E THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES Ex Libra SIR MICHAEL SADLER ACQUIRED 1948 WITH THE HELP OF ALUMNI OF THE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION NATIONAL EDUCATION NATIONAL LIFE J. E. G. DE MONTMORENCY, B.A., LL.B., of St. Peter's College, Cambridge, and of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law. AUTHOR OF "STATE INTERVENTION IN ENGLISH EDUCATION, "THE PROGRESS OF EDUCATION IN ENGLAND," &c. lon&on : SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LTD., 25, HIGH STREET, ELOOMSBURY, VV.C. 1906. Library PREFACE THESE brief essays are chiefly intended to appeal to the large class of which the writer is a member the class of local educational administrators, who, as Managers of Provided and Voluntary schools, as Governors of Endowed Secondary schools, are inti- mately in touch with educational conditions. It is true that the Managers of Elementary schools have little direct power, and that the powers of the governing bodies of Secondary schools tend slowly to decrease, as the control of local authorities and of the Board of Education increases ; but, in fact, the power by way of influence of Managers and Governors is very great. This vast class of unknown men and women who give freely of their time to local educa- tional problems, plays, I believe, a part of far- reaching importance in the evolution of national education and national life. Were it not for this class, administration would become purely mechanical and bureaucratic, and the human, as opposed to the official, element would have hardly any place in our educational administrative system. The Managers very often know not only the teachers and the children, but also the parents, and convey to the minds of all directly 3 808415 concerned in the working of the educational machine, the knowledge that somebody is really interested in them and in the results produced. The great danger that threatens the development of our educational system, is its tendency to become purely mechanical and unconscious of the inspiration that springs out of a mutual esteem existing between administrators and those whom administration affects. If School Managers and School Governors can carry into the actual school buildings both sympathy and high educational ideas and ideals, there is a work done for education that no Legislation could accomplish. I have, therefore, ventured to indicate in these brief essays certain principles that underlie educational advance, and I think, perhaps, that those principles will appeal to some of the many thousands of School Managers who are daily visiting the great and small schools of the land. If any of the questions with which I have dealt reach, through the agency of this little book, the stage of discussion between parents, teachers and managers, the end aimed at will have been attained. I am sure that opportunities should be devised for the meeting together of parents, teachers and managers at fairly frequent intervals. All three classes invariably gather strength and hopefulness from such meetings. I have ventured to add a final essay dealing with "The Evolution of the Religious Controversy." Public feeling on the question of religious teaching in schools is at present so heated, that perhaps it was scarcely wise to do so. But it has seemed to me that to many it would probably be useful to have at hand at this time a perfectly unbiassed outline of the course of the long religious controversy. I say unbiassed, for I know that I have set down naught in malice ; but I am certainly biassed if that is the right term in one respect. I am convinced that any Legislation which renders possible an organic separation between religious and secular teaching, would inflict in no long time a terrible injury upon this nation. I look at the matter from within, and not, as the Legislator must look at it, from without. Both as a Manager of schools in very poor districts, and as a student of the history of English education in relation to the social life of the poor, I am absolutely certain that to divorce religious teaching from the State curriculum in schools would have disastrous results. To my mind this is ultimately not merely a question as to the rights of any religious bod}-, or as to the pricking of any particular conscience important as rights and consciences must ever be to a great Legislature. The ultimate question is whether the State is prepared to say that, in its capacity as a State, it is no longer the Defender of the Faith. If it is not prepared to say that, it has no right to exclude, or to render it possible for a local authority to exclude, from the curriculum of the State schools the elements of Christianity. The 6 Government, have, I think, specifically disavowed the doctrine that the State as a State is only concerned with secular matters. If this is so, the country may expect such amendments in the Bill as will secure in all cases (subject to a conscience clause applying equally to parents and teachers), the elements of Revealed Religion as part of the State curriculum. That is one most important matter from the School Manager's point of view. There is another, only less important, that a final and just settlement should be found for the outstanding questions of rights and consciences. While we are quarrelling, other countries are forging ahead. The nation at large cannot afford to have the religious controversy remain open ; to have this Government come to one decision, and the next come to another. The scare of uncertainty destroys efficiency in the schools. The educationalist demands as a right some settlement that no great party in the State will feel compelled, on accession to power, to re-open. National life cannot be secure till national education is placed on a permanent basis outside the storm-area of local and imperial politics. J. E. G. DB M. LINCOLN'S INN. CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE 3 THE EDUCATIONAL OUTLOOK 9 THE LESSONS OP THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION 54 THE EDUCATION OF THE VERY POOR 94 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 120 SCHOOL NURSERIES 137 NATIONAL EDUCATION AND FREE LIBRARIES ... 167 EDUCATION AND INSPIRATION 180 THE EVOLUTION OF THE RELIGIOUS CONTRO- VERSY ... 199 THE EDUCATIONAL OUTLOOK THE religious aspect of National Education at times threatens to overwhelm in popular interest those other aspects of education that are hardly less disputable and scarcely less important. Difficult as it would be to over- estimate the value of a just settlement of the religious difficulties, and important as it is to keep in mind the fact that religion has played a predominant part in the history of English education, yet it is certainly at times necessary to lay the question aside and to consider the evolution of national education as a whole, to regard its organisation and its grading, the interaction of its parts and its relationship to national life. It is often said that those aspects of education are so technical and un- attractive that nothing can render the subject one of popular interest. Yet, in fact, there are few subjects that call more vehemently for the attention of the mind of the people, since it io National Education and National Life may be alleged, without any exaggeration, that the future of England as a nation depends upon the creation of a really efficient system of national education. This paper is, therefore, an attempt to state in non-technical language our present educational position, and to describe the educational outlook. It may be said with confidence at once that so fair a prospect has not been seen before in the educational history of the English people. Certain principles distinguish a system of national education from what may be called a national group of educational facilities. Such a group of facilities we have always had in a more or less complete though inorganic form. We have always had universities ; we have always had secondary schools ; we have always had primary schools ; and all these facilities have once or twice possessed at one and the same moment a considerable measure of efficiency. They seem to have been efficient for a brief period at the end of the fourteenth and again at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But it may be said, without fear of The Educational Outlook II contradiction, that they have never yet been so efficiently co-related as to constitute a national system that is to say, an educational system forming an organic part of the life of the nation. For the last century there has been a stern struggle to create such a system. Slowly the primary portion of this system was evolved from the crudest beginnings until to-day there are elementary schools enough. Still more slowly have the secondary schools awakened to consciousness from the sleep that the eighteenth century imposed upon them, only to find that there are nearly two hundred thou- sand school places too few. The tertiary, or university portion of the system has had some fifty years of fairly full activity, and to-day it is receiving accretions from every side ; but it is still in the main a detached group of facilities not yet organically related to the primary and secondary groups. That, at any rate, was the position in the year 1899, when a new stage was reached. Seven years ago all these groups possessed considerable independent vitality, with a common drift towards the extension of 12 National Education and National Life scientific teaching and training at the expense of the general mental outlook. There was, however, no organic relationship between the groups. It is true that scholars passed from, one group to another, that certain county councils endeavoured to create a definite relationship between the primary and secondary group, and that the universities, by means of examinations and extension lectures, kept themselves and some slight measure of culture alive in the hearts of the people. But, in fact, the spirit of antagonism and educa- tional waste was abroad. The great School Boards were anxious to compete with, rather than to feed, the secondary schools ; the Voluntary schools and the schools of the lesser Boards had never heard of secondary educa- tion ; while the universities were content to draw their undergraduates from sources that had very little to do with endowed schools. The Government Departments, from whom light if not sweetness might have been expected, preferred internecine war and educational chaos. The general tendency of The Educational Outlook 13 educational effort was to crush out secondary education in the strict sense of the term as an intermediary stage between an elementary and a university course, and to substitute for it a somewhat advanced elementary curriculum based on the elements of natural science and leading no whither. The position was obviously intolerable. Half of the bulk of the children of the country were in Voluntary schools vainly struggling to be efficient, and the other half were in Board schools that in the rural districts were even less efficient than the Voluntary schools, and in the urban districts were afflicted with an unrealisable ambition. Secondary education meant nothing to any of these schools. Specialisation by imma- ture brains was their highest aim. Such specialisation was encouraged by the Code, fear- fully and wonderfully drafted, that governed all those schools without the least regard for the elementary principles of graduated education. Such specialisation was, indeed, forced upon the schools by the Directory of the Science and Art Department a document 14 National Education and National Life almost Asiatic in its lavish profusion of subjects. The earning of grants was, indeed, the whole duty of teachers; and the work of constructing a grant-earning curriculum was comparable with the exquisite art of drafting bills of costs. The grant-earning capacity of a particular pupil was a far more important fact than his or her education, and therefore every effort was made to secure for a primary school scholars who would, under a reasonable educational system, have gone to a secondary school. Indeed, attempts were sometimes made to seduce scholars actually working in such a school. The plight of the secondary school was, beyond doubt, at least as woeful as that of the higher elementary school, since it not only competed for the Science and Art grants but also with the primary school. In such a competition the fact that it was compelled to charge fees was a severe handicap that lavish grants from the county council could not remove. Nor could the governing bodies of these schools find any comfort in the fact that the law gave no countenance to the fee-lessness The Educational Outlook 15 of higher elementary schools. But the day of Mr. Cockerton was at hand. By the year 1899 educationalists were faced by the fact that the best scholars finished their school life in the Board schools, and only the less competent passed on to the secondary schools to take advantage of the county council grants. It was, indeed, clear that if England was ever to have a national system of education there was no time to delay. A scheme of instruction that no sane person could call education was rapidly becoming stereotyped. The nation could not hope to face the competition of the world if the new generation were to grow up inefficient in every branch of thought. No nation can produce thinking workers that has no secondary. system of education, and yet the salient fact in the year 1899 was the doom of the endowed secondary schools to suffer a mad change into higher elementary schools of the baser kind. Before dealing with the pro- vidential interposition of Mr. Cockerton, it will be convenient to refer briefly to the long delayed intervention of Parliament. 16 National Education and National Life Reform at the hands of the Legislature began on the gth August, 1899, when the Board of Education Act of that year was passed. The Act established a Board of Education charged with the superintendence of educational affairs in England and Wales. It took the place of the offices at South Kensington and Whitehall, and at once abolished the preposterous antagonism be- tween these complementary departments. The new Board thus became not only the central authority for elementary education, but it also controlled the mongrel type of instruction that South Kensington had so sedulously fostered in direct antagonism to the very life of the secondary schools. That this reckless policy would be aban- doned was assured by the fact that the statute empowered the new Board to acquire by Order in Council the educational powers of the Charity Commissioners. Before the end of the year 1901 the Board, in fact, acquired all the powers conferred upon the Commissioners by, or by any scheme made under, the The Educational Outlook 17 Endowed Schools Acts, and thus became the authority for secondary as well as elementary and higher elementary education. The Act, moreover, gave the Board power to inspect, either directly or through the medium of any university or other organisation, such secondary schools as desired and deserved inspection, in addition to schools that the Board directly controlled by scheme. In this way it was rendered certain that eventually every secondary school of repute would be drawn within the net of the State system. It was further provided that county and borough councils could contribute to the expense of such inspection, thus bringing those important educational authorities into direct touch with schools that they could not otherwise reach. The Act of 1899, as we have seen, suggested the regular employment of the universities for the purpose of inspecting secondary schools. University inspection of such schools might well forerun, as it must accompany, the organic relationship of the university and the 1 8 National Education and National Life school. But inspection could not do every- thing, even though it were combined with the university local examination system now at work for half-a-century. The Act, therefore, took a further step. It provided for the for- mation of a Consultative Committee, ' ' con- sisting, as to not less than two-thirds, of persons qualified to represent the views of universities and other bodies interested in education," for the purpose of forming a Register of Teachers and of advising the Board of Education on any matters referred to it by the Board. In this way the universities could not but become an integral part of a national system. A university which is an examining body, an inspecting body, which is directly concerned in forming an authoritative list of both primary and secondary teachers, and in advising the Central Authority on matters of national policy, is directly related to the life of every school. The work that the Consultative Committee is now doing, after consultation with the chief universities and other public bodies interested, The Educational Outlook ig in formulating a scheme for the best method of testing the instruction in secondary schools, is of inestimable value ; but not perhaps of greater value than its efforts, through the Teachers' Registration Council that it has formed, to secure the highest possible standard of teaching in secondary schools. The present system of registration has proved unsatis- factory, but this does not detract from the value of those efforts. Much has been learnt from the experiment, and the Board of Educa- tion is pledged to the position that practically every secondary teacher must possess, in addition to a university degree or its equivalent, a thorough knowledge of both the theory and the practice of teaching. The quality of the teaching and of the teachers in all secondary schools is now, in fact, practically assured. The Act of 1899 was, so to speak, a flash of electricity that, passing through the educa- tional atmosphere, integrated the existing mechanical mixture of educational oppor- tunities into a real, a vital combination. It added little, it took nothing away, but it 2O National Education and National Life effected a transformation that will in time transform England. The first question that arose after the Act was as to the way in which the Board should make itself felt. It was clear that two things were required : First, that the existing law should be administered ; and secondly, that the process of administrative transformation should be extended to local bodies. The existing law had not been administered. The weakness and incoherence of the two Education Departments, combined with the energy of the great School Boards, had created a position that had to be reversed. As we have seen, the School Boards had pressed, in their laudable desire to give educational oppor- tunities to all, the meaning of elementary education beyond its extremest limits, and in so doing had threatened the very existence of secondary education. By perhaps a not inexplicable coincidence Mr. T. B. Cockerton, a district auditor, disallowed about this very time certain items in the accounts of the London School Board. The question came The Educational Outlook 21 before the courts, and it was eventually decided that " it is not within the power of a School Board to provide, at the expense of the ratepayers, science and art schools or classes under the Science and Art Department in day schools ; nor can a School Board provide, out of money raised by rates, for instruction at evening continuation schools outside the curriculum prescribed by the Code issued by the Education Department for public elemen- tary schools. To educate adults in such schools by means of funds drawn from the rates is beyond the legal powers of a School Board." This decision at once checked the secondary policy and work of the School Boards. The Board of Education was no longer compelled to look on while their secondary schools were destroyed. The controversy that had raged round the principle involved in the Cockerton- case was dead and gone. All competition between the primary and secondary groups of schools had ended and further legislation became not only desirable but necessary, since the very fact of ending the competition had 22 National Education and National Life made the instruction of a large army of elder children illegal. Special legislation enabled the School Boards to carry on their advanced work pending the introduction of a statute that would place a sound secondary education within the reach of the best children in the primary schools. In 1902 that statute came. The School Board system was abolished. Every county council and county borough council and the borough council of every non- county borough with a population over 10,000, and the district council of every urban district with a population over 20,000, became the local education authority for elementary education, while the county council and the county borough council became the authori- ties for higher education, with the supplemen- tary aid of the councils of all non-county boroughs and urban districts. These authori- ties replaced the multitudinous authorities that existed under the Act of 1870. Under that Act there was a School Board in London, and there were also Boards in 61 out of 69 county boroughs, in 139 non-county The Educational Outlook 23 boroughs, and in 2,363 urban and rural parishes. Where no School Board existed, the provisions of the Education Act as to compulsory school attendance were enforced by School Attendance Committees, appointed in the boroughs by the town council, in urban districts by the urban district council, and in other areas by the guardians of the poor. The effect of the Act of 1902 was to substitute 328 local education authorities for over 2,500 School Boards and nearly 800 School Atten- dance Committees. It must be remembered that not only was this a remarkable simplifica- tion which brought education into constant touch with a homogeneous system of local government, but it also brought every elementary school into close contact with a secondary educational authority. Moreover, the new local education authorities acquired not only the powers of School Boards and Attendance Committees, but also the entire control of the secular education in the Volun- tary schools, thus ensuring as high a standard of education in these schools as in 24 National Education and National Life the most extravagantly conducted Board school. The Act in order to carry the system of delegated work, which alone could secure uniformity of administration, to its legitimate conclusion, provided managing bodies for each individual school directly in touch with the local authority. In the case of county council schools the managing body consists of a maximum of four managers appointed by the council, and a maximum of two appointed by the minor local authority. In the case of borough or urban district schools, the local authority can either govern each school direct or by a body of managers. In the case of Voluntary or "non-provided" schools, the managing body consists of a maximum of four persons appointed under the trusts of the school, and two persons appointed as to one by the county council, and the other by the minor local authority. In borough or urban district council Voluntary schools two are appointed by the council. In London one is appointed by the county council and one by the borough council. In this way the The Educational Outlook 25 question of education is brought into intimate connection with every grade of government,, and every public elementary school has on its managing body representatives of a local authority. In the case of the Voluntary, no less than in the case of the rate-provided school, the managers must carry out the directions of the local education authority, both with respect to secular education and the number and educational qualifications of teachers. This authority may, moreover, inspect the school. The standard of secular teaching imposed by the Board of Education and the local authority, by virtue of their bearing the cost of such teaching, is thus secured in every school, and the certainty is attained of a high level of elementary teaching throughout the country. The Act dealt not less effectively with the question of secondary education. It provides that ' ' the local education authority shall consider the educational needs of their area, and take such steps as seem to them desirable, after consultation with the Board of Education, 26 National Education and National Life to supply or aid the supply of education other than elementary, and to promote the general co-ordination of all forms of education, and for that purpose shall apply all or so much as they deem necessary of the residue under Section I. of the Local Taxation (Customs and Excise) Act, 1890, and shall carry forward for the like purpose any balance thereof which may remain unexpended." This provision had been made necessary by the Cockerton case. The Act removed evening schools from the purview of elementary education, and limited such education in day schools to scholars under the age of sixteen at the end of any school year. All the higher work was to be carried on under the name of secondary education. It was, of course, left to the Board to determine what the type of secondary education should be ; but the Act made it clear that the old confusion and competition between primary and secondary education should disappear. The provisions as to the latter were also necessary for the effective carrying out of the Act of 1899. Under the The Educational Outlook 27 new provisions that Act at once secured an ample field of operation. Those new pro- visions did not limit the funds for secondary education to fees and funds derived from local Excise taxation. The county boroughs were empowered to make any necessary rate for the purposes of higher education, while the county council were limited (apart from the consent of the Local Government Board) to two- pence in the pound, or threepence if the non-county boroughs or urban districts relinquished their right of making a penny rate for the same purpose. This power of providing higher education includes the power to train teachers, to supply or aid the supply of any form of education not given in a public elementary school, to supply higher education outside the area of the council when such supply appears to be for the benefit of the area, and provide scholarships and pay the fees of scholars at educational centres within or without the area. The powers in respect of higher education vested in the great local authorities are, indeed, practically unlimited. 