FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS
State irresponsibility for national education on, and after, the
Queen's accession. Summary of early movements towards educating the
people. Lancaster and Bell as pioneers of educational systems. Samuel
Whitbread's faint foreshadowing of W. E. Forster's Education Act.
Brougham as educational pioneer. First State grant to Church and
Nonconformist schools. Increased in 1839. Education Department
completed on the principle of State aid to all schools, Protestant or
Roman, satisfying State examiners. Mr Lowe at the Education Office and
the grant stationary. National education the law of the land by the
Forster Act of 1870. Free education under Lord Salisbury 1891.
Elementary education now organized. External change in the English
landscape. Secondary education waits. Details of progress recently
made towards this.
Those processes of organization which seem in all departments of national
activity the special features of English life during the last half of this
century have nowhere been more visible than in the educational
arrangements for the long neglected mass of the English people. Slowly,
with occasional relapses, yet upon the whole with sure and steady
progressiveness, there is being prepared, there now seems within
measurable distance of completion, the ladder that will enable any English
boy and many English girls to accomplish the ascent from the gutter to the
highest teaching of the University, and so to gain a position from which
merit and industry, favoured by fortune, will command the highest career
open to either sex. All this has been accomplished within little more than
half a century. Till 1833, the educational responsibilities of the State
practically were ignored. In that year there was made for teaching
purposes a grant of L20,000. The sum with annual increments was
thenceforth dispensed annually by the Treasury to the National Society in
Broad Sanctuary, as representing the Church of England, and for the
Nonconformists to the British and Foreign School Society. Till a
twelvemonth after the passing of the first Reform Act, the most active of
organizations for teaching the people had been the Church of England and
the great Dissenting bodies as in the case of the School Society just
named. The Roman Church on both sides of St. George's Channel never
neglected its educational duties. The Sunday School system, to which, on
the eve of the Queen's accession, thousands of working men and women owed
practically all the teaching they had received, were started towards the
close of the eighteenth century by a Gloucester printer, Robert Raikes. In
the last year of William IV. there had died a Nonconformist, a member of
the Society of Friends, Joseph Lancaster. To him and to the English
clergyman associated with him, Andrew Bell, founder also of the Bell
Classical Scholarship at Cambridge, were due the first beginnings of a
scheme of instruction for the whole English people.
Two or three decades earlier than the grant of 1833, Parliament fitfully
recognized its educational responsibilities. In 1807 Samuel Whitbread, the
son-in-law of Earl Grey, tentatively anticipated the spirit of Mr W. E.
Forster's reforms, three score and three years afterwards. By his proposal
of parochial schools throughout the Kingdom, Whitbread ranks as the
earliest education reformer of the nineteenth century. Within a decade, in
the year 1816, Brougham took up the question, obtained a committee to
enquire into the educational resources of London, and in 1820 himself
brought forward an early Education scheme of the nineteenth century. The
project perished amid the denominational tempest of religious rivalry
which it evoked. Nothing after this was done till the date at which we
have already arrived, 1833. Then, in faint forecast of the L7,000,000 now
spent by the State on the teaching of its youthful subjects, a grant for
that purpose of, L20,000 was for the first time made, distributed as we
have seen between the Protestant Churches of the country. After an
interval of six years, in 1839, Lord Melbourne's Administration excited
much obloquy, and raised the 'No Popery' cry against them, by allowing a
share in a grant, now increased to L30,000, to Roman Catholic schools. The
House of Lords, in an address to the Queen, condemned this new policy of
religious emancipation. The vote was only carried in the Commons by a
majority of two (the figures being 275 for, 273 against). Together with
certain other changes that endure to this day, it became law. Hitherto,
the State grant had been administered by the Treasury. Now for the first
time an Education Department was organized under the Lord President of
the Council, and four other members of the body. The Vice-President was
appointed in 1856. During Lord Palmerston's long term of office, in 1857,
the Education grant rose to L451,000. It became more expressly understood
that henceforth the specific duties of Education Minister were vested in
the Vice-President.[34] With the steady increase of the annual grant, its
province of usefulness was extended also. Subject always to the principle
of State inspection, where State aid was received, the grant was no longer
limited to assist the erection of new schools. Even before 1857 it had
been allotted in due proportion to help schools already in existence.
