"English education" by Kenneth Lindsay

Kenneth Lindsay was a politician who sat as an MP for National Labour, National Independent, and independent (the last MP for Combined English Universities), serving as a Lord of the Admiralty and as a Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education. This book was written in 1941, during the Second World War and before the Butler 1945 Education Act.

It is a very brief (wartime paper rationing?) utterly one-sided history of education with a brief look at what might happen next. Some wonderful quotes:

• HMI "move quietly among the schools befriending teachers".
• "A wise head leaves his staff free to compose their own syllabuses within a general framework."
• Examinations exercise "considerable control and sometimes tyranny over pupil and teacher alike".
• "All recent researches of psychology compel us to think more of the individual child .... it becomes more and more difficult to reconcile a rigid and centralised scheme of examinations with this."

August 2013; 48 pages