28 National Education and National Life It is conceived that a university might be founded and maintained under these pro- visions, and certainly there can be no doubt that scholars could be sent to universities outside the area. We see, in fact, an educational system in which the secondary schools are intimately related to higher and lower grades of education by means of scholar- ships, by the paying of fees, the training of teachers. The fact that these all important secondary schools are intimately related both to the Board of Education and the local education authority is one of the most significant facts of the present position. These schools are one of the strongest bonds between the Board and the local authority, and their joint efforts seem destined to produce a secondary system of unique efficiency. We thus see that the Acts of 1899 and 1902 (combined with the special London Act of 1903) substituted for the educational facilities that existed in 1899 an organic system of education intimately related to the govern- mental, administrative and political life of the The Educational Outlook 29 country from Parliament to the pettiest Parish Meeting. But these Acts, after all, only created machinery, and machinery requires skilled working to produce systematic results. It would have been possible so to have mis-worked the machinery of these Acts as to have left national education still in a condition of chaos. It is not necessary here to point out the means by which the Board of Education have set the machine going ; how intimate relations have been set up, in the overwhelming majority of cases, between the Board and the local authorities, the individual schools, the managers and governing bodies ; how the statutory and other powers of the different bodies are now in steady operation ; the means by which, in fact, an educational system dealing with 6,000,000 children and about 160,000 teachers (including pupil teachers and probationers) is working with a smoothness that no political prophet could have foreseen four years ago. Since that feat has been accomplished the interest of the educationalist necessarily shifts 30 National Education and National Life from the machinery to the human material with which that machinery is dealing. The movement of the children in the machine necessarily attracts attention. We know that we have got rid of what may be called the higher elementary tendency ; but most of us do not quite realise yet what we have in its stead. What we need in the way of educational movement is clear enough. We want a system that will, with unerring certainty, grade children according to their capacity apart altogether from any artificial distinctions between primary and secondary schools. We need a system that will, almost unconsciously from the moment that the child enters it, guide the scholar through the necessary grades of education to the logical end of his or her school life an end that comes according to capacity at any age from fourteen to nineteen years. The system should be such that at the different stages of de- velopment of the child and every child has very definitely marked stages of development he or she should be shunted, as it were, on to The Educational Outlook 31 the curve of progress belonging to that stage, thus ensuring no waste, no loss either of public money or private capacity. It is costly and harmful to attempt to teach a child subjects beyond its capacity ; it is shameful and a vital loss to the community to cease to teach a child while any subject remains within its capacity. The testing of capacities and potentialities is, therefore, the root problem of any national educational system. The infant classes, by a sort of logical compulsion, demand the most subtle, penetrating, sym- pathetic and skilled teachers. Therefore and here I speak for myself alone I believe that the employment of pupil teachers to be a positive evil in any educational system, though I fully realise the hard task that it will be to dispense with them. The Board of Education, by their present efforts to raise the standard of those teachers, practically admit the whole case against such teachers. No doubt a child of fifteen half of whose school time is devoted to strict secondary instruction, and the other half is given to teaching in an elementary 32 National Education and National Life school is better than one of Mr. Lancaster's monitors. But still they belong to the same class. The very facility, the extraordinary facility, with which pupil teachers and monitors convey information is in itself a danger. It is instinctive and not intellectual teaching, and does nothing to develop either brain power or interest in life. It will be useful to note (apart from this system of teachers) what is actually being done in the schools. We shall then see the educational movement of the children along the grades of the whole system. The old heterogeneous Code for primary schools has disappeared. We have in its place the first reasoned attempt to solve the problem of educating the English people. In the new elementary Code there is a division of scholars by age into three classes : an infant division, comprising scholars from the age of three years to the age of seven; the younger scholars' division, including all children from seven to twelve years; and the older scholars' division, bringing together all pupils from twelve to The Educational Outlook 33 fifteen years. There is only one course of instruction for the whole school. It comprises the English language, arithmetic, knowledge of common phenomena, imperial history and geography, hand and eye training (including drawing from actual objects, memory drawing and brush work), singing by note with practice in proper breathing, physical exercises, and (for girls) plain needlework. The Code states that " the education given in every public elementary school should be based on a graduated course of instruction, suitable to the age and capacity of the scholars " in those subjects. Here certainly is a graduated course capable of great results, and more especially so since the line between the different age divisions is elastic. A child of six years, who is mentally and physically eight years, can be in the younger division, while a child of eight years, who is mentally and physically six years, can remain in the infants' division, and so forth. Considerable stress is laid on the desirableness of limiting the infant division to even younger children than is now 34 National Education and National Life suggested as the normal rule of practice. A sound solution of the problem of determining the infant stage in each particular case is, of course, of the first importance, for the child's whole career depends on the teaching in these earliest years. The need for teachers of absolutely the highest skill in the infant division becomes more and more apparent when we consider this problem. It is obvicus that pupil teachers should be excluded absolutely from the infants' division. The brain of the infant is peculiarly plastic and susceptible, and to intrust it to untrained teachers is to tamper with national education at the very base. But the problem of determining the moment when a child should pass out of the infants' division is only more difficult than the problem of deciding when a child should pass into the older scholars' division. To make the normal age division ten years (as in the Scotch Code) instead of twelve, or, at any rate, not later than eleven, seems to me likely to obviate certain diffi- culties. It is desirable to discriminate early, The Educational Outlook 35 for those scholars who are to leave school at fourteen ought to have their final course so designed that it will last four years ; and it is, in the vast majority of cases, possible to tell at the age of ten years if a child (or at any rate a boy) has the qualities that demand a lengthened school career. There seems to be no reason why a child should not be drafted into the secondary school at the age of ten, indeed it seems desirable that this should be done, so that the scholar will have two years of the atmosphere of the secondary school before the special secondary course is begun. There is still, unfortunately, a class of school that stands between the elementary and the secondary school, though it seems to me, at any rate, impossible to regard it as an educa- tional link. The higher elementary school is, it is true, but a shadow of its former self; yet, the fact remains that it not only exists but threatens to multiply. These schools take children (who have already spent two years in a public elementary school) for a course of three years between the ages of twelve and 36 National Education and National Life fifteen years. These scholars were excluded from the evening schools; and devoted them- selves exclusively to their daywork at rather longer hours than the ordinary elementary scholar, with a graded curriculum involving special training in practical and theoretical science. The Code of Regulations for 1905 has, however, done something towards making the curriculum less specialised, and has thrown open the evening schools to the scholars. No doubt it may be contended, as it is contended by some experts, that these schools are now doing useful work ; but they are demonstrably outside a true graded system. It is contrary to the nature of the average child to take a special course at such an early age, and in the case of brighter minds, which can take such a course, harm is done, for such minds belong to the secondary type, and require prolonged checking and preparation before anything in the nature of specialisation begins. These schools are at the best a tem- porary substitute for secondary schools, and should not be allowed to delay their coming. The Educational Outlook 37 In seriously considering a national system we may, therefore, presume the absence of the higher elementary school, or regard it as an accidental survival of the invertebrate age, and may look on the primary and secondary schools as a continuous system. We have seen that at present the primary school has an admirably graded curriculum for scholars between the ages of three and fifteen years. The curriculum of the secondary school apart from certain exceptions pre- sently to be considered as open to very serious criticism is a logical continuation of the primary school course. It is true that for the purposes of grants the Board can at present only deal with a period of the secondary school life, with the period between the thirteenth and the seventeenth years. For that period of four years the Beard puts forth a graded curriculum in respect of which grants can be earned. ' ' No school will be considered eligible for these grants which does not provide at least this amount of education. But the earlier education leading up to this Course > 38 National Education and National Life and the further education (if any) given beyond it, are regarded by the Board as forming together with it a single organic and progres- sive system." The Board, therefore, controls the whole curriculum. The earlier part must lead up to the Course ; the later part must be the logical development " of that general education which it is the function of the Secondary School to provide, and shall not check the general development of the scholar's faculties by excessive or premature specialisa- tion." We must thank the Board of Educa- tion for teaching us this phrase. It will be observed that the Board's position enables it to intervene in all classes of secondary schools whether the schools lead to commerce or affairs, to science or learning. The Board in effect says : Our course is essential to a secondary education. If you go no further it will give you an intellectual outfit for life, while if you intend to go further you cannot do so with success unless you begin where our course ends. You must not specialise in life, science, or letters until The Educational Outlook 39 " a certain solid basis for life has been laid in acquaintance with the structure and laws of the physical world, in the accurate use of thought and language , and in practical ability to begin dealing with affairs." Such a position is incontrovertible, and it is because of its strength that it is impossible seriously to consider the claims of the higher elementary school. When a scholar leaves the elementary school at fifteen every opportunity should be given him to obtain a strictly secondary education in evening schools and classes. But when the national system is really at work we shall find, in fact, that the vast majority of those who ought to have a secondary education will at the proper early stage have been passed from the elementary into the secondary school. The necessity for highly-trained teachers for the purpose of the necessary discrimination is, of course, obvious, and is again an argument against the employment of the pupil teacher. The function of the evening school will then 40 National Education and National Life chiefly be to provide advanced study of a university type for those whose other duties exclude them from the day classes of local universities. It may be heresy, but for my part I am inclined to believe that in a really perfectly organised scheme of national education there should be no evening schools, though there should be every facility for study in the provision of lectures, reading- rooms and technical lending libraries. The four-year Course that the Board offers is an organic development from the graded courses of the primary school, and is capable of elastic expansion or contraction, as the special needs of the particular secondary school demand. The Board insists that " a certain minimum number of hours in each week must be given, in each year of the Course, to the group of subjects commonly classed as ' English/ and including the English Language and Literature, Geography and History ; to Languages, ancient and modern, other than the native language of the scholars; and to Mathematics and to Science. The Educational Outlook 41 Ample time is left for a well-planned curriculum to add considerably to this minimum in one or more of these groups of subjects, as well as to include adequate provision for systematic Physical Exercises ; for Drawing, Singing, and Manual training ; for the instruction of girls in the elements of Housewifery ; and for such other subjects as may probably be included in the curriculum of any particular school." Here we have a definite organic scheme as truly the evolutionary product of the primary scheme as the child of fourteen in the secondary school is the product of the child of ten in the primary school. It is, therefore, with regret that educationalists have observed the un- fortunate determination to preserve exceptions to this scheme, not only in the case of the specialised schools of science known as ' ' Division A schools," but also by the creation of a new ty.pe of school intermediate between the organic type and the Division A type. There can be no doubt that the Division A schools seriously depart from the admirable 42 National Education and National Life working ground plan that the Board has laid down. These schools were, in a sense, the answer of secondary education to the challenge that primary education flung down when the higher elementary school began to compete with the secondary school. If they have all the merits, they certainly have all the vices of the higher elementary schools. The Board clearly feels the difficulty of attempting to fit these schools into a national system, for in limiting their number an attempt has been made to avoid " the danger of that premature specialisation which is destructive of real progress," and a tempting compromise between the organic type and these schools is being offered to the endowed foundations of the country. But neither the attempt nor the compromise avoid the danger. The fact re- mains that in the Science School a specialised course begins at the age of thirteen, and yet no educationalist would attempt to deny what the Board specifically affirms namely, that all specialisation must be postponed till the completion of the sixteenth year. If the The Educational Outlook 43 specialised science work is to be duly balanced by the other aspects of education, the scholar must inevitably be overworked at the most crucial period of his physical and moral life. The Division A schools are indefensible, and no school should continue to be subjected to the almost overwhelming temptation of the grants attached to their curriculum. The com- promise that the Board offers is that the ordinary four-years' course should be deviated from in the case of pupils who would, in a Division A school, have been grant-earners. At the age of fifteen those scholars, after taking the general graded curriculum for two years, are to take for the remaining two years a special course in advanced Science, Language, or Literature. This is only slightly less indefensible than the Division A course. It involves specialisation at the age of fifteen, when seventeen is the minimum age for special work. Surely the real difficulty can be faced at no great cost. Let the Board offer a really heavy grant for an advanced course between the years of seventeen and nineteen. 