of teaching any religious formulary in a rate school would thus
depend _exclusively_ on local circumstances, and would
accordingly be so decided by the Education Department in case of
dispute, I was informed in explanation that 'their lordships''
letter was intended to convey to me that no general rule, beyond
that stated in the first paragraph of their letter, could at
present be laid down by them; and that their decision in each
particular case must depend on the special circumstances
accompanying it.
"I think it would appear from this that it may yet be in many cases
both lawful and expedient to teach religious formularies in rate
schools. H. I.
"Steyning, _November_ 5, 1870."
Of course I do not mean to suggest that the editor of the _Guardian_
is bound by the opinions of his correspondent; but I cannot help
thinking that I do not misrepresent him, when I say that he also thinks
"that it may yet be, in many cases, both lawful and expedient to teach
religious formularies in rate schools under these circumstances."
It is not uncharitable, therefore, to assume that, the express words of
the Act of Parliament notwithstanding, all the sectaries who are
toiling so hard for seats in the London School Board have the lively
hope of the gentleman from Steyning, that it may be "both lawful and
expedient to teach religious formularies in rate schools;" and that
they mean to do their utmost to bring this happy consummation about. [2]
Now the pathetic emotion to which I have referred, as accompanying my
contemplations of the violent struggles of so many excellent persons,
is caused by the circumstance that, so far as I can judge, their labour
is in vain.
Supposing that the London School Board contains, as it probably will
do, a majority of sectaries; and that they carry over the heads of a
minority, a resolution that certain theological formulas, about which
they all happen to agree,--say, for example, the doctrine of the
Trinity,--shall be taught in the schools. Do they fondly imagine that
the minority will not at once dispute their interpretation of the Act,
and appeal to the Education Department to settle that dispute? And if
so, do they suppose that any Minister of Education, who wants to keep
his place, will tighten boundaries which the Legislature has left
loose; and will give a "final decision" which shall be offensive to
every Unitarian and to every Jew in the House of Commons, besides
creating a precedent which will afterwards be used to the injury of
every Nonconformist? The editor of the _Guardian_ tells his
friends sternly to resist every attempt to throw the burden of making
the teaching undenominational on the managers, and thanks me for the
warning I have given him. I return the thanks, with interest, for
_his_ warning, as to the course the party he represents intends to
pursue, and for enabling me thus to draw public attention to a
perfectly constitutional and effectual mode of checkmating them.
And, in truth, it is wonderful to note the surprising entanglement into
which our able editor gets himself in the struggle between his native
honesty and judgment and the necessities of his party. "We could not
see," says he, "in the face of this clause how a distinct
denominational tone could be honestly given to schools nominally
general." There speaks the honest and clear-headed man. "Any attempt to
throw the burden of making the teaching undenominational must be
sternly resisted." There speaks the advocate holding a brief for his
party. "Verily," as Trinculo says, "the monster hath two mouths:" the
one, the forward mouth, tells us very justly that the teaching cannot
"honestly" be "distinctly denominational;" but the other, the
backward mouth, asserts that it must by no manner of means be
"undenominational." Putting the two utterances together, I can only
interpret them to mean that the teaching is to be "indistinctly
denominational." If the editor of the _Guardian_ had not shown
signs of anger at my use of the term "theological fog," I should have
been tempted to suppose it must have been what he had in his mind,
under the name of "indistinct denominationalism." But this reading
being plainly inadmissible, I can only imagine that he inculcates the
teaching of formulas common to a number of denominations.
But the Education Department has already told the gentleman from
Steyning that any such proceeding will be illegal. "According to a
well-known rule of interpreting Acts of Parliament, 'denomination'
would be held to include 'denominations.'" In other words, we must read
the Act thus:--
"No religious catechism or religious formulary which is distinctive of
any particular _denominations_ shall be taught."
Thus we are really very much indebted to the editor of the _Guardian_
and his correspondent. The one has shown us that the sectaries
mean to try to get as much denominational teaching as they can agree
upon among themselves, forced into the elementary schools; while the
other has obtained a formal declaration from the Educational Department
that any such attempt will contravene the Act of Parliament, and that,
therefore, the unsectarian, law-abiding members of the School Boards
may safely reckon upon bringing down upon their opponents the heavy
hand of the Minister of Education. [3]
So much for the powers of the School Boards. Limited as they seem to
be, it by no means follows that such Boards, if they are composed of
intelligent and practical men, really more in earnest about education
than about sectarian squabbles, may not exert a very great amount of
influence. And, from many circumstances, this is especially likely to
be the case with the London School Board, which, if it conducts itself
wisely, may become a true educational parliaments as subordinate in
authority to the Minister of Education, theoretically, as the
Legislature is to the Crown, and yet, like the Legislature, possessed
of great practical authority. And I suppose that no Minister of
Education would be other than glad to have the aid of the deliberations
of such a body, or fail to pay careful attention to its
recommendations.
