THE LADDER OF EDUCATION
Mr Lowe's advice thirty years ago now fairly fulfilled. Individual
influence co-operating with the State reforms the true secret of
recent educational advance. Animating effect felt throughout the
country of Benjamin Jowett's educational example at Oxford. The
practical and concrete test of the helpfulness of the educational
ladder to the entire community applied in detail. Instances of Board
School boys, and of sons of day labourers who have risen to
distinction with the help of the new educational agencies. Experiences
of the Clerk of the London School Board and others. Missing rungs
still to be supplied to the ladder by reorganization or slight
enlargement of existing resources. Need of reorganizing the teaching
profession by new local and central councils. Dangers besetting the
present movement illustrated.
The theory, and, in outline, the practice, of the educational reforms
reserved for the most recent years of the present reign have now been
explained with as much fulness as the scheme of this work permits. It
remains concretely, if of necessity briefly, to answer the question: What
actually has been done? No Blue Books, or other educational statistics are
necessary to convince one of the reality and magnitude of the enterprise
already accomplished. 'Let us educate our masters,' was the advice of Mr
Lowe when, in the House of Commons, he bewailed so brilliantly and
bitterly the era of the new democracy begun by the legislation of 1867-8.
The advice has been followed. A new generation has sprung up, which is
demonstrably better educated and more humanized than any of its
predecessors. The diminution of pauperism and crime; the gradual
disappearance from London and from other great towns of the uncontrollably
rough element among the street observers of public holidays; the growing
competition among the industrial classes of museums or picture galleries
with drinking bars on Sundays and on popular feasts; these are the more
superficial signs of the progress already made and still going forward.
Intelligent foreigners,[38] the very men who are said to anticipate the
judgments of posterity, declare that within the last twenty years the
physiognomical type of the London street loungers and loafers has visibly
improved; that the look of the vulture which was habitual on faces pinched
by hunger, and puffy or pallid with debauchery, is no longer the
dominating expression of feature; that the rapacious arabs of the pavement
who were formerly ready to devour the new comer outside Charing Cross or
Victoria railway stations, where they have not disappeared, have become
orderly, intelligent, and not altogether the reverse of polite. It
requires perhaps an Englishman to appreciate at their true worth, the more
delicate gradations of this improvement as it is illustrated elsewhere. Go
into the pit or gallery of a London theatre, on the Surrey side or in
Hoxton. In look, in manner, and in the kind of conversation between the
acts, the play-goers have changed. If there were ever any danger of an
orange or ginger-beer bottle descending from the gallery to the pit, the
peril is now obsolete. Should the situation be Shoreditch or the City
Road, the strains of the orchestra intermittently may be accompanied by
voices joining in the chorus with original variations. But the melodies,
however irregular, only express an honest holiday enthusiasm. Schools
elementary, whether of the first or second grade, secondary, technical or
scientific, explain much of this new improvement in the facial
characteristics and at all public places in the general deportment of the
humblest of Her Majesty's subjects. But they do not account for the entire
change. Something like twenty years ago, when a work named _England_ was
in preparation its author by personal inspection of the localities
mentioned, ascertained that the latest reports on the truck system as in
some parts of Staffordshire it continued to exist, and of the agricultural
gangs in more northern counties, faithfully depicted the social condition
of great masses of the mining and rural population. The same local
examination to-day presents a cheering contrast to the writer's earlier
and depressing experiences. In every town and village of the United
Kingdom it is now easier than was ever known before for the very poorest
to live in a cleanly, a godly, sometimes even in a comfortable fashion.
All the necessaries, most of the superfluities, of existence are to-day
unprecedentedly cheap. Wages have risen all round, till a pound a week has
become the normal pay of unskilled adult labour in the town, and about
twelve shillings in the country. Some conspicuous evils in our industrial
system have indeed yet to be removed. The fines and deductions[39] to
which, often without just cause, the earnings of factory hands are
subjected, have been denounced with just severity, though in moderate
language, on platforms and in print, by Sir Charles Dilke. On this side of
the Millennium finality in social legislation will prove, it is to be
feared, not less difficult than in political matters Lord John Russell
found, to his disappointment, was the case. The advance of civilization
itself creates new social conditions which call in their turn for
periodical legislation. Till the resources of all classes are equalized,
there must be some who cannot protect themselves, on whose behalf the
legislature must interpose.