44 National Education and National Life Only certain schools indeed could give the course, but it could easily be arranged for such a distribution of these schools as to render it possible for all who are actually competent to take such a course which would deliberately forerun a University Honour School or Tripos to enter such schools after completing their secondary graded course. The cost of such an ex- tension of the secondary graded system would be small, and would be as nothing com- pared with the waste and loss involved in the present system. It is impossible not to feel that the higher elementary school, the moribund Division A school, and the " Para- graph 13 " school are all unhappy survivals of the invertebrate educational age. They may, perhaps, have a temporary use in a period of transition and experiment, but they can have no place in a national system. No doubt it is possible, in all these three reversionary types of schools, for a highly-skilled head-master or mistress to minimise the evils, to secure high grants, and to give an education far better The Educational Outlook 45 than the type would normally involve. But such results are only secured, if at all, at the cost of a strain alike on teachers and scholars that, in the long run, will have its revenge. Nothing is organic or systematic that has to sustain special strains inconsistent with its environment. A perfect educational system ought to be quite unconscious of the results that it produces. It ought not to have to fight against its own machinery, and use half its energy in overcoming its own friction. Assuming, then, that these reversionary types will disappear, we have a system as simple as it is effective a system of graded education capable of educating a scholar for the period between the ages of three and nineteen years, and, in fact, educating the vast majority of the children of the country between the ages of five and fifteen years. The question that is still unsure is the relation- ship between the primary and the secondary school. We have a continuous graded education that runs through the whole system ; but what are the possibilities of this system 46 National Education and National Life so working that every scholar who has a birthright, so to speak, to a complete course, will get it ? The primary school ends at fifteen. The secondary course in the secondary school begins at twelve. What guarantee have we that before the age of twelve the scholar with a secondary capacity will have been transferred to a secondary school ? It must, of course, be assumed that the earlier curriculum in the secondary school, over which the Board has full control, will be so graded as to admit of transfers from the primary school without dislocating either the mind of the scholar or the working of the school. Assuming, however, that practical difficulties of this kind do not exist how does the matter stand ? What number of children do, in the average, require a secondary education ? The Schools Inquiry Com- mission arrived at the conclusion that I2'28 per thousand of the population required a secondary education between the ages of eight and fifteen years, balancing those who leave school before fifteen against those who The Educational Outlook 47 leave after that age. This estimate includes the preparatory stage from eight to twelve years, and assumes the gross educational heresy that the early training of a child destined for a secondary school should differ from that of a child destined to complete his education in a primary school. The heresy is, of course, obvious ; for, in a national system, it cannot be ascertained whether a child is to have a secondary course until the age of ten or twelve is reached. The proportion named by the Commission has been, unsoundly it seems, rejected on other grounds than this. I think, however, that if we deduct the number who are having their earlier grade education in a primary school that the figure is approximately correct. If, in order to make this deduction, we halve the Commission's figure, we get 6*14 per thousand, which is almost exactly the average figure for London at present (6*2). That, however, seems a little low, and probably 8 per thousand of population would give the average number requiring a secondary course. The total 48 National Education and National Life population of England and Wales at the moment may be put at 34,000,000 persons, and, therefore, on the above basis, accommo- dation is required in secondary schools for 272,000 children. As there are about 6,000,000 children at present on the school registers, this would mean that between four and five per cent, of the children in the elementary schools should pass into the secondary schools. If we assume that the children chosen for secondary schools were ascertained between the ages of ten and eleven, and that on the average these children were to have a six-years' course in the secondary school, a sixth of the total number receiving secondary education would pass into that grade every year from among the 630,000 children at the elementary schools of the age of between ten and eleven years. We should thus have an annual flow of 45,000 scholars into what Mr. Morant calls " the educational laboratory of the nation." When that is achieved, and not till then, can it be said that the national The Educational Outlook 49 system is at work. At present we stand nowhere near this consummation. The Secondary Education Commissioners of 1895, arrived at the conclusion that the total number of scholars in the endowed schools in the selected counties gave only 2*5 per thou- sand of the population. Not quite one-quarter of the number were girls ; and it must be remembered, in any future calculations, that the number of girls receiving a secondary education will at least approximate to the number of boys. If prophecy were anything but futile in social economics, I should be tempted to think that when, under a national system, the primary system attains its maxi- mum overflow into the secondary system, the number of girls will exceed the number of boys. However this may be, if the figures of the Report of 1895 were now true for the whole country, it would mean that there are 85,000 scholars in the endowed schools. Possibly, in all, there are 100,000 scholars^in those schools. Of these, however, we need only consider as secondary scholars those 50 National Education and National Life who are taking the approved secondary courses. Of these there were, in 1903-4, 32,625 in Division A schools, and 19,841 in Division B schools (the present approach to the organic type of school in a national system), and the Board of Education estimate that the total number for the year 1904-5 of scholars taking the approved course was 63,800. If to the figures for 1903-4 we add, as scholars who are obtaining some measure of secondary education, the 20,729 students between the ages of twelve and fifteen years who earned grants in the year 1903-4, in recognised day classes, and the 100,315 students between the ages of twelve and fifteen years who earned grants in the evening schools, we reach a total of 173,510 scholars receiving something that comes within our present official con- ception of secondary education. More might be added for the vast number of evening scholars above fifteen years ; but that number may very fairly be set off against those over twelve and under fifteen years who are re- ceiving instruction in the primary schools. The Educational Outlook . 51 It may, therefore, be said that there is only a deficit of under 100,000 scholars on these figures that 272,000 require secondary education, and 173,000 actually secure it. But it must be remembered that the evening school scholars under a national system must be brought into secondary day schools, and that, therefore, we have a shortage of secondary school seats of about 200,000. These figures are more than confirmed by the fact that there were in 1903-4 in the evening schools 246,832 scholars earning grants between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one years. I claim that these approximate figures give complete sub- stance to my contention that, until we have an annual overflow of 45,000 children from the primary to the secondary schools, the national system will not be efficiently at work. But is not the education of 270,000 children in secondary day schools a financial impossi- bility ? Let us again consider the approximate figures. The endowed schools have an aggregate annual income available for education of * For the above figures see Statistics of Public Education in England and Wales, 1903-4-5. [Cd. 2782]. 52 National Education and National Life approximately 650,000*. The Local Taxation (Customs and Excise) Act, 1890, produces for secondary educational purposes about 900,000 a year, and this is an increas- ing asset. If we take the average fees for 250,000 children (including the children under twelve years) at 3 per head per annum, we have a further 750,000 per annum. The grants on the basis for 1905-6 from the Board of Education would exceed 620,000 f, while an average rate of one penny in the pound on the present assessable value throughout the areas of the new educational authorities would produce at least 500,000}. The total of those sums is 3,420,000. Assuming that there would be 200,000 grant-earning scholars in the schools, this would give 17 per annum per head. This sum, it is submitted, would cover the whole educational cost and the maintenance of structures in the secondary schools (includ- ing the cost of non-grant-earning scholars), * Secondary Education Commission Report (1895) p. 39. t[Cd. 2,916.] J Parliamentary Paper [Cd. 2782], p. 357. The Educational Outlook 53 and would probably show a surplus. There is no financial impossibility to face ; and, since the financial question, in these days of educational energy, is the only question (other than the religious difficulty) which can block educational advance, it is perhaps not altogether gross optimism to believe that an efficient secondary scheme will within ten years be before the country. Until this is accomplished, it cannot be said that there exists a complete system of education for the youth of England. It is certain that, without such a system, it will not be possible for the next generation to compete successfully in the markets of the world. THE 'LESSONS OF THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION THE study of the history of education has, during the last few years, been introduced into the curriculum of those who propose to enter the teaching profession. Educational history has, indeed, become almost a univer- sity subject ; it has received especial attention in the special reports of the Board of Educa- tion, and a considerable number of writers have specialised upon it as a subject that offers a large field for original research. No adequate history of education in England is yet available, nor, indeed, is likely to be for many years. The material is not at hand, though it is being slowly accumulated from the records, papers, and literature of the successive centuries. The epoch of a series of highly-technical monographs dealing with particular aspects of education and with 54 The Lessons of the History of Education 55 particular periods and persons, must exhaust itself before some gifted historian can gather, unify and breathe life into the disjected material that is now being brought together. Indeed, the dramatic moment for the appearance of .such a history has not yet arrived. Anything like a definite history of English education must, of necessity, be delayed until the present furiously historic years have passed into history. All the mysterious forces of the past are now cen- tralising for the creation of an educational system that will meet the needs the almost suddenly recognised needs of a great and an unready nation. Till we know what that system is, no history of the economic movement that has given it birth is possible. By its fruits shall we know it. But, nevertheless, there never was there never will be a moment when the history of education, both English and foreign, could perform so useful a function as now. History is, or should be, an applied science ; that is to say, knowledge which is intended to be 56 National Education and National Life practically applied to the problems of life. History never repeats itself, but it is eternally exhibiting the operation of eternal principles. The events of the twentieth century cannot be the events of the sixteenth century ; but the history of all centuries shows principles at work as effectively in the sixteenth as in the twentieth or any other century. The move- ments and periods of equilibrium in history are as capable of yielding the laws of social motion as the phenomena of Nature are of yielding the laws of material motion. It is true that the sciences of social statics and dynamics have as yet hardly passed the empiric stage. We are still casting about for laws, and have as yet but few definite principles that can be applied to the solution of new social problems. But we have at least passed the stage of mere aimless experimenting, and we are in a position to apply tentative principles which it is highly probable are real principles governing social development. One law, concerning which there can be no doubt, applies in the social as well as in the physical The Lessons of the History of Education 57 world. In both spheres, action and re-action are always equal and opposite, and energy is always conserved. The social world is, how- ever, by no means a frictionless combination of machines, and the rate of doing work is enormously diminished by the amount of energy that is exhausted in overcoming friction, cohesion, and the inertia of con- servative forces. We cannot expect to obtain in return for an expenditure of energy even an approximate equivalent. Our action must be balanced against not only the positive result achieved but also the obstacles over- come. A Government must be judged not only by the laws placed upon the Statute Book, but also by the cohesion, the inertia, and the friction presented by the Opposition. The first lesson, then, of history in con- sidering educational questions is the adoption of a policy that will not work counter to the inertia of great traditions and the cohesion of great organisations, of a policy that will not generate friction in the minds of the bulk of the population. Every movement has 58 National Education and National Life only a certain amount of energy behind it. If that is wasted, the movement ends. The French Reform Movement of the eighteenth century exhausted itself in the bloody episodes of the Revolution, while the English Reform Movement of the early nineteenth century, troubling itself little about blood and iron, achieved results that gave us the commercial supremacy of the world. When, however, we turn to English educational history, we find no such satisfactory results. A thousand years lay between Alcuin's School of York and Lancaster's School of the Borough Road ; a thousand years of strenuous effort by Church and State. That there were no results would be a hard saying, though in the year of grace 1800 the results were none too obvious. It is true that a rich tradition of classical culture was possessed by the governing class ; that two great and slumber- ing universities handed on the same traditions and trained the clergy of an Erastian Church ; that three thousand endowed schools without scholars recorded the munificence The Lessons of the History of Education 59 of the dead and the improvidence of the living. For the rest there might never have been a millennium of effort. The education of the ' ' people " was undertaken by a few miserable charity schools that were, educationally speaking, to use the words of a contem- porary, " useless or worse than useless." In fact, the rate of educational work had been subject to every possible slackening force, and the overcoming of these forces had consumed the bulk of the energy available. Glance for a moment at the inertia that had to be over- come, the cohesion that had to be rent asunder, at the friction that ate up strength. It would be idle to assert that the work thus done was loss; though it has no explicit place in the balance of results. Nations are made by such work. The statue that lies hidden in the block of marble is not wrenched into the daylight without efforts that are forgotten in the glorious result. But, keeping all this in mind, it is not possible to do other than groan over the course of history. Put Nature's lavish waste aside famine, pestilence 60 National Education and National Life and the sword, the Yellow Death, the Black Death, invasions and intestine wars, hungry myriads starving on a generous soil- put all that aside as calamitous but natural. Consider only the uneconomic handiwork of man. Think of the Conqueror's miserable policy that obtained for three centuries a policy that forbade school children even to speak in their own tongue. Recall the national policy that laid an embargo on the education of the serf; that prohibited the circulation of any book that had not the imprimatur of the universities; that allowed no man to teach who did not hold the licence of the Church. Think of the Chantry Legis- lation of the early Tudor period, and the loss to education that it involved ; of the ortho- doxy imposed upon teachers by Mary and Elizabeth ; of the renewal of the licensing business under James I ; of the Conformity legislation of 1662 and 1665, with all its intolerable Erastian consequences ; of the almost school-less England of the eighteenth century, when effort after effort to break down The Lessons of the History of Education 61 the vis inertia of a slumbering Church failed and fell away. Lessons enough, surely, in such a record. These were not natural difficulties necessary to be overcome, but obstacles ignorantly thrust into the current of work by minds steeped in false economy and actuated by preposterous political ideals. The law that action and re-action are always equal and opposite did not trouble the rulers and administrators of the past. The only law that they recognised was municipal law, reeking with economic error, and clumsy beyond belief. But it is not even enough to be economically sound. It is necessary also to be economical. Our road-makers and engineers have learned that the best way to pass a mountain is neither to go over or through it. The best way most often is to go round it. The way may be longer on paper, but it avoids intolerable gradients, tunnels that cost a king's ransom, and the innumerable dangers of the mountain road. It is necessary to devote the re-action to the carrying of passengers, not to the overcoming of daily 62 National Education and National Life difficulties. Heroic methods may, of course, be necessary, for there are Alps even in politics. But if they are not necessary they are too expensive. To-day we are not burdened with quite the same temptation to be uneconomic as were the Kings and Legislatures of old time. We are not so brutally frank nor so naively thorough in our treatment of men and ideas, and are, therefore, not likely to commit ourselves to gigantic errors in policy and the wholesale persecution of opponents. But, on the other hand, the field of action has so enormously increased in area and intensity, that comparatively small mistakes may retard our progress as much as far greater mistakes blocked the way in earlier days. Consider the position of a Legislature desirous of creating uniformity in the type of elementary schools. The Legislature had to deal with such a question in 1902. On considering the question of national education it found that there were efficient Board schools and inefficient Board schools, forming together a huge group The Lessons of the History of Education 63 of schools giving somewhat undenominational religious teaching. It also found that there were efficient Voluntary schools and ineffi- cient Voluntary schools, the latter greatly out- numbering the former, forming together a huge group of schools giving denominational religious teaching. The School Board group were partly maintained by State grants and partly by local rates. The Voluntary group were partly maintained by State grants and partly by voluntary subscriptions. Behind the Voluntary group was ranked a solid mass of definite educational opinion an opinion that might be right or might be wrong, but which, right or wrong, was of immense strength since it was based upon definite personal knowledge, interest and work. On the other hand, behind the School Board group, was ranked a mass of less definite educational opinion an opinion that might be right or might be wrong, but which, right or wrong, was of less strength than the opinion behind the Voluntary group, since it was based rather upon constitutional doctrine and the theory 64 National Education and National Life of what is good for a nation than upon personal interest and sacrifice. Now assume for one moment that the mass of opinion behind the Voluntary schools was, in the mind of the Legislature, wrong, and that behind the Board schools right, what course ought the Legislature to have pursued ? There is no doubt as to the course that William I, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, or the Restoration Parlia- ment would have pursued. They would have swept away the Voluntary schools with one tremendous effort, and would have ground their educational machine against and through the frictional debris of the schools and the cohesive mass of opinion behind them. Apart altogether from the enormous money-cost of such a policy, the Legislature would have had to overcome a resistance that would have left little energy to fulfil the object of the move- ment. National education would have become disorganised, and the Legislature itself (since the modern Legislature does not possess Caesarian courage) disheartened. Suppose, on the other hand, that in the mind of the The Lessons of the History of Education 65 Legislature it was the mass of opinion behind the Voluntary schools that was right, what course ought the Legislature to have pursued ? To have pursued the Norman-Tudor-Restora- tion method would have been as disastrous in this case as in the other. Indeed, it would have been more disastrous, for it would have crystallised floating opinion and have finally divided the country into two educational camps. The Legislature had no choice but to go round the mountain of the religious question and avoid the fearful stress and strain of a forcible passage through it. Whether the right road round, the best road round has been taken, is another matter. It is possible, or probable, that another Parliament may mend or shorten the road, may devise easier gradients, may avoid any tunnelling at all, may reduce friction here and there. But no Parliament will start afresh and cleave a road through the mountain or over the mountain. In view of the educational strides of other nations, we must do more than merely over- come active or passive resistance. On the 66 National Education and National Life contrary, there must be brought to the aid of the educational machine all the forces that, wrongly faced, will obstruct it. None can doubt that in the mass those who have devoted their time and money to the support of Voluntary schools have done so not from merely sectarian, but from patriotic, motives. Nor can any doubt that those who are striving to secure the education of the masses in the great towns, but are sternly opposed to denominational teaching in the schools, are equally patriotic. The issue between the two bodies of opinion that these two classes of workers represent is not a real issue at all, though, doubtless, the refining capacity of the human mind can give it a real appearance. If examined, there is no real issue, for it is clear that the parties to the alleged conflict never come face to face ; at least, so it appears to me. I see the problem like this. The sup- porters of undenominational education assert and their arguments are put forward with thorough earnestness that denominational teaching of religious subjects, while reasonable The Lessons of the History of Education 67 enough in itself, must not be supported out of the rates. The supporters of denomina- tional education are now estopped from denying this proposition, though they might have argued that, inasmuch as for many years denominational teaching had been in part and indirectly supported by State aid, there was no logical reason why it should not be in part supported by rate aid. But the Act of 1902 cuts away that argument. The Voluntary school supporters admit that the teaching of religious subjects must not be paid for out of the rates. Both parties are at one in principle. It is in working out the principle that the difficulty arises. Those who represent the undenominational way of thinking claim that it should be made clear to them that, in fact, the principle is not infringed. In considering this question, it is well to remember that the undenominationalists have no objection to denominational teaching in itself. Their intellectual attitude makes it impossible for them to have such an objection. They claim for themselves, and therefore for other people, 68 National Education and National Life absolute freedom of thought, and they admit that a parent has a right to choose his own religion, and to see that his child, while still a child, shall be brought up in that religion. It is not denominational teaching that they object to, but such teaching at the cost of the rates. Indeed, it is probable that logically they could have no objection to denominational teaching at the cost of the rates if they could be certain that every child was taught exactly what his parent wished him to be taught. Logically, they ought to object to unde- nominational teaching, since it may involve a class of teaching of which a parent dis- approves. If it is not possible to give every child the type of religious teaching its parent requires in school, the only logical position for the undenominationalist to adopt is the removal of all religious teaching from the school. If any real issue existed between the two types of opinion, we should have in this fact a serious threat to the progress of education, since an attempt to create a system of purely secular schools would arouse The Lessons of the History of Education 69 organised resistance of the most stubborn type. But since there is no real issue, since the opponents are not in fact face to face, and since the abolition