(_To the Editor of the Herald._)
SIR,—In your issue of Saturday, May 9th, Mr. Edwin Bean, of All
Saints’ College, Bathurst, brought under serious consideration
the suggestion made by your correspondent “A. N.,” as regards
what he called “A Rugby for New South Wales.” Anything that
a schoolmaster of Mr. Bean’s talent and experience has to
say must be interesting to those of us (alas, too few!) to
whom the question of secondary education, whether in England
or Australia, is a care. He will understand, then, that when
I pass over, almost without notice, his criticisms on the
individual aspects of the “reproduction” here “of that which is
certainly best,” as he says, “in the English Public schools,
viz., what is called the Public school spirit”—that the only
reason of my doing so is the fear of encroaching too much on
your “valuable space.” For, interesting as these criticisms
are, the interest which lies in what I take to be the two
real points at question here is, I must think, greater: these
two points being (_1_), _the growing sense in all competent
judges of discontent with the present condition of middle-class
secondary education in Australia_; (_2_), _the means of
ameliorating this condition_.
As regards the first point, I must here almost take it for
granted, in the face of the fact that, so far as I am aware,
there is not a single colonial politician who seems to realise
that if the education of the People, the rulers of the future,
is of vital importance to us all, the education of the Middle-,
or, as we should say now, the Upper-class, the rulers of the
present, is of importance at least quite as vital. The mass
of intelligent men here, then, or, as we are wont to say, the
intelligent public, naturally enough, holds the same opinion
about upper-class secondary education that their political
representatives do. “It is all right,” they say. “What are you
grumbling at in these ‘private adventure schools,’ as you
call them? They do well enough, we think, for us upper-class
people; and if you want your son to have a really first-rate
education, why, are there not plenty of fine Denominational
schools about—the King’s School, Newington, and so on, and our
splendid Grammar-school?” The only answer to “prophesyings” of
this sort is, that the Upper-class, as a class, are, whatever
they may think themselves, simply abominably educated; their
education is, even when judged by its own miserable standard,
superficial, incoherent, impalpable; and the sole necessary
proof of this is, that a good three-quarters of the knowledge
acquired by an average boy at an average private adventure
school is of no subsequent use whatever to him, either in the
culture of himself or in the prosecution of his business or
trade. As for the best Denominational schools where a secondary
education is to be obtained, if inadequate, at any rate much
superior to that of the private adventure schools, these are
out of the reach of the pockets of the average upper-class
people, who, even if they appreciate this misfortune (which, as
a rule, they do not), are unable to remedy it.
Here, then, as it seems to me, lies the difficulty; and we
have now to look at the solution which the apparent tendency
of things is proffering to us. “If ‘A. N.,’” says Mr. Bean,
“had resided in Victoria, he would have learnt that the Public
schools (as they are there called) of Geelong and Melbourne
are already taking something of the position, and aspiring to
fulfil the functions, of the English public schools.... And,”
he goes on, “at Paramatta, Stanmore, Bathurst, Bowenfels, and
elsewhere, there are already boarding-schools, not private, but
belonging to Denominational corporations, which, if fostered
by private assistance, will eventually grow into something
resembling the Public schools of England.” Mr. Bean is, of
course, right. If things progress in the way in which they
are now progressing, if our colonial statesmen turn all their
attention, and as much of ours as we will give them, _to_ the
education of the People, and _from_ that of the Upper-class,
then, I say, more and more will the Upper-class be thrown into
the hands of schools which are mere private speculations,
which are really under no control but that of personal caprice
(and the personal caprice, great heavens! of what a stamp of
intellectual and spiritual man), which, accordingly, provide
an education, even when judged by its own miserable standard,
superficial, incoherent, impalpable. And these other schools,
I say, the best Denominational and Corporation schools, the
Australian Public schools of the future, will become more and
more the educational monopoly of the professional and wealthy
portion of the Upper-class, just as in England they have become
that of the aristocracy and these portions of the Middle-class.
These “_great schools_,” exclaims Mr. Bean justly of the
English Public schools—“_which have done so much to form the
character of the English gentleman_.” Of the English gentleman?
