three centuries earlier. Dependent on the
fees of their pupils or on special funds or endowments, these schools
could not, for the classes unable to pay a fee, adequately supplement
the elementary schools of the country, which provide for such
children education at most up to fourteen or fifteen years of age. The
Education Act of 1902, therefore, placed education beyond this age in
the hands of local authorities, the Board of Education supplementing
the rates by grants for secondary education--so that publicly owned
schools have been started by municipalities and County Councils, while
other institutions receive grants on certain conditions.

Schools of all the types mentioned and a few others, providing
education at least from ten to sixteen (or eighteen) years of age,
are known as secondary schools, and it is to work in them that this
article refers.[1] Various as may be their origins, and different
their aims, the teachers in them form a fairly homogeneous group,
with definite points in common, resulting from the requirements of the
Board of Education for the earning of the grant now paid to most of
these schools, or for the register in force for a short time--as
well as from the co-ordinating influence of membership of the
Headmistresses' or the Assistant Mistresses' Associations and other
professional and educational bodies, and of educational literature
from the publications of the Board of Education downwards.

It would be well if for this, as for other parts of educational work,
people of middle age, or in fact all whose school days lie in the
past, would dismiss their ideas gained from schools of even the end
of the nineteenth century, and realise that the daily life of a school
to-day is, in most cases, very different from that which they have
in their minds. The time-table and the class-room work may not
appear dissimilar to the casual observer, but a difference there
is, nevertheless. The chief alteration, however, is that a girl's
education is increasingly carried on by many agencies other than
these. In the school society rather than in the class-room lesson,
at net-ball and hockey rather than in the drill lesson, on the school
stage or in the school choir she learns, rather than is taught, her
most valuable lessons. Examinations still exist, it is true; but these
come later in a girl's school life, and are more frequently based on
the school curriculum and held in the school than used to be the case.