of religious teaching in the elementary schools is as impossible as to run a railroad over the summit of Mont Blanc, the undenominationalists' logical claim to secular schools indicates a way out of a difficulty that is not a difficulty arising out of ultimate principles, but out of words and physical arrangement. Surely it is possible to separate nominally to separate the secular and the religious teaching, without in any way in- fringing on the historic rights of the Voluntary schools to give the children of a particular communion attending particular schools instruction in the tenets of that communion. Let us assume that the number of the elected representatives of the public on the managing body of a Voluntary school are increased by statute so as to become a majority of the managers. This is what is claimed by a large majority of the House of Commons as essential, on the ground that in any other case public 70 National Education and National Life funds are administered by private individuals. The denominations would probably offer no objection to such a change in so far as it affected secular education. Their objection to it is based on the fact that it would be pos- sible for the majority to attack the denomi- national character of the schools, and so undo the efforts of perhaps a century to bring up children, with few home facilities for religious teaching, in the faith of the parents. That difficulty would, however, not occur if the business of the statutory managers is absolutely restricted to questions relating to the secular education in the school. The old body of managers, or, to be more explicit, that section of the statutory managers who are not appointed as representatives of the public, would have exclusive control of the religious teaching subject, of course, to the conscience clause which .would be given in hours definitely separated from the secular school hours by a provision that school for the purposes of grants should not begin until the religious teaching is ended. This brings us to The Lessons of the History of Education 71 the heart of the controversy. Who is to have the appointment of the head teacher? A controversy has raged round that point, since the denominations have naturally felt that the denominational character of the school depends on the denomination of the head teacher. If the managers as a body, through the introduction of inimical public repre- sentatives, resolve to appoint a head teacher either opposed to or indifferent to the form of belief taught in the school, the school would very rapidly lose or change its denominational character. Such a position would be in- tolerable. Under a scheme that nominally separates the religious and secular teaching the difficulty would not arise. The appointment of the head teacher would be in the hands of the whole body of managers. If the denom- inational managers were at one with the public representatives as to the person to be appointed, no difficulty would arise. The head teacher so appointed would have the control of both the sections of work in the school the religious section and subsequently the secular 72 National Education and National Life section. This would happen in the vast majority of cases. As a rule, throughout the country, the managers work admirably to- gether, and the public representatives do nothing to interfere with the normal course of religious teaching. But provision would have to be made for sporadic cases where difficulty might arise. Where the majority of the managers determined to appoint a head teacher, who, in the opinion of the foundation managers, was an improper person to conduct the religious teaching in the school, then those managers would have a right (subject to an appeal to the Board of Education, who should have the power to quash the appointment altogether) to say that the head teacher appointed should be absolutely restricted to secular teaching, and that the religious teach- ing should be given by a person to be appointed by the foundation managers. The payment (if any) for the services of such a person should be made by the Board of Education or out of the rates, if the Board, after inquiry, finds that the majority of the managers had unreasonably The Lessons of the History of Education 73 and without due cause appointed a head teacher likely to injuriously affect the denom- inational character of the school. On the other hand, if the Board find that there were sound reasons for appointing a head teacher out of sympathy with the denominational teaching in the school, then the foundation managers should have the right to appoint their own religious teacher at their own expense. No doubt such a method of making a path round the religious question is open to criticism, but it, at any rate, largely re- conciles conflicting claims, all of which are based upon opinions, traditions and patriotic motives, which can only be thrust aside at the cost of energy that ought to be devoted solely to the interests of the children. The fundamental lesson of educational history is that hitherto the great volume of educational energy has been devoted to the almost hopeless task of sweeping away obstructions that had a rational ground of existence. Tact, in- genuity, statesmanship, can in most cases enlist on the side of progress those very 74 National Education and National Life obstructions that it is mere recklessness to face. If we tack, a head- wind will help us into port. There is a bye-problem in the particular case I have considered, that has created, and is still creating, a good deal of difficulty. It is the question of the denominational training colleges with their considerable State grants. Students not conforming to the Church of England can only attend the colleges founded in connection with the Established Church as day students. They cannot join in the corporate residential life of the colleges. The difficulty is a real one, but not one that appears to involve the breach of any principle. It is inherent in the nature of the case, for a man or woman of a different denomination, even if he resided in the college, could scarcely enter into the corporate life of the place. The establishment of hostels affiliated to the colleges is one way out of the difficulty, but a more hopeful way is the for- mation of undenominational colleges under the Act of 1902. With the present short The Lessons of the History of Education 75 supply of teachers additional colleges are greatly needed, and this would prevent the friction that would from time to time arise were the denominational colleges to throw open their doors. No doubt various extremely painful cases have arisen involving the pro- fession of conformity for the sake of residence ; but it certainly cannot be alleged that such a dereliction of moral duty has ever been connived at by the college authorities. To keep men or women capable of such conduct out of the teaching profession would be the first thought of anyone responsible for the training of teachers. To compare such lapses with the scandal of the old Test Acts is to pervert the meaning and the lessons of history. When we turn from the external to the internal problems of national education we find the same principles, the same lessons, before our eyes. Action and re-action are always equal and opposite. I have referred to the question of the training colleges. These colleges are indeed at the heart of the whole question. The lessons of history show how 76 National Education and National Life vital is the teaching problem. If statesmen of past ages have erred grievously, those responsible for the actual supply of teachers have erred still more grievously. Bede and Alcuin eleven centuries ago realised soundly enough that a nation was in the hands of the schoolmaster. The influence of a great schoolmaster is probably more important and more lasting than the influence of a great statesman. But a great schoolmaster is rarer than a great statesman, since he must have all the rare qualities of statesmanship without the ambition that is scarcely ever absent from the human mind. Bede was a great schoolmaster, though he never moved from his little school at J arrow. Cornwaile, in the fourteenth century, was a great school- master, though he never moved from his little school at Penkridge. So here and there in the centuries we can pick out a name representing a force that changed the current of events, and gave a new meaning to teaching by the creation of a whole school of teachers. But, on the whole, teaching was not a life-giving The Lessons of the History of Education 77 profession in England during the long cen- turies between the days of Bede and the days of Lancaster. Rarely enough did any teacher try to get at any principles of teaching. It was not the object of the teacher to interest the child. Occasionally we get glimpses of such an object. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, and perhaps a little earlier, the way to teach was being carefully considered, both in the universities and at the schools. Joseph Mede, the learned tutor of Christ's College, had his rooms crowded at night by students discussing the lectures of the day. Never were the universities more popular; never had learning been more at- tractive. Oxford had more men in residence than she has now, and her lecturers were rapidly extending the limits of the new learn- ing. In the grammar schools of the country methodical teaching had taken root. John Brinsley, in his dialogue between two masters of a " poore countrey schoole," published in 1612, elaborates a monitorial system with specially devised checks on mere automatic 78 National Education and National Life teaching, applicable to grammar schools. Brinsley held our very latest views on the age at which definite teaching should begin. He thought it should be much later than has been the fashion till quite recent times. ' The time of their entrance with us, in our countrey schooles, it is commonly about seven or eight yeers olde ; six is very soone." But the promise of the seventeenth century soon faded away. The Civil War and the re- actionary uniformity legislation had a deaden- ing effect upon all education, and when, after a century or more of sleep, we come to the revival of popular education at the hands of Bell and Lancaster, we find that the frightful needs of the time necessitated teaching methods that have hampered and checked elementary education ever since. The intro- duction of the monitorial system, without the checks and supervision devised by Brinsley, created a type and a tradition of teaching that accounts in a way that nothing else can account for the slow progress of education in the nineteenth century, It was not possible, The Lessons of the History of Education 79 when it was suddenly found necessary to educate a teeming and entirely ignorant people, to find teachers good, indifferent, or even bad. The teaching of children by children, an ancient Indian method that sufficiently accounts for the stationary character of the Indian mind, was the only method available. It was not ignorance, but necessity, that brought the monitorial system to England. Brougham and a hundred others were preaching in and out of season the need of trained teachers for very young children. But there were no means of supplying the need. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had bequeathed to the nineteenth a problem that had to be dealt with in some way off hand, since the invention of machinery suddenly aggregated vast masses of people in various centres, and universal ignorance became a positive danger as well as a disgrace to society. It was negligence, however, and not ignorance, that continued the monitorial and invented the pupil-teacher system. The posi- tive evils of both systems were well recognised 80 National Education and National Life by the time that the State had obtained a fair grip of the educational needs of the nation in the mid-nineteenth century. It was by that time perfectly obvious that the desperate efforts which were being made were not only not keeping pace with the rapid increase of population, but that the education actually given had no vitality whatever. Children who had been at school rapidly fell back and became as ignorant, or almost as ignorant, as those who had never been taught. There were other causes, other most serious causes, at work, besides bad teaching ; but the teaching of children by children was responsible for much of the inefficiency of national educa- tion throughout the nineteenth century. The error is not reversed yet, for it is not possible to get rid of mistaken policy, however dangerous, in a moment. But the Board of Education fully realises the evil and has devised a scheme which will slowly eliminate the pupil teacher, and, in the meantime, will see that such teachers are no longer mere children, winning their experience at the life-long expense of The Lessons of the History of Education 81 other and younger children. The provisions that now make it necessary for pupil teachers to receive some form of secondary education, and (in the large majority of cases) to have attained the age of sixteen years before beginning the work of teaching, eliminate the most serious evils from the system. If it could also be arranged (to use John Brinsley's words) that the head teacher ' ' have an eie and see carefully that they deale faithfully, and make some short examination after," the subtler dangers of mechanical and instructive teaching, teaching by virtue of shouting, might also be avoided. The fact that the curriculum of the schools is now carefully graded should also form a valuable check on inferior teaching in the lower classes, since the effects of such teaching to an experienced teacher or inspector will at once become visible as a child moves up the school. The danger of falling back from the present high ideal of teaching is, however, continually to be feared and guarded against. Trained teaching is necessarily very expensive, and 82 National Education and National Life there can be no doubt that its cost, most naturally at times alarms the Board of Education. An instance has recently occurred that is somewhat disturbing. Compulsory education begins at the age of five years, but, as is well known, it is the practice of mothers of the working class to send their little ones to school as soon as possible after the age of three years. For years past the schools have gladly received them, and it is sincerely to be hoped that there will be no reversal of this policy, since the new environment un- doubtedly makes for the physical well-being of the babies. In the recent most interesting report on the education of children between the ages of three and five years, it is made fairly clear that these little people, from a certain point of view, " get practically no intellectual advantage from school instruction." If that means that they get practically no intellectual advantage from organised in- struction in the elements of book learning, no one will probably dispute the proposition. But it is certain, as Lord Brougham long The Lessons of the History of Education 83 enough ago pointed out, that little children are, as a matter of fact, developing their intellect at a rate which will never again be reached in after life. That is the reason why it is necessary to remove the children from the slum streets to the school house at the very earliest moment. The child's whole future depends on his intellectual environment. It is the function of the school to supply the child's brain with the food that will, in each individual case, secure such an enforced intellectual development as will naturally lead up to specific book education later on. In this place the point that I am anxious to make is that infants of under five years require not less, but, if possible, more skilled teaching than that given to older infants, and that it would be to tilt in the face of all the lessons of history to place these children in the hands, as has been suggested, of untrained teachers carefully selected for their kindly motherly qualities, on the grounds that such teachers would be cheaper and would set free trained teachers for other, and, as I think, less 84 National Education and National Life important, work. It is true that we do not need for infant teaching the same kind of trained teacher as is necessary in the case of the various standards. Indeed, one may well believe that untrained, but bright, instinct- ively sympathetic teachers, coming from good homes where large families are being brought up, would be far better qualified for the work of baby-training than trained teachers whose business it is in life to maintain discipline and impart book knowledge. But neither are really the type needed. If we are to believe and it is very difficult not to believe that the first seven years of a child's life are the most important years, and that of these those before the age of five are more important than those after the age of five, then it is impossible for us to be content to place babyhood in untrained or ill-trained hands. To do so would be a reversion to the dark middle ages of education, and we should be guilty of sur- prising inconsistency. If it is admitted that older children need highly-trained teachers, it is absurd to give untrained teachers to The Lessons of the History of Education 85 children at the all-important age. The logical error underlying such a proposal is fairly obvious. There is a tendency to regard reading and writing as things in themselves, whereas they are, in fact, merely educational tools and instruments of commerce and culture. But they are not the only educational tools, and a large part of every man's education is produced by other instruments. It requires, however, a much more highly-trained person to teach with those other instruments instruments that very often have to be invented to suit the mind of the particular child. The lesson of history is clear. Action and re- action are always equal and opposite, and bad teaching in the earliest years absorbs a vast amount of child-energy that will never be re-created. Another matter scarcely less important than, and intimately allied to, the question of teaching and its methods is the question of .school books. History has a good deal to say on that subject, and has a great deal to teach It is not my present purpose to trace, even in 86 National Education and National Life rude outline, the history of school books in England. The subject is still sufficiently obscure and is one of peculiar fascination. The mind, perhaps, gets more closely into touch with other ages by actually handling their school books than by any other means. Every man is more or less of a schoolboy at heart, and when he takes up a school book of, let us say, the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, his sympathies rush out to, and his mind's eye sees, the little boy of four centuries ago who conned with pain and under many stripes that little book. In the educational past the book has ever been the thing. It is to us to-day almost the only faithful record of educational progress and decay in past ages. A flood of intelligent school books ushered in the revival of learning and the Reformation, and was followed at no long interval by the book of educational methods in the modern sense. The nineteenth century saw the same thing happen. We fully re- cognise to-day that the secret of education lies largely in books and methods, though the The Lessons of the History of Education 87 national effect can only be secured by the organisation and co-ordination of the schools. But it can scarcely be said that we have yet learnt all that the books can teach us. Most of the old books presented difficulties to be overcome that ate up more than a fair pro- portion of the energy that a scholar brought to his task. The boy, when he had conquered his book, was still as far off as ever from conquering his subject. Action and re-action are always equal and opposite. The scholar had spent on his book what was meant for mankind ; the schoolmaster had spent on his method what was meant for the scholar; and the State, in uneconomic fashion, had spent on the political organisation of schools what was meant for the schoolmaster and the scholar alike. Energy on every side was recklessly diverted from the end in view by the laborious creation of difficulties and equally laborious efforts to remove them. To-day we are seeking, as never before, to alter all this. The State and the provincial councils are labouring at organisation, co-ordination, 88 National Education and National Life methods, and the creation of a highly-trained class of teachers, while private individuals are pouring into the market school books on every possible subject, treated in every possible way. While we may be fairly contented with the progress made in matters of organisation and method, and with the classes of earnest teachers for every grade of education that are now available, it may seriously be doubted, despite the shower of praise bestowed upon them, whether the new school books are all that could be desired. The revulsion from former types of school books has (I write with great diffidence) in my opinion gone too far. The modern writers of text-books have re- cognised in the full the errors of the old books and the wasteful difficulties that they presented to the scholar. They have, therefore, in many cases swung round to the position that, if possible, difficulties must altogether be eliminated, and the acquisition of learning be made as intellectually effortless as possible. That seems to me to be a mistake, as great a mistake as to produce books that overwhelm The Lessons of the History of Education 89 a scholar through inherent difficulty and dulness. The energy lost in overcoming difficulties is not lost. We have a right to complain when energy is used for overcoming difficulties and the end aimed at is not attained. The energy may then be said to be wasted so far as the particular work in hand is concerned. But, on the other hand, the end cannot be attained unless energy is used in consolidating results step by step. The road must be made as well as passed along. An intellectual track that is to last a man his whole life cannot be made by a pleasant and effortless passing from one place to another. The track must be made yard by yard, thought by thought. There is no royal road to learning, no king's highway. Each man must make his own road, and if it is not well made and deep-founded, the rains and storms of life will, when they descend, wash its every vestige away. I may be wrong in the view I hold. It is possibly old-fashioned and re-actionary ; but, at any rate, it is a point of view worthy of the con- sideration of the learned multitude who write 90 National Education and National Life text-books. Boys, like other people, value little what costs them little. A boy who has wrung a principle and its application out of the austere text-books of the late Mr. Todhunter will not easily forget what he has learnt. It has cost him, to say the least, not a little. For my own part, I regret the approaching disappearance of Euclid. From the point of view of geometry, the disappearance is, it must be admitted, most welcome, though the new books are themselves very often, from the pure mathematical point of view, open to not less serious criticism. But the disappearance of Euclid will be an intellectual loss of a very noticeable kind. It is not every boy or girl who is going to be a mathematician, to be even an electrical engineer. Science and mathe- matics are luxuries that in the practical day to day lives of most of us can play only a very limited part. On the other hand,, logical thought and mental reasonableness are necessities of daily life. All the miseries of life are due, one is almost inclined to think, to the want of sweet or bitter reasonableness ;; The Lessons of the History of Education 91 to the absence of the elementary notions of the logical sequence of ideas. But it is clear that formal logic cannot be taught in schools, and if it were it would be as useless as the teaching of English grammar in the first or second standards of an elementary school. Euclid, however, supplied logic to the schools. The logical sequence of his immortal propositions and books is a mental education of the first order. It is impossible for a person to be unconsciously and entirely unreasonable who has ever been made to understand the logical sequence of ideas, the gradual building up of results that is apparent in the First Book. Almost anyone can learn the First Book, and I cannot believe that the possible retardation to a born mathematician involved in the use of it can possibly be as great an evil as the removal of so notable an intellectual influence from school life. The case of Euclid draws attention to a more general criticism of modern school books. Euclid was a book common to all schools. It will be replaced by innumerable books, some 92 National Education and National Life very good, some good and some indifferently bad. But the schools will no longer have a book in common, and, consequently, a bond uniting all the secondary and the better primary schools of the country will be snapped. The same criticism applies, in a lesser degree, to other books. The standard of books has disappeared. A new burden is laid upon the schoolmaster. If he is very wise and very competent he may possibly secure the very best books for his school, but he will probably only be able to do this in one or two subjects. In the early sixteenth century a fiat went forth that only a particular Latin grammar should be used.