Yes, and alas! of the English middle-class man, that terrible
and pathetic being whom Mr. Arnold has taught us to know as
the British Philistine. “I declare,” says General Gordon, the
hero-elect of this very class, “I declare I think there is more
happiness among these miserable (Soudan) blacks, who have not a
meal from day to day, than among our middle-classes. The blacks
are glad of a little handful of maize, and live in the greatest
discomfort. They have not a strip to cover them; but you do not
see them grunting and groaning all day long as we see scores
and scores in England, with their wretched dinner-parties and
attempts at gaiety where all is hollow and miserable.”
What a future for the Upper-class, the by far largest class
of Australia! What an appalling solution to an educational
difficulty is this:—_A small class made up of our squatters,
professional men, and wealthy tradesmen, forming a sort of
intellectual and spiritual aristocracy; our Upper-class not
only itself intellectually and spiritually dull and debased,
but debasing and dulling all the better spirits which, in
their social ascension, pass into it from the ranks of the
People._ The thought of such a future to those of us to whom
the progress onward and upward, whether of England or of
Australia, is a care, is appalling, heartrending, unendurable!
There is nothing that we could do, by the devotion of our
powers, energies, and means, that we should not, would not,
do to prevent it. And we should be, and are, encouraged in
our struggle against it by the reflection that the real deep
true spirit of the time is against all monopoly, practical and
physical, intellectual and spiritual—that once the Upper-class,
and after them the People, is aroused to the realisation of
the fact that there is a danger here of the formation of a new
aristocracy, an aristocracy which, with all its charm (let us
suppose) of social manners and of intellectual and spiritual
culture (and this is supposing a very great deal), means
nothing less than the materialisation, the dulling and the
debasing, of everything beneath it—when the Upper-class and the
People, I say, are aroused to the realisation of this, we may
be sure that they will not rest till they have prevented it.
And how, it is asked, is such a future to be prevented? how
such a present to be ameliorated? By the formation, not of
Denominational and Corporation schools at a charge which places
them out of the reach of all save the richer among us, but by
the formation of Public State schools that provide a secondary
education as good, and, we will hope, better, than that of
these others, and at a charge that is within the reach of the
average upper-class people. “Yes, but,” at once is answered,
“such schools already exist in the High schools, and they have
not been a success.” I will not here contest, although I well
might, the first assertion; but I cannot, if I would, contest
the second. I began by noticing the cause of it, this general
satisfaction of “the intelligent public” with the educational
pabulum provided for its offspring. I deplore it; I hope for
the day of its removal to the gulf of oblivion. In the meantime
all that can be done is to strive to assist this “consummation
devoutly to be desired” earnestly and perpetually.
One word more. No one is more in sympathy (if I may be pardoned
for speaking of such an unimportant entity) than _I_ am, with
the efforts of such men as “A. N.” and Mr. Edwin Bean to
reproduce, or try to reproduce, in Australia as far as may be,
“that which is certainly best in the English Public schools,
viz., what is called the Public school spirit.” I have not the
least prejudice against English Public schools, at one of the
oldest and most conservative of which I was myself educated,
and from which I almost entirely derived the circle of my
most valued friends; nor yet against the Denominational and
Corporation schools here. I have only to remark to Mr. Bean,
what I am sure he will at once admit, that if the danger of
State schools is the excessive interference of the State,
the danger—nay, the absolute abuse—of endowed Public schools
is that they become mere feeders of the universities; and in
England to such an appalling extent was this the case that
the State absolutely had to alter and narrow its Indian Civil
Service examinations in order to bring them within reach of the
Public schools, which were being quite left out in the cold!
Doubtless, then, the Australian endowed Public schools would
have their danger too, a danger which “even no less a thinker
than Herbert Spencer,” as Mr. Bean says, has not perhaps, in
the application to artificial civilization of the laws of the
natural “struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,”
quite comprehended.
With all apologies to you for the amount of your “valuable
space” on which I have encroached in even this far too
perfunctory consideration of the matter in hand,