That is only to say that England is not Paradise. Meanwhile, socially as
well as educationally, the progress made is so great that two decades
since the most sanguine prophets would have pronounced it to be
impossible. The Staffordshire miner, the roughest perhaps of his class,
would no longer be represented, even by _Punch_, as proposing to 'heave
half a brick' at a new comer for the offence of having a strange face. As
for setting the bull-pup at the parson's little boy, the suggestion is
less likely to come, if at all, from the collier than from the mischievous
undergraduate, the son of the collier's employer who is home for his
College vacation, and indulges a pretty canine fancy. The eighth Duke of
Devonshire is not a social leveller. But on a public occasion he had the
frankness to define the difference between the Sunday crowds in Hyde Park
round the Reformers' Tree, and the week day crowds in the Ladies' Mile as
being that the former were not nearly as well dressed as the latter. That
implied compliment to the manners of a metropolitan mob at once showed the
discernment of him from whose lips it fell, and emphasizes the truth of
the views expressed in the present context. Even the carnival of Lord
Mayor's Day has felt the touch of those humanities that are said in the
Latin grammar example to soften manners and not permit them to be brutal.
The London crowd which, as Mr Disraeli knew, was the most emotional in the
world, is to-day the best conducted, and incomparably the least drunken.
As for its occasional rowdiness: what are these little outbursts in
comparison with the horseplay of the prosperous gentlemen in glossy, silk
hats, with high white collars, and deep wristbands, who, having placed a
new rose in their button hole, drive high-stepping cobs to their suburban
railway station every morning and who, if a stranger strays into their
Stock Exchange deal with that unfortunate person as an Epsom mob treats a
welsher. Continuation schools, lectures, universally accessible for adults
who wish to carry on their education beyond the limit of their school
days, the discipline of collective sight-seeing in museums and galleries;
the habits formed at free libraries; these are the agencies that share
with the teaching which the State provides the distinction of rearing a
new generation, not merely veneered by a superficial decorum, but
wholesomely controlled by a public opinion of its own quite as real as
that which dominates Belgravia or Pall Mall.
Before considering the provisions necessary to complete the educational
ladder, it will be well from specific instances to see what the facilities
already established have done towards promoting the ascent from the Board
School to the University. The following instances now published for the
first time, are supplied by the courtesy of the Clerk of the London School
Board. In 1879 a boy whose first learning was gained at a primary London
Board School, obtained on entering a secondary school the Carpenters'
Foundation Scholarship, together with the Conquest gold medal. Shortly
afterwards he became captain of the City of London School. Proceeding
thence to Cambridge, he won a Foundation Scholarship at Trinity;
eventually was placed in the first class of the Classical Tripos, became
next a Fellow of Trinity; and subsequently held a high position in the
Board of Trade. Another lad of equally humble birth in 1880 got a
mathematical scholarship at Queen's College, Cambridge, was among the
Senior Optimes in the Tripos and in 1886 was appointed a mathematical
master at one of the great public schools. In 1881, another Board School
boy, having received the Greek and Latin certificate from the Universities
Examining Board won a classical scholarship at St John's, Oxford, and
afterwards a First Class in Classical Moderations. A little later he was
placed fourth in the First Class of Civil Service candidates. He has since
developed into a useful official of the Local Government Board. Another
boy of like antecedents won a scholarship at St John's College,
Cambridge; subsequently came out first class in one division, second
class in another division, of the Theological Tripos; carried off the
Jeremie Septuagint prize, open to the whole University, and afterwards
became a successful parish clergyman. Other distinctions won by candidates
of the same category are a scholarship at the City of London School; in
1883 a first place in the competition for vacancies in the India Office;
in another case, and with the other sex, in 1885, the fifth place in the
London Matriculation test, the Gilchrist and Reid scholarships, and later
First Class Academic Honours for English. This instance is the more
