Abstract
IF, as there is good reason for believing, an Education Bill is shortly to be presented to Parliament, no one man's contribution towards that desirable end has been greater than the contribution of Dr. H. G. Stead. His professional experience for the work he was doing was admirably wide and varied. This enabled him, practically and expertly, to examine the education system and to make sound and far-reaching proposals for its improvement ; but merely to say that he made proposals would be to present a thin and colourless picture of Stead. The real picture is one of a colourful, dynamic yet intensely sympathetic personality. He did not merely examine the education system in the manner of the cold and careful administrator. He had formed his own very clear ideas concerning reforms which he was deeply convinced were essential to the practical implementation of the democratic ideal. He wrote prolifically about his ideals ; he went about the country tirelessly and persistently and lectured about them. He read and he listened to those who appeared to differ from him on method or principle, but everyone with whom he talked or worked or argued recognized his brilliance, his clear vision of the shape of -things to come, and, above all, his kindliness and his passionate sincerity. It is difficult, at this juncture, to sum up his work. Generalization is notoriously difficult and uncertain, but in the planning of the new system which he envisaged, it seems clear that, if civics be the “most architectonic of the arts”, he pointed the way by which that art might illumine and widen both the process and end of education.
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MURRAY, J. Dr. H. G. Stead. Nature 151, 273 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151273b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151273b0