. For some, the experience of beauty may be the main source of purpose in life and, for these, appreciation may supply the incentive and the power for good living that others find in religion or in civic interests.
Enough has been said to indicate the importance of a side of education that is of its nature delicate and fragile. It would be a pity to overstate the case or to damage it by too much direct emphasis. This is not primarily a social matter but one where the spirit bloweth where it listeth and where personal and independent vision matters more than collective wisdom. But it has a social aspect that is worth remembering and those who care sufficiently about it will not be slow to find opportunities in school and home life for making and understanding beautiful things.
15. CITIZENSHIP AND SCIENCE
As with history, geography and other subjects, science comes under notice in this pamphlet only through its influence on social life, though this is a very important part of its impact on the times in which we live. But it is not forgotten that science as an area of human thought has an independent existence outside the social and political spheres and that it is moved and justified by its own ends: - the extension of knowledge and the increasing mastery of natural forces. True, this last is to some extent a social process, since the power conferred on men by scientific discoveries and inventions cannot avoid changing their relationship to one another, and testing, perhaps changing, their attitude to God and the universe.
Perhaps the greatest general contribution science can make to the life of a good citizen is a sense of wonder, or, more truly, the exercise of that sense of wonder that is born in us but which a surfeit of mechanical marvels is beginning to deaden. Curiosity and wonder are natural to most children and, so far as we know, they were formerly natural to most adults also, not unmixed with superstition it is true, but joined also to poetry, mysticism and natural piety. This sense of wonder and excitement is still to be found, for example, in the early novels of H. G. Wells, and it still lends a transfiguring enchantment to even the ugliest of the Victorian museums of London. For young children there is abounding material for curiosity and wonder in nature. The sun, moon and stars are visible to all; so are the birds and fishes, flowers and trees, rain and snow, sunshine and clouds - all the created things that are asked in the
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school's morning assembly to praise the Lord. Later comes the wonder of the properties of matter and organic life, from the very small to the very large, centred on the marvels of living plants and animals and of man himself. Older and abler pupils will encounter the difficulties of applying physical laws to biological and even more to human material. They will learn something of the limitations as well as the victories of the scientific method, not least through the biographies of the great men and women of science. Before they leave school some will glimpse the mystery of the constitution of matter and so will stand on the threshold of philosophy where the vast questions of ends and means unfold before their minds.
The great majority of girls and boys will not get nearly as far as this. But they can all learn something of the discipline of scientific method which can be applied in a limited way to social matters. The elements of the inductive method, the pursuit of truth for its own sake, the collection and interpretation of facts, the resort to observation and experiment, the objective analysis of evidence, the suspension of judgment and the willingness to be proved wrong, all have value in the training of the citizens of a democratic community. In biological fieldwork especially, the pupils may be put in the position of original investigators into problems of real interest and importance. Again, experiments mean planning and working together, pooling resources, sharing methods and comparing results, and these experiences are themselves an exercise in the co-operative attitude necessary to make a democracy work.
Something may be said about the content of a science course. In the upper forms of secondary grammar schools this must be determined to a large extent by the systematic and disciplined mastery of a body of knowledge. For many other pupils the social aspects of science will be the more interesting and the more important. These include, first, the impact of science and technology on work: for example, in the mines, on the farms, in the workshops and drawing offices, in the labour-saving devices of the home. They include next the scientific background of home life and life in the community: water supply, the production and distribution of mechanical power, the study of communication, the conquest of disease and provision of health services, the production and distribution of food, the improvement of crops and stocks, a knowledge of some industrial processes. Linked closely with these come such international scientific questions as world food production, population increase, soil erosion and control of pests, the international control of raw materials, atomic research. These matters are all important social issues and some of them are not difficult to discuss in reasonably simple terms. The history of science has its place, too, for many different kinds of pupils. It contains some noble stories of selfless human endeavour, team work and the subordination of personal interest to the needs of the community. It shows, too, that science recognises no frontiers; Davy, for example, was awarded the medal of the Académie des Sciences during the Napoleonic Wars.
There remains the difficult and important question of sex education.
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No wiser or more practical guidance could be given than that to be found in the notes recently compiled and circulated to governors, managers and teachers by the London County Council. The notes open with the following introductory passage which is reproduced by kind permission of the Council:
The Education Act, 1944, states that 'It shall be the duty of the Local Education Authority ... to contribute towards the spiritual, moral, mental and physical development of the community'. Education, so conceived, is not only an intellectual process. It takes account of the fact that a child is not a mere receptacle for information, but a developing personality with an inner life of his own, and that as he grows up, he will enter into personal relationships and responsibilities, for which education must prepare him.
When education is thought of in this way, as a whole, it is clear that sex is a part of life which cannot be ignored, either in meeting the current needs of the developing personality or in preparing young people for adult living. Both stages are important. Sexual development is often accompanied by feelings of uncertainty, which in some children can develop into real anxiety. At this stage, in the interests of healthy individual development, a child needs such help as education can wisely give. In later adolescence and in adult life, the problem involves other people. Boys and girls just leaving school need to establish a sensible relationship with one another, based on respect, understanding, and a growing sense of social responsibility. Such attitudes and ideals reach their fullest importance in adult life, when marriage and parenthood may bring rich fulfilment, or may lead in various degrees, to boredom, frustration or disaster.
So stated, the importance of the problem is obvious, and most people would now agree that both factual information and moral guidance in these matters should in some way be made available to children and young people. There is room for differing views on how this can best be done. It is sometimes said, for example, that it is a matter for parents. Certainly it is best that a child's first steps towards a knowledge of the facts of reproduction should come in answer to the questions of young children in the family setting - when, for example, a younger brother or sister is on the way. Certainly, too, the best guarantee of right attitudes towards love, marriage, and parenthood is to be brought up in a happy family by parents who love one another. Even so, the fact must be faced that many parents lack the skill, knowledge and wisdom to give information simply and naturally as it is sought, and that many families unhappily fail, in one way or another, to provide a suitable environment for the development of right attitudes. Indeed, some of the sexual difficulties of children and young people can often be traced to the influence of the home, or to the well-intentioned but misguided attitude or actions of the parents. Finally it should be said that even the most sensible and well-informed parents may find that their complex emotional relationship with their children is a source of difficulty in dealing with some of these problems.
The advice which follows this introductory matter is in close agreement with the policy of the Ministry of Education and, with the "warm support and encouragement" which the Board of Education promised in a pamphlet published in 1943 "to all those in schools, youth organisations and training
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colleges and to local education authorities who are giving serious attention: to this subject".
