s.

This want of unity between the various parts of our educational system
manifests itself again in the indefiniteness of aim of many of our
Higher Schools, and in the lack of co-ordination between the Higher
School on the one hand, and institutions providing university and
advanced instruction on the other. Up till quite recently, the sole aim
of our Secondary Schools was to provide students for the Universities
and to supply the needs of the learned professions. But with the
economic development of the country, and as a consequence of the keen
international competition between nation and nation in the economic
sphere, there has arisen a demand for a higher education different in
kind from that provided by the older Universities, and a need for a type
of Secondary School different in aim and curriculum from that which
looks mainly to the provision of students intending to enter upon some
one or other of the so-called well recognised learned professions. It is
here, when compared and contrasted with the educational systems of some
of our Continental neighbours, that we find the weakest point in our own
system, and at the present time our most urgent need is for the
extension and better equipment of the central institutions of the
country which provide higher technical and commercial instruction.

This unsatisfactory condition of things is due in large measure, as we
have already pointed out, to our innate dislike as a nation of all
system-making, and to the distrust felt by many minds of any and every
form of State control of education. Hence, partly from these causes,
partly as a result of historical conditions, it has followed that
various authorities have in this country the guidance and control of
education, with the usual result of want of unity of aim, of lack of
correlation of means, and in some cases of overlapping and waste of the
means of higher education.

In the second place, while much has been done since the advent of
compulsory elementary education to better the means of education and to
increase the facilities for the higher instruction of the youth of the
country, there is a widespread belief that all the hopes held out by
the early advocates of universal compulsory education have not been
realised, and that our Primary Schools in large measure have failed to
turn out the type of citizen which a State such as ours requires for her
after-service.

Universal education has not proved a panacea for all