What, then, ought to be the nature and scope of the education which a
School Board should endeavour to give to every child under its
influence, and for which it should try to obtain the aid of the
Parliamentary grants? In my judgment it should include at least the
following kinds of instruction and of discipline:--
1. Physical training and drill, as part of the regular business of the
school.
It is impossible to insist too much on the importance of this part
of education for the children of the poor of great towns. All the
conditions of their lives are unfavourable to their physical
well-being. They are badly lodged, badly housed, badly fed, and live
from one year's end to another in bad air, without chance of a change.
They have no play-grounds; they amuse themselves with marbles and
chuck-farthing, instead of cricket or hare-and-hounds; and if it were
not for the wonderful instinct which leads all poor children of tender
years to run under the feet of cab-horses whenever they can, I know not
how they would learn to use their limbs with agility.
Now there is no real difficulty about teaching drill and the simpler
kinds of gymnastics. It is done admirably well, for example, in the
North Surrey Union schools; and a year or two ago when I had an
opportunity of inspecting these schools, I was greatly struck with the
effect of such training upon the poor little waifs and strays of
humanity, mostly picked out of the gutter, who are being made into
cleanly, healthy, and useful members of society in that excellent
institution.
Whatever doubts people may entertain about the efficacy of natural
selection, there can be none about artificial selection; and the
breeder who should attempt to make, or keep up, a fine stock of pigs,
or sheep, under the conditions to which the children of the poor are
exposed, would be the laughing-stock even of the bucolic mind.
Parliament has already done something in this direction by declining to
be an accomplice in the asphyxiation of school children. It refuses
to make any grant to a school in which the cubical contents of the
school-room are inadequate to allow of proper respiration. I should
like to see it make another step in the same direction, and either
refuse to give a grant to a school in which physical training is not
a part of the programme, or, at any rate, offer to pay upon such
training. If something of the kind is not done, the English physique,
which has been, and is still, on the whole, a grand one, will become as
extinct as the dodo in the great towns.
And then the moral and intellectual effect of drill, as an introduction
to, and aid of, all other sorts of training, must not be overlooked. If
you want to break in a colt, surely the first thing to do is to catch
him and get him quietly to face his trainer; to know his voice and bear
his hand; to learn that colts have something else to do with their
heels than to kick them up whenever they feel so inclined; and to
discover that the dreadful human figure has no desire to devour, or
even to beat him, but that, in case of attention and obedience, he may
hope for patting and even a sieve of oats.
But, your "street Arabs," and other neglected poor children, are rather
worse and wilder than colts; for the reason that the horse-colt has
only his animal instincts in him, and his mother, the mare, has been
always tender over him, and never came home drunk and kicked him in her
life; while the man-colt is inspired by that very real devil, perverted
manhood, and _his_ mother may have done all that and more. So, on
the whole, it may probably be even more expedient to begin your attempt
to get at the higher nature of the child, than at that of the colt,
from the physical side.
2. Next in order to physical training I put the instruction of
children, and especially of girls, in the elements of household work
and of domestic economy; in the first place for their own sakes, and in
the second for that of their future employers.
Every one who knows anything of the life of the English poor is aware
of the misery and waste caused by their want of knowledge of domestic
economy, and by their lack of habits of frugality and method. I suppose
it is no exaggeration to say that a poor Frenchwoman would make the
money which the wife of a poor Englishman spends in food go twice as
far, and at the same time turn out twice as palatable a dinner. Why
Englishmen, who are so notoriously fond of good living, should be so
helplessly incompetent in the art of cookery, is one of the great
mysteries of nature; but from the varied abominations of the railway
refreshment-rooms to the monotonous dinners of the poor, English
feeding is either wasteful or nasty, or both.
And as to domestic service, the groans of the housewives of England
ascend to heaven! In five cases out of six the girl who takes a
"place" has to be trained by her mistress in the first rudiments of
decency and order; and it is a mercy if she does not turn up her nose
at anything like the mention of an honest and proper economy. Thousands
of young girls are said to starve, or worse, yearly in London; and at
the same time thousands of mistresses of households are ready to pay
high wages for a decent housemaid, or cook, or a fair workwoman; and
can by no means get what they want.
Surely, if the elementary schools are worth anything, they may put an
end to a state of things which is demoralising the poor, while it is
wasting the lives of those better off in small worries and annoyances.
