It is in this region that the battle of England's commercial supremacy may be lost, and must be won.
Those who would try to define the secondary education of this country, will not succeed, or, if they do survive and reach the other shore, will emerge from their Odyssey as exhausted as the much-travelled and much-troubled Ulysses. The French, very logically, have their primary, secondary, and tertiary, education; we call the first and last by the terms Elementary and University, though still, with disregard of coherence, retaining the second name.
Writing in 1887 amid the torrent of Jubilee, Matthew Arnold sounded an emphatic warning. Our secondary education, he said, is a chaos. He pointed out that the bulk of the middle class of this country were worse educated than the corresponding class either in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, or the United States; the reason being, he explained, that our upper class do not want to be disturbed in their preponderance, or the middle class in their vulgarity. Let us have, he cried, good elementary schools taking our youth to thirteen, and good secondary schools taking them to sixteen, together with good technical and special schools parallel with the secondary schools proper. As yet, nothing really substantial or adequate had been achieved; we had indeed broken up the old type of secondary instruction, but had not yet founded a new one of any soundness or worth.
