Introductory survey of the old system of teaching--Salutary influence
of the Church--Education of Englishmen in their own homes and on the
Continent--Severity of early discipline--Dr. Busby.
I. A fair body of authentic evidence has been collected, and is here
before us, exhibiting and illustrating the origin and progress of the
educational movement, and the opportunities which our ancestors acquired
and improved for mental cultivation and literary development.
An attentive consideration of the ensuing pages may bring us to the
conclusion that the English and Scots, at all events, of former days were
not ill provided with facilities for mastering the rudiments of learning,
and that the qualifications necessary and sufficient for ordinary persons
and careers were within the reach of all men, and, as time went on, women,
of moderate intelligence and resources.
Moreover, when the taste for a more elaborate and extended system of
training, and for a circle of accomplishments, set in with the Stuarts,
the appliances of every kind for gratifying and promoting it were
superabundant; and London and other cities swarmed with experts, who
either attached themselves to academies or worked on their own account,
waiting on their clients or receiving them at their own places of
business. The youth of family who had passed from the grammar-school or
the tutor to the University, enjoyed, from the moment when professors
began to flock hither from France, Italy, and Germany as to the best
market, greatly increased facilities for completing themselves in special
departments of science, as well as in such exercises as were thought to
belong to gentlemen. As our intercourse with the Continent became more
regular and general, its fashions and sentiments were gradually
communicated to us, and we began to overcome our old insular prejudices. A
familiarity with other languages and literatures than our own, and with
the pursuits and amusements of countries which a narrow strip of sea
separated, was the beneficial consequence of the French and Italian
sympathies which the union of the crowns, after the death of the last of
the Tudors, introduced into England.
We are scarcely entitled to plume ourselves on the elevation from which it
is our privilege to look back on obsolete educational theories and
principles. The change which we witness is of recent date and of political
origin. It is within an easily measurable number of years that the
democratic wave has loosened and shaken the direct clerical jurisdiction
over our schools and our studies. What more significant fact can there be,
in proof of the conservative bigotry of those who so long exercised
control in schoolroom and college, that a primer compiled in the first
quarter of the sixteenth century was still substantially the standard
authority less than a hundred years since?
When we regard a History of English Literature, and the works which either
constitute its principal strength and glory, or even such as, rather from
the circumstances connected with them than their own intrinsic importance,
lend to it a certain incidental or special value, it becomes natural to
inquire by what process or course of training the men and women whose
names compose the roll of fame became, or were aided at least in becoming,
what they were and remain?
As for the women, they followed their studies at home under governesses
and professors; and Ballard's volume on Learned Ladies will shew what was
capable of accomplishment in a few isolated and conspicuous cases, before
any scheme for the higher education of the sex had been broached. But it
is with the men that I have more particularly to deal.
Every eminent Englishman who has done more or less to augment and enrich
our literary stores, and an infinitely greater number who have adopted
other vocations, passed of course through the scholastic ordeal. They were
sent to school, and perhaps to college; and they had books put into their
hands, as our boys have books put into theirs--books written by the
scholars of the time up to the knowledge and opinion of the time.
With the fewest exceptions, the boy was the father of the man, and what he
had himself acquired he was content to see his children acquire. There
were centuries during which the lines of instruction and the scope of
culture varied little.
The greater part of our early English teachers came across the sea, or had
been educated there; our best books were modelled on those of French or
Roman grammarians, and the improvement in our system was due, when it
came, to the _gymnasia_ and academies of the Continent.
II. We all know that the Church in early times, before it became a
conflicting and mischievous influence, did much valuable work toward the
development and progress of literature and art, and was instrumental in
preserving many monuments of ancient learning and genius, which might
otherwise have perished. But the strong clerical element in the old social
system operated beneficially on our English civilisation in another
equally important way.
For a vast length of time the schools attached to the monasteries were not
only the best, but almost the sole seminaries where an education of the
higher class could be obtained. They were, in point of fact, the
precursors of the similar establishments subsequently attached to some of
the colleges; and it is further to be remarked, that, besides the ordinary
features of a mediæval scholastic _curriculum_, they taught music for the
sake of keeping a constant succession of candidates for the choir of the
chapel. It was through the monks and through an ecclesiastical channel
that we derived both our most ancient schools of music and our primitive
educational machinery, the two alike destined to become sensible, in
course of time, of a potent secular influence, scarcely imaginable by
their monastic institutors.