3. But the boys and girls for whose education the School Boards have to
provide, have not merely to discharge domestic duties, but each of them
is a member of a social and political organisation of great complexity,
and has, in future life, to fit himself into that organisation, or be
crushed by it. To this end it is surely needful, not only that they
should be made acquainted with the elementary laws of conduct, but that
their affections should be trained, so as to love with all their hearts
that conduct which tends to the attainment of the highest good for
themselves and their fellow men, and to hate with all their hearts that
opposite course of action which is fraught with evil.
So far as the laws of conduct are determined by the intellect, I
apprehend that they belong to science, and to that part of science
which is called morality. But the engagement of the affections in
favour of that particular kind of conduct which we call good, seems to
me to be something quite beyond mere science. And I cannot but think
that it, together with the awe and reverence, which have no kinship
with base fear, but arise whenever one tries to pierce below the
surface of things, whether they be material or spiritual, constitutes
all that has any unchangeable reality in religion.
And just as I think it would be a mistake to confound the science,
morality, with the affection, religion; so do I conceive it to be a
most lamentable and mischievous error, that the science, theology, is
so confounded in the minds of many--indeed, I might say, of the
majority of men.
I do not express any opinion as to whether theology is a true science,
or whether it does not come under the apostolic definition of "science
falsely so called;" though I may be permitted to express the belief
that if the Apostle to whom that much misapplied phrase is due could
make the acquaintance of much of modern theology, he would not hesitate
a moment in declaring that it is exactly what he meant the words to
denote.
But it is at any rate conceivable, that the nature of the Deity, and
his relations to the universe, and more especially to mankind, are
capable of being ascertained, either inductively or deductively, or by
both processes. And, if they have been ascertained, then a body of
science has been formed which is very properly called theology.
Further, there can be no doubt that affection for the Being thus
defined and described by theologic science would be properly termed
religion; but it would not be the whole of religion. The affection for
the ethical ideal defined by moral science would claim equal if not
superior rights. For suppose theology established the existence of an
evil deity--and some theologies, even Christian ones, have come very
near this,--is the religious affection to be transferred from the
ethical ideal to any such omnipotent demon? I trow not. Better a
thousand times that the human race should perish under his thunderbolts
than it should say, "Evil, be thou my good."
There is nothing new, that I know of, in this statement of the
relations of religion with the science of morality on the one hand and
that of theology on the other. But I believe it to be altogether true,
and very needful, at this time, to be clearly and emphatically
recognised as such, by those who have to deal with the education
question.
We are divided into two parties--the advocates of so-called
"religious" teaching on the one hand, and those of so-called "secular"
teaching on the other. And both parties seem to me to be not only
hopelessly wrong, but in such a position that if either succeeded
completely, it would discover, before many years were over, that it had
made a great mistake and done serious evil to the cause of education.
For, leaving aside the more far-seeing minority on each side, what
the "religious" party is crying for is mere theology, under the name
of religion; while the "secularists" have unwisely and wrongfully
admitted the assumption of their opponents, and demand the abolition
of all "religious" teaching, when they only want to be free
of theology--Burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches!
But my belief is, that no human being, and no society composed of human
beings, ever did, or ever will, come to much, unless their conduct was
governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal. Undoubtedly,
your gutter child may be converted by mere intellectual drill into "the
subtlest of all the beasts of the field;" but we know what has become
of the original of that description, and there is no need to increase
the number of those who imitate him successfully without being aided by
the rates. And if I were compelled to choose for one of my own
children, between a school in which real religious instruction is
given, and one without it, I should prefer the former, even though the
child might have to take a good deal of theology with it. Nine-tenths
of a dose of bark is mere half-rotten wood; but one swallows it for the
sake of the particles of quinine, the beneficial effect of which may be
weakened, but is not destroyed, by the wooden dilution, unless in a few
cases of exceptionally tender stomachs.
Hence, when the great mass of the English people declare that they want
to have the children in the elementary schools taught the Bible, and
when it is plain from the terms of the Act, the debates in and out
of Parliament, and especially the emphatic declarations of the
Vice-President of the Council, that it was intended that such
Bible-reading should be permitted, unless good cause for prohibiting it
could be shown, I do not see what reason there is for opposing that
wish. Certainly, I, individually, could with no shadow of consistency
oppose the teaching of the children of other people to do that which my
own children are taught to do. And, even if the reading the Bible were
not, as I think it is, consonant with political reason and justice, and
with a desire to act in the spirit of the education measure, I am
disposed to think it might still be well to read that book in the
elementary schools.