Portions of it were also received by training colleges for teachers. The
quality of the instruction supplied in the schools had not improved in
proportion to the liberality shown by the State. In 1859-60, the grant was
more than a million. A Commission reported most unfavourably as to the
efficiency of the schools. Hence in 1862, the then Vice-President of the
Council, Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, enforced the Education
reforms which he had already drafted, and initiated the policy of payment
by results; in other words, the regulation of the amount of the grant in
schools by the success of the scholars in the yearly examination. The
teachers grumbled, but the taxpayers were relieved. The rate of increase
in the grant ceased automatically. In 1870 the Education Vote amounted to
one and a quarter millions instead of, as, but for Mr Lowe's drastic, if
indirect, retrenchment, it would have done, to something like thrice that
sum.
No fundamental change took place till the Education Act of 1870, always
associated as that will be with the name of W. E. Forster. Dealt with as
to its provisions, its working and its results, in elaborate detail in the
author's preceding work, _England_, the Measure now rather more than a
quarter of a century old will here be summarized sufficiently by reminding
the reader that this legislation empowered the election of School Boards
throughout the Kingdom, but maintained the system of voluntary
subscriptions, and only compelled the institution of School Boards where
voluntary effort had failed, and in the Time Table Conscience Clause
provided a security for individual liberty. Mr Mundella's Act of 1880 made
education absolutely compulsory throughout England and Wales, whereas
before then the power of compulsion was left to the local authorities. In
all State-aided schools, religion was to be taught either at the beginning
or end of school hours, so that, without disturbance to the general
curriculum individual children could be withdrawn from the sacred lesson
at their parents' will, without incurring any disability on that account.
These provisions met with the usual fate of legislative compromises. They
deeply offended many sections. They entirely pleased none. The battle
between religious and irreligious training, between what have been called
the National and the Denominational systems was not decided in 1870. It
has been fought over again more than once since then. It remains unsettled
to this day.
During the whole of that decade, the Education Acts were supplemented with
detailed legislation of a consolidating or modifying kind. No organic
change took place till in 1891, the Government of Lord Salisbury adopted
the first of the three Fs, long since propounded by Mr Chamberlain, and by
abolishing the School pence which scarcely repaid the trouble of their
collection, made elementary education as free to all children in the land,
as by the law of 1870 it had practically become compulsory. The proposal
to free the schools was not universally popular with the party to whose
lot it fell to execute that policy. So, notwithstanding its exclusive
traditions, that party had, under Mr Disraeli a quarter of a century
earlier by its Household Suffrage Bill, recognized and established the
English democracy. The plea on which those who had begun by resisting free
schools finally accepted them was the expediency of accepting the
inevitable first, and secondly the practical wisdom of obtaining credit
for Conservatism by doing well and wisely that which at some future time
the opposite party would have ingratiated themselves with the masses by
doing badly. The results of free education were speedily visible in the
increase of the children educated throughout the land. The increase of
children in schools during the five years preceding the Free Education Act
of 1891 had been 269,903. During the quinquennial period after the Act the
increase was 421,860, or, in round numbers, just double. The first rung
in the educational ladder for the benefit of all classes of the Kingdom
had been fixed firmly by the Act of 1870. It was not, nor was ever,
regarded by its authors as a complete Measure. It provided no regular
system of higher grade schools intermediary between the most elementary
teaching, and the more liberal culture of the grammar schools. The only
supplement that it received from the Government under which it had become
law was the Endowed Schools Act of 1874 for re-arranging the funds and
remodelling the curricula in secondary endowed schools throughout the
country. Private effort and local enterprise usefully came in where Mr
Foster's Education Act had stopped short. In various parts of England, and
especially in the great northern counties of Lancashire, Durham and York,
School Boards, fortunate enough to possess controlling spirits of
exceptional enlightenment, exercised their legal power to establish
schools of a higher kind specially for the teaching of science or art, and
generally for the tincture of the youthful mind with a more generous
training. Such schools received additional grants from the Science and Art
Department at South Kensington.
In this way the 1870 Act at once partially enabled the child of the
poorest parents to mount through the elementary schools, to the secondary
schools of the Kingdom and thence to those seats of learning at which the
picked youth of the country enjoy the choicest opportunities of mental
culture, or are qualified for the highest posts in after life to which
English ambition can aspire. The problem now to be solved, which is in
actual process of solution and of which a few years more may probably
dispose, is the completion of the national ladder of learning by a more
thorough organization of the agencies for advanced knowledge throughout
the country, and for the passage of the pupil from schools of the lowest,
to schools of the higher grade. Just as, during recent years of the
present reign, successive Reform Bills have increasingly nationalized the
legislative Chambers at Westminster; so the tendency and the result of the
transformations undergone by the great public schools and by the
Universities, that they feed, is to draw more closely together the bonds
uniting these institutions with the nation as a whole, to widen their
curriculum, to infuse a popular element into their governing bodies, and
to make them not merely the instructors, but the representatives of the
intellectual interest of the land. By remodelling the governing bodies of
Eton, Winchester and Harrow, the Public Schools Act of 1868 appreciably
quickened and deepened the sense of public responsibility inherent in
these corporations. Nearly thirty years' experience of the Endowed Schools
Act justifies the statement that the work accomplished for the grammar
schools of the country is analogous to the results which the earlier
legislation has yielded in the case of the more famous seats of youthful
study.[35] A wholesome spirit of competition now animates the governors of
these old if often still obscure endowments,[36] and daily causes fresh
usefulness to be extracted from money resources, long suffered to remain
idle. Later legislation, whose general aspects have already received
attention in these pages, has conspired to deepen the sense of obligation,
and to stimulate to efforts, most salutary for the taught, alike the
governors of and the teachers in the schools.
