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40 broken up into two sub-stages: the lower secondary and the higher secondary. It further recommended that the elementary and lower secondary stage should cover the first ten years of school and that the higher secondary stage should cover the last two years. It is necessary to understand the reasons which led the Education Commission to make these recommendations. The Education Commission found that whenever the course of secondary education is made continuous and unbroken, as in the higher secondary schools of Delhi or Madhya Pradesh, two undesirable consequences follow. The first is that the expansion of secondary education is much larger than necessary or desirable. This is because the principle of selective admissions cannot be introduced at the beginning of the stage (Class IX) when the students are too young and because every student who enters the stage has to continue till the very end because of the continuous character of the course. Such a system therefore prevents the students from leaving the school at the end of Class X, although they would be eligible for admission to many vocaticnal courses at this point. Secondly, the continuous character of the course compels the student to decide upon his future career at a very premature stage when he is entering Class IX and is about 13 or 14 years old. This is academically undesirable and in fact, Dr. D. S. Kothari has condemned it as a system of “child marriage”. The Education Commission was therefore strongly of the view that the secondary stage should be broken into two parts at the end of Class X that the students should continue to receive general education till the end of this stage, and that in the next higher secondary stage of two years, two distinct streams should be introduced, one stream preparing the students for admission to universities and the other preparing them for different vocational