Bishop Percy says that the system of instruction appears to have consisted
of learning the Psalms, probably by heart, and acquiring the principles of
music, singing, arithmetic, and grammar. Some of the boys, he adds, who
had made the art of music their profession, assisted in later life at the
religious services on special occasions, while others relinquished their
original callings, and sought their fortune as minstrels and instrumental
players.
Altogether, it is evident that music and other branches of a liberal
training were primarily indebted at the outset, and long subsequently, for
their encouragement and diffusion to the only class which was at the
period capable of undertaking tuition. We have to seek in the Church of
the Middle Ages the source of all our scholastic erudition and refinement,
and of all the humanising influence which music, in all its forms, has
exerted over society.
III. Carlisle, in his well-known work on the Endowed Schools, supplies us
with some very desirable facts touching the cathedral institutions which
preceded the lay seminaries, and over which the bishop of the diocese
presided _ex officio_. The pupils in these institutions were termed the
scholastics of the diocese; and one of the latest survivals of the system
was, perhaps, the old St. Paul's, which Colet's endowment eventually
superseded. The preponderant element here was, of course, clerical; the
boys were, as a rule, educated with a view to ecclesiastical preferment;
and those studies which lay outside the requirements of the early Church
were naturally omitted. It was a narrow and warping course of discipline,
which lasted, nevertheless, from the days of Alfred to the age of the
Tudors.
But these cathedral schools themselves had grown out of the antecedent
conventual establishments, of which hundreds must have at one time existed
among us, and consequently the former represented a forward movement and a
certain disposition to relax the severity and exclusiveness of purely
religious education. As we see that subsequently it was the practice to
attach to a college a preparatory school, as at Magdalen, Oxford, so in
the mediæval time almost every monastic house had its special educational
machinery for training aspirants to the various orders. This point does
not really come within my immediate scope; but I thought it well to shew
briefly how, as the lay schools evolved from the cathedral schools, so the
latter were an outcome from the conventual. There seems, however, to have
been one marked difference between the monastic or conventual and the
cathedral programmes, that in the latter the sciences of law and medicine,
having become independent professions, were abandoned in favour of the
academies, where youths on quitting school were specially inducted into a
knowledge of those Faculties.
Prior to the institution of colleges and schools of a better class, the
nobility and gentry often sent their children to the monasteries and
convents to be initiated in the elements or first principles of learning.
The sort of education obtained here must have been of the most meagre
character; the course was restricted to grammar, philosophy of the cast
then in vogue, and divinity; the classics were treated with comparative
neglect, and a study of the living languages was still more remote from
their design.
Even so late as the Tudor time, those who could afford to send their
children abroad found the education better, and probably cheaper; some
distinguished Englishmen, driven from their country by political or
religious differences, brought up their families whitherever they fled as
a matter of necessity.
Sir Thomas Bodley, in the account of his life written by himself in 1609,
acquaints us with the fact that when his father was living at Geneva, the
great centre of the Protestant refugees, and he was a boy of twelve, he
was sufficiently advanced in learning, through his father's care, to
attend the lectures delivered at that University in Hebrew, Greek, and
divinity, in which last his teachers were Calvin and Beza; and besides
these studies he had private tutors in the house of the gentleman with
whom he boarded, including Robertus Constantinus, the lexicographer, who
read Homer to him. On the return of the Bodleys to England upon the
accession of Elizabeth, the member of the family who was destined to
immortalise their name was sent to Oxford.
Bishop Waynflete appears to have been among the earliest men who
perceived the necessity, at all events, of grounding boys more thoroughly
in grammar, and he was the prime mover in the establishment of schools at
Waynflete, Brackley, and Oxford, where the Accidence and Syntax were
taught on an improved plan. The last-named seminary was within the
precincts of Magdalen College, and became by far the most important and
most famous of the three, in consequence of its good fortune in having
among its masters men like Anniquil and Stanbridge, who took a real
interest in their profession, and bred scholars capable of diffusing and
developing the love of acquiring knowledge and the art of communicating
it.
As Knight observes, grammar was the main object; but then the method was a
great advance on the old monastic plan. Even Jesus College, Cambridge, was
merely erected and endowed for a master and six fellows, and a certain
number of scholars to be instructed in grammar.