* The educationalists of that age felt the difficulty and the loss that would arise from the use of varying text-books. Scholarship was then all-important, and the standard of scholarship depended on the standard of text-book. History has in this surely a lesson for to-day. A Royal * " Every schoolmaster and teacher shall teach the grammar set forth by King Henry VIII of noble memory, and continued in the time of King Edward VI, and none other." (Injunction 39 of the year 1559.) The Lessons of the History of Education 93 Commission or a Departmental Committee might be worse employed than in the work of selecting or directing the production of text-books for schools to be issued under authority. Some of the books used now would have made the scholars and even the mathematicians of the seventeenth century shudder. The book is still the thing that tests the real value of education. A bad text- book now, as ever, blunts the minds of both the teacher and the taught. We want a standard now more than we wanted it in the Tudor times, and yet the modern tendency is to destroy even the partial standards of the nineteenth century. THE EDUCATION OF THE VERY POOR THE education of the children of the very poor not the children of paupers is a problem involving factors that tend to dis- appear in the case of the children of persons possessing efficient means. The problem occurs again when we pass from the very poor and emerge, after moving through the vast bulk of the population, among the very rich. The education of the very poor and the very rich raises questions of great complexity. This paper does not attempt to deal with the educa- tion of the children of the latter class. It is, however, clearly a very serious problem, since the spending of a great fortune, even on philan- thropic works, is almost invariably accom- panied by definite injuries to organised society. The obverse question is, fortunately, less hope- less. The class of children whose parents are 94 The Education of the Very Poor 95 very poor is a large class, but not nearly so large as we are apt to believe. The poverty of a large number of the parents in question is, moreover, due to definite causes, about which no mystery exists. A very large number .of families are only classed among the very poor because the wages earned are subject to con- tinual deduction for drinking and betting purposes. If the heavy gambling tax could be remitted altogether, and the drink tax reduced to a reasonable proportion of the total income, an enormous army of families would at once rise into the ranks of families capable of living in healthy surroundings, with children well clothed, well fed, and well shod. It seems clear that in England the drink tax on incomes is rapidly falling away. There can be no doubt that a new feeling on the subject of the con- sumption of alcohol is pervading the entire community. This feeling is, in my judgment, the first noticeable fruit of the Education Act of 1870. It is said that it takes three genera- tions to make a gentleman. If by a gentleman we mean an individual who recognises his duty 96 National Education and National Life to his neighbour, even though his neighbour lives under the same roof as himself, we may apply the rule to the third generation of children who have reaped the benefit of the legislation of 1870. The grandchildren of the children who were at school in 1870 are now entering the public schools. Their parents are now making efforts to throw off the curse of excessive drinking. There is reason to hope that the generation now at school may resist, with even a greater measure of success, the temptations of both alcohol and gambling. It has interests in life that were unknown to earlier generations, and the root cause of betting and drinking is neither despair nor sorrow nor want . It is lack of interest and inspiration in life. But much indeed, almost everything depends upon the education that the children receive. The generation that is now sending its children to school had special advantages with respect to the drink question; for whatever particular criticism may be passed upon the curricula of Voluntary schools or upon the school buildings, the fact remains that these schools, both The Education of the Very Poor 97 directly and through the affiliated agency of institutions such as the Band of Hope, exerted during the last forty years a vast influence in favour of temperance. The children in the Voluntary schools have been brought up to look with special horror upon alcohol drinking, and the evils of drink have been painted in colours that have received practical illustra- tion in their home lives and daily woes. The present school generation requires very definite help in the same direction. In many ways there is a tendency to shirk the giving of warning in all the public schools of both the Voluntary and the Provided type. A some- what too material standard of life is placed before the children. They are taught to realise the exchange value of money, they are taught many things related to the getting and spending of money, but there is little enough definite instruction on the economic questions that determine their environment. If children were made to realise that drinking and gambling are as much their natural enemies as a man-eating tiger lurking in the outskirts of 98 National Education and National Life an Indian village is the natural enemy of the Indian, much would be gained, and more especially would this be the case if the economic reasons were brought within the children's comprehension. Instead of this being the case, the children are too often used as the decoy of the enemy. The very children who are at school are often employed, in defiance of an ill-enforced law, to sell the halfpenny prints that exist solely for betting and sporting pur- poses. Some cheerful expressions of optimism have recently been based on the decline in the official returns of the number of prosecutions of children. There is no reason for optimism. It is a lamentable fact that the decline in prosecutions is no evidence for the decline in law-breaking. In London and other great towns the law against the casual employment of children remains absolutely unenforced. Thus we have the painful result that while a parent is losing ten shillings a week under the guidance of a betting paper, that paper is distributed at a remuneration of, perhaps, a shilling a week by the gambler's child, who in The Education of the Very Poor 99 the intervals of sale is picking up the vices of the gutter and the morale of the professional pauper. The small bookmaker who haunts the corners of poor streets is, moreover, allowed to flourish. Imprisonment without the option of a fine is the only way to break up the bookmaking fraternity. No system of fines (which ultimately come out of the pockets of the poor) can check so remunerative a trade. The problem that lies before churches, chapels, schools, social reformers, local municipal authorities, and the Legislature itself is the gambling problem. Betting is the recruiting sergeant of the ragged regiment of the very poor. Direct legislation cannot cure the evil, but it can do something by suppressing the bookmaker with a heavy and merciless hand ; and local authorities can do a good deal by using their statutory power to forbid any child under sixteen years of age to sell or distribute newspapers. The Legislature can also with economic safety deal indirectly with the ques- tion in a way hereafter suggested. Meanwhile we have our earth here, and, ioo National Education and National Life indeed, even if drinking and betting are reduced to their irreducible minimum, we shall still have some, indeed many, of the very poor with us. There is some waste of material, some loss of energy, even in the most perfect machine. In the social machine this waste is exhibited in the existence of the very poor. The question immediately before us is to see how by educational methods that waste can be reduced. That it can be immensely reduced by such means I have no doubt whatever. The law of compulsory education applies to all classes alike. It is a statute law, and only dates from 1876. It is not part of the common law of England. The courts held in 1796 that no duty to educate his child is imposed upon the parent. It is a moral, Blackstone explains, and not a municipal, obligation. He points out that it is a moral obligation which, if broken, reacts on the parents in many indirect ways. No doubt, in a comparatively small and simple society, the evils springing from the breach of such an obligation are obvious enough, and the loss falls largely enough on the The Education of the Very Poor 101 erring parent. . But punishment, fortunately for the advance of the world, is a vicarious thing, smiting the innocent and passing by the lintels of the guilty. Since this is happening on every side in a great society, that society must revise its sanctions. The innocent have a right to make a moral obligation a legal obligation, if the evils that must arise from the breach of the moral obligation are likely to fall upon their heads. Hence, in our complex society, it became necessary to supplement the common law by checking the extension of a dangerous illiterate class. But if it was necessary for the protection of society at large to make education compulsory, it was also a logical deduction from that step that such education should be free. The object of public education is the protection of society, and society must pay for its protection, whether it takes the shape of a policeman or a pedagogue. All then must go to school, and all may go to school free of specific, though not free of, ultimate charge. When, however, we begin to analyse the IO2 National Education and National Life classes of children, we see, as has been said, that with certain particular classes especial factors have to be considered. Here we are dealing with the children of the very poor. Consider these children as they grow. They, like other children, require food, light, air, shelter, clothes, and last, but certainly not least, boots.* They require more than the lilies of the field, and they get considerably less. Though the common law declines to cast upon a parent the duty to educate his child, it does impose upon him the duty to maintain it. There are few facts in civilized society more remarkable than the efficient way in which very poor parents, unafflicted with certain specific vices, do maintain their children. Anyone who has any acquaint- ance with poor districts, and more par- ticularly with the schools in poor districts, knows that large families are miraculously reared, fed, and clothed on incomes that are both tenuous and uncertain. The unthrift * The results of naked feet among the children of the very poor in the Scottish industrial centres are lamentable. Wounded feet, covered with festering sores, are a usual sight. The Education of the Very Poor 103 of the poor is much written about. The almost heroic thrift of innumerable families is too common for notice. Speaking broadly, the common law duty of maintenance is treated, as all duties ought to be treated, as a right. Moreover, the very poorest families seem capable of enlarging the duty beyond the normal enlargement due to the biennial baby. Talk as we will of decadence, it is not yet to be found among the industrial poor. The only real test of decadence among the poor is the appearance of a widespread desire to live upon bounty. It may truly be said of the English poor, that bounty and the workhouse are the nightmares of their lives. While fees were still allowed to be paid in the London Voluntary schools, the school pence was gladly scraped out of the thin income, and to-day, very poor parents willingly con- tribute their mites to Voluntary school funds for the maintenance of structure, and the other charges that fall on the managers. Emulation has perhaps a little to do with it. A very dirty, ill-dressed, half-booted child 104 National Education and National Life of four appears for the first time at a school in the poor neighbourhood where it lives. It is seized by an enterprising teacher, washed and tidied, and returns home with the tale, not only of this wonder, but of other wonders, in the shape of other clean children. This goes on perhaps for a week, and then the child comes to school clean, with mended clothes and, probably, sound boots. The poor mother's standard has gone up. From her scanty time and pence a little more is spared for this baby citizen. The schools in the poorest districts are, to my mind, a per- petual testimony to the efforts made to send children to school in good time, clean and respectably clad. Of course, the elder children help the younger ones, and a good deal of the mother's work is delegated in this way; but it must be a miracle of management to send forth, long before nine in the morn- ing, from one very poor home, perhaps five children under twelve years of age. The duty or right of maintenance is extended to this point, and if the uncertain income is not The Education of the Very Poor 105 spent on drink or bookmakers, the mother can manage to send a very presentable family to school, morning after morning, year in, year out. But the difficulty that the educationalist has to look at, is this. To make the children respectable for school, means an additional drain on a very small income. Moreover, if these same children were not going to school, half of them could probably earn enough to pay for their actual keep in food and, perhaps, clothes. Instead of that, there is the additional out-of-pocket ex- pense in making them presentable, and there is the necessity to feed them better than they need have been fed had they simply led that peace-abiding animal life which, apart from statute, is all that their parents need secure for them. At common law, a parent must give his child such food, clothing, and shelter as a normal child requires to preserve life. If, however, the State comes to the parent and says, " You must send your child to my school and there, in the interests of society, I will specially develop his moral and intellectual io6 National Education and National Life faculties," the parent might naturally reply, " I am glad to have the child educated, but I doubt if I can do more for him than I am doing now. If you are going to work him in such a way that he requires extra food and clothing, I will find this extra food and clothing if I can, since I know that what you are doing is good for the child, as well as for society. But I shall probably be able to do no more than I am doing now." It is difficult to find any answer to this position. There can be no manner of doubt that the wear and tear of tissue in the school- child is very great. A child with enough food for the maintenance of a healthy animal existence becomes underfed the moment that it is subjected, on the same food, to close, intellectual application. Very often the food that the child is given can be assimilated under " wild " conditions, while it ceases to be digestible when the infant exchanges the life of the street or the hillside for that of the school. Recent reports show that it is not want of food, but want of digestible food, The Education of the Very Poor 107 which injures the physique of the children of the very poor, and that this is more notice- able in children who go to school at three, than in those who go to school later. Hence there is nothing economically unsound in the State, within certain very definite limits, coming to the assistance of the parent by supplying food, and even clothing, to school children. If, by legislation, we enlarge the common law duty of maintenance, we are justified by all the principles of political economy in supplying the means to perform the enlarged duty where it clearly cannot be performed without such help. But the economic danger is lest, in doing this, the parent's sense of responsibility becomes im- paired, since it is, fortunately, difficult to make the average man distinguish between the original and the extended duty of main- tenance. Normally, if means are sufficient, he accepts the extended duty as if it were the original duty, while, if means are insufficient and help is forthcoming, he may think that help in meeting the extended duty is intended loS National Education and National Life to relieve him of the ultimate or original duty. The real question is as to the way of meeting this difficulty. That it must be met is plain. No educational system can tolerate underfed, ill-clothed children in the schools. On the other hand, the very basis of society is attacked if the parental right or duty of maintenance becomes obscure. The education of the children of the very poor has a social importance that cannot be over estimated. Such children require the most careful education of all. The principle which demands that very highly-skilled and sympathetic teachers should be allotted to the baby classes of a school, also insists that the very pick of teachers should be given the work of teaching the children of the very poor. Nature threatens us at every turn with the weapons of heredity. We meet her challenge with a weapon snatched from her own armoury environ- ment. It is our only means of defence and attack. Extreme poverty, with its insidious assaults on the physical, the mental, and the The Education of the Very Poor 109 moral nature, is a product of social and personal heredity. We cannot altogether rescue the parents of the children in the vast majority of cases, though by attacking their environment we can modify the darkness of their lives. But in the vast majority of cases we can rescue the children altogether. We can bring into their lives physical, mental, and moral health, and in an atmosphere of sweetness and light give to their youth a scope for its infinite possibilities. But in many cases the difficulties are almost in- tolerable ; and none but the most highly- skilled and sympathetic teachers, who are not hampered by the helpless knowledge that the children under their care are hungry, ill-clad, and weary, can achieve such a triumph of civilization. It is a mistake to build the schools in the heart of the very poor districts. It is not always, but it is very often, avoidable, and where it is possible to avoid it, it should be done. The poorest children should attend schools some little distance from their homes no National Education and National Life where they will meet children of a happier class. If the poor children are fed and clothed up to something like the standard of the school they attend, the better class children will lose nothing, while the poorer children will gain much. The class tendency is a positive evil, and one that it is very difficult to avoid. In practice it is found almost impossible to prevent the poorest children attending one school, and the children of parents earning better wages, another school. Yet it is an evil that has to be overcome. The distance that children have to go is really no factor in the problem. In Westmoreland, children tramp in all weathers two, three, and even four miles to school. Remove the schools altogether from poor districts. Build them on high ground, fill them with light and sunshine, give the very young children plenty of freedom for the development of mind and body, spare no efforts to make all classes mingle in the schools, and above all, attack conditions of dirt and under-feeding. The Education of the Very Poor in How then is this latter problem, the feeding of the underfed and the clothing of the ill- clothed, to be solved ? Parents, as a rule, will not admit under-feeding, and, indeed, cases of actual under-feeding are rare. Improper feed- ing, under the conditions of school life, is the exact evil in most cases. The only method of ascertaining whether a child requires help in this way is to obtain a medical opinion. If a child on admission, or at any subsequent periodical inspection, is certified to be under- fed, it should thereupon become a compulsory attendant at a midday meal provided in the school buildings. There is no difficulty in arranging for such meals, and they rapidly become very popular with the children. In a large secondary endowed day school for girls, of which I am a governor, excellent midday meals are supplied at a very low price, and comparatively few children shun the dining tables. These midday meals at the school should be open to all, and should be compul- sorily taken by those to whom the doctor decides such meals are necessary. In the case 112 National Education and National Life of those children a weekly account of the cost should be sent to the parent, but the charge should be remitted when the parent is able to satisfy the education attendance officer that the family gross income is too small to bear this additional expense. The cost of the unpaid dinners can be borne in one of two ways. When the system has been for some short time in working order there will be a profit on the dinners, which will form a fund that can meet necessitous and really deserving cases. There is a second way, capable of immediate, though only temporary, applica- tion, described in the circulars of the Local Government Board and the Board of Education of 27th and 28th of April, 1905. These circulars point out that it is the