It must be confessed that, up till 1902, which dated a new epoch in this connection, little clear response came to the objurgations of our English Jeremiah. This branch of instruction continued to grow haphazard, unpruned, and at its own sweet will.
Yet secondary education is vital to our ultimate prosperity, since it undertakes to guide youth at its most uncertain hour, when it enters, or ere it enters, the real business of industrial life.
The cause of our tardy action has been that in this country the function of secondary instruction is complicated by special embarrassments. The precise nature of the difficulty may be stated to be that while, on the one hand, compulsion by the State ceases abruptly at the elementary age, on the other, nearly two-thirds of the boys leaving the elementary school select a form of occupation where there is little initial call for skill, no provision for training, and small prospect of a permanent position when the boy becomes a man, so that they feel no reason to pursue their education further than the primary stage. The individual needs to be shepherded towards aptitude and efficiency, and this, next to our care for the physique of the race, is the other main problem which for many decades far into the future, if we are to judge from the analogous history of our primary education, must exercise us most.
A reference to the example of Germany may serve to clear our views as to the office of secondary