At the time of the Civil War, John Allibone, a Buckinghamshire man, and
author of that rather well-known Latin description of the University as
reformed by the Republicans in 1648, was head-master of Magdalen School.
In the English _Ship of Fools_, 1509, which is a good deal more than a
translation, Barclay ridicules the archaic system of teaching, and Skelton
does the same in his poetical satires. It was by the indefatigable
exposure of the inefficiency and unsoundness of the prevailing modes of
instruction that reforms were gradually conceded and accomplished. In all
political and social movements the caricaturist plays his part.
It is not surprising to find Ascham in his turn, fifty years later on,
taking exception to the school-teaching and teachers which had educated,
and more or less satisfied, so many anterior generations.
We naturally encounter in much of the literary work of the seventeenth
century advice and information in matters relating to scholastic and
academical culture wholly unhelpful to an inquiry into the training of the
middle class. In the section of a well-known book, entitled _The
Gentleman's Calling_, 8vo, 1660, dedicated to our immediate subject, the
anonymous author observes: "Scarce any that owns the name of a
_Gentleman_, but will commit his Son to the care of some Tutor, either at
home or abroad, who at first instils those Rudiments, proper to their
tenderer years, and as Age matures their parts, so advances his Lectures,
till he have led them into those spacious fields of learning, which will
afford them both Exercise and Delight. This is that _Tree of Knowledge_
upon which there is no interdict...."
The preceding extract points to a sphere of life which was wont to
conclude its preparatory stage with the Grand Tour and an initiation into
the profligacy of all the capitals of Europe; but we see that it deals
with a case in which a tutor took a youth almost, as it were, from his
nurse's apron-strings, and does not merely indicate a finishing course.
The volume from which the passage comes has a promising title, and might
have been intensely interesting and truly important; but it was written by
some dry and pedantic scribbler, and, like Osborne's _Advice to a Son_,
1656, and many other treatises of a cognate character, is a tissue of
dulness and inanity. It is characteristic of the whole that portraits of
Jeremiah and Zedekiah are selected as appropriate graphic embellishments.
From a woodcut on the back of the title-page of a _Grammatica Initialis_,
or Elementary Grammar, 1509, we form a conclusion as to the ancient
Continental method of instruction. This engraving portrays the interior of
a school, apparently situated in a crypt; the master is seated at his desk
with a book open before him, and above it a double inkstand and a pen,
both of primitive fabric. The teacher is evidently reading aloud to his
four scholars, who sit in front of him, a passage from the volume, and
they repeat after him, parson-and-clerk-wise. They learn by rote. They
have no books before them. They represent a stage in the teaching process
before the science of reading from print or MS. had been acquired by the
scholar, and copies of school-books were multiplied by the press. There
was no preparation of work. The quarter wage included no charge for books
supplied. The teaching was purely oral. So it was probably throughout. It
was thus that Stanbridge, Whittinton, Lily, and their followers conducted
their schools, long after the cradle at Magdalen had been reinforced by
other seminaries all over the country.
There is no written record of this fashion of communicating information
from the master to the pupil, so diametrically opposed to modern ideas,
but conformable to an era of general illiteracy; it is a sister-art, which
lends us a helping hand in this case by admitting us to what may be viewed
as an interior coeval with Erasmus and More.
The modern school-holidays appear to have been formerly unknown. In the
rules for the management of St. Paul's and Merchant Taylors', for
instance, where a vacation is called a _remedy_, no such indulgence was
permitted save in cases of illness; and it is curious that in the account
which Fitzstephen gives of the three seminaries already established in
London in the reign of Henry II. the boys are represented as spending the
holy days (rather than holidays) in logical or rhetorical exercises and
disputations.
In all the public schools, indeed, holidays were at first intimately
associated with the recurrence of saints' anniversaries and with festivals
of the Church, and were restricted to them. The modern vacation was not
understood; and the first step toward it, and the earliest symptom of a
revolt against the absence of any such intervals for diversion from
studies and attendance at special services, was an appeal made in 1644 to
the Court of the Company by the scholars of Merchant Taylors "for
play-days instead of holy-days."