duty of the guardians of the poor, or, in cases of sudden necessity, of the relieving officer, to give an underfed child food. The cost of the food, where the need is not due to the fault of the parent, falls on the poor rate, but where it is due to the neglect of the parent the cost must be treated as a loan to the parent, and must be The Education of the Very Poor 113 recovered, if necessary, by legal proceedings. This provision of the Poor Law Act, 1834 (section 58), is applicable, of course, to the case of school children. Where in a school cases of under-feeding are detected, the circulars 'recommend that the head teacher, authorised by the school managers or by an officer of the education authority, should apply for the statutory relief to the guardians, who must give it to any child under sixteen years of age. If the guardians decide that the food is to be given on loan, the fact must be notified to the parent. The relief is only temporary, and cannot be continued for a period exceeding one month. If a second application for relief becomes necessary within six months, the circulars state that the parent should be pro- secuted under either the Vagrancy Act, 1829, or the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act, 1905. In the case of urgent necessity the relief can be given by the relieving officer, and the money expended becomes a loan due to him. If, however, the dinner system is introduced, cases of urgent relief requiring the intervention 114 National Education and National Life of the relieving officer will not arise. The dinner will be there, and the child, by the doctor's order, will perforce take its meal not unwillingly perhaps. The school authorities will have notified the guardians, and will from week to week notify them, of the number of children and the name of each of them who, in the opinion of the doctor, are underfed. The guardians will pay the school authorities their out-of-pocket expenses, and will recover from the parents in such cases as it appears that the under-feeding is due to the neglect of the parent. When, however, the dining system is in full vogue, practice shows that there would be a profit on the dinners, and part of this profit might well be spent on the dinners of those children whose parents are really unable to supply them with the money for the dinner. If possible, it is well to prevent any poor law help entering into the education question. The poor law should only deal with the wilfully negligent, and should deal merci- lessly with them. To those parents who do not or cannot pay daily for the daily dinner weekly The Education of the Very Poor 115 accounts should be sent. The dinner profits would cover the cost of the new clerical work involved in the making out of the weekly accounts and collecting and entering the payments. The books would have a value other than that of mere account books. They would form a valuable record of the poor who just keep out of the clutches of the poor law, and so give to society some real idea of the amount of that terrible and noble form of poverty the poverty that fights to the bitter end with the environment of want and disease. The number of those who could not pay the daily dinner bill a penny to three-halfpence a head would, however, I believe, be far less than is usually anticipated. We must remember that the home would save to some considerable extent. A sick child is in many ways a terrible drag upon a home. It takes the mother's invaluable time as well as her money. The children under the system I suggest would be more healthy, and the cost of sickness in time and money would be lessened. Moreover, the shameless poor would n6 National Education and National Life be separated from the true poor. Malingerers would have no mercy shown them. If parents capable, on their gross income that is without deductions for drink and betting of paying refuse to pay, they would be brought before the magistrate, under the Act of 1829 or that of 1905, and fined or imprisoned. The man would soon find that it is cheaper to pay. After a few years, I am optimistic enough to believe that such a system would cost the country nothing. The profits on the dinners would cover the whole cost both of feeding and, where absolutely necessary, clothing. The same principles apply to clothing as well as feeding, but the clothing question, except in the very pinch of winter, is not so urgent as that of daily bread. The system of weekly accounts would, moreover, have the not inconsiderable merit of keeping poor parents in constant touch with the school authorities, and from time to time a special report on the progress of each particular child could be transmitted with the account to the parent, thus giving the home a new direct interest in school life. The Education of the Very Poor 117 There is one other aspect of the question of the education of the children of the very poor that requires particular notice. The poor are a migratory people. From district to district they pass in search of work or possibly in flight from rent. Their children suffer in many ways from this moving of the family tent, but chiefly they suffer educationally. It is a practical difficulty of a most serious character, and one that must be met. I am not referring, of course, to the very special cases of the children on canal boats or the children of Egyptians. Those cases are only solvable either by compelling the children to come in or by making the parents submit the children at certain ages for examination, and if the children, being normal in health, do not reach a certain standard, by taking the children away from the parents for a certain period of the year. The migration of the poor casual labourer is another matter. It is one of the chief hindrances of the educational and social development of the very poor. The difficulty can only be met by a system of correspondence. n8 National Education and National Life Before leaving a district a parent should be bound under severe penalties to inform the school at which his child attends as to his movements such information to be used for scholastic purposes only so that the attend- ance officer of the district or town to which he goes can be informed. In this way the child can be followed, and the head teacher of his new school informed as to his capacity, and generally supplied with his record at the old school. It would be possible, by some such method, to preserve an educational continuity ; and the fact of such correspondence between schools would do something to keep various schools in constant touch with each other, both in respect to methods and the types of children. In all the various questions relating to the education of the very poor, the one fact to keep in mind is the absolute necessity to place new thoughts, new wants, new ideals in the child's mind. To escape from an environment is the only proper definition of progress, and the progress of a nation depends in the long run upon the widening horizon of the people The Education of the Very Poor 119 as a whole. Yet the people as a whole can have no extension of horizon while they are held down by the dead weight of ignorance in a considerable section of the community. If education can really reach the very poor education, religious and secular, accompanied by sufficient food and healthy dwellings then the standard of the nation will rise and the nation itself with it. I therefore view with something like consternation the Government proposal to place the period devoted to religious teaching outside the period of compulsory attendance. It will rapidly destroy the hardly- acquired habit of school-going among the very poor ; it will destroy the all-important household routine of early rising which the Act of 1870 made necessary, but which is entirely distaste- ful to English poor women in great towns ; and it will, therefore, take away from the very class that needs it most that regularity of religious instruction and of daily duties which lies at the root of national life. This is the view of nearly everyone whose humble educational duties bring them into touch with the very poor in the great cities of England. EDUCATION AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN dealing with the question of the education of the very poor, I referred to the relationship of drinking and gambling to poverty, and endeavoured to indicate some of the aspects that education bore to those terrible influences, and its power of carrying to a further point than the State itself could go the process of eliminating these causes of want and crime. In fact, education in the true and complete sense of the word, is a transforming force in all social action, and is often enough the only possible source of change. A case looks insoluble. A whole quarter of a city seems" outside the range of civilization. But educa- tion, imposed on this wild community from without, almost unconsciously transforms the problem. Light and knowledge, hope and self -helpfulness, have flowed in, displacing ignorance, helplessness and social darkness. Education and Social Problems 121 The area has suddenly realised that it is, in fact, related to the rest of the world, and the individuals have realised the same thing with respect to themselves. It is not good either for man or any particular class of man to be alone, and when a man or a class realises this, education has begun to do its work. The truth is that social problems, unlike other problems, require for their solution the conscious co-operation of the units involved. If by the wave of a municipal wand we could in an instant transform the worst slum in London into a grove of paradisal cottages, it would be a perfectly futile operation, unless we could modify the outlook of the inhabitants. The slum without is largely a product of the slum within, though the converse proposition is also, in the case of those born into a slum, true. The mental slum and physical slum act and re-act upon each other. It is, on the whole, useless to reform one without the other. But it is more hopeful to reform the mental than the physical slum, for the educated mind will revolt from its surroundings, where possible. 122 National Education and National Life Experience has definitely proved, however, that it is impossible to abolish slums by mere physical changes. The slum mind imme- diately recreates its appropriate environment. The only method of securing permanent results is for the two processes to go hand-in- hand. If light and air are let into and con- tamination is removed from the slum mind and the slum area at the same time, a definite and irreversible victory is achieved. It is in this way that the attack on corrupt social conditions is at last being made. The local government authorities on the one hand are dealing with the complex questions of housing, drainage, water supply, and open spaces, while, on the other, the education authorities are so developing the minds and the moral and intellectual outlook of the people that any retrogression in the physical conditions of life becomes from stage to stage impossible. Without the mental and moral training, the improvement of physical conditions is of little permanent benefit. The open spaces would be abused, the water supply recklessly fouled, Education and Social Problems 123 the drainage service destroyed, and the houses converted into piggeries. This is what has happened over and over again. This is what happens to-day, though far more rarely than was the case even ten years ago. It is what must, of necessity, happen when a backward and retrograde class is presumed to under- stand, and is placed in possession of, the scientific appliances of an advanced stage of civilization. If, in the interests of society, a retrograde and ignorant class is compelled to use the means of life that are familiar to the educated only, the abuse of those means and the consequent creation of slums is inevitable. Forty years ago a certain section of English society were for all practical purposes savages, save for certain inherited instincts and for certain potential capacities. There were thousands who could not read, who could not write, who had never heard of God or Christ, who did not know that they lived in an island, who had no knowledge as to the means whereby they were governed, or why they were governed or controlled, who lived a life 124 National Education and National Life lower than that of an Australian savage, insomuch as they had not the physical con- solations of the forest and a heaven un- smirched with smoke ; insomuch as they had not even the spiritual consolation of a God after whom they could dimly feel. Such facts are possible side by side with the most advanced civilization. The life of the helot, of the Roman slave, of the American negro was incomparably happier than that of the ignorant mill-slave of the mid- Victorian epoch, immersed from birth to death in physical and intellectual darkness. The reports of prison chaplains and school inspectors in the mid- nineteenth century form a chapter in the social history of England that is, indeed, almost unbelievable. The passage of half-a-century has changed all that, and we have, at any rate, reached the stage when the problems for solution are enunciated. We know what has to be done, and thousands of minds are engaged in thinking out and working out schemes for the betterment not so much of individuals as of types. Yet at the moment a considerable Education and Social Problems 125 sense of pessimism prevails. The social activities of the present day to some extent account for this. We know at last how we stand and the definite problems appal us. The fundamental error for error it surely is that underlies this pessimism has been created by our increased social insight. To-day we aspire, on the one hand, to withdraw ourselves to a distance and regard the world of humanity as a telescopic entity, and on the other hand to investigate its structure with microscopic intensity; we see it, or think we see it, as a whole, and we certainly see it in its parts. Either aspect fill us with terror. The progress of the human race is terrifying, for in its course, the individual, that domestic deity of the western mind, is counted as nothing. The life of the individual is not less an object of fear, since its infinite potentialities for good are being daily forged into instruments of evil. Scarcely a life in our experience realises itself. The passions are largely perverted from their functional position by the subtle influence of heredity and the enormous forces of environ- 126 National Education and National Life naent ; the intellect is too often expended on things worthless or evil, while we imagine that religious faith is tending to dissolve. Nature's revenge for broken laws terrifies us since there is no home that it does not invade, no hearth that it does not desolate with the weapon of vicarious punishment. Moreover, the abnormal variations in individual cells of the body politic threaten with cancerous growths the entire body. We see definite evils affecting vast groups of individuals. Betting seems to have expanded from a personal vice into the intellectual environment of whole classes. Drink has become, it is said, the habitual concomitant of self- indulgence, and self-indulgence plumes itself under the name of a higher standard of social comfort. Religion, it is alleged, has ceased to interest the educated classes, and the obligations of faith are forgotten in an age pre-eminently of reason. Indeed, so reason- able is the age that it refuses the consolations of philosophy as being even more baseless than those of religion, and stands aghast at Education and Social Problems 127 the neo-religious, neo-philosophic mysteries which the physicist detects and leaves unsolved. On these and other analogous grounds the pessimist declares that England has passed her prime, and that the decline has come. Whether the fall will follow rapidly or will be prefaced by a gentle and even genial process of decay depends upon the idiosyncracy of the prophet. The allegation that England has passed her prime is, however, untenable, and is really due to the present vivid realisation of problems that fifty years ago existed in a much more threatening form had our parents but realised the fact. If we have passed our prime, when did we attain it ? Was that the period of prime when the bulk of our vast industrial population were producing the wealth of the country under conditions of complete intel- lectual ignorance, complete spiritual neglect, and entire physical misery ? We know what we are ; we forget what we have been. The glories of the past remain while its miseries are forgotten. The miseries of the present 128 National Education and National Life are with us while its achievements are only in part realised. To-day we see ourselves at a huge mirror, and the profusion of detail exceeds in every way the detail known of any other age. Most of us see the past in large, but the present in small. We are horrified at the wickedness, the dirtiness, the laziness, the faithlessness, the self-indulgence and the pharasaic comfortableness of this present age ; and we point with unhistoric finger at the patriotic period of King Alfred, at the godly faith of the middle ages, at the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, at the robust religious and political freedom of the Commonwealth, at the extraordinary potentialities of the eighteenth century, and the ceaseless and enormously rewarded activities of the nineteenth. We have a vague belief in these facts, which, indeed, represent broad historic truths, but truths that were not largely related to the individuals of the age that made them. The industrial workers of the nineteenth century were not enormously rewarded ; the eighteenth century was for the most part Education and Social Problems 129 unconscious of its thinkers ; few Englishmen of the Commonwealth period believed that they possessed either political or religious freedom ; the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth were very narrow to the multitude. Our belief in the godly faith of the middle ages considerably evaporates when we read the autobiography of Adam of Usk. King Alfred, and not his age, was patriotic. If we saw every age in the minute detail that obscures our own, pessimism would be modified; while, if we saw our own age in the broad outline that dignifies times past, optimism would reign supreme. The salient fact stands out that when we examine in detail any past age of England, or, indeed, of any other country in Europe, we do find, considering the population either in the mass or individually, that a definite progress has been made, and that such progress is to rje seen both in the physical and the ethical sides of life. To raise the standard of social comfort has a moral and a spiritual, as well as a physical, meaning. It does not mean, or necessarily 130 National Education and National Life involve, self-indulgence. On the contrary, the experience of our generation, which sees side by side well-housed and ill-housed poor, proves to any reasoning mind that true social life under the housing conditions to leave all other questions aside that generally obtained throughout Europe from the earliest to quite recent times in the case of the poor, was an impossibility. We know what rural social life seemed to involve in the mind of George Crabbe in the eighteenth century, and it is easy to select writers of every generation backward to the days when modern Europe was forming who will tell a not dissimilar tale. If social life was impossible, religious life was scarcely more possible. Distance lends enchantment to our view of the religious practices of the middle ages. That there were then a devoted, laborious and much-slandered clergy we have no reason to doubt ; that the mass of the people had a belief singularly un- related to social progress we have every reason to believe. The mass of the people Education and Social Problems 131 were not sceptical, but neither did they think even within the narrow limits that fosters scepticism. A reflecting and thinking democracy extending beyond the crowded industrial centres barely yet exists in Europe. Such a stage of development as that we have now reached is indicative of backward youth rather than decrepit age. The Renaissance of the fifteenth century has not yet reached the inner lives either of the peasants or the industrial workers of the twentieth century, save in so far as the influences of the Reforma- tion and the Counter- Reformation have purified their religion and spiritualized their faith, and save in so far as the influences of the educational ideal of to-day have brought the literature of the few into the lives of the many. The joint operation of these various influences are responsible for that sense of intellectual discontent and ill-directed activity which sums up in large the peculiar evils of to-day and indicates the peculiar promise of to-morrow. Two salient facts stand out in the social life of the labourer of to-day. The first 's the 132 National Education and National Life continual movement to the towns, and the second is the widespread desire for gambling. The agricultural labourer is no longer con- tented with his lot. His life no longer supplies the demands of his personality. The ceaseless round of pleasure failed to hold the awakened Rasselas within the compass of his Happy Valley, and the ceaseless round of toil cannot restrain the peasant to the pasture and arable of Auburn. He must move townward, because of cravings as clamorous as those of hunger ; but, alas ! less easily satisfied. Often enough unfit for the life of cities, he com- plicates the problem of urban life, though he partially makes up for this by the new physical energy that he brings. He at last has heard the voice of the Renaissance calling, and answers it in the only way that is his by seeking centres of laborious gaiety, where he hopes to find some response to his inarticulate yearnings. It is the same fact that accounts for the steady increase of gambling. Men and boys must have an interest in life. The daily round, the Education and Social Problems 133 very common task, is no longer enough. The industrial developments during the last century have tied the worker to a restricted field of labour. Now he never makes what he uses,* nor raises what he eats. The results of his labour are not present to his mind ; his heart, if he is a good workman, is in his work, but his mind is not. Therefore, the intervals of leisure are not periods in which can be chewed the intellectual cud gathered in the periods of work. But he, too, has been called by the belated spirit of the Renaissance. His leisure is considerable ; his protestantism is extreme ; and he has had a blurred vision in the State schools of learning and culture. Interest in life he must have even at the cost of all that makes life worth living, and so the habits of gambling and drinking have been formed to vivify the dull routine of life. Formed they were before much of our modern efforts had taken noticeable effect efforts * A school inspector in the north of England recently depre- cated the teaching of needlework in schools on the ground that, as now everything was ready-made, it was not necessary to know how to sew ! 