CHURCHES AND CHILDREN A STUDY IN THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE 1902 EDUCATION ACT.

This article presents information on the controversy over the 1902 Balfour's Education Act. It was an educational success is shown by the torrent of secondary education which it undammed. But of all the educational advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this Act was decided on grounds other than educational on political and religious grounds. In all the debates on the Bill, in or out of Great Britain's Parliament, in the sermons preached about it and the pamphlets issued in their thousands, little was heard of the child. He or she was a mere pawn-it was the system that mattered. Not even Robert Morant, the brains behind the 1902 Act, had anything to say about the pupil as such. And the intense opposition which the Act aroused was based again on religious and political issues-or upon doubts as to whether the new system was the most efficient one, not so much for the child as for the nation. For the national need, then as now, was one of the prime motives for educational reform.