Shortly after the Local Government Act of 1888 was passed, important
functions, educational and financial, were given to the new County
Councils. The grammar schools were quick to perceive a new opportunity. In
1889, thirteen representatives of the Councils, in some cases at the
instance of their older colleagues, received seats on the governing bodies
of the Secondary Schools. The corporations thus reformed have already
begun vigorously to deal with an abuse inveterate in their smaller
schools. Where the value of the endowment, from charges on the property of
which it consists or from a fall in the value of land, has fluctuated the
governors have been in the habit of farming out the school to the
headmaster. They have, that is, assigned to him the income of the trust,
and such fees as he can charge. In return, the pedagogue takes upon
himself the charges of working the school, and of the teaching of a fixed
number of free boys. The tendency of this arrangement is, of course, to
repeat in the present day the experiences of Do-the-boys Hall under Mr
Squeers in _Nicholas Nickleby_. The headmaster has upon him the burden
not only of his educational work, but of the solvency of his daily
business. His own stipend is too small to admit of his paying competent
assistants. He becomes a pensioner on the caprice of well-to-do parents,
and the instrument of their not generally very enterprising will, or of
their too enlightened pleasure. The only chance for the small secondary
schools thus circumstanced is their rescue by some of the more
public-spirited and opulent of the governors. But this relief is
forthcoming so rarely that the Commissioners generally recommend the
closing of all schools existing under these conditions and the application
of their endowments to purposes less obviously foredoomed to failure.
Other instances of the waste of existing resources for secondary education
are even more frequent and not less serious. Grammar schools of competent
calibre are often geographically crowded so close together as to obstruct
and paralyse their mutual efforts. Thus in South Devon there is at
Chudleigh a grammar school of considerable repute. Within a radius of
sixteen miles, _e.g._ at Ashburton, Totnes, and Bovey Tracey, there are
similar schools capable of good work, but lacking a population of parents
and children to fill their empty benches. A like experience has often
occurred in the case of establishments which, not being endowed grammar
schools have not come under the notice of the Commissioners. Bath, for
instance, has long possessed more educational opportunities than most
other cities in the West of England. The oldest of her proprietary
colleges, that in the district known as 'Grosvenor,' to some extent became
merged in the less ancient Sydney College. That in due time produced a
successful offshoot, the Somerset College. These two latter institutions
during some time were healthily stimulated by mutual competition. At last
the rivalry became profitable only to the prestige and numbers of the
secondary schools that, managed on the same principles, had come into
existence first at Cheltenham, then afterwards on the Clifton downs, near
Bristol. In 1885,[37] the Somerset and Sydney Colleges were amalgamated
under a single headmastership by the title of the Bath College. This
to-day is doing an excellent work. But it is the North and East of England
where by the needless reduplication or ill-advised contiguity of schools
of the same grade the most flagrant breaches are committed against the
first laws of educational economy. Thus, in the West Riding, the grammar
school of Ossett has a fair endowment but practically no scholars. Again,
Walsingham in Norfolk, with less than 1,000 inhabitants, possesses a
substantially endowed school, the boys attending which had decreased from
32 in 1884 to 11 in 1894. Not far off at Ipswich, Norwich, and Bury St
Edmunds, are establishments of historic fame, and of present competence.
As an alternative to the continued waste of such opportunities, and to
promote the local completion of the educational ladder indicated in the
beginning of this chapter, the Commissioners suggest that the Walsingham
school should be transferred bodily to Fakenham, a prosperous and not
distant town, or that the Walsingham funds should be converted into
scholarships and exhibitions to be held at other places of education
within the County. There are other small grammar schools which, while just
paying their way, have evidently no considerable career before them. Here
the spirit of commercial impatience is apt to suggest the conversion of
these places of teaching into elementary schools of the better sort. But
the places now spoken of often have honourable traditions, and resemble
families that, through no fault of their members, have, by misfortune,
come down in the world. Local patriotism dwells fondly on the creditable
past of such institutions, and would be wounded by their irrecoverable
degradation. Surely, therefore, these schools might have the chance of
retrieving their position. That, in effect, is what the Commissioners say.