On factual instruction, the London County Councils advice begins with a maxim drawn from the Board of Education pamphlet just noted: "Whatever the age of the child, and whatever question he asks, answer him to the fullest extent that he is capable of understanding at that stage". As the Council's notes state: "This is mainly, perhaps, a maxim for parents; but teachers may find that straightforward answers to children's questions, at all stages of education, provide a means of covering some aspects of the subject. In the nursery and infants school, the answers to children's questions will be the only source of information, since formal instruction would be out of place at this stage." In the junior school the keeping of pets and the natural history lessons will provide many opportunities for unobtrusive and matter of fact instruction. Some direct knowledge of the working of the human body may be possible in the last year of the junior school and should certainly be accomplished in the first year's general science course at the secondary school. In this way a small though adequate scientific vocabulary is acquired and there is some hope of avoiding the embarrassment and even more the anxiety which may arise if these matters are deferred to puberty. During the period of adolescence there is need for further guidance mainly during lessons when the sexes are separated, but this instruction should always be against a proper scientific background and sex should be treated not as a special and isolated topic. At a later stage in the education of girls, courses on mothercraft could help to establish a sensible attitude towards child-bearing and give guidance on the psychological as well as the physical care of young children.
The most careful weight must be given to some reservations which the London County Council make to this policy of factual instruction.
First:
Reproduction is an important, but not a preponderant feature of the living organism at work; it should take its place, but no more than its place, in the teaching of biology. The impression should certainly be avoided that biology is only included in the Science syllabus with this end in view. It is better to say too little than to say too much, and say it badly.
It is well to recognise that this cannot be altogether a neutral subject - like the study of respiration or circulation. In adults it is rightly associated with deep personal feeling, and even in children it is natural that the subject should not be entirely free from emotional tension. It will often be found that the best way of off-setting this emotional tension in a class is to make the subject as intellectually interesting as it can be in its own right. The well-informed biology teacher will find ample material for this purpose, both in the evolutionary story of reproduction, and in the history of scientific discovery in this field.
Secondly, the Council stresses the need for the schools to move forward, wherever possible, in consultation with the parents and keeping "in the forefront of discussion the importance of respecting other people's views".
Thirdly, factual instruction "if it is given wisely and well, may help
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to lay a foundation for right attitudes but it cannot by itself ensure them." This is the province of home and school generally. It comes, so far as school is concerned, from active and creative interests of the right kinds, from the general atmosphere created by the staff, aims and traditions of the school, from healthy opportunities to meet the other sex in social and intellectual pursuits, and from the tenderness and fidelity with which love, marriage and other human relations are dealt with through history, literature, art and religion.
This section cannot conclude without a clear recognition of the need, in schools, as elsewhere, to come to terms with the scientific environment in which civilised life will henceforth have to be lived. It is true that men are coming to realise, with disappointment and fear, that scientific progress does not necessarily entail moral progress, that men's hearts and wills have not grown with their brains, that man's mastery over nature has brought him so far little mastery over himself, perhaps not even full mastery over those dynamic natural forces which science has revealed and unleashed. It is salutary that this recognition should have come, but its coming will not stay the accelerating rush of knowledge and invention. The children of this generation have been born into a world of scientific power from which they catch a natural excitement and with which they have a natural affinity of ideas and even of language. The answer is not less science in schools but better science, science that is big enough to know its own limitations, to suspend judgment on matters not susceptible of experimental proof and to recognise the evidence and consider the validity of subjective experiences and well-authenticated testimonies from outside its own province. If religious, æsthetic and humane experience is willing in its turn to re-interpret its basic values in the light of scientific knowledge and of the changing forms of social organisation, the schools can play a part in re-stating, acceptably, truths that may yet set society on a steadier course.
16. CITIZENSHIP AND RELIGION
It is not necessary in this Section to re-open the contentious question of the place of religion in the life of modern societies. Some readers will disagree with the importance assigned to the religious view of life in Part I of this pamphlet; in dealing, therefore, with adults and those who are on the verge of adult life, every effort must be made to engage the interests and co-operation of all, regardless of professions of faith, who feel the spirit of service and take pride in their membership of the local and national communities. This is not untrue of children either; but the fact remains that religious teaching and the daily act of worship are included by the Education Act of 1944 as part of the process of education in schools, subject to the right of individual parents to withdraw their children on grounds of conscience. Very many teachers and parents are grateful for these provisions of the Act in respect of religious education, and there is considerable and grow-
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ing evidence that the opportunities provided are, on the whole, being widely used. The spirit, as well as the letter, of religious education has been assisted in many schools by the disappearance of sectarian bitterness and by the additional strength given by legal recognition to religious teaching and worship in the schools.
Most syllabuses of Religious Instruction deal with the history of the Jewish people and the teaching of the Hebrew Prophets, and also with the life of Our Lord and the development of Christianity in the time of the Apostles. In the treatment of both the Old and the New Testaments the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to draw moral and spiritual lessons cannot be avoided. The Scripture lesson will be rightly despised if it loses connection with the problems of conduct that arise in the daily lives of even quite small children. But these moral lessons need not be glib or ready-made and they should not intrude into story or parable until the children are ready for them. With this reservation, the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven is full of consequences for all who are interested in framing or keeping the rules of a good society. This teaching will be most effective if, with older children, at least, it is reasonably astringent and set against an intellectual background as scholarly and precise as that of any other subject. If it is remembered that the sayings of Our Lord and of St. Paul were addressed to the men and women of their times, in the idiom and context of their times, it is clear that they will need to be interpreted through exact historical and geographical and, where possible, linguistic knowledge, before they can be applied with full force to our own time and place. If this interpretation is skilfully and sympathetically done, by those with both the faith and knowledge to do it, religious teaching will contribute to education an emphasis on conscience, individual responsibility and service to others which is peculiarly its own, beyond the power of any other subject.
The act of corporate worship is unique in the school day. It offers a sense of fellowship, an opportunity for praise, and the experience of a short period of quiet or silence, as well as the prayers and Bible reading. Many schools make the morning assembly an opportunity for personal effort on the part of older pupils who themselves conduct a part or the whole of the service. There are opportunities also in morning assembly for the celebration of civic, national and international occasions as well as the special occasions of the Christian year. In boarding school, the Chapel services, and in some day schools the annual or terminal services in Cathedral, Parish Church, or Nonconformist Chapel have a deep significance for many pupils.
To notice, thus, the special opportunities of Christian teaching and worship in schools is not to belittle the importance of the general atmosphere of the school and the personal example of teachers. These are of the deepest importance, not only to the more intelligent and reflective children, but to all; if these imponderables are not exerting their rightful influence, the Scripture teaching and the morning worship may be little
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more than a meaningless ritual. The atmosphere of a school is difficult to define, made up, as it is, of countless small acts and incidents and controlled, as it is, by subtle forces of personality from the past and the present. But anyone who knows a school from the inside knows quickly whether its spirit or atmosphere is good or bad, and knows also that this atmosphere affects everything done in the school and many other things done by its pupils in their own homes and outside. As for the personal example of teachers, it is tremendous. Their lives and ideals are mirrored in the school community, not their personal actions only, but also their attitude to the values and personalities dealt with in lessons, and to the problems of conduct thrown up by school life.
