13 JANUARY 1900, Page 25

Educational Reform. By Fabian Ware. (Methuen and Co. 2s. Gd.)—Mr.

Ware cautions us against too great a readiness to import foreign methods into this country, on the one hand, and a blind refusal to learn from elsewhere, on the other. He helps us by putting things which are often misrepresented in a true light. Education, for instance, is not specialised early in Germany, where public opinion favours the classical secondary schools as producing the best results. Agricultural education in Denmark, again, is not the system which some theorists would impose on our village schools. The students at the agricultural schools are the sons and daughters, more or less grown up, of farmers. Mr. Ware has a good deal to say about various educational subjects, and what he says is always worth considering. We venture to doubt whether the impression given by his remarks on the action of the Reformation on secondary schools is quite correct. One would think from reading it that there was a great educational movement in England in the first half of the sixteenth century which the Reformation checked. Unhappily, there was a great deal of plundering, and educational endowments suffered with the rest ;.but that on the whole the religious movement of the century checked the progress of education seems a very strange paradox.