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results, we cannot repress the disgust we feel at the sectarian bitterness which subjects the education of the country to a passionate predilection for this or that refinement of doctrine, formulas, or observances on the part of the managers of schools, not of the parents who send their children to them indiscriminately. The day is past when we had to war against the bigoted enemies of popular education; but those our ancient adversaries are in some degree avenged by the intolerable cant of the religionists, and the equally extravagant pretensions of the lay school managers, whose high-flown schemes and brilliant promises are alike annihilated by the poor practical results of all their systems.

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Is it not a mere mockery,' says Dr. Hook, the present Dean of Chichester, to tell persons that there is a religious education given in our National schools, because the children are permitted to dogs'ear a Bible? Is not the education almost irreligious when instruction is given on some important points of theology, and yet no care is taken with respect to spiritual training? To make the Bible a classbook, where the education given is avowedly secular, is a profanation of the sacred volume. Children ought to be taught that it is, what it is in truth, the word of the living God, too sacred for common use, and to be employed only when religious instruction is given.'

I never in one instance,' says one of the Assistant Commissioners, 'found the slightest apparent interest excited in a class by the reading lesson; and this no doubt is one of the causes of the fault into which children almost universally fall, of reading mechanically without any apparent notion that the words have a meaning.'

At this point, some positive inferences may be fairly drawn from the facts ascertained by the Royal Commission. On the two first-mentioned classes of grants for building schools and for the establishment of training colleges we have no remark to make. They were urgently required; they have been judiciously applied; but they are of a temporary character, inasmuch as the extension of school building is not now required at the rate of more than one hundred or two hundred schools a year, and the existing training colleges more than suffice for the production of an adequate number of teachers.

But we entertain grave doubts as to the principle on which the personal grants to pupil-teachers, &c. have been made, and these doubts the Report of the Commission has not removed. To justify these grants it must be assumed that in this matter of public education all the natural laws of demand and supply are to be inverted, and that there is one calling in life, of essential utility to the well being of society, to which young men and women will not devote themselves in sufficient numbers, without a large encouragement or bounty from the nation. It

would further appear that although this calling is by no means repulsive or unremunerative, these young persons, so trained to it at the public expense, are only to be retained in it by an addition of about 20 per cent. to their salaries from the public Treasury. A very large sum of money has actually been voted by Parliament, applied by the Education Committee, and received by these 25,000 individuals, for this purpose.

The mere statement of these facts seems to us to place them in a very questionable light. Every other class of men throughout society, from the highest dignities and professions down to the humblest calling, have to fight their own way, to rely on their own resources, and to sell their labour at the true market price. The certificated schoolmaster alone is, in this country, the creature of the Government-taught, trained, inspected, salaried, and protected by a highly centralised system of administrative authority. We have already said that we hold that system to be a dangerous exception to the administrative principles of this country: we now add that we believe it to be no less injurious to the class of persons who are the object of it.

The inevitable effect of thus applying Government patronage, high-sounding official names, and public money to this object, has been, that the whole system of popular instruction has been pitched too high. This result may be traced at every step. In the first place, the Committee of Council on Education appear to have fallen into the error of mistaking the means for the end. They have, since 1846, applied a very large proportion of the grant, not to building schools, or even to aiding schools, but to making schoolmasters. They were of opinion (rightly enough), that this was the thing most needed, and the most essential service the State could render to popular education. As far as the personal attainments and high characters of the 25,000 individuals are concerned, on whom these advantages have been bestowed, the result is perfectly successful. They are extremely well educated, well behaved, and valuable members of society for many purposes. But are they primary schoolmasters? In the first place, after the education they have received, and the habits of life they have acquired, the average salaries of teachers which can be given throughout the country are inadequate to satisfy their wants, and to retain their

To such absurd lengths was this carried, that at one time (Minute of 21st Dec. 1846) the expectation of obtaining employment in the public service was held out to pupil-teachers who might not 'display the highest qualifications in their examinations for school'masters.' This Minute was, however, rescinded in 1852, but the effect remains.

services. The State therefore, having spent a large sum in raising these persons to their present position, is obliged to spend a further sum in augmentation of their incomes: otherwise they would naturally turn the acquirements they have obtained at the public expense to more lucrative callings. But is this class of highly accomplished schoolmasters, fresh from training colleges, which certainly surpass in many practical respects our highest public schools, exactly the class of men best adapted to the instruction of children under ten years of age in the first steps of human knowledge? The Commissioners reply in the negative. They are perfect in all respects except that of teaching the junior classes, including 75 per cent. of the scholars, those rudiments which are most needed. So that the whole system of the Committee of Council on Education lands us in this absurd result-that we have created at a vast expense a body of men and women so superior to their station in life and to their humble work, that they cannot subsist without a vote in aid of their incomes from Parliament and the Privy Council, and that they do not perform with effect the drudgery of teaching very young children to spell and to cipher. The true value of a school to the country does not consist in the accomplishments of its head master or the proficiency of a few leading pupils, whose superior abilities make them an object of interest to the master himself, to the managers, and to the inspector. These are a minority who may, and probably will, rise to a higher station in society; or, as is now very frequently the case, they already belong to a higher station; for many parents in the middle ranks of life, finding how excellent an education can be obtained for next to nothing, now send their children to the popular schools, where of course they take a high place and attract to themselves the advantages designed by Parliament and the State for their poorer neighbours. But the real test of the value of a popular school is its effect on the ignorance of the country, its relation to the large majority of children in the humblest station, to that immense body of human beings who have no other instruction, no previous knowledge, no further assistance when they enter upon the hard and rude lives they are doomed to lead. Tried by this test, the Commission tells us, that the results of the present system are scanty indeed; the upper surface may be brilliant enough, but the social depths are untouched. We are by no means certain, though it may be a heresy to say so, that less highly trained teachers and less artificial methods of teaching than those now in vogue, were not better adapted to reach those humble classes and contracted minds into which we would throw some glimmer