Lastly, comes the influence of other school subjects, not perhaps a strictly religious influence, but not an entirely secular one either. History and literature abound in moral and religious issues that must be treated as such because the author has so treated them already. In science, as was said in the preceding Section, the mechanistic or fatalistic view has serious and immediate social implications, and the same is true of history and geography. Other subjects, like art, music and handicraft, with opportunities for creation and appreciation, offer food for the spirit and so can nourish the roots of social life. Once again it must be emphasised that nothing could be more fatal than to use any subject to mould the child to a pattern - except the negligence that leaves him to be moulded accidentally, but no less indelibly, by the base and dangerous chance influences that abound in the modern world of propaganda and cheap and effortless amusements.
17. COMMUNITY LIFE IN THE SCHOOLS
In Section 5 a preliminary glance was given at the community life of a school, its relationship to home life and to the outside world and at the possibilities of self-government arising from the disciplined work and social activities of the school as a whole. It was there suggested that discipline was perhaps the most difficult aspect of school life on which to offer any general guidance and none will be offered here. Some schools have achieved favourable results through various degrees of self-government and it ought to be the aim of every school to ensure that the relations between staff and pupils are natural and friendly, that order and self-control are habitual, that justice is done and is known to be done and that the school can command the willing services and loyal sentiments of all its members. These things can be achieved in many different ways.
The contribution of school studies and of educational activities to training in citizenship has been considered further in the preceding sections of Part Il. It remains to develop further the contribution to citizenship of the community life and social training of the schools which was touched on in Section 5.
This aspect of citizenship is so vast that it cannot be treated at length within the compass of a short pamphlet. A great many practical
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suggestions are to be found in five books mentioned in the footnote below*. These books cover both the primary and secondary stages of education. They are issued by the Association for Education in Citizenship and this pamphlet is indebted to the Association's publications for many suggestions which have been included here.
In a contribution to the first of these books, the late Dr. H. G. Stead wrote:
Philosophers and fanatics, dictators and revolutionaries are alike agreed upon the fact that the most fertile soil in which to implant their faiths is the mind of the young child. In this respect Plato and Aristotle, Sir Thomas More and the Jesuits, Milton and Rousseau, Lenin and Hitler are in accord with one another. Recent psychological research has not only confirmed the importance of childhood days as the origin of much that goes to make up the adults attitude to life, but it has also stressed the fact that it is to this period that most of the prejudices, fears and anxieties of later life can be traced. Further, the importance and significance of the earliest years are now recognised.
If this is true, the earliest stage of education, the nursery school or nursery class, is not too soon for a beginning in social education. The nursery gives the child the opportunity of living with other people outside his family circle, and furnishes the roots from which his social life is to grow. He gradually learns the need to be clean and tidy; he learns to respect the order and routine that make the nursery comfortable for himself and others; he learns to do some things for himself and to know when to ask for help in mote difficult matters; he learns to perform helpful little acts, for example, in the preparation of meals and the tidying of rooms; towards the end of the nursery stage he comes to enjoy activities in which he takes part as a member of a group.
The good infants' school continues the social training of the nursery. There, is the same need for orderly and suitable routine, for clean and healthy habits, for self-reliance and helpfulness to others. More than at the nursery stage, the various forms of social experience are incorporated with intellectual and imaginative exercises so that, for the first time, the child becomes aware of an environment of people and things that has the power to give him feelings of harmony and satisfaction. Good use can be made of children's preference for real-life situations in their imaginative play. Most of their games, for instance, are modelled on family situations and relations between neighbours, and many of their most cherished toys are not bought in shops but are cast-off versions of symbolic representations of things used at home or seen in the street.
These opportunities for social experience, limited though they are, continue up to the age of 11 or 12. During these years, the child remains primarily a free-lance individual; living in a private world which
*Education for Citizenship in Elementary Schools [O.U.P.]
Education for Citizenship in Secondary Schools [O.U.P.]
Democracy in School Life [O.U.P.]
Experiments in Practical Training for Citizenship
The School Looks Around [Longmans, Green]
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is a curious mixture of the real and the fantastic. But he has at this age an insatiable curiosity, a zest for mastering information that interests him and often great willingness to make himself useful to those who have kindled his admiration. If these qualities can be satisfied with interesting information about other people who work for his food, shelter and comfort, and if in return he can be made to enjoy opportunities of personal service without vanity or priggishness, a good foundation will have been laid. It must be repeated, however, that at this age almost everything depends on the home. It is here that the qualities of young children's lives are decided, often more by example and atmosphere than by precept.
In the secondary schools the opportunities for social training through the corporate life of the school become more numerous. The boys and girls are now at a more companionable age. The knowledge and skill which they are able to put at the service of their clubs and societies, or of the school as a whole, are greater. Their contacts with the outside world are more practical. In their later teens, at least, they are beginning to be interested in social and political problems and are formulating their own judgments on matters of belief and conduct. In their personal lives they are more conscious of social relationships and more anxious to adjust themselves adequately to the demands of other people, even though these other people are not always, at this age, the members of their own families. At school they find themselves in small societies, which are commonly organised to meet some of these needs and interests and which are the heirs to a tradition consciously developed in the past to breed enterprise and self-reliance.
The salient problems of community life in schools, especially secondary schools, were touched on in Section 5; special notice was given to the possible limits of self-government and to the problem of the individual relationship of secondary school pupils to "outside" interests. These are matters of delicate adjustment which the schools will best solve for themselves, each in its own way, at its own pace. Of the other main matter raised in Section 5 - the school's relationship with parents - it is possible to say a little more. Undoubtedly the school and the parents have much more to give one another than they usually do. In particular, the school's social activities may offer a golden opportunity for bringing parents into closer touch with social life. Many parents have been drawn, willy-nilly, into school camps and excursions, sometimes reluctantly at first, but with the most agreeable results: this has happened in primary as well as secondary schools. Many mothers and fathers have helped to dress and stage school plays and have played and sung in school orchestras and choirs, and some have met their children's teachers for the first time in this way. Others have made toys for nursery and infants' schools and some skilful fathers have helped to decorate classrooms. A very large number have helped with such pleasant functions as cricket teas, Christmas parties, and the judging of sports. In some circumstances, these helpful forms of co-operation have existed without a parent-teacher
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association, though more often the existence of some parents' organisation has consolidated, if not inaugurated, the partnership. The examples given are only a few of the many forms of co-operation possible, and it is interesting to note that none of the examples given is limited to any particular type of school.
