Welsh Journals

COMMERCIAL EDUCATION IN COUNTY SCHOOLS I 'HE present administration of the County Schools has already been severely criticized, and with perfect justice; it has been defended, it is true. not on scholastic grounds, however, but because of a pride in the system of education that the Welsh may call their own. It has even been called our national system of education, overlooking the fact that there is no such thing as nationalism in real education beyond the inclusion, in our case, of our language and history as subjects of study. Who would venture to incur ridicule by talking of a national system of mathematics? In effect, no defence has been made out for the present state of things. But as things are, they may yet be worse, if the Central Welsh Board fails to realise in time the danger ahead. The vicious capitation-fee system, the over- crowded curriculum, the folly of cram preparation for cram examination papers are up to-day against a force that has been gathering strength for some years, and is now suddenly become the deciding factor. That force is a demand for a shoddy com- mercial education. Old ideals of secondary education, whether as leisured accomplishment or as necessary preparation for a professional career, are well nigh dead. As things used to be, my son John was sent to the County School to finish his education," but now parents send their boys to school to get a mental outfit that will fetch a salary. And what a mental outfit After about two years of this polishing the parents realise that the boy's mental equipment has no cash value or very little, and the end is the withdrawal of the boy from school after a stay of two or, at the most, three years. Ratepayers pay the piper and call the tune, and parents who are intelligently concerned for the intellectual development of their children are very scarce. Practically the uniform demand of parents is for a grossly material equipment-an evil state of things, but quite an inevitable result of our backward civilisation, and for which the parents must not be abused in prose and verse by high-souled revilers. The present evil of futile schemes of futile studies will be destroyed and supplanted by as great an evil unless the Central Welsh Board steps in quickly with some sensible scheme of reform that will ensure on the one hand the modification of the present curriculum, with safeguards against incompetent examinations, and on the other hand provide com- mercial, industrial and agricultural education that shall not be an evil but a real education, and better brain-drill than a silly smattering of Latin and French. Let us consider commercial education. The opinions of business men can only have the value of personal experience and are necessarily limited by the actual requirements of individual businesses, and what applies to one may or may not apply to another. We have the notions of business parents on what they have found adequate in life, and they are usually wrong there are educationists of a kind, too, who have woolly notions at the other extreme. They appear to assume that commerce is a profession like the law or medi- cine, as if there were a body of principles applicable to commercial technique capable of being classed and taught in the same way as different branches of legal and medical science. But when the subject of commercial education is examined in detail, we must push back beyond the mass of technicalities to a foundation of economics, for a body of principles. The study of economics ought to find a place in the curriculum of every secondary school it has been neglected in the past, partly because of the abstract manner in which it has been presented by many of the earlier writers. But the subject is an intensely practical one, dealing with problems of everyday life. Some knowledge of economics is essential to the proper discharge of the duties of citizenship no present captain of industry can afford to be ignorant of it, and in the immediate future a knowledge of its principles will be indis- pensable to employers and employees if our country is to enjoy industrial peace, and if it is to be purged of the hysterical ideas of street-comer anarchy. Our purpose is, however, not to demonstrate the value of economics as a school.subject-no educationist would deny it-but to insist upon it being part and parcel of any scheme of commercial education. Neither should any pupil taking a commercial course be able to escape History and Civics, together with two modern languages-with something of their literatures, too, for the sake of his soul. But all that local control in Wales appears to demand as commercial education is instruction in Book-keeping, Shorthand and Typewriting: the