I have always been strongly in favour of secular education, in the
sense of education without theology; but I must confess I have been no
less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the
religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be
kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these
matters, without the use of the Bible. The Pagan moralists lack life
and colour, and even the noble Stoic, Marcus Antonius, is too high and
refined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as a whole; make the
severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings
and positive errors; eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do, if
left to himself, all that it is not desirable for children to occupy
themselves with; and there still remains in this old literature a vast
residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great
historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven
into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that
it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble
and simple, from John-o'-Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and
Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and
purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary
form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his
village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other
civilisations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest
limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other
book could children be so much humanised and made to feel that each
figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a
momentary space in the interval between two eternities; and earns the
blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good
and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their
work?
On the whole, then, I am in favour of reading the Bible, with such
grammatical, geographical, and historical explanations by a lay-teacher
as may be needful, with rigid exclusion of any further theological
teaching than that contained in the Bible itself. And in stating what
this is, the teacher would do well not to go beyond the precise words
of the Bible; for if he does, he will, in the first place, undertake a
task beyond his strength, seeing that all the Jewish and Christian
sects have been at work upon that subject for more than two thousand
years, and have not yet arrived, and are not in the least likely to
arrive, at an agreement; and, in the second place, he will certainly
begin to teach something distinctively denominational, and thereby come
into violent collision with the Act of Parliament.
4. The intellectual training to be given in the elementary schools must
of course, in the first place, consist in learning to use the means of
acquiring knowledge, or reading, writing, and arithmetic; and it will
be a great matter to teach reading so completely that the act shall
have become easy and pleasant. If reading remains "hard," that
accomplishment will not be much resorted to for instruction, and still
less for amusement--which last is one of its most valuable uses to
hard-worked people. But along with a due proficiency in the use of the
means of learning, a certain amount of knowledge, of intellectual
discipline, and of artistic training should be conveyed in the
elementary schools; and in this direction--for reasons which I am
afraid to repeat, having urged them so often--I can conceive no
subject-matter of education so appropriate and so important as the
rudiments of physical science, with drawing, modelling, and singing.
Not only would such teaching afford the best possible preparation for
the technical schools about which so much is now said, but the
organisation for carrying it into effect already exists. The Science
and Art Department, the operations of which have already attained
considerable magnitude, not only offers to examine and pay the results
of such examination in elementary science and art, but it provides what
is still more important, viz. a means of giving children of high
natural ability, who are just as abundant among the poor as among the
rich, a helping hand. A good old proverb tells us that "One should not
take a razor to cut a block:" the razor is soon spoiled, and the block
is not so well cut as it would be with a hatchet. But it is worse
economy to prevent a possible Watt from being anything but a stoker, or
to give a possible Faraday no chance of doing anything but to bind
books. Indeed, the loss in such cases of mistaken vocation has no
measure; it is absolutely infinite and irreparable. And among the
arguments in favour of the interference of the State in education, none
seems to be stronger than this--that it is the interest of every one
that ability should be neither wasted, nor misapplied, by any one: and,
therefore, that every one's representative, the State, is necessarily
fulfilling the wishes of its constituents when it is helping the
capacities to reach their proper places.
It may be said that the scheme of education here sketched is too large
to be effected in the time during which the children will remain at
school; and, secondly, that even if this objection did not exist, it
would cost too much.
I attach no importance whatever to the first objection until the
experiment has been fairly tried. Considering how much catechism, lists
of the kings of Israel, geography of Palestine, and the like, children
are made to swallow now, I cannot believe there will be any difficulty
in inducing them to go through the physical training, which is more
than half play; or the instruction in household work, or in those
duties to one another and to themselves, which have a daily and hourly
practical interest. That children take kindly to elementary science and
art no one can doubt who has tried the experiment properly. And if
Bible-reading is not accompanied by constraint and solemnity, as if it
were a sacramental operation, I do not believe there is anything in
which children take more pleasure. At least I know that some of the
pleasantest recollections of my childhood are connected with the
voluntary study of an ancient Bible which belonged to my grandmother.
There were splendid pictures in it, to be sure; but I recollect little
or nothing about them save a portrait of the high priest in his
vestments. What come vividly back on my mind are remembrances of my
delight in the histories of Joseph and of David; and of my keen
appreciation of the chivalrous kindness of Abraham in his dealing with
Lot. Like a sudden flash there returns back upon me, my utter scorn of
the pettifogging meanness of Jacob, and my sympathetic grief over the
heartbreaking lamentation of the cheated Esau, "Hast thou not a
blessing for me also, O my father?" And I see, as in a cloud, pictures
of the grand phantasmagoria of the Book of Revelation.