It is, at present, in the secondary school that the possibilities of corporate life may be said to be most fully exploited. The pattern is usually most complete - and most self-contained - in the public schools and big city grammar schools of old foundation which have modelled themselves to some extent on the public schools. But the pattern is also found, and is often highly developed, in the secondary schools that date from the Education Act of 1902, and the social contributions made by many of these schools, especially in recently developed towns and suburbs, is a major social phenomenon. The prefect and House systems, the ordering of school routine, the school musical and dramatic activities, the clubs, and societies, the organised games, the camps and field expeditions, the school journeys, the social service, have now left their mark on several generations of young people, who have widened the area of service and responsibility formerly marked out by the great boarding schools. If secondary schools of all types can continue to follow something of the same road, this is probably, the best chance to diffuse, throughout the British people, at an impressionable age, some notions of service and responsibility.
Admittedly, school life can only be a beginning. Our notions of social service and team-work need continual adaptation, and the newer secondary schools will adapt and develop them just as the grammar schools, and public schools have done and continue to do (the almost complete disappearance of games-worship is an example). The whole concept possibly needs special adaptation for girls, and if this is so it may fall to the newer schools to give a lead in this respect. But "new looks", in education at least, are not the privilege of either sex or any type of school and, as was suggested earlier, there are forward-looking minds in every section of the teaching profession ready to re-interpret the old and simple virtues of humility, service, restraint and respect for personality. If the schools can encourage qualities of this kind in their pupils, we may fulfil the conditions for a healthy democratic society given by the late Lord Lothian in a speech. "Democracy", he said, "is a system that can only succeed where it produces a race of aristocrats." After a significant pause, he continued, "An aristocrat I define as any person who habitually gives more than he receives".
18. THE PRESS, THE CINEMA, BROADCASTING AND THE SCHOOLS
Mr. T. S. Eliot says in a recent book*:
If we include as education all the influences of family and environment, we are going far beyond what professional educators can control -
*Notes towards the Definition of Culture [Faber and Faber]
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though their sway can extend very far indeed; but if we mean that culture is what is passed on by our elementary and secondary schools, or by our preparatory and public schools, then we are asserting that an organ is a whole organism. For the schools can transmit only a part, and they can only transmit this part effectively, if the outside influences, not only of family and environment, but of work and play, of newsprint and spectacles and entertainment and sport, are in harmony with them.
Of the influences mentioned by Mr. Eliot in this passage, the most pervasive, other than those already considered in this pamphlet, are probably the newspapers, including magazines and other periodical publications. There may be more than one opinion about the power of the press to launch and carry through an effective social or political campaign. But there can be no doubt of its immense influence in shaping and stereotyping attitudes and habits of mind, and in raising or lowering standards of private and social behaviour by the remorseless iteration of patterns. To some extent, no doubt, these journalistic patterns follow the spirit of the age, to some extent they help to create it, and to some extent they run parallel or interwoven with it. Whatever the relationship, the power of the printed word and printed picture is ubiquitous and few schools are blind enough to ignore it altogether.
A candid recognition of the power of outside agencies such as the newspapers and the cinema is a salutary check on any tendency to self-importance among teachers and other members of the education service. Further, these agencies are sources of material for lessons and activities in closer touch with daily life outside school than much of what comes out of school books. For certain limited purposes, there is no better source of information that is likely to stimulate and interest children than the newspapers and magazines, having, as they do, the glamour and authority of the outside world; a certain selectivity is assumed sufficient to eliminate the gross or vulgar, but the selection should not be so severe as to appear priggish or to destroy variety and contrast and thereby spoil the opportunity of illuminating comparisons. In general sixth forms, and, more lately, in the secondary modern schools, there is a good deal of experimental work in reading and cutting newspapers, in following the different treatment by several papers of the same news item, in tracing the relationship between reporting and editorial opinion, in studying advertising methods, and in simply amassing and classifying articles and illustrations of value on selected topics. One of the main objects of such work is critical attention, but it is possible that the more censorious type of criticism can be overdone. We do not wish to breed a race of prigs or cynics and we need to remember - and perhaps editors and art editors need to remember also - that to the enthusiastic and unspoilt mind of a child, a bright and attractive magazine is one of the most exciting things in the world. If magazines are degraded in subject and presentation, children's natural good taste may be ruined for life. If teachers are over-censorious, the child's mind may be turned and his heart hardened permanently against the printed word.
The influence of the cinema is almost as pervasive as that of news-
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papers and cheap magazines; in towns possibly it is even more so, and perhaps even more powerful emotionally. The cinema represents for the general public to-day all that the popular drama meant for our Elizabethan ancestors, and more than what the novelette and the music hall meant to our parents. Its influence is complicated by the systematic "build-up" of star personalities and by the origin of a large proportion of films overseas in a social context far removed from our own. How deep and permanent is the imprint of films on the minds and behaviour of young people it is difficult to say and very difficult to establish what influence, if any, the cinema has on such problems as juvenile delinquency and sexual morality. It seems reasonable to suppose, however, that such vivid presentations as occur in talking pictures, organised with every subtlety and refinement of photographic art and artifice and played by personalities who have been collected from every corner of the earth and then elaborately "groomed" and advertised by every whispering and shouting device known to propaganda, must seriously affect, for better or worse, the minds and imaginations of habitual cinema-goers, especially those whose personalities are still only half-formed. This is clearly an enormous and kaleidoscopic question and one that can scarcely be touched on in a short pamphlet. The only point that will be made here is the need to take such a dynamic agency into serious account in considering the responsibilities of the schools for producing good citizens. There is probably little good to be done by censorship and prohibition by the state or local authorities and worse than none by condescension and indifference on the part of the education service. Two things the schools can do. As films and equipment become available, the schools can use visual material as a teaching instrument more than they now do. This in itself will not only broaden the scope and sometimes improve the quality of lessons, but will also build up a certain experience in looking at films intelligently. Much more directly, the schools can find a place - not necessarily between the hours of nine and four - for film appreciation. At such times the better feature films of the commercial cinema could be shown and talked about, and there might be a regular service of notes and reviews on current releases for the guidance of the older children. All kinds of practical difficulties can be thought of immediately with regard to such developments. But the fact remains that some schools do it and in some areas the number of schools and teachers interested is sufficient to form an area organisation capable of supporting individual effort with a corporate service of film shows and associated activities. There are also several national bodies ready and able to help. The third need - and this is certainly outside the power of the schools - is a better supply of good entertainment films specially made for children, so that children's cinema shows - to which nearly a million children now flock every Saturday - may become a civilising agency for the next generation as well as providing better entertainment.
Broadcasting is another dynamic agency for creating and spreading opinion. Like the cinema, it speaks to those not interested in books as
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well as to the well-educated minority. It lacks the vivid visual presentation of the film, but it has its own powerful resources of speech, sound and silence, with a capacity for imaginative suggestion that to the active and co-operative listener may be even more powerful than the film.
