Thunderer over the Schools

Before November befogs the Thames, the House of Commons will have a try at overhauling British education-if it sticks to its order of business. It better had or prepare to hear crashing thunder.

For three years the London Times Educational Supplement and the Supplement's editor, energetic, fiftyish Harold Collett Dent, have been pitching thunderbolts, helping arouse the public until Parliament is cornered. A reform program, presented to Parliament by the head of the Board of Education, would use the first seven postwar years to create a system costing -L-67,400,000 more annually, a more than 50% hike in the British education budget. Some proposed reforms:

> Equal opportunity for all to get as much education as they can qualify for.

> Unified administration of elementary, secondary and "farther" education, elimination of the partition between elementary and higher schooling.

>-- A boost of the top compulsory-schooling age from 14 to 16, with compulsory part-time education up to 18. ^ More free milk, shoes, medicine for pupils and increased "amenities" in secondary schools.

> Religious instruction in state schools with parental option to withdraw children from religious classes.

"Bloody, Bold and Resolute." Editor Dent, the son of a nonconformist preacher, has given the Times's still ponderous, now reformist educational supplement more influence in England than any general educational magazine has in the U.S. He likes to quote Shakespeare: "Be bloody, bold and resolute," and he has a popular cause in Britain's war-born determination that higher education shall not be confined to England's moneyed classes.

Dent lays about him right & left. He attacks the Labor Party's educational proposals for "timidities and vaguenesses," the Government a.s "pettifogging," headmasters as petty authoritarians, public (British for private) schools for monopolizing key public posts for "old boys," education officials for letting old school ties obscure their vision.

Britain is in no mood, says Dent, to tolerate those who obstruct educational reform. The Manchester Guardian, too, warns M.P.s: ". . . The nation will not easily forgive. . . ."

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