On the negative side there seems no valid objection to the single management of Elementary and Secondary in Burghs. But we can go a step further and urge an important positive reason. In cities the relation of schools to one another in respect to grading is specially important. Unless all are under one management adjustment is rendered difficult, if not impossible. At best the transition between Elementary and Secondary is hazardous and critical. If the schools of either grade are divorced in management the difficulty is so aggravated as to become an actual bar to progress. fining ourselves for the moment to the Burghs we are forced to the conclusion that any separation in management is incompatible with the highest results in efficiency. The two bodies, if there are two, will be in part ignorant of each other's policy and action; judging from experience each will be jealous of its rights and privileges; it will be fortunate if they are not to some extent in actual antagonism. Con On three main grounds we conclude that in Burghs Elementary and Secondary ought to be under the same management : (a) The recognition of the national character of Secondary Education is thus ensured, and its claim on public support is firmly established through the association of the common interests of Education in common management. (b) There is no other method by which proper grading of schools and the classes in them can be secured. (c) It tends to simplification and consequent ease and economy of management, and obviates risk of overlapping and injurious competition. We may add as the satisfying of a desirable condition, though perhaps hardly a ground, that, if the governing body is, as is assumed, a popularly elected one, the arrangement preserves the desirable contact and sympathy between school and governing body, which is a source of strength and of success. Uniformity would suggest that a similar arrangement should hold in the rural area, but analogy does not quite settle the question. Sacrifice to mechanical uniformity is unjustifiable where conditions vary so widely as to render a uniform system inapplicable. Undoubtedly there is a wide difference in the circumstances in the latter case, and it must be matter for deliberation whether they will be fully met by a plan which suits the urban area. Mutatis mutandis two of the grounds urged above apply with equal force. Simplification of management and due recognition of the equal claims of Secondary with Elementary Education will be no less forcible reasons in country than in town. But grading stands in a somewhat different position, while the condition about distance presents great difficulty. If we take purely rural areas in Scotland we shall find no Secondary Schools at all. Even if we include village communities, i.e., places with a population not exceeding 2,000, we shall, with one exception, find the same state of matters. But evidently, in order to find a unit of population for a Secondary School, we must go much higher than a population of 2,000-it is difficult to say how much higher or where the line between rural and urban for educational purposes should be drawn. The two categories of rural and village as defined above embrace about 30 per cent. of the whole popu lation of Scotland; but for reasons which we need not here discuss we might with much greater truth roughly estimate the population as about equally divided between urban and rural, and reckon 50 per cent. as rural. In the wholly rural areas it would appear that the management of Secondary Schools is simplicity itself!-there are no such schools. But this is not an end of the matter there is Secondary Education though there are not Secondary Schools. There are Secondary departments, and, as has been seen, there is a great deal of the Secondary work done in the Elementary School itself.1 It is somewhat curious to find that Secondary and higher instruction seems to be most sought after where the facilities for it are least. The average percentage of the population, aged four 1" The connection between the Parochial and Burgh Schools and the University is therefore an essential element in our scheme of national education. The only way in which this essential element can be preserved, is by insisting that the teachers in every Burgh or Secondary School, and many of the Parochial Schools, should be capable of instructing their pupils, not only in the subjects common to all Primary Schools, but in the elements of Latin, Mathematics and Greek" (Report of Argyll Commission, vol. iii., p. 10). teen to twenty, in receipt of instruction is 10:24. The distribution, however, shows considerable variation, for while the south-western district (Renfrew, Ayr, Lanark) gives only 7.90 per cent., the north-western (Ross and Cromarty, Inverness) rises to 22:11. The highest individual county is Ross and Cromarty, with 22 87 per cent., and the adjacent county of Sutherland comes close to it with 22:16. These, with Inverness and Caithness, are the only counties with over 20 per cent. That is to say, the great manufacturing and industrial south-western division, with a total population of 1,862,775, furnishes 18,003 pupils of Secondary Education; while the rural north-western division, with a population of only 166,554, furnishes to Higher Education no fewer than 4,430 pupils with a population of one-eleventh it supplies one-fourth as many students of Higher Education. These are only typical instances, for a similar state of matters holds all through. The causes 1These are the Registrar's figures in the census return for 1901; fourteen to eighteen would have suited the purposes of Secondary Education better. |