The object of this petition was to procure a truce with work and an
opportunity for exercise and sport, in lieu of a system under which the
boys, from their point of view, merely substituted one kind of task for
another; but the time had not yet arrived for reform in this matter; our
elders clang tenaciously to the stern and monotonous routine which they
found established, and in which they had been bred; and the feeling in
favour of relaxing the tension by regular intervals of complete repose is
an incidence of modern thought, which betrays a tendency at the present
moment to gravitate too far to the opposite extreme.
A quite recent report of one of the great schools in the United
States--the West Point School--manifests a survival of the old-fashioned
ideas upon this subject, carried out by the Pilgrim Fathers to the
American Plantations; and whereas in the mother country the original
release from work in order to attend religious services has resolved
itself into the latter-day vacation or holiday, the modern educational
system beyond the Atlantic seems to withdraw the boys from the church, not
in favour of the playground or the country, but as a means of lengthening
the hours of study.
IV. Ingulphus, who lived in the reign of Edward the Confessor (A.D.
1041-66), furnishes us with the earliest actual testimony of a schoolboy's
experiences. "I was born," he tells us, "in the beautiful city of London;
educated in my tender years at Westminster: from whence I was afterwards
sent to the _Study of Oxford_, where I made greater progress in the
Aristotelian philosophy than many of my contemporaries, and became very
well acquainted with the Rhetoric of Cicero." It is very interesting to
learn further that, when he was at school at Westminster, and used to
visit his father at the Court of Edward, he was often examined, both on
the Latin language and on logic, by the Queen herself.
Insights of this kind at so early a period are naturally rare, and indeed
we have to cross over to the Tudor time and the infancy of Eton before we
meet with another such personal trait on English ground.
Thomas Tusser, author of the _Points of Good Husbandry_, admits us in his
metrical autobiography to an acquaintance with the severity of treatment
which awaited pupils in his time at public schools, and which, in fact,
lingered, as part of the gross and ignorant system, down to within the
last generation. We have all heard of the renowned Dr. Busby; but that
celebrated character was merely a type which has happened from special
circumstances to be selected for commemoration. Tusser, describing his
course of training, says:--
"From Paul's I went, to Eton sent,
To learn straightways the Latin phrase;
Where fifty-three stripes given to me
At once I had.
For fault but small, or none at all,
It came to pass that beat I was:
See, Udall, see the mercy of thee
To me, poor lad!"
But this kind of experience was too common; and it had its advocates even
outside the professional pale: for Lord Burleigh, as we learn from Ascham,
was on the side of the disciplinarians.
Sir Richard Sackville, Ascham's particular friend, on the contrary,
bitterly deplored the hindrance and injury which he had suffered as a boy
from the harshness of his teacher; and Udall himself carried his
oppression so far as to offend his employers and procure his dismissal.
Nash, in _Summer's Last Will and Testament_, 1600, makes Summer
say:--"Here, before all this company, I profess myself an open enemy to
ink and paper. I'll make it good upon the accidence, body of me! that in
speech is the devil's paternoster. Nouns and pronouns, I pronounce you as
traitors to boys' buttocks; syntaxis and prosodia, you are tormentors of
wit, and good for nothing, but to get a schoolmaster twopence a week!"
In a French sculpture of the end of the fourteenth century we have
probably as early a glimpse as we are likely to get anywhere graphically
of a scene in a school, where a mistress is administering castigation to
one of her pupils laid across her knees, the others looking on. But it
soon became a favourite subject for the illustrator and caricaturist.
The strictness of scholastic discipline existed in an aggravated form, no
doubt, in early days, and formed part of a more barbarous system of
retribution for wrong done or suffered. The principle of wholesale and
indiscriminate flagellation for offences against the laws of the school or
for neglect of studies marched hand in hand with the vindictive
legislation of bygone days; and doubtless, from the first, the rod often
supplied a vent for the temper or caprice of the pedagogue.
At Merchant Taylors' in my time the cane was freely used, and the forms of
chastisement were the _cut on the hand_ and _the bender_, for which the
culprit had to stoop.
The _régime_ of the once redoubtable Dr. Busby at Westminster was a kind
of survival of the Draconic rule of Udall at Eton when poor Tusser was
there; and it is exceedingly probable that in the time of Charles II.
notions of what was salutary for youth in the shape of _unguentum
baculinum_, or stick-ointment, had undergone very slight alteration since
the previous century. Busby, of whom there is a strange-looking portrait
in Nichols' _Anecdotes_, was the most sublime of coxcombical Dons, and
within his own pale an autocrat second to none of the Cæsars. Smaller
luminaries in the same sphere paid him homage in dedicatory epistles.
