THE FINANCING OF GRANT-AIDED EDUCATION IN ENGLAND AND WALES

by Fletcher Harper Swift '98. University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley.

DR. SWIFT HAS PACKED his 264 pages full of interesting facts and significant figures. Take the 77 statistical tables: He treats language distribution in Wales, [32% bilingual, 4% Welsh only] the religions, [69.5 Anglicans in England, 27.8 in Wales] distribution of attendance among state-aided schools, [76.5% in public elementary, 13% part-time technical, less than 1% colleges and universities] increase in per capita cost [25s, 1871, 2695, 1935] etc. Table 194 shows, significantly, a steady flow into public schools from all church schools except the Catholic. In 32 years Anglicans had lost 850,000 pupils, Methodists 137,000, other Protestants 231,000, while Catholics gained 56,000. New York University alone enrolls more students than do the sixteen universities of England and Wales. Forty per cent of England's 50,000 are in the University of London; Cambridge is second, Oxford third. The state of Ohio has more colleges and universities and more students than all England and Wales. Average salary to full professors £1,095 (upper limit £2,000 to eleven men) average to assistant professors £664, instructors £384.

England is far behind America in democratic desire for universal education. Dr. Swift tells of the furious opposition of the House of Lords to public education in the last century. The "tradesmen masses and lower middle classes" did not gain their ends until the passage of the Fisher Act of 1918. But the armistice signed, its provisions were never fully carried out.

The universities of England, except the socially desirable Oxford and Cambridge, are "largely local," and therefore depend on the wealth of their immediate neighborhoods. Large gifts are not commonly made nor expected.

One of the largest of these benefactions was that of the Rockefeller Foundation to London University, [1927] £400,000, used for the erection of badly needed buildings.

This volume is the fifth and last of a series covering France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. It seems a pity that so much of Dr. Swift's scholarly and painstaking work should have been made obsolete by the events of the past two years in Europe.