memorable because it is the earliest distinction of the sort won by a
Board School girl. Since then the same young woman has become an assistant
teacher at the Ladies' College in Jersey. This example has often been
repeated since. Three or four of the prize winners at Girton College
during the later eighties were London Board School girls. The well-known
senior curate of St Saviour's, Everton, Liverpool, a High Honours
Cambridge graduate, had been a Board School boy. His colleague had been
enabled by a Fishmongers' scholarship to enter at Sidney Sussex College at
Cambridge. In the summer of 1880, F. J. Wild was the first London Board
School boy who went to Balliol. Nine years afterwards, this lad entered
the Indian Civil Service, and became Assistant Magistrate and Deputy
Collector in the North-West Provinces. 'Bachelor of Science, Bedford
College, first division, 1891;' 'Recommended by Wesleyan Conference for
training in their theological institutes and for the Home ministry;'
'Teacher at Diocesan Training College;' these are comparatively common
entries in the catalogue of Board School honours for this decade. In or
since 1893, there have been some half dozen cases of Board School boys
taking College and University Honours at Oxford as well as good places in
the Indian Civil Service competition. The experience of the London Board
Schools is not unlike that of similar institutions in the provinces. A
decennial calendar after the Oxford precedent of distinctions academic or
professional won by Board School pupils is a volume which it would really
be worth while to prepare, and materials for which are accumulating on all
sides. Pending the completion of the ladder for ascent in the normal way
from the Board School to the University, private encouragement supplies
many of the missing rungs. Thus, the vicar of a Herefordshire village
noticed the quickness of his gardener's son; helped him to enter the
Hereford County School. From this the lad got a scholarship to Malvern
College. Afterwards, one of the first Board School boys who won that
honour, he carried off the entrance blue ribbon of a Balliol scholarship.
In due course the gardener's boy took a first class in Classical
Moderations, and a first class also in Classical Greats.
Typical instances have now been cited sufficient in number and variety to
show that, as seems to be the general opinion of the last Education
Commission, notwithstanding incompletenesses and imperfections here and
there, enough has already been done to enable every clever boy in whatever
station he is born by his own industry and volition to secure the same
opportunities of cultivating his gifts as the nobleman's son who wins the
Newcastle medal at Eton. The personal effort and initiative of the late
Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, did more perhaps than has been done by
any other individual to promote this work. Under him the College of
Wycliffe not only maintained the prestige which it had acquired in the
days of Dr Jenkyns, and which was greatly increased by the successor of
Jenkyns, Robert Scott, but became at once the patron and the pattern of
minor places of education throughout the country. Provided they showed
ability and industry, the day labourer's and the artizan's son were
welcomed from the provincial grammar school as warmly at Balliol as the
Sixth Form boy from Harrow or Eton. The connection between secondary
schools of all grades in the provinces and the University on the Isis had
already been promoted by the agency of local examinations; it was rendered
more intimate by the Socratic interest which Jowett took in the
intellectual welfare of the rawest lad from the country if only he showed
the slightest sign of mental promise. Jowett's stimulating sense of
citizenship was felt during his life in the remotest corners of the
country. Its animating influences have survived his death; they still
operate as an inspiring force wherever the domains of municipal and
educational life converge. This good man and patriotic citizen did not
live to witness the active assumption of educational responsibilities by
the County and Borough Councils from which, not vainly, he hoped great
things. An educational system in thorough touch with Oxford and Cambridge
on the one hand and on the other hand with primary village schools; this
was the ideal that Jowett, Lake and Stanley advocated to the earlier
School Enquiry Commissions. Jowett lived long enough to see in the case of
several great provincial grammar schools, notably that of Bradford, his
ambition fulfilled.
In many, if not in most districts, the new provincial Councils have now
added as many rungs to the educational ladder as could fairly be expected.