Fortunately, broadcasting in this country has been developed with a sense of social and artistic responsibility and with a regard for educational as well as recreational service. Undoubtedly, the British Broadcasting Corporation has made a big contribution to the recent growth of interest in good music, good plays and intelligent talk and to that extent has helped, directly a little, indirectly a very great deal, to raise standards of taste and so, perhaps, of behaviour in the face of innumerable influences to the contrary. The B.B.C. provides a forum for the candid discussion of serious and fundamental problems of religion and politics, art and personal conduct. It gives a platform to public men and women of the day - a very exacting platform, quite different from the public hall, and one where the slightest hint of insincerity is magnified to a shout; to that extent broadcasting has probably helped to raise the tone and quality of political oratory, in the teeth of other influences that might have encouraged its decay. Last of all, the B.B.C., under the guidance of the Schools Broadcasting Council, has developed a service of "wireless" lessons, or, more properly, "School Broadcasts", having a variety, a freshness of presentation, an authority and reliability, an originality of purpose and method that raise them from the level of a teaching accessory to that of a new educational method.
It is probably true that the schools have so far made more use, and better use, of broadcasting than of the other agencies considered in this Section. But their use of broadcasting is still small and inadequate in relation to the effort and skill employed at the production end and it still makes little contribution to more intelligent and discriminating listening by adults and to a better use of leisure. There are some obvious difficulties. The rural schools are often without a supply of electricity. There is an appalling amount of bad reception owing to technical faults and old equipment. Much school listening is casual and unprepared and unrelated to the rest of the curriculum. The time-table in grammar schools, and sometimes in other secondary schools, is too rigid to permit the incorporation of broadcast material. But few, if any, of these difficulties are insuperable and the position is improving slowly all the time. At the broadcasting end there is now an increasing realisation of the social importance of "wireless" lessons. The various series are now less closely attached to subject instruction and they deal increasingly and with increasing effectiveness with problems of life in the community, seen through vividly imagined situations drawn from history, travel, biography, general science, farming, architecture, government, art and sport, and, above all, from the daily work and lives of children and parents in their own homes. Indeed, there are few aspects of citizenship discussed in this pamphlet that are not to be glimpsed somewhere in the current programme of Broadcasts to Schools.
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PART III
The Study and Practice of
Citizenship in After Life
19. IN COUNTY COLLEGES
WHILE good citizenship implies good intent, it equally implies competence. It calls for a mind trained to deal with the subject matter of community living; it demands certain qualities of character - integrity, purposiveness, and public spirit; it needs practical good sense - wisdom and judgment in affairs.
Little can be done in the county college by formal instruction in the development either of character or of practical good sense - but, indirectly, a quite considerable contribution can be made if the institution itself reproduces in its policy, its organisation and detailed management the characteristics of a good society. In brief, it should reflect in all its activities the following qualities: - a high standard of integrity; a recognition of and respect for quality; a vigorous spirit of adventure and enjoyment; freedom from arbitrary or capricious regulation; a rich development of corporate student life in which all will gain something from the activities, and some at least will make a good beginning in learning to shoulder responsibility, to make decisions, to take action and to acquire practice in intelligent leadership. Though the development of character, which is essential in good citizenship, is little amenable to formal instruction, nevertheless such instruction is necessary to enable students to acquire the kinds of knowledge which are required for an understanding of community living and for competence in dealing with community affairs.
In the first place it is useful to remember that the students already possess and are continually acquiring direct knowledge and experience of community living. They are members of families, they have attended school under direction, they are employed in office or shop or factory, they have their own voluntary activities, they may be members of a social centre or a youth club, they may go camping; they live in particular neighbourhoods - and there is no single neighbourhood, however superficially homogeneous it may seem, which is not a complex community with its social distinctions, its varied interests, its friendships and enmities, of which young people are aware, often at a very early age.
In consequence, they know what it means "to be free", to "do what they wish"; they have definite ideas about "fair play"; they know and respect the "just beast"; they speak of "playing the game"; they recognise
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the slacker and the one who pulls his weight; they have notions about order and discipline and the necessity for rules and they appreciate the need for knowledge and skill. We may, therefore, recognise how considerable is the range of fundamental "political" knowledge which young people in their middle teens have acquired through their own social experience. In more formal language, they have notions about such matters as justice, toleration, government and being governed, of freedom and responsibility, and of the need for discussion.
It is possible to consider this experience and on the one hand to make the knowledge and the crude judgments arising from it explicit, more orderly and coherent, and, on the other, to enable the students to carry them forward into their studies of those wider aspects of community living in which their direct experience is still modest or negligible.
This involves a deliberate examination both of some of the forms of society of which the students have experience, and of the actual knowledge which they have gained, which is implicit in their language and in their conduct. This is a training in the sorting out of social relations within a limited sphere of actual experience; and in the recognition of certain general ideas and standards of conduct which are as relevant and as fundamental in the affairs of state as in the most modest of voluntary corporate activities. Moreover, it presents under skilled and informed leadership an opportunity for the conduct of discussion groups whose ends are clearly defined and whose subject matter is well within the knowledge and experience of the students. Along those lines an important step forward may be taken by the students in discovering the world of society, in interpreting it, in thinking about it intelligently and in learning to live as responsible members of a community.
But this aspect of education in citizenship, important though it may be, is not the only one. Much knowledge necessary for good citizenship is not within the direct experience of young students and it must, therefore, form the subject matter of "instruction".
In the first place, "public affairs" are not momentary, but continuing; they have a history. Again, the thought, the wisdom and the experience on which we must rely for guidance, are not limited to the contemporary. We can learn from the thought and the conduct of our predecessors. It is impossible, for instance, to make sense of the U.S.A. of to-day without some understanding of its early English settlers and of the War of Independence, of the relatively recent pioneering activities of Americans throughout their great country, and of the immense streams of emigrants, Russian, Polish, Irish, German, Scandinavian and Italian, which poured into that country in the later years of the 19th century. How is it possible to understand the Russia of to-day without some knowledge of the long tyranny of the Czars, or to appreciate the strength of Communism without a knowledge of conditions in the new factory towns of the 19th century? How is it possible to unravel the relations between England, Ireland and Northern Ireland apart from their history?
To know some history both of one's own country and of its rela-
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tions with other communities, to be able to examine a "current affair" in its historical perspective and, equally important, to have learnt that history is an essential form of knowledge for an intelligent understanding of contemporary life, these are necessary elements in the competence of the mature and responsible citizen. They represent an attempt to answer the questions how our present way of life has come into being and what is the quality of the inheritance to which we are heirs.
In addition, human activities do not take place in Utopia but in a physical world which is the setting for these activities, which provides the material resources for them and which in terms of environment and climate in varying degree limits and determines them. Man's capacity to utilise natural resources and his power to control his physical surroundings are factors which are continually changing. New knowledge leads to new applications and these to changes in the importance of places and in the value of their resources - socially, politically, economically and militarily; and every such change produces some new stress, some need for adjustment both in communities and between communities. These adjustments are often as difficult to foresee as they are painful to carry out. The growing pains of communities cannot be cured without some understanding of the constantly changing relations between man and his environment which are a main cause of them. In most problems of any major importance with which the citizen must deal, there is a significant geographical aspect. Instruction in human geography must, therefore. have an important place in education for citizenship.