134 National Education and National Life summed up in the words sanitation and education. A consciousness of, and a rebellion against, ignorance disturb the even tenor of toil. The yearning for intellectual activity, the demand for mental interest, must be satisfied in some way or another. How shall the satisfaction be given ? The worker is indeed moving in worlds not realised. He dimly feels that j he is a disfranchised citizen in a world of science, a world of culture, a world of thought, a world of religion. He is told, times without ceasing, that the world of labour in which he earns, precariously, bread for so many mouths is, in fact, the same world as those other worlds not realised, and that if he were but enfranchised they would become part of his life. Industrialism has taken out of the workman's work its science, its culture, its thought and its religion. It has dis- franchised his soul. It is the function of education to replace these things in the worker's life. He partakes of the restless yearnings of the age, and interest he must have. If he is shut out from everything else he can at Education and Social Problems 135 least gamble and drink. But this is only a phase of transition. It is the hustling of the crowd outside the opening doors of the House Beautiful. The spirit of the Renaissance has at last reached the western multitudes and their rulers and it calls itself Education, the upbringer of the peoples. Always men have been born in chains with the destiny of freeing themselves as best they might. To-day for the first time the chains seem almost easy to unlock. Men are born into the twilight now and not into the dark. The key that will unlock the chains can be looked for, and need not only be groped for, by beings that doubt if there is, in fact, any key at all. The birth chains of evil heredity and environment can be unlocked by the joint efforts of the individual and of the society to which he belongs, and, once free, the individual can develop in all their wealth those noble potentialities that are but chained, obscured, and hidden deep down, in even the ignoblest man. The fact that the educa- tionalist and the teacher has to consider is that 136 National Education and National Life every man born into the world has some peculiar and individual quality necessary to the well-being of the world ; a quality that can only become fully operative and useful under conditions favourable to its develop- ment, and that if the man is lost to society something more is lost than a mere unit. It is the true function of education and social science to see that every man has the environment and the opportunities that will enable him to fulfil his potential capacities and the purpose of his being. To achieve that is the goal of civilization, and the ultimate purpose that gives an ethical meaning to organised society. SCHOOL NURSERIES NOTHING raises so directly the question as to what education really is as a discussion on the subject of the education of very young children. There is a tacit assumption on the part of the general public that education is something that provides a painful acquaint- anceship with reading, writing, arithmetic, and certain other branches of learning that depend for sustenance on these main trunks. A popular saying that associates the acquisition of manners with a trifling payment seems a dim survival of a nobler conception of educa- tion as a process that maketh man. Educa- tion either makes man or unmakes man. There is to-day at any rate in the crowded centres of civilization no middle course. There, at any rate, the individual cannot stand idle all the day long. He is working in the school of life, and is being made or unmade. Education, as the best thinkers define that 137 L 138 National Education and National Life term, is the process by which he is made. It is a process that lasts from birth to death. It is a process that human art can hasten and glorify. But the process is not a matter of art at all. It is not reading, writing and arithmetic. Great men have been made without these arts, and notorious criminals have been made by them. It is, of course, in our present stage of civilization, essential that these arts should be known to all men. But that is no reason to confound them with the term education. Such a proposition is, indeed, obvious, and there would be no reason in drawing attention to it were it not for the fact that the course of educational history in the nineteenth century, the crying need of that epoch, obscured the obvious, and made men feel that if these arts were distributed among the people all would at once become very well with the world. This idea became so deep- rooted that the educational policy of the country was pledged to the process of con- veying these priceless gifts even to those whu were as fit to receive them as a new-born babe is School Nurseries 139 to receive into its frame the food of middle life. Consider the case of the new-born babe. Complex as are the physiological processes that are proceeding in his body and brain, he at first exhibits only one psychological phenomenon. That is physical hunger. Before long he gradually developes another form of hunger. That is mental hunger. The brain is growing far faster than the body, and the wide eyes are watching with insatiable curiosity a tolerable world. The mind is drinking in facts at an inconceivable pace. The overwhelming conceptions of time and space are assimilated in a manner that would be impossible at any later age. The trailing clouds of glory are shut out, and the twilight of three dimensions flows swiftly in. At this point one comment of vital importance is necessary. The baby from now onwards, for, perhaps, some years, is an entirely different being in one respect from the elder child. As we all know with the elder child, the educa- tional problem is to inspire him or her with interest ; to create interest in school work 140 National Education and National Life and life work generally. A certain dullness, doubtless due to the manners and methods of the elder folk, falls upon the child. He creeps unwillingly to school. But with the baby, who has not learnt that life is full of artificial limitations, this is not so. He is interested in everything, everybody. His mind drinks from every fountain, eats the fruit of every tree. He is still in paradise, and feeds freely on the tree of knowledge. His body is equally unreasonable. There is nothing, sufficiently small, that he would not eat, and there are few things, in the course of the long history of man, that he has not eaten. The death rate among infants is sufficient evidence of this. It is still about nine times the death rate among adults. Here, however, we have to observe an interest- ing distinction. On the whole, mothers make all the efforts in their power to feed a baby as it should be fed, and they are helped by admirable merchants, who outstrip all other benefactors in the variety and the publicity of their wares. If a baby dies from mal-nutrition to-day, it is not the fault of those who make it School Nurseries 141 their business in life to bring home to the multitude the best food for babies. A grue- some and disastrous death-rate testify to their unsuccess, but no one can say to-day that the proper way in which to feed infants has not been sufficiently intimated to the world. But the brain of an infant is still greedier than its stomach. It will have food at all costs, and food is always available, food of the deadliest kind as well as food of the noblest ; visions of dreadful night and visions of green fields. If it is necessary to feed the stomach properly, it is still more necessary to feed the brain properly. In the first case error only kills the body ; in the second, error destroys the whole man. It is, moreover, easier to feed the brain properly than to feed the body, for it is not, as a rule, a case of procuring food, but merely of shutting off, of closing access to, deleterious food. To feed the body, in the case of an infant, is a positive, to feed the brain is a negative, act. The infant mind cares not which food it has all it demands is food. If it is not fed on sunlight, 142 National Education and National Life it will as greedily feed on night. The conse- quences are unending, for the child, as it slowly emerges from babyhood, develops a terrible, an awful quality the quality of imitation. He lives " As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation." Nature, of course, provides her own checks on the over-use of the infant brain. The child sleeps a great deal, and is in this way able to cope with the ceaseless revelations of its waking hours. From teeth and other causes the child suffers a good deal, especially if it has a very active brain, and nature utilises this suffering by making it a screen that shuts out the phenomena on which the brain feeds. But by the age of three the average healthy, properly-fed child can walk and talk, and has thus acquired the means of satisfying the physical and mental hungers that rage within him. He can ask and grope for food, as well as cry for it. He can imitate by deed and sound the things he sees and hears, as well as School Nurseries 143 register them in the brain . It is at this moment, with excellent judgment, that the schools throw themselves open to the little people. To allow an infant of three, in a squalid area, to gather into his brain, there to remain as a life-long environment of the personality for, though the surface memory fails to retain early impressions, the personality itself retains them all the sights and scenes of a slum, is sheer social madness. The child must be removed, or partially removed, from such an atmosphere, since it has reached the imitative stage, and is nearing the selective stage of life. For the moment he imitates anything ; presently he will imitate what pleases him, what gives him momentary pleasure. Before the un-moral selective stage is reached the stage which inevitably precedes the moral or immoral selective stage it is essential that children should receive definite and deliberate guidance, that their imitative faculty should be con- trolled. In the case of innumerable children this can only be done in nursery schools. Parents will gladly adopt the methods of the 144 National Education and National Life schools if such methods are brought home, but it is in school that the basis must be laid. Children must be taught what to imitate by the process of eliminating from the sphere of their observation what should not be imitated. This can largely be done if the school is made full of attraction. . If they love school they will love chiefly and chiefly imitate the things that school brings before them. All this is so obvious that it would be scarcely worth setting forth were it not that the educational traditions now held by the vast majority of school teachers are in absolute opposition to this line of thought. The reading, writing and arithmetic con- ception of education has held them spell- bound. Despite much vague talk about Nature-study, they regard school as a place that in reality only exists for the purpose of teaching those three indispensable aids to knowledge. It is not the fault of the teachers ; it is not the fault of the Board of Education. It is the fault of a gross and ignorant species of utilitarianism that for the last eighty School Nurseries 145 years has clamoured for results tangible and immediate. Large numbers of teachers have had nobler ideals, but the machine at which they worked registered "results" only, and they, being judged by "results," had to confine their chief attention to the production of dull and often brutal scholars. The new Board of Education having overhauled, with admirable results, the whole elementary system has recently reached the infants. It certainly regards with horror the system that it has found at work. Even the Common Law, which is not wholly scientific in its concepts of status, has always refused to consider children under the age of seven years as capable of classification with the remainder of society. But the happily deceased Education Depart- ment never gave the subject a thought, never attempted anything approaching classification or grading among children, and allowed infants of three to attend school as grant-earning subjects of the Crown. Perhaps nothing more preposterous scintillates from the interesting annals of English education. The new Board 146 National Education and National Life has at last put its foot down, though not firmly enough, on the system of treating infants under five as an integral part of a three-R grant-earning elementary school. The current regulations deal specifically with the question of these infants. They are no longer to come within the ordinary curriculum of the school. They are to have a special curri- culum, which will ' ' provide opportunities for the free development of their bodies and minds, and for the formation of habits of obedience and attention." The curriculum intended to secure these results will include physical exercises, consisting exclusively of games involving free movement, singing and breathing exercises, and various employments that will give the eyes, the hands and fingers free occupations suitable to little people. The teacher will lead the children to form ideas ' ' and to express them in simple language of their own " by talking with them and encouraging them to talk, and by telling them stories. The elder infants, infants that is of four or five, will be taught to listen carefully, School Nurseries 147 to speak clearly, to recite easy pieces, to reproduce easy stories and narratives, to do simple things with their hands, to begin to draw, read, write, observe and acquire an elementary knowledge of numbers and of music. Knitting may be practised by children under six, but sewing need not be taught until the age of seven is attained. In these regulations we have an enormous stride, though it cannot be said that they are not open to criticism. They are still ranged on the side of positive results, and do not sufficiently recognise that it is chiefly by negative efforts that the mind of an infant is rightly developed. There is one omission from the curriculum that is difficult to under- stand. If the school is to be the scene of continuous development, the infant depart- ment must be a grade that is dovetailed into the other grades. There is no suggestion how this transition is to be effected the transition from the younger infants, the mites of three, to the older infants, the mites of five, and from them to the veterans of six and 148 National Education and National Life seven in the full tide of standard work. It can only be done organically by the aid of picture-books. Comenius* was undoubtedly right when he laid so much stress on the uses of pictures in education. Tiny children love pictures, and through a carefully graduated series of picture-books they can be gradually led on to those conventional pictures, the letters of the alphabet and words. Letters and words were once pictures, and in teaching the child there is something organically sound in going through the very process that the letter itself went through in the minds of successive races before it became a symbol and a sound- value. By adding a pictorial scheme to the methods directed by the regulations, not only would the little child be naturally drawn on to learn how to write and read, but he would also acquire a love for beautiful pictures and beautiful things. His imitative faculty, which at that age rules his whole being, would thus be guided along the best and most inspiring way. * Schola Pansophica. School Nurseries 149 The new regulations are, however, designedly experimental. They are not the only effort made by the Board to deal with the infant question. In April, 1904, five women inspectors were directed to report on children under five years of age in public elementary schools. In September last the reports were published, and revealed, on the whole, a lamentable misapprehension through- out the country of the principles that underlie the education of infants. Miss Munday tells us that : ' ' The chief faults in the organisation and curriculum of the baby rooms are too often the large size of the classes, the lack of sufficient physical exercise, insufficient changes of posture, air, scene, and teachers, the repression of originality in the individual, the instructional type of teaching which prevails instead of the educational, and the use of unsuitable occupations which cause too long a strain on the muscles and nerves of the body, especially when done to drills. Writing and drawing on ordinary lined or squared 150 National Education and National Life foolscap paper, threading and sewing with small implements often in poorly lighted rooms, are all mentally and physically injurious for children between the ages of three and five. . . . The furniture of our infant babies' room still chiefly consists of a huge gallery constructed to hold nominally forty to sixty children, but often containing as many as eighty at the end of the educational year, or if classes have to be put together owing to the lack of sufficiency of staff. In some cases the gallery occupies the chief amount of floor space, and necessarily reduces the cubic air space of the room, to say nothing of the accumulation of rubbish which takes place on the floor beneath, generally unget-at-able to floor cleaners. When this type of baby- room obtains, the class can have little scope or space for movements of any right kind, and if the school has no hall, or has a hall but the babies' class does not use it, as is too often the case, the children suffer physically and quite unnecessarily." On the whole, Miss Munday does not convey * School Nurseries 151 a satisfactory impression of London baby rooms ; and she tells us that ' ' London children have very little originality, and even less power of observation," and that "in many cases the slum children are more observant and more original than the well-to-do residents in more comfortable surroundings." She adds that, as the result of her general observation in town and country, ' ' instead of the pro- motion of self -development under safe, healthy, or happy conditions being the aim and rule of those in charge of these young minds, the chief aim has been instruction, with the result that the child with the least so-called educational advantages proves itself mentally more alert and vigorous at seven than the one who has spent five hours per day, five times weekly, under the care of an up-to-date educational authority." Miss Munday comes to the conclusion that " Persons need not, therefore, be highly trained or qualified experts to educate babies, but preferably young, bright girls, without high attainments, fond of children, 152 National Education and National Life sympathetic, nice-mannered, and sweet- voiced, patient and firm, with the idea of ministry and service to the children as their chief aim rather than the teaching of them." I have given my reasons above for disagreeing with these conclusions in so far as it dismisses the necessity of training, though, of course, the other qualities upon which Miss Munday lays such stress are as essential as training. I think that girls of the type indicated by this experienced inspector should receive a very special training before they take up their work, and I am sure that they should not be young, if by that adjective is meant any age under twenty. Anything like a reversion to the monitorial or pupil-teaching type would be an educational calamity. Miss Callis reports on the schools in Barry, Cardiff, Newport, Swan- sea, and Greenwich, thus comparing London with Wales. She says : "In writing this report, some amount of comparison between these schools has been unavoidable. Broadly speaking, the differences are the result of the greater freedom from restriction enjoyed by School Nurseries 153 the schools in Barry, Cardiff, and Swansea, leading to greater variety in the types of schools and in their internal working as compared with the hampering conditions imposed by the late London School Board which have tended to kill initiative and originality and to deaden enthusiasm." Miss Callis, therefore, independently agrees with Miss Munday as to the extraordinary want of originality and observation in London children. Business men who employ London boys fresh from school frequently hold the same opinion. It is satisfactory to know that the fault lies- with the schools. It largely lies, indeed, in the baby rooms, for the mind is formed for good or evil before the age of seven is reached. The example of the Barry schools show clearly enough how the educational evils that seem rampant in London schools can be rooted out. The aim of the infant school in London is " not primarily to help children to develop naturally and healthily according to the laws of their being. ... In Barry, Cardiff, and Swansea one finds : M 154 National Education and National Life " i. A story or nature lesson every morning generally at the beginning of secular instruction. "2. One lesson for games every morning, and at least one for manual work. "3. In some schools the place of the three R's for babies is taken by talks, drawing, and games. " 4. The afternoon is, as a rule, given entirely to occupations, singing, recitations, and games. "5. Needlework is rarely taken with children of five. " In London one finds : " i. The morning devoted mainly to the three R's, with a fourth lesson for singing, object lesson, or recitation. "2. The afternoon divided between object lessons, manual work, needlework drills (omitted in some schools), singing or recita- tion, and further instruction in the three R's. "3. Kindergarten games once or twice a week, and a short story lesson on Friday afternoons. School Nurseries 155 " In the Barry and Cardiff schools the main features of the work are the story and nature lessons, with their correlated occupations. In London the three R's bulk largely, and too little time is given to ' expression ' lessons." Miss Callis concludes that children under five should not be taught reading, writing, or arithmetic, and that needlework should not be taught at all before seven years of age. The comparison between the staffs of the T7 London and the 21 Welsh schools appears to bear out my contention that specially- trained teachers produce results that cannot be reached in any other way. The Welsh teachers have about five more children per head than the London teachers, but they include seven highly-trained kindergarten teachers, while in the London schools in question there is no kindergarten teacher. " The head teachers spoke in the highest terms of the work of these teachers. The com- bination of certificated teachers of greater experience in managing large classes with the .trained kindergarten teachers, and their wider 156 National Education and National Life knowledge of the principles underlying the education of young children seems here to be eminently successful. I think the policy of the Barry Council first in appointing these teachers, and secondly in giving suitable remuneration to them is sound., (The salary for a teacher holding the higher Froebel certificate is the same as that of a certificated teacher.) Having learnt from their study of Froebelian methods and principles to respect the individuality of the children and to help the natural unfolding of their powers, mental and physical, by surrounding them with a suitable environment and to refrain from over-much interference and instruction, one finds in the classes in charge of the trained kindergartner a happy, wholesome