[Footnote 26: They may now continue their studies at continuation evening schools after fourteen years of age, if they choose, and earn money the while in some daily employment.] [Footnote 27: The girls’ curriculum, into which it will not be necessary to enter here, is very much the same as the boys’, except that it excludes Manual Work and Physics, and includes Laundry, Cooking and Needlework.] [Footnote 28: All the calculations that follow are based upon the assumption that eight weeks are allowed for holidays each year.] [Footnote 29: Owing to the great importance of history in inspiring children to maintain the traditions of their country, it is only with the greatest reluctance that this subject is not allotted special hours to itself. It is, however, felt that in view of the short space of years that elementary education covers in the life-time of the working-class child, some drastic pruning of the curriculum must at all costs be made, as anything in the nature of a compromise inserts the thin edge of the wedge of superficiality in the teaching. Moreover, seeing that the English lesson will draw largely upon historical facts for the explanation of words, the subject cannot be regarded as entirely neglected in this programme.] [Footnote 30: As the whole week’s work amounts only to 22 hours, and there is no home work, boys at an elementary school cannot in any case be said to be overworked, and there would be no hardship involved in curtailing the time allowed for recreation, or in cancelling it altogether.] [Footnote 31: It is true that in its _Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers_ (p. 28) the Board of Education does lay down that: “One of the fundamental purposes of education is to ensure that the child has an ample fund of ideas about the world in which it lives, and that these ideas should be, as far as may be, full and exact”; but what follows (pp. 28, 29) is so meaningless and reveals such an inadequate appreciation of the value of ideas in adult life, that it stultifies the value of the foregoing.] [Footnote 32: _Ibid_, p. 39: “The minutiæ of Parsing should be completely omitted.... There should be no Grammar teaching apart from the other English lessons, it should arise naturally out of the reading and composition lessons.” One headmaster of an elementary school with whom the present writer discussed the question of Parsing, declared that he greatly regretted that it had been dropped.] [p153] CHAPTER VII SOCIAL REFORM[33] “Things are so bad that, to have any genuine insight to-day, any special human feeling to-day, means perforce to devote these gifts to the social problem, instead of to art and beauty. That is the curse of having been born in this Age.”--Extract from a novel of last year.