There is one aspect of instruction in English which is of primary importance in this context. In a free society where "public opinion" matters and, where government is by discussion and persuasion, it is important for good government that such persuasion should be rational and informative and should not be conducted by slogans and by appeals to passion and prejudice. In a world of Billy Browns and their numerous progeny, this power to discriminate between knowledge and reason on the one hand and the many devices of propaganda on the other is not the least of the requirements of competent citizenship. The material for training in this discrimination is ample, and continuing - in advertisements, in newspapers, in books and in speeches. Nor is it difficult for young people of normal intelligence to examine such material and to learn to recognise when they are being informed and when they are being cozened.
Thus, education in citizenship carried out as a major aim of a county college should train students to discriminate with increasing ability between information and reason on the one hand and at least the cruder forms of irrational appeal on the other and to understand, through history and human geography, some of the broad characteristics of their society. It should also make explicit the knowledge which the student already possesses of community living, developing his notions of freedom and justice, of tolerance, of order and discipline and the like.
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Finally, the quality of the college as a whole should ensure that the students are maturing in some of those aspects of character which are essential for good citizenship. More generally, it seems at least as important that students should be trained in processes of understanding and that they should become increasingly capable of independent learning and reflection about governing and being governed and about the subject matter of community living than that they should acquire some specific body of knowledge.
Education in citizenship, therefore, needs to be conceived on broad and generous lines and to be regarded as one major aim of all the humanistic studies. There is no simple, tidy body of knowledge which can be labelled "citizenship" and which will provide a satisfactory prescription for dealing with the changing pattern of public affairs. Any narrow concentration on contemporary events or on the formal executive machinery of government must fall far short of the requirements. It will be lacking in adequate intellectual stimulus and will not lead naturally to further developments in understanding in maturer years.
20. IN ADULT LIFE
The preceding sections have described the conditions essential to effective training during the years of preparation for adult life and its responsibilities. The extent to which men and women are able to play their part in the several relationships which go to make modern society will depend largely on the training they have received during these formative years. Among the benefits which they will have received in their secondary schools and county colleges will be some knowledge of political institutions and the factors governing international relations, opportunities of developing qualities essential to good citizenship and some practice in democratic living.
But such training, however important and effective, can at most be only preparatory; it provides young people with no more than the foundation for further study and practice when they grow up. This is so because the practice of full citizenship and the appreciation of intricacies of government and world affairs demand some maturity, and because each new experience provides the citizen with further material for study and thought. We cannot afford to disregard this material if our judgment and our actions are to suit to-day's situation, which may be very different from that of yesterday. The study of public affairs, which are never static, is, as Dr. Johnson said of ethics, "One of the studies which ought to begin with the first glimpse of reason and only end with life itself".
There are certain qualities which an individual must have developed if he is to play an effective part as a member of society. But as well as these qualities he needs to be armed with knowledge, perception, and the ability to think clearly and honestly. Many temptations exist and many devices are employed which induce him to dispense with thought and
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accept what appear to be easy and attractive solutions without scrutiny. The purpose of education in public affairs is to raise the level of knowledge, to improve the quality of detached judgment and to limit the influence of emotional appeal to mass sentiment. In choosing the methods employed to achieve this purpose the educator must have regard to individual capabilities and aim at helping as large a section of the community as possible.
To-day the home is no longer the place where the younger members of the family spend all their leisure time, and the older members also tend to seek their pleasures away from the family hearth, in the company of their neighbours and friends. Various clubs and institutions exist today to cater for the social needs of all age-groups and with the growth of community centres this tendency is likely to increase: facilities can be provided in such centres which cannot exist in the limited accommodation of the private house.
This tendency to seek pleasures in organised groups is not without its value for the training of the citizen. Participation in such social activities, particularly when their organisation involves active co-operation by the participants, is itself a useful exercise in community living and public service. A further stage is reached when the members of a group choose representatives and form committees with the duty of making decisions and initiating action on behalf of them all.
Among groups which meet together to pursue activities of common interest are some associations of persons studying the contemporary scene and exchanging ideas about events in a world which is continually changing and often puzzling. It is reasonable to expect that as more people come to understand that they can make a contribution to public welfare. as they come to realise the equipment they need if this contribution is to be effective and as increased opportunities are given them for equipping themselves, the number of associations will increase. Such a development is anticipated by the Education Act of 1944, which encourages provision of such opportunities for all persons able and willing to profit by them. For many people education in citizenship will be largely education through action: for a number it should be possible to do something more, to help them to consider and reflect upon their actions and to be in some measure students as well as practitioners.
It cannot be expected that all these new students of public affairs will be ready or able to undertake a regular and intensive study of politics and kindred subjects. Most of them will need a gentle introduction to the study of public affairs. Their interest in such matters may at first be narrow and slender, but the hope will be that it will develop and widen as they become increasingly aware of the relevance of world affairs to their own personal situations. They will need time to develop confidence as they see their own powers of comprehension and expression growing.
The picture presented is likely to be one of groups differing in their interests and in their approach to study, and of work carried out as it were on many different levels. To assess the achievement of these groups will
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involve clear understanding of their nature and aims, but foremost among any set of criteria will be honesty of purpose and sincerity of thought. Two factors are essential if the work of any group is to be fruitful. First of all, those responsible for guiding the students must be of high quality, both in the extent of their knowledge and in their ability to fit their knowledge into a coherent pattern. To do this they must have a synoptic vision and a balanced judgment. Whatever the calibre of their groups they must apply to themselves all the disciplines which are essential for serious, study and intellectual integrity.
The second factor is the contribution made by each member of a group to the proceedings of the meeting. Each will need to be an active participant, and not merely a passive recipient. Each can gain much from discussion provided that the limits that can be achieved by it are made clear to all. A brief and light-hearted discussion of a problem which continues to baffle experts is nothing short of dangerous if the participants are led to believe at the end that they have found all the answers.
The members of these groups will have had experience of life's responsibilities and practice in managing their own affairs. They will hold opinions on many topics, and some of these opinions will have hardened into settled convictions. Many will have prejudices, and they may have spent most of their time hitherto in the company of persons with the same prejudices. They may have found living conditions difficult, and a large number may have endured hardships and made sacrifices. Only the minority, however, will have made an active and continuous contribution in that wide field in which the truly democratic citizen is called upon to exercise his abilities. Many will have been content to leave the business of government to politicians and officials, restricting their own actions to criticism, based on little reasoned argument, of a system from which they disassociate themselves. Their motives for attending study groups in public affairs may be various, and will not necessarily be related to any desire to play a more active part in the government of their country.
