tion which compels him to choose between Welsh and any other necessary or desirable subject. Such a flexible organisation may and probably will in many schools mean a larger staff.
(d) It is regrettable that so many Welsh-speaking pupils who take Welsh at the School Certificate examination should still be entered for the second-language papers designed for those whose mother tongue is English. The effect on the pupils themselves cannot but be harmful; apart from the fact that they are thereby denied the discipline and cultural enrichment which should accompany the serious study of the mother tongue at the Secondary school stage, the amount of preparation required to enable many of them to pass is relatively so small as to lead them to look upon Welsh as a "soft-option" and so the language loses dignity and prestige.
(e) The preceding observations refer only to the unsatisfactory position of Welsh as a subject in the curriculum of the school. When, however, the place of Welsh as a medium of instruction is considered, the position is seen to be even less satisfactory. There are only a few secondary grammar schools in Wales where the Welsh language is used even largely as a medium of instruction. In the Welsh-speaking areas Welsh is used perforce in varying degrees in the lower forms, merely because the pupils' command of English has not yet reached the stage where it can be used freely as a medium of instruction. The aim, however, is to reach this stage as quickly as possible, and, except for those schools where Welsh is used as a medium in such subjects as religious instruction and Welsh history, English becomes the exclusive medium by the time the pupil reaches his third year in the school. By that time his native language has ceased to occupy any place in the curriculum other than that of one subject among many others, and even then it may be only an alternative subject.
There are obvious reasons why Welsh cannot be used today as the sole medium of instruction in the secondary schools and it is unnecessary to recapitulate them. It does not follow, however, that English should be the sole medium. The normal policy in a bilingual country should be that a pupil should be able to use either language, and the lack of such a policy in Wales is already evident in the present condition and prospects of the Welsh language. Its incapacity to deal adequately with many aspects of modern civilisation is due not to any inherent weakness in the language itself but in large measure to the fact that the institutions of higher education, the secondary schools, the training colleges and the university, have never seriously attempted to use Welsh as a medium of instruction. Had the will existed, such difficulties as the lack of books and of a technical vocabulary would have been overcome long ago, for within these last 25 years precisely similar difficulties have been overcome in Belgium and Palestine, so that today Flemish in Flemish-speaking Belgium, and Hebrew in Palestine are used as media of instruction throughout the whole field of education, from the primary school up to and including the University. The writing on the wall should be