The wants which still await fulfilment are definite. They ought not to
prove very difficult to supply. Local endowments supplemented by a
moderate amount of State help, will, if wisely directed, provide the
larger facilities still needed for the promotion of higher grade
elementary school pupils to grammar schools. In order that there may be no
further waste either of the money or of the machinery for national
education, a drastic scheme of reorganization seems to be a cardinal
necessity. Secondary education is a phrase too mechanically interpreted as
a synonym for technical or scientific education. If the Statutes be
interpreted literally, the County Councils are empowered only to levy a
rate for a higher school grant when the teaching which that grant defrays
is to enable a boy or girl to learn the elements of some remunerative
handicraft, and is thus expressly sanctioned by the Technical Education
Act of 1890. If the Councils have gone beyond this, and pecuniarily
ministered to the needs of a more generous culture, they have acted, so to
speak, at their own peril, or that action has been rendered possible by
the private liberality of their more opulent members. In addition to this
need of a new definition of the ambiguous epithet and substantive employed
so often in the foregoing text, a new educational authority which can
officially survey every department of the entire field of teaching has
become indispensable. Centralized at Whitehall this authority will to some
extent inevitably be. Its operation, however, must be highly elastic. The
conditions of its control must be adaptable to the infinitely varying
conditions, social, geographical, material, sentimental, of the United
Kingdom. The most recent enquiries show that there is much less
dissipation of educational energy by the mutual overlapping of schools
than might be expected. The single instance of this sort to which
attention has been directed by the last Commission is that of Bolton,
where there exists an unprofitable competition between the grammar school
and the Church Institute Boys' School. Elsewhere, however, as at Leeds and
other great towns of the North, Mechanics' Institute Schools, Higher Grade
Board Schools, trench respectively on each other's province, though each
of them, by slightly varying its curriculum, does good work and is in
great local demand. The explanation of the latter fact is the universality
of the appetite for higher teaching created in the large centres of the
English population. The most frequent, and with proper care the most
easily remediable form of overlapping occurs when the higher divisions of
a lower grade school retain pupils already ripe for a higher grade school.
What are the exact limits to be placed respectively to the provinces of
elementary schools of both grades? and what to the grammar schools on the
one hand, or the University schools on the other with which the
rudimentary institutions ought closely and cordially to co-operate? these
are problems with which, in the fifty-ninth year of Her Majesty's reign,
there does not exist any single authority competent to deal. The confusion
between the jurisdiction of the educational bodies now in being is
comparable with that which existed in the relations of the various
administrative authorities and areas in the case of local government
before these functions were comparatively simplified by the legislation of
1874 and of 1888. The Education Department in London has no concern with
secondary schools save so far as some of these are inextricably
intermingled in their operations with the finance or the teaching of
primary schools. The Charity Commission wherein the Endowed Schools
Commission is now merged, can only take cognizance of the agencies for
higher teaching for a special purpose and from a single point of view.
This loose and very partially effective machinery of control has since
1890 received a new element of complexity from the educational power
vested with such happy results as it has been in the County Councils. The
educational branch of the Privy Council office in London has long
attracted to it young men of industry and talents from the Universities as
well as of considerable administrative ability developed at a later date
by official experience.
Meanwhile the profession of the teacher becomes more highly organized each
year. The value of its material interests is constantly increasing. It
still remains without any direct representation in the official world
comparable with that which is secured to the civil and military services
by the Council of the Secretary of State for India. The headmasters'
annual conference has during the last few years supplied a useful medium
for the interchange of opinions and experiences between the recognized
chiefs of their vocation. The College of Preceptors has its occasional
meetings. Certificated assistant teachers have formed themselves into a
loosely coherent body of their own. None of these can, except in an
indirect way, place their practical experience at the disposal of the
central authority whose consent is necessary for any organic change in the
teaching subjects of schools that receive a public endowment. In the case
of schools whose speciality is a sound commercial education, proofs of
late have multiplied that the object of this training may often be more
faithfully accomplished, to say nothing of the intellectual gain to the
learner if the boy who is going to stand behind a counter, and may
sometimes be called upon to write a business letter for his employer, is
instructed in something beyond the arts of summing and penmanship. Many
boys of the humblest birth show a remarkable aptitude for applied logic
and political economy when the elements of physical science fail entirely
to attract their minds. The educational council which might be auxiliary
to the Vice-President of the Council will perhaps number amongst its
members men who, from their own practical knowledge, can give sound advice
in cases where the teacher ought to be entrusted with the power of
adapting the education, not merely in a general way to the vocation that
is hereafter to engage the learner, but to the idiosyncrasies of the
pupil as well. The stipends of assistants in secondary schools are often
unwisely and wastefully low. Men and women who work so hard as these
persons do are entitled to the assurance that their emoluments will be
regulated by the consideration that comes of knowledge as well as the
severer equities of commerce.