spirit of freedom and activity. The nearest approach to this, I venture to say, is oftenest met with in the work of the supplementary teacher, who, led by instinct and by sympathy with little children, attains a similar result." This is better put, but it is precisely the position that I have endeavoured from first School Nurseries 157 principles to state. Trained teaching does and must produce the best results. But it must be the right sort of trained teaching. If it is the wrong kind of trained teaching, it is better to employ those who possess by instinct the principles that Froebel and others have rightly asserted to be a necessary part of the outfit of one who educates little children. Miss Heale's report opens with a passage that fully confirms the view that it is absolutely essential for babies in very poor districts to go to school as soon as they are physically able to undertake the daily journey. She says : " Beyond question , in poor neighbourhoods, it is better for babies of three even, to be in school under the care of teachers who do a great amount of work wholly apart from time- tables, inspections, and salaries. They really look after the babies and infants, teach them how to behave well at meals by seeing how they eat their lunch, make them tidy up the crumbs, and clear away the papers. They see that their heads, hands and faces are clean ; 158 National Education and National Life that their clothes are fastened up ; they get their mothers to wash the children and the clothes ; they see to sores, bruises, cuts tie up, salve and bandage. They ask parents of better-off children to let them have boots, shoes, clothes for the poorer children, they get their friends to send them clothes, they buy food for the toddlers, who sometimes come to school in tears from hunger. The babies, undoubtedly, improve in growth and physique on coming to school the regularity of the hours, after the universal dishevelment and disorder, and confusion and noise, with which their senses have been distracted, the kindly voice in the place of the cruel threat, the lifting up and down, the being talked to, the having lunch, the warmth and the companion- ship, all help the babies to grow. The sitting during so much of the morning and afternoon cannot be so harmful in poor neighbourhoods as it would appear at first sight, because it is the only time in the day probably that they are sitting. In many of the homes from which they come there are few, if any, chairs, School Nurseries 159 and I cannot recall one that was of a suitable height for a child." The case could not be put better. The children pass out of chaos into order when they enter the school, and secure, or should secure, a physical and mental rest that is of infinite importance. Unfortunately, there can be little doubt that, at present, all that is given with one hand, the human hand, is taken away with the other, the official hand. Children who have not had these advantages enter at five and very soon outstrip those who have two years start of them. There must be something seriously wrong with an educational system that is capable of utterly undoing by its mental training all the good results of two years' patient physical care. It is not difficult to see what is wrong. It is mal-nutrition of the brain. ' ' The weak points in infant teaching seem to me to have been rather forced upon the teachers by outside pressure. The extra- ordinary amount of repetition and the constant appeal to the children to remember, must 160 National Education and National Life have come from being expected to reach a standard of attainment beyond what might be reasonably looked for in infants. The object lessons are generally failures : the teacher talks too much, tells the children all that they should have found out ; the objects are frequently conspicuous by their absence, and the subjects chosen are not suitable. The efforts to get the children to talk fail from attaching value to words apart from objects and actions. The vocabulary of an infant from three to six years of age must be very limited ; and the fallacy of teaching words, apart from that which they represent, has been pointed out over and over again. The ill-effects of this merely verbal knowledge follow the child all through the elementary school, and those who become teachers show it again in their examination papers ; words, words, mere words with no sense, meet one in every class." I have ventured to italicise certain words in the last sentence, for they show in practice that which I endeavoured to demonstrate School N^^r series 161 from first principles as certain to occur. There is no end to the evil of improper education in the nursery school. It not only haunts the victim for life, but makes him if he becomes as he is very likely to become a teacher, a positive centre of infection. The baby class is the most important class in the school, and demands the highest intelligence and the most ample training from its teachers. To relegate the baby class to untrained teachers would be, to my mind, the most serious, the most expensive, error in policy that our educational authorities have com- mitted in recent years. It would be to turn the back to all the lessons of history in the nineteenth century. Both principle and experience are, as I have endeavoured to show, absolutely opposed to it. Miss Heale shows us clearly enough that teachers, however kindly, however motherly, however loving and self-sacrificing, can do nothing to resist the mind-killing pressure of an educational system that it is their duty to obey. Yet an educa- tional system there must be. These infants 162 National Education and National Life are, in fact, to be gradually prepared for the next grade, and it is only very highly-trained teachers who know how to make an educational system elastic, who can, so to speak, invent an educational method, for each particular child if need be, that can bring out the bent and naturally develop the faculties of these little ones. The untrained teacher, no doubt, would make an ideal nursery maid, but the mother who would leave the mental develop- ment of her child of four to an ideal nursery maid is, one can only hope, rare. A nursery maid, moreover, is not fitted to carry into execution a carefully devised method, with its necessary variations from case to case. Such a conception is not magnificent, and it is not education. For, after all, a school is a school and not a nursery. The children are in the school for infants in order that they may be brought through into the school for children sound in limb and mind. Nothing will secure this but the method in force at Barry. It is not the first time that Wales has taught England a lesson in matters educational. School Nurseries 163 Miss Harrington is not more merciful to the present system than her sister inspectors. School work, as at present carried on, does not tend to develop originality ; rather is it crushed before that ' ' Car of Juggernaut " " Uniformity." She protests most emphatically against the teaching of the " three R's " and needlework to children of five or even six years. ' ' Nothing is gained but a slight mechanical power." " Expend the same amount of energy on possibilities, and there will be some happier children and teachers." Miss Harrington tells a delightful story that we must hope is mere rumour. ' A council inspector remarked, in a certain school, that ' the discipline would have been perfect but for two or three babies who moved.' It is easy to understand how, thenceforward, the unfortunate babies ' sat up.' ' This photo- graphically-minded gentleman was, however, merely expressing the views of his preposterous employers. In one school belonging to the council ' an assistant teacher, though admittedly one of the best on the staff, was 164 National Education and National Life deprived of her increase of salary because her class was not quite up to the mark in providing the appointed facts and figures." Under such a system ' ' all individuality is crushed ; they must all work to pattern and be like everybody else. . . . Universally, the standing principle seems to be that mistakes must never be made. Perfection is expected at a first or second trial so that fatal dis- couragement enters the baby soul that ought never to have come near it and the joy of finding out for itself and climbing by its own mistakes is never known." Miss Harrington has here gone to the very root of the whole question. Human beings, after all, are human beings and not pins, and even if there are six millions of them at school that is no reason why they should be turned out according to sample. But Miss Harrington will have nothing to do with cheap empiric remedies. They are too dear, too extravagant in the long run. Trained teachers and grading of the careful kind is the only remedy. The school for infants must be an organic part of the School Nurseries 165 whole school. Miss Harrington tells us frankly that * the work of Standard I should be carefully co-ordinated with that of the infant school that there may be no break when the child is moved from one department to another. If teachers of the lower standards were made familiar with Froebelian principles and had a working knowledge of Kindergarten methods, much hardship and many weary hours would be spared both teachers and taught." The invaluable point of these remarkable reports is that they absolutely confirm the theory on the subject of infant education. The infant is surrounded with brain food good and bad, and the function of the teacher is not to- substitute artificial conceptions for natural conceptions, but to select for the child the proper food and to see that he has it in proper quantities at proper times. That is one aspect of the teacher's work. Another is the utilisation of the child's infinite capacity for imitation without the child being in the least conscious that his power in this direction is being used at all. A third aspect is so to 1 66 National Education and National Life regulate brain food and so to utilise the power of imitation that the whole process is really a grade of education that will pass imper- ceptibly into another grade, in which the child will be able to take up and learn the use of those educational tools which are familiarly dubbed "the three R's." To transform the present methods of drilling the mind of infancy into a living grade of education is a work that can only be accomplished by teachers closely familiar with the theory and practice of teaching infants. Every school must, if it is to be a living school, have in future at least one teacher holding a higher Froebelian certificate. In no other way can our frightfully expensive system of education justify its existence. It can hardly be said to justify its existence, or, indeed, to be a system at all, when we are told that the children of the Metropolis ' ' have very little originality and even less power of observation;" and that in many cases the children of the slums are more observant and more original than their more fortunate brothers and sisters. NATIONAL EDUCATION AND FREE LIBRARIES THE salient fact about national education in the past was its cul de sac character. The child went to school and left school, and there was the end of national education (if ever there was such a beginning) in the great majority of cases. It is true that it was not always so. In the opening of the seven- teenth century, the proportion of school children who passed into the universities was greater than it has ever been since, even if we include quite modern developments. Oxford had then more students than it has now, and Cambridge also was very full. These same universities were indeed crowded in the thirteenth century, but the university movement at that date was rather cosmo- politan than national; and no particular deduction can be drawn from the fact that, at certain periods in the middle ages, both 167 168 National Education and National Life English and Continental universities were thronged with aspirants for priesthood or fugitives from justice.* If we except the very brief period in which the Elizabethan educational system was at its prime, it is true enough to say that national education in England has had few organic characteristics. It has played but a comparatively small part in national life, though the universities and certain individual schools have, altogether apart from any system of national education, played a sufficiently great part in that life. We have never had a system that could offer to a child, independent of his or her position in society at large, a reasonable chance of realising the latent qualities and powers that existed at birth. It is claimed by modern educationalists that we have now obtained, or are now about to obtain, such a system. It is, however, sufficiently clear, that one con- dition which must accompany such a system is absent, or is still undeveloped. * Compare the letters written by King Henry III to the Univer- sities of Oxford and Cambridge in 1231 (The Close Rolls, 15, Hen. III). He describes them as centres " ubi convenit multitude studentium," gathered from all lands and including many criminals and rebel clerks. National Education and Free Libraries 169 Atmosphere, to use a somewhat cant term of the present day, the atmosphere of books is a necessity of education in its most com- prehensive sense. You must live in the past, in its colours, in its culture, in its thoughts, in its achievements, if you are going to live in the present and do anything for the future. You cannot do anything vital for an age unless you understand the age, and you cannot understand the age unless you broadly grasp the forces that make it what it is. Such understanding, such grasp, can only be obtained in any real sense in the atmosphere of a great library a library that a man can call his own whether he possesses the fee simple of it or not. That the great news- papers and reviews have done much to help those who have not adequate libraries will readily be conceded, and it is probable that to-day the average man has a working know- ledge of the world and its ways, its thoughts, aspirations, and achievements that would seem hardly less than miraculous to his ancestors. But even the best newspaper or N 170 National Education and National Life review cannot take the place of books, and if newspapers attempt to do so, if they do more than lead man to the library, they are positive evils from the point of view of education. It will probably not be denied that the habit of serious reading, the desire for culture has been, and is being destroyed in thousands of men and women by the quick literary meals that are supplied by innumerable and well-meaning periodicals. There can be no educational growth in an age of extracts. A thinking nation must feed upon books, and must sit down to its meals. The position is, of course, perfectly obvious. From the time of Alcuin, when England had the noblest libraries in Europe, to our own times, the relationship of national education to a library system has been well recognised, In the reign of Anne, Parliament actually created the machinery for setting up parochial libraries throughout the land. The machinery, except in the Isle of Man, proved in- adequate, but the idea was one that could not be forgotten. It was adopted in the National Education and Free Libraries 171 American colonies with a large measure of educational success, and when in the mid- Victorian period the education revival came to England, it was almost immediately accom- panied by legislation empowering crowded areas to supply themselves, out of the rates, with museums and libraries. This was the educational equivalent of the early legisla- tion for the promotion of public health, and for the well lighting, paving, and draining of public streets. Neither the physical nor the moral effort was perhaps very successful at first, but the fact remains that the under- lying idea of the free public library was entirely educational. It was to give the poor man the gift that the rich man was supposed to possess already that literary atmosphere without which all education is either eccentric or weakly. There has been in recent times a tendency to obscure this fundamental idea, to regard the free library as a place of recreation where the general reader can indulge in misconducted reading tours, and eke out the magazines with 172 National Education and National Life occasional fiction. Literature, no doubt, supplies the highest form of recreation, and works of imagination exhibit literature at its noblest point. But public money is not well used in supplying the individual with any- thing that the individual thinks that he wants, and can obtain for himself without undue difficulty. That public money in certain cases may be used for purposes of recreation without economic waste, is clear. But it must only be in cases where the recreation subserves some general public good, and is unknown to, or unattainable by, the indi- vidual. Open spaces in a great town not only supply recreation, but conduce to the general health of the community. The pro- vision of noble music in open spaces supplies what is privately unattainable, and tends to beautify the life of the community. But to supply ephemeral literature in public libraries meets no public need. Such literature can readily be bought, even in those somewhat rare cases where it is calculated to add to the health, or beautify the life of the community. National Education and Free Libraries 173 No doubt it might be said that the great literature of the past can also be bought cheaply, and should therefore also be ex- cluded. But the cases are not the same. It is one of the express functions of a library to create a taste for this very literature. The library must possess all time-honoured books, and so encourage its readers to form libraries of their own. The introduction without limit of modern untested books into a free library has tended to obscure its original educational purpose. Let those who have acquired a taste for current fiction indulge it at their own expense. The taste is a luxury, and none should gratify it at the expense of his neigh- bours. The true purpose of the library is essentially educational. Its object is, to enable the thinking man or woman to think truly out of a full mind, to bring him or her into communion with the immortals, and so in a new measure realise the possibilities of life. To carry culture the love of know- ledge and the knowledge of love into the 174 National Education and National Life organic life of society is the true function of the public library. When this is achieved we can say, and not till then, that we have an educational system which gives to every child a reasonable chance of realising his hidden self, his soul of goodness. This stage of national life cannot be reached until the library has become an organic part of the means by which national life is carried on. It is, at present, for the most part unrelated. To use a familiar metaphor, it is not a corn- field in the midst of meadows, but an oasis in a stricken wilderness. How, then, is the free public library to be related to the educational system of the nation? It must, of course, be done through the schools. Every school, whether elementary or secondary, and every college of the university type must be brought into direct touch with the public libraries. If the children and the young men and the maidens are taught to regard these libraries as their own, as places where they can sit among their books, it is scarcely a stretch of the imagination to National Education and Free Libraries 175 suppose that, as youth glides into middle life, there will move with it that sense of culture and that desire for self-fulfilment which alone can make life entirely tolerable. For my own part, I can see no difficulty in the matter of connecting the libraries and the schools save in certain mechanical respects. It will be difficult, no doubt, for each library area to secure a specimen of that rarest of living species, good librarians, and to elect an enthusiastic committee composed of men and women representing all classes. The choice of books will offer no singular difficulty to such a Lbrarian and committee, but it will involve great responsibility and demand some inspiration. But the chief of the mechanical difficulties will be the bringing of the school and the library into physical touch. There must be a library-room, an exchange room, in each school whence books can be taken out, after due notice, and given in. In order that the best type of book in each particular case should be selected one of the subjects taught in the school in each class must be the choice of 176 National Education and National Life books. The formation of school catalogues, sub-divided for special divisions of the school, would have to be undertaken by the librarian or the head teachers of the various schools. I would carry the principle of book loans to scholars from the baby class of the infant school to the post-graduate class of the university college. The noblest fairy stories and folklore of all nations, nobly illustrated, should be at the service of the babies ; the most advanced treatises on philosophy, theology, medicine, law, science and mathematics, and the most admirable texts of the authors of all times, should be at the service of the graduate. So with all intermediate classes. But certain books, rare editions and manuscripts for instance, and books of great cost should only be available in the central library, and all scholars should be encouraged to resort there. The library authorities should appeal for gifts of works likely to add to the permanent value of the library, for rare editions and for manuscripts, and for books specially illustrating local history. In order to create a taste for actual National Education and Free Libraries 177 library study, and to overcome the shyness that often excludes the young from great libraries, classes should actually be held in the library itself; and there should be in the library buildings a local museum where everything could be learnt that belongs to the history of the locality, whether it be its natural history or the history of its human affairs, or the history of its relationship to its country or the world. A concrete instance will illustrate this need. Greenwich is the most interesting historical spot in England. It had till this year no public library and no museum. Yet in the Park are burying-grounds of the Bronze Age, Roman villas, remains of the Danish occupation, and in the town resided the Kings of England throughout the middle period of our history. Greenwich Hospital is associated with the greatest period in our naval annals, and the Royal Observatory is one of the most famous centres of scientific research. This quaint little town, now sub- merged in the flowing, murky tide of the Metropolis, has indeed more historical and 178 National Education and National Life scientific associations than has any other place in the world of the same size. Yet its average school 'child could with difficulty distinguish it from Poplar or Barking. In some such way as has been indicated the public library should be brought into the actual life of the people. Nor should it stop there. The library should be made an example. Good books to-day are cheap, if all cheap books are not good. From the first children should be taught to collect good books and slowly to build up personal libraries