Of the 7,000 farmers’ sons who left school every year to take up farming, only 200 received any formal instruction in agriculture. Why? Because, in the 1930s, the Catholic bishops had rejected a proposal to establish 500 agricultural colleges. This was ‘an unnecessary extension of state control into education’. And, from a moral point of view, ‘there was an inherent danger in allowing boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 16 to travel unsupervised to school together’. The plan was abandoned.65