The first thing, therefore, as all who on this matter speak from
experience agree, is to establish local councils for educational purposes
which by the prevention of confusion and overlapping between schools of
different grades, will directly promote the economy of educational force
not less than of expenditure. As for the central authority which the
interests alike of teachers, of taught, of children and parents, of the
State, and of its subjects demand, substantial unanimity as to the
composition of that body exists among those who are most qualified to give
an opinion. Generally it is suggested that the new Council might be shaped
after the model of the Indian Council. To come to particulars, there would
be, in the first instance, a certain number of Crown nominees; secondly,
the Universities, perhaps the great public schools or other public
educational bodies, would be asked to select representatives of their own.
Another element in the new central authority would be experienced members
of the teaching professions. These might be chosen partly by the
headmasters in conference, but to some extent by the assistant teachers
employed in every variety of public schools from the highest to the
lowest. It would seem on the whole advisable to select the teachers'
members by the direct vote of the class immediately concerned. The
machinery for doing so would not be difficult. Voting papers, as in the
case of London University in the choice of appointments to the Senate, or
of professional representatives on the Medical Council, would be employed.
In this way, every registered teacher would have a voice in regulating the
details and rewards of his profession to the great increase, as cannot be
doubted, of its _esprit de corps_. In the case of elections to the local
authority for preventing waste and confusion between local schools an
analogous method might be employed. The registered teachers, that is,
would in each neighbourhood choose their proportion of the members of the
local educational body.
Signs are sometimes visible of a reaction from the enthusiasm for
educational progress that has engaged the national energies during the
last half century. There is a danger, one is told, of educating boys or
girls beyond their capacities, and above their station. The increased
competition for the positions of governess and clerk, means misery and
ruin to many of the candidates who would be more suitably, comfortably,
and far more remuneratively employed in domestic service, or in manual
labour according to their sex. The virtues of humility and respect for
superiors are said to be crushed out in the scramble for knowledge that
may enable its possessors to better themselves. Servant maids, one is
told, no longer confine their demands to permission to wear a fringe, but
stipulate for a pianoforte in the basement, or a bicycle with which to
take their airing on their Sundays out. That upon the humbler levels of
the community the progress from ignorance to education should be
accompanied by real or apparent disturbances of the personal relations
between classes was to have been expected. Seasons of transition such as
the present always generate a certain amount of personal friction or of
social displacement. Those just being emancipated from the illiteracy or
semi-barbarism which have been the traditions of centuries have not yet
overcome the agitating strangeness of their new and improved condition.
Those above them in the social scale have not yet been able to decide
whether to conciliate their educated inferiors as possible friends, or to
stand on their guard against them as actual enemies. As the situation
becomes more familiar, it will prove less strained. Common sense as a
supplement to their zeal, seems the chief want of the educational
reformers, official or private, of the day. The tendency is to postpone
the development of intelligence to the acquisition of knowledge. The
masters whom we are now educating are not in the habit of using their
minds for the mere pleasure of intellectual exertion. Hence they often
give an impression of being far less intelligent than they really are. The
correct use of common words in the mother tongue ought orally, not out of
any lesson book, to be taught all boys and girls. The difficulty
experienced by the persons now spoken of in clearly answering a simple
question is often insurmountable. The tendency is, not to digest the query
as a whole, but to catch some word used in it and then to make a remark
suggested by the association of the sound of the syllables, and so
practically to evade the question put. The cheap diffusion of newspapers
and magazines confirms rather than corrects these failures to concentrate
the mind in the casual talk of everyday life. It is not beneath the
dignity of the State educator to deal with the defect.[40]