Everybody must remember the traditional anecdote of the visit of Charles
II. to Westminster, and of the King, with his hat under his arm, walking
complacently behind Busby through the school, the latter covered; and of
the head-master, when his Majesty and himself (_Ego et rex meus_ over
again) were beyond observation, bowing respectfully to Charles,
trencher-cap in hand, and explaining that if the boys had any idea that
there was a greater man in England than him, his authority would be at an
end.
But there is a second story of Busby and a luckless Frenchman who threw a
stone by accident through one of the windows while the lessons were in
progress and the principal was hearing a class. Busby sent for the
offender, thinking it was one of the boys in the playground; but when the
stranger was introduced, it was "Take him up," and a flogging was
inflicted before the whole assembly. The Frenchman went away in a fury,
and at once sent a challenge to Busby by a messenger. The Doctor reads the
cartel, and cries, "Take him up," and the envoy shares the fate of his
employer. He, too, enraged at the treatment, returns, and demands
compensation from Monsieur; but the latter shrugs his shoulders, and can
only say, "Ah, me! he be the vipping man; he vip me, he vip you, he vip
all the world."
It was of Busby that some one said how fortunate it was for the Seraphim
and Cherubim that they had no nether extremities, or when he joined them,
he would have "taken them up," as the Red Indian in his happy
hunting-grounds still pursues his favourite occupation on earth.
Charles Burney, one of a famous and accomplished family, kept school at
one time at Greenwich. He subsequently removed to Chiswick. There are
still persons living who recollect him and his oddities. He was a great
martinet--a miniature Busby; but a singular point about him was his habit
of inserting in the quarterly accounts sent to the parents a charge for
the birch-rods bought in the course of the term, and applied for the
benefit of his pupils. This was a novel and ingenious method, a treatment
of the question from a financier's point of view; and if black draughts
and blue pills were recognised as legitimate items in the school-bill, why
not the materials for external application?
The condition of the schoolmaster himself, on the other hand, and of his
allies, the tutor and the usher, was as far removed from our present ideas
as the code which he enforced and the books which he expounded. The freer
diffusion of knowledge and an advanced civilisation have tended to
liberate the schoolboy from the barbarous despotism of his teachers, the
majority of whom were latter-day survivals of a decadent type, and to
raise the latter in the social scale. The rod is broken, and Busbyism is
extinct. But the successors of that renowned personage enjoy a higher rank
and enlarged opportunities, and may maintain both if they keep pace with
the progress of thought and opinion.
The schoolmaster has set his house in order at the eleventh hour, in
obedience to external pressure, coming from men who have revolted against
the associations and prejudices of early days, and inaugurated a new
educational Hegira; and the evolutions of this modern platform are by no
means fully manifest.
The propensity of the class to adhere to ancient traditions in regard to
the application of corporal punishment was, of course, to be checked only
by the force of public opinion. Had it not been that the latter was
gradually directed against the evil, the probability is that this would
have ranked among those popular antiquities which time has not seriously
or generally touched. But so early as 1669 a representation on the
subject was actually laid before Parliament in a document called "The
Children's Petition: Or, A modest remonstrance of that intolerable
grievance our youth lie under in the accustomed severities of the
school-discipline of this nation." This protest was printed, and facing
the title-page there meets the eye a notice to this effect: "It is humbly
desired this book may be delivered from one hand to another, and that
gentleman who shall first propose the motion to the House, the book is
his, together with the prayers of posterity,"--in which last phrase a
double sense may or may not lurk.
It required many attacks on such a stronghold as the united influence and
prejudice of the teaching profession to produce an effect, and probably no
effect was produced at first; for in 1698 another endeavour was made to
obtain parliamentary relief, and in this instance the address humbly
sought "an Act to remedy the foul abuse of children at schools, especially
in the great schools of this nation."
These preparatory movements indicated the direction in which sentiment and
taste were beginning to stir, not so much at the outset, perhaps, from
any persuasion that greater clemency was conducive to progress, but from a
natural disposition on the part of parents to revolt against the senseless
ill-usage of their boys by capricious martinets.