Assign to the decayed grammar schools their exact place in a reorganized
system of secondary education. On condition of their adapting themselves
to the place thus appointed to them, assist them out of the public funds
to regain full effectiveness, and, together with that, to renew their past
prosperity.
Within the last few years an illustrious proof has been given that a great
school is not necessarily so sensitive a plant as to depend for its
life-blood and vigour on the essential qualities of the soil wherein its
founders first fixed its roots. 'The Grey Friars' of Thackeray's novels,
the Charter House school, which, in R. C. Jebb, now Professor of Greek in,
as well as M.P. for, Cambridge University, has produced probably the first
scholar of the latter half of this century, has been removed recently to
the great advantage of the physical health and literary industry of its
scholars from its ancient home in London city to the rural neighbourhood
of Godalming town. A precedent for the same policy in less famous
instances, exists. At Hewsworth, in the West Riding, Archbishop Holgate's
grammar school has been closed from lack of pupils. Its endowment was
merged in that of the grammar school at Barnsley, a town of some 36,000
inhabitants, midway between Sheffield and Wakefield. Within half a dozen
years, the Barnsley school, thus reinforced, had achieved prosperity, and
had adopted the chief recommendations for effective teaching made by the
Commissioners. One thing is at least clear. If liberal education, the
process, that is, of the development of the whole intellectual nature,
without immediate reference to the supply of material needs, is not to
become a mere tradition; if, in other words, literary culture be worth
preserving as an instrument for training the mind, the cry for merging the
grammar schools in agencies of specialist and technical teaching must not
be adopted without consideration. The highest experts in this matter agree
that the scientific and technical instruction, which is visibly a paying
investment, runs in these days no risk of neglect, but that there does
exist a danger of the first aims and the true methods of intellectual
training being ignored. Even thus, fairly equipped as England is with the
machinery for secondary teaching of the scientific sort; still better
furnished as she might be with a more economical administration of
existing resources, fresh provision must be made on a liberal scale before
the national appliances are complete. The Commissioners have estimated in
those counties to which they have paid special attention the number of
boys or girls educated at secondary schools at 21,878 or 2.5 per 1,000 of
the population. As might be expected, the local inequalities revealed by
this analysis are very great. Thus, in Bedford, because of the great
Harpur endowments of that small county, the proportion per 1,000 is 13.5.
In Lancashire the population has altogether out-grown the secondary
endowments available: the proportion per 1,000 is only 11. In Yorkshire it
is only 2.1. In Warwickshire, notwithstanding the splendid foundations of
Edward VI. at Birmingham, and the wealthy and famous schools of Warwick
and Coventry the proportion remains as low as 5.2.
While these aspects of latter day education are being considered, the
honourable connection of the new Local Government bodies with schools must
not be ignored. Liverpool, like South Lancashire generally, is not ill
supplied with agencies for secondary or technical instruction. The means
of the capital and of the county would both be inadequate but for the very
liberal contributions made by the County and City Councils to the schools
owned by religious and secular proprietors for boys and girls. The
companies thus spoken of are enabled by the Councils to carry on more than
one particular school at a loss, even though the deficiency be not made
good by the profit on other schools of the group. In view of the fact
stated above that a great educational pioneer of this century, Joseph
Lancaster, was a Quaker, it is interesting to know that the most recent
Education Commission selects for special compliment the Ackworth Friends
School, open to members of the Society from all parts of the world, in the
West Riding of Yorkshire. The more searchingly the enquiry is made, the
more distinctly there emerges the fact that private venture schools
created by voluntary effort, conducted by individual enterprise, render
the most effective service to secondary education. These institutions open
their doors for public examination. They cannot, therefore, be unworthy of
State help. Their headmasters and their chief assistants generally are
University graduates, and were often trained at one of the older public
schools. A fresh rung in the ladder of educational ascent will have been
made when these schools, 30 per cent. of whose teachers are University
graduates, receive official registration as well as whatever material
assistance State recognition can confer. State organization of national
teaching primary or secondary by means of official examination and by
grants of money proportioned to the proficiency established by these
ordeals, is, as we have seen, and as it must always be remembered, not
more than half a century old, and in a national sense, scarcely therefore
passed beyond its infancy. The progress indicated in the preceding remarks
justifies the expectation that before very long the edifice will be
crowned with a completeness worthy of the strength with which the
foundations have been laid, and more than one storey of the fabric has
been already reared.