What needs to be done for such groups is to show them the evidence on which judgments in the sphere of public affairs must be based, and to stimulate in them a readiness to examine this evidence in an impartial way. It is to show them the contribution that each branch of study has to make towards the assessment of a political situation, the influence of economics in world affairs, the effect of geographical factors and the importance of the historical approach, to name but a few. It is to help them to discount the undue prominence often given to what is startling and sensational, and to liken "current affairs" not to islands raised above the surface of the sea by sudden and unexplained convulsions, but to land formed by the continuous process of depositing one layer of alluvium on another.
Another task is to direct men's minds towards the various sources of evidence, to introduce them to books and to show them the different functions of different types of book - the pamphlet, the popular exposition,
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the standard work and, finally, the specialist monograph. Emphasis on the importance of examining this evidence should not, however, direct attention away from the value of exchanging ideas with other members of the group and submitting their opinions to the criticisms of others, a process which is intellectually stimulating as well as providing a practical exercise in democratic living.
We can sum up the preceding paragraphs by saying that a fundamental part of training in citizenship is provided by participation in local community activities and that, with increased opportunities, more people are likely to take part in such associations; that from such beginnings may arise an interest in affairs of government and the problems that confront us in the world to-day; that those who seek information on such matters will do so for various reasons and in, various ways; and that the means adopted for satisfying this desire for knowledge will only succeed if they are closely related to the interests and abilities of individuals at each stage.
When this has been said, we must not forget those enthusiastic students of politics who attend classes provided by the universities, the local education authorities, and other bodies, such as the Workers Educational, Association, and who pursue continuous and intensive courses, sometimes in residential colleges. These students are a minority, but a minority whose importance is out of all proportion to its numbers. We are fortunate in possessing an adult education movement in this country which, like so many other British institutions, has its roots in popular initiative and has not been imposed from above.
It is to be hoped that among those persons who join less formal groups for the consideration of public affairs some will be found who are ready to follow the example of these students, and undertake a more detailed study of the branches of knowledge which contribute to an understanding of world situations. Those who do this steadfastly, submitting to the disciplines of serious study, sifting evidence, reading widely and "concocting their reading into judgment" will enrich their minds and make an important contribution to the community by furthering "the study of the means whereby liberty and authority may be best combined; whereby the dignity of the free man is made compatible with the highest and richest forms of co-operation".*
*D. W: Brogan: The Study of Politics [Cambridge U.P.]
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EPILOGUE
AT the beginning of this pamphlet a distinction was drawn between public and private life as these exist for most of us in our everyday thinking. Those who have read the pamphlet through will have discovered that for the good citizen as he appears in these pages there is no such distinction. We have not regarded man as an entirely "political" animal as the Greeks did, but we have regarded citizenship as comprising not only man's duties to the state but also his whole social life with his family and his neighbours: his work, his pleasures, his recreations, his health, his philosophy of life, his ethical values, his religion, if he has one. This is not to make him a little cog in a big machine. Man is primarily an individual soul with a personal destiny, a need for privacy and solitude and, in the opinion of some, a personal relationship to God and the universe that transcends his political relations and even his social relations with his fellow human beings. But this destiny is worked out, and this personality is fulfilled, on earth, largely through human relationships, and it is these, public or political and private or personal, that together constitute the background of citizenship against which the educational problems raised in this pamphlet have been considered. "Education for citizenship." Citizenship for what kind of state? A state for what ends and what sorts of human beings? This chain of enquiry was unavoidable and it seemed best, almost inevitable, to start at the end and work backwards. The educational issues themselves have been left at a point where teachers may feel interested to work out the detailed implications for themselves.
The religious issue has not been avoided. In a free and educated community there must be absolute toleration of religious belief. This pamphlet has not concealed its own conviction that temporal and eternal values are interdependent, but it has no wish to thrust these beliefs on those who hold other views. Many of the virtues called Christian still commend themselves to liberal-minded men of many different persuasions and any plea for truth, honest dealing, kindness, tolerance and courage in our public and family life still meets with general goodwill. If there is one truth more than another which this epilogue would press, it is the sovereign importance of the free individual human personality. We each of us matter: to God, as some of us believe; certainly to ourselves and to one another. Once this is accepted, then any form of anti-social conduct becomes not only fratricidal but suicidal, and the good citizen is seen to be the only sane and rational inhabitant of society.
This pamphlet has been concerned mainly with citizenship within the nation, but this, of course, is not the end of the matter. It is clear that, whether for good or for ill, the world is on the way to becoming
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one in the sense that it is no longer possible for countries to insulate themselves from the rest. But evidently this consideration applies with particular force to our own country, both because a large measure of world trade is necessary to her very existence, and because of her position at the centre of a great Commonwealth of nations. If other countries, more economically self-contained and without the wide-flung and historic political connections of Britain, have nevertheless come to the conclusion that isolation no longer makes any sense, how much less are we in this country ever likely to be able to shut our eyes to the outside world. Whichever way we look at it, we are led inevitably to the conclusion that the kind of education which we were considering in the previous sections, education about our locality, education about our country, cannot stop there; it must inevitably spread right out and, in some measure, embrace the whole world. The greatness of the danger and the greatness of the opportunities, the interests of the Commonwealth and the demands of trade, alike require that we rise above a parochial or even a national outlook.
Like the rest of citizenship, this is primarily a matter of experience, and what is most to be hoped is that it will prove possible to arrange for visits, tours and exchanges of all kinds for young people and for teachers, enabling them to acquire first-hand knowledge of the Commonwealth and of the world. But the scope of such visits will necessarily always be limited, while the part played by sight and sound in film, picture, or radio will be very large. It is the peculiar advantage of seeing and hearing people from other countries that we come to appreciate them as human beings, living in cities and villages, practising industries and arts, facing their own peculiar problems. We realise, too, how underneath, despite all the differences brought about by history and geography, by race and temperament, the reactions of other people to the realities of life, to opportunity and to danger, to plenty and to want, are much the same the world over. Education of a vivid, personal kind helps to counteract one of the most unfortunate tendencies in our way of thinking about world affairs to-day, the tendency to think in terms of "masses of power", in terms, that is, of national strength reckoned by areas, populations, and economic potential. This is a way of thinking inevitably stimulated by war, and by the feverish calculations and conjectures which precede it and which must always characterise a world in which the fear of war predominates. It disguises the truth that there is, in fact, no such individual as a U.S.A. or a U.S.S.R. which "thinks" this or "hates" that. There are, rather, a great many people, living - especially in those two countries - under very different conditions, and with quite different backgrounds, differences wider even than those which separate the Cornish fisherman from the Yorkshire miner.
