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Just before Christmas of 1970 I received a letter from a French friend who had enabled me during the period 1950–1960 to visit, in Paris, many of the new Industrial Complementary Courses which were being built up as part of the French post‐war drive to restore and advance the nation's industrial life after the sad years of the Occupation. These Industrial Complementary Courses represented the lowest level of technical education and recruited, in a fairly wide field of preparation for skilled factory work, boys and girls who, by their teachers, were regarded as some of the least able pupils. They were not educationally subnormal, and they were not those of the absolutely bottom stratum, academically speaking, but they were boys and girls for whom, in the academic eyes of the average secondary school teacher, normal bookish secondary schooling was impossible. The three years of Industrial Complementary schooling were a post‐primary alternative to any of the other forms of education from the age of 12 to the school‐leaving age of 15 years. The youngsters concerned had already shown that in the bookish studies which had hitherto constituted the bulk of their schooling, they were either thoroughly incompetent or had reached the stage of utter boredom and lack of interest. So, for them, there were now these various dust‐bins provided, under the heading Manual and Industrial.

If things develop as they should, Canada and persons and things Canadian should become ever more important, in the decades ahead, to the people of the British Isles. There are several reasons for this. The first was expressed last August in the Calgary Herald in an article which stated firmly that, even though the United States dominates the economic life of Canada, the different international viewpoint of Canada ought, in the councils of the world, to be made ever more apparent. Canadians, as a whole, are very anxious to help the building up of a harmonious cooperating world and less fiercely doctrinaire than most Americans in their opposition to the allied ‘evils’ of socialism and communism and their delegates at international conferences have been very helpful in this respect.