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ing of light and knowledge. The teacher must not be too far removed from his scholars; and there was this of good in the old monitorial system of Joseph Lancaster, that the drudgery of teaching spelling, for example, was not thrown upon those who are too accomplished to perform it. The modern system of highly trained and highly paid, certificated masters has, on the contrary, produced a class of teachers who would be most valuable agents for the education of the middle classes, but who are far less qualified to devote themselves to the humbler duties of instructing the lowest classes in society. Indeed, one of the witnesses states that many of them are now taking assistant masterships in grammar schools. It is certain that a much better education can now be obtained in a National school for two pence a week, than in a middle school for one or two shillings a week. These teachers are naturally dissatisfied with their position when they discover that their superior attainments can rarely be brought into play in the contracted sphere of a village school for children under eleven. Let any one compare the high range of subjects which a successful pupilteacher is compelled to master before he obtains his certificate, with the low range of duties he is expected to fulfil for the remainder of his life, and it will be no subject of surprise that his work is sometimes a failure and his life often a disappointment.

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Mr. Senior furnishes us with a specimen of the examination papers of the Queen's scholars in 1857 and 1859. It is impossible to conceive anything more extravagant than the range of questions addressed to these young persons, male and female, at this stage of their career; and on answering these questions, be it remembered, their success in life depends. A girl of eighteen or twenty is asked What events are associated with these places - Hobah, Beerlahai Roi, Mizpah, Peniel, Shalem, 'Sechem, Luz? to give an exact and complete analysis of a considerable portion of one of St. Paul's Epistles-to give an analysis of the Athanasian Creed-to describe the chief points of difference between the first Prayer-book of Edward VI. and 'that now in use:-in English history, to give some account of 'the minority of Richard II. and of the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle: -and to explain, as to a class of children, the spring and neap tides. In the papers of 1859 the Queen's scholars are told to 'write a complete sketch of the reign of Edgar, and to give the 'terms of the secret Treaty of 1670.' For this incredible mockery of common sense, we must suppose that the Lords of the Council or their Examiners are responsible, since these examination papers are submitted to them, and, for aught we

know to the contrary, prepared by them. We leave them, without another word of comment, to the judgment of the reader.

One of the consequences of the direct interference of the Government in any branch of employment is to raise the price. of labour in that branch to an unnatural point. Accordingly we are not surprised to find that the expense of the present system, as compared with its own results, and likewise as compared with the corresponding institutions of other countries, is enormous. In England there are independent resources which exist in no other country. The financial aid of the State bears after all but a small proportion to the vast sums voluntarily raised for the purposes of education, partly by the endowed clergy and partly by the public. The Parliamentary grant is more than doubled by these private contributions. The popu lation of England and Wales is less than half the population of France. But Mr. Arnold assures us that the English Parliamentary grant alone would on the French system entirely maintain 25,000 schools, instead of assisting only 8500; and that it would completely educate 1,500,000 of French children, in place of some 950,000 English ones. The Government are

to a great extent responsible for this lavish expenditure. Under

*The Commissioners state that whilst the Government has spent on education 4,400,000l., the sum raised from other sources for the same purpose is 8,800,000l. In France the whole charge of public education is thrown on the State, with a slight contribution from local taxation. M. Guizot said, when he brought in the French law of public instruction in 1832:

'In our country all the ancient and various establishments for public instruction have disappeared, with the masters and the property, the corporations and the endowments. We have no longer within the great society small societies of a private kind, subsisting independently, and devoted to the various grades of education. What has been restored, or is struggling into birth, of this description, is evidently not in a position to meet the public wants. In the matter of public instruction, as in the whole of our social organisation, a general system, founded and maintained by the State, is to us a necessity; it is the condition which our history and the genius of the nation have imposed on us. We desire unity; the State alone can give it we have destroyed everything; we must create anew.'

But the case of England is precisely the reverse of this. We have all these resources. We do not desire unity. We do not want to create anew. Nevertheless, the expenditure of the State, in addition to all these private resources, has been greater in proportion to the number educated and to the population than in continental countries which have no other funds devoted to this object.

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