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more certainly if it exercise the patronage in appointments.

Besides the power exercised through rates and patronage, the local body, as representing the parents of pupils, is calculated to do much to stimulate and encourage the teacher's effort and to co-operate with him in the difficult and critical duties of discipline and moral control. Further, the educational wants of the district are through it brought home to the school; the teacher is kept in touch with changing requirements, the governing body mediates between him and the public, asserting his interests, defending his procedure, preventing the forcing of his hands through rash and ill-considered innovation, and at the same time keeping him up to the standard of current needs and not suffering him to lag behind in the educational race. All this and a great deal more an efficient local body can do.

Again, one hardly needs to allude to the fact, once adverted to already, that throughout Scotland local patriotism is a highly-developed sentiment. Each locality, each city, and still more each village and each parish, has the greatest

pride in its own institutions and its own products; it follows with the utmost interest and satisfaction the career of its sons who have gone forth to win fame and fortune in war, in commerce, in literature, in affairs. This is closely connected with the schools, which are rightly regarded as instrumental, more than any other agency, in producing such results. The management of its schools enlists the local patriotism to an extent that few things do; if it acts on the schools, it reacts as a powerful leavening influence on the whole community. A distinct loss is suffered if anything is done to impair the bond. The matter is not so much one of obtaining power as of assuming responsibility; the locality should be held responsible for the welfare of its school, and so much power granted to it that its duty may be fully discharged. Whatever faults may be incidental to such a system, and however incomplete it may be in itself, it cannot be dispensed with, it is the most necessary part of the whole machinery. Such a conclusion is forced upon any one who has regard either to the past history or the present conditions of Scotch Education.

There are two distinct grades of school, and if each school is to have a local governing body with large powers, we are confronted with a question as to the relation of the government of the two grades. Is there to be one governing body for Elementary Education and a different one for Secondary? and, if so, how are they to be related to one another?

At first sight it must be allowed that there is a strong case for two bodies. It might, for example, be urged that Elementary Education is for the many, Secondary for the few; the former compulsory, the latter optional; the one provided by the community, the other by the individual; the one a national concern, the other a private concern. Elementary Schools must be brought to the doors of the people, they must be scattered thickly all over the land. Pupils must find their own way to the Secondary Schools, which should be at convenient centres, but cannot be within reach of all. Elementary Schools are popular institutions, schools of the people, to be managed by the people; Secondary Schools are at best only semi-popular, hardly that even, to be managed

by the select few who are interested in them, and must be prepared to show their interest by paying for them.

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Arguments of this kind contain a measure of truth which imparts plausibility to them, but they will be found to rest on a radical misconception. Secondary Schools-and be it always borne in mind that " Secondary" covers and includes Technical --are a national concern and as much a popular concern Elementary ones. They are as vital to national interests as any other class of schools. Nothing but harm comes of looking upon Education as divisible into parts, each part an interest of a separate class of the community. If that was ever true in Scotland, which may be doubted, it is not true now. The Secondary School is, to be sure, the school of the few, and must always be so, and the University is the school of the still fewer. But this does not prevent their being national institutions. The few do not belong to any particular class or section of the community: they are drawn alike, if not in equal numbers, from all classes. They are the few not of birth or rank, but the few of

talent and capacity, the destined leaders in every branch of the nation's work, whom it is worth the nation's while to train to the utmost.

The gradations of rank in Scotland, as related to Education, do not present any great extremes. We may leave out of the count the nobility and gentry, who are not as a rule educated in our public institutions at all. All the rest of the population may be roughly divided into middle class and lower class. The extreme difference is not great, it may be taken as that between a successful professional man and a humble industrial worker. The students from both classes meet on a common basis in Second

ary School and University. As many of the best pupils are, perhaps, drawn from the one class as from the other. The country is thoroughly democratic in its education; the advent of free education and the extension of subventions in the form of scholarships, bursaries, free places, railway fares, etc., have tended to make it increasingly so. Probably the conjecture is not far from the truth that there is a keener appreciation of the benefits of Higher Education in the better class "work

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