A few last words may be permissible about the educational dilemma, or so perhaps it seems, which has been touched on repeatedly in Part II of this pamphlet and which runs like a thread through the argument. In
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one* of the books mentioned in the footnote on page 39 there occurs the following caution, written by the headmaster of a school which is a pioneer in training for citizenship:
No one will, I hope, misunderstand this statement (i.e., his description of work done in his school). The relation of school subjects to immediate experience is not their first object. The pursuit of knowledge and the acquisition of skill and formal training of the mind, together with the necessary element of preparation for careers, are not subordinated to the aspect described in this article. But through all the various means for the pursuit of knowledge and skill - study, class-assignments, projects, hobbies, crafts, and the rest - one of the aims that we try to keep continually in mind is preparation through experience for the fulfilment of social duty.
These words convey the kind of perspective which this pamphlet would like to leave with its readers. The distinction between the different aims of education: for work, for leisure, for scholarship, for culture, for self-development, for social and political life, have never been as deep or real as they sometimes appear when sharpened for controversy. Work, for instance, both manual and intellectual, is a social process and its social motives and rewards, as distinct from its purely economic functions, are becoming increasingly apparent in conditions of full employment. Culture, as Mr. T. S. Eliot has shown us, is a social as well as a personal affair. Self-development is a snare if it is detached both from the traditional loyalties of the past and the crying needs of the present for social co-operation. We can have no single one of these desirable objects in full measure - knowledge, self-development, vocational or social training, least of all, wisdom - without having some of the others also; in fact, education can scarcely avoid involving them all, differently balanced at different times to meet the main contemporary needs. Our main contemporary needs to-day are the will and knowledge to live together, with wisdom and understanding, in a world society that is capable of using the different endowments of individuals and nations for the common good. This means, undoubtedly, more explicit training in human relations than has been common in the past. But that is a trifle. The main need is not an intellectual revolution, but a change of heart; the recognition that all knowledge and skill are gifts, to be cultivated humbly as a privilege and a trust and to be used generously in the service of others.
*Article by C. H. C. Sharp; M.A., in "Experiments in Practical Training for Citizenship" published by the Association for Education in Citizenship.
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NOTE
Readers may find it useful to be reminded of the names and addresses of the four bodies listed below. Many other associations exist for furthering one or other of the many aspects of citizenship mentioned the the pamphlet.
Association for Education in Citizenship,
Secretary, Miss M. W. Roach, 51 Tothill Street, London, S.W.1.
Council for Education in World Citizenship,
Secretary, D. H. Ennals, Esq., 11 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, W.C.2.
The Imperial Institute, South Kensington, S.W.7,
Director, Sir Harry Lindsay, K.C.I.E., C.B.E.,
General Secretary, J. A. Nelson, Esq.
The United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO,
Secretary, W. D. Pile, Esq., 23 Belgrave, Square, S.W.1.
The Imperial Institute is now grant-aided by the Ministry of Education. Particulars of its services, which include exhibition galleries, film displays and a panel of lecturers may be obtained from the Secretary.
The United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO, which includes representatives of the most important organisations and institutions in the educational, scientific and cultural fields, advises on all matters relating to UNESCO in this country and distributes information about the development of the work of the Organisation.
The National Co-operating Body for Education, one of the constituent bodies of the National Commission, has set up a Committee specially to enquire into and report on the methods and materials of teaching for international understanding. The report of this Committee, whose enquiries have already begun, may well prove a valuable supplement, in its special field, to the present pamphlet.
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| Other Pamphlets in this Series
No. 1. The Nations Schools. Their Plan and Purpose. Out of print.
No. 2. A Guide to the Educational System of England and Wales. (1945.) Describes the changes introduced by the 1944 Education Act. 1s. (1s. 2d.).
No. 3. Youth's Opportunity - Further Education in County Colleges. (1945.) Suggestions for the organisation and curriculum of the colleges, which will provide part-time education for young people who leave school before 18. 1s. (1s. 2d.).
No. 4. Building Crafts. (1945.) How to plan Training Courses for new recruits to the Building Industry. 1s. (1s. 2d.).
No. 5. Special Educational Treatment. (1946.) The ascertainment and education of mentally and physically handicapped children. 9d. (10d.).
No. 6. Art Education. (1946.) Information and suggestions for the development of art education. 2s. 6d. (2s. 8d.).
No. 7. Entrants to the Mining Industry. (1947.) How to plan courses for young miners. 6d. (7d.).
No. 8. Further Education. (1947.) Defines future policy under the 1944 Act. 2s. (2s. 3d.).
No. 9. The New Secondary Education. (1947.) The development of Secondary Education under the Education Act of 1944. 1s. 6d. (1s. 8d.).
No. 10. Local Studies: Bishop Aukland. This pamphlet is part of the Ministry's Visual Unit "Local Studies". 3s. 6d. (3s. 8d).
No. 11. Organised Camping. (1948.) A guide for those responsible for introducing young people to camp life. 1s. (1s. 2d).
No. 12. UNESCO and a World Society. (1948.) An account of the history, organisation and programme of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. 1s. (1s. 2d.).
No. 13. Safety Precautions in Schools. (1948.) How to ensure that children can carry out various school activities with the minimum of risk. 9d. (10d.).
No. 14. Story of a School. (1949.) A Headmaster's experiences teaching children aged seven to eleven. 1s. (1s. 2d.).
No. 15. Seven to Eleven Children at School. (1949.) 1s. (1s. 2d.). |
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| Other Publications of the Ministry of Education
PAMPHLETS (Old Series)
No. 112. The Education of Backward Children with special reference to children who are backward because they are dull. (Reprinted 1949, Revised price.) 1s. 3d. (1s.4d.).
No. 116. Suggestions for the Teaching of Classics. (Reprinted 1949. 1s. (1s. 2d.).
No. 119. Sex Education in Schools and Youth Organisations. (1943.) 6d. (7d.).
WELSH DEPARTMENT PAMPHLETS
No. 1. Language Teaching in Primary Schools. (1945.) 9d. (11d.).
No. 2. Education in Wales, 1847 to 1947. (1948.) 1s. 3d. (1s. 5d.).
No. 3. Education in Rural Wales. (1949.) 1s. 6d. (1s. 8d.).
No. 4. Bilingualism in the Secondary Schools in Wales. (1949.) 1s. (1s. 2d.).
MISCELLANEOUS
Education in 1948. Report of the Ministry of Education and the Statistics of Public Education for England and Wales. [Cond. 7724.] 3s. 6d. (3s. 9d.).
School and Life. A First Enquiry into the Transition from School to Independent Life, Central Advisory Council for Education (England) Report, December, 1946. 2s. 6d. (2s. 9d.).
Out of School. Central Advisory Council for Education (England) 2nd Report, February, 1948. 1s. (1s. 2d.).
The Future of Secondary Education in Wales. Central Advisory Council for Education (Wales) Report, 1949. 3s. (3s. 3d.).
University Awards. Report of the Working Party appointed by the Minister of Education in April, 1948. 9d. (10d.).
The Supply of Women Teachers. Report of the Working Party. 6d. (7d.).
PUBLISHED BY H.M. STATIONERY OFFICE |
