Welsh Journals

PERSPECTIVES ON A CENTURY OF SECONDARY EDUCATION IN WALES. 1889-1989. Edited by W. Gareth Evans, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1990. Pp. 240. £ 6.95; EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN A VICTORIAN COMMUNITY. By W. Gareth Evans, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1990. Pp. 67. £ 2.50. These two volumes are the first fruits of University College, Aberystwyth's recently established Centre for Educational Studies and were published as a centennial celebration of the Welsh Intermediate Education Act (1889). Perspectives on a century of secondary education in Wales (1889-1989) is a collection of twelve papers by different authors, arranged in three sections, the first dealing with the origins and implementation of the 1889 Act, the second with selected aspects of secondary education during the ensuing hundred years, and the third with a number of currently defined issues. Educational development in a Victorian community complements the larger study by examining the response of Carmarthenshire to the founding Act. focussing on the early years of the 1890s, but tracing some aspects to 1914 and beyond. Having such a wide compass, the papers in Perspectives tend to be free standing, with little attempt to mesh them together, it being left to the reader to make the links and connections. Almost inevitably too there are gaps in the topics discussed, and in the depth in which others are covered-there are no papers as such on the change to comprehensive schooling in the 1960s and '70s, nor are developments in the secondary sector considered within the total context of the education system. Yet the book is informative and useful for the light it throws on the nature of Welsh secondary education from its inception, and on the changes that have occurred within it during the past hundred years. If an underlying theme can be discerned it is that despite its unique legislative origins Welsh secondary education at no time succeeded in assuming a distinctive national character. That is the implicit drift of the authoritative papers by B. L. Davies and J. R. Webster on the aspirations and objectives of its founders, and of D. I Allsobrook's diagnosis of the failure to develop its technical side in response to Wales's economic needs in the 1920s and '30s. In Gwilym Humphreys' and Edgar O. Lewis's papers on current plans for tertiary reorganisation in Gwynedd and Clwyd the strength of standardised thinking in the contemporary educational world is strikingly confirmed, and thrown into sharper relief by Gerald Morgan's refreshing paper on the future of small secondary schools in Dyfed, in which he draws on Scottish experience to show what might be achieved in a distinctive country of the United Kingdom which had the confidence to respond creatively to the particular challenges of its own rural communities. In Welsh education, a sense of national identity appears to have been so consistently dulled that even in the most obvious area of language, as Colin Baker argues here, bilingual policies have evolved pragmatically and piecemeal, with only a weak base of intellectual justification owing to the failure to commit adequate resources to academic research, thus rendering the policies vulnerable to changes in the climate of opinion which may well occur under the pressure of the demands of the national curriculum. It is the short but provocative