Other agencies now fairly at work in this enterprise remain to be
mentioned. Before the Universities had sent their resident representatives
to the East End of London, and to the slums of other great cities, they
had actively identified themselves with the encouragement and the testing
of secondary teaching throughout the land. The Oxford and Cambridge middle
class examinations began to be held during the early sixties in the chief
towns of provincial England. Very soon afterwards, there were organized
successively the Higher Schools Examination Board, conducted by the two
Universities, and the University Extension Lectures which presently will
be examined here with some detail.
But by this time the fresh appliances for elementary and secondary
education, both directly or indirectly growing out of the legislation of
1870, had changed the physical, not less than the intellectual, aspect of
the whole country. In the city as in the suburbs, in the provinces not
less than in the metropolis, the whole landscape was thickly dotted with
new piles of buildings, in all cases constructed with marked regard to
convenience and health, substantial always, in some cases really handsome.
These were the new Board Schools, some for the most elementary instruction
of the rising generation, some for higher grade teaching, or for imparting
to older children the rudiments of scientific and technical knowledge. In
the former case the buildings were surrounded with gravel playgrounds,
furnished with swings, parallel bars, and other gymnastic appliances, all
used under the direction of an expert teacher, who alternately with the
drill sergeant came on duty during play hours. The structures annexed to
the actual class-rooms of more advanced pupils were furnished within as
laboratories and work rooms. Here the pupils were apprenticed to the
initial duties of the chemist, the gasfitter, the electrician, or of any
other vocation they were destined in after life to follow. One result of
this new start in the State schools was the stimulus of a competition that
produced a perceptible increase of efficiency in the private schools not
necessarily identified with any religious denominations. These private
schools still exist; and by the greater elasticity of their system, and
special opportunity of encouraging individual originality in the learners
they are the salutary and indispensable adjuncts of the State
institutions. The generally superannuated and often inefficient dominie,
alternating between slumber over the text book from which he was supposed
to teach, and unprovoked aggressions with his cane upon the knuckles or
any other available part of the persons of his nearest pupils, is now
replaced by a master in the prime of life and energy, who, if not a
graduate in a University, has the certificate from one of the many
examining bodies which attest his fitness for the place. Almost
imperceptibly to-day, the elementary school matures into the secondary
school. Nor is the development always indicated by a change of name, for
higher grade elementary schools, to employ their official title, in which,
after all his Standards have been passed, the Board School boy, between 15
and 17 years old is placed, are in effect not less of secondary schools in
their way than Cheltenham or Westminster. Controlled indeed by the School
Boards, they prepare their pupils for matriculation at the London or other
Universities, or for entrance upon professional life. Thus, in 1894,
exclusive of the capital, the English School Boards controlled no fewer
than sixty establishments of this higher type. Of that number thirty-nine
were organized science schools. The fabric of the buildings had been
provided out of the rates. The cost of the superior teaching was defrayed
by private munificence, or by the State grants conferred by the Science
and Art Department which, in South Kensington began as, and still is, a
portion of the Department in Whitehall. The number of boys and girls,
according to the latest statistics, educated in these superior Board
Schools is 4,606 boys, 2,023 girls. Outside London, the great majority of
the institutions now spoken of are in the Northern, the Midland and the
Eastern counties. Advantage to all concerned might be expected to accrue
could these higher Board Schools be managed, if not in active concert, yet
with the practical approval, and pecuniary encouragement, of the County
Councils. When, therefore, by the withdrawn Bill of 1896, it was proposed
to invest County Councils with educational powers, but not, save in rural
districts, to displace School Boards, the new duties contemplated for
those Councils were not those for which they entirely lacked preparation.
In addition to all this, the great City Guilds, notably the Drapers,
Grocers, and Goldsmiths provide for secondary teaching not only in London,
but wherever their property lies, a machinery of proved effectiveness. The
more recent Intermediate Education Act fills in Wales the interval between
the schoolroom and the workroom; its precedent is sure to be followed
elsewhere. The means, therefore, of technical training accessible to the
very humblest classes of the community, cannot be described as inadequate.
While the tendency thus is for places of secondary teaching to become
training grounds for special, technical, or professional instruction, it
is satisfactory that Oxford and Cambridge should hold before the eyes of
the country the standard of the more general culture which is identical
with real education, and should bring to the very doors of the humblest
homes throughout the country the effective and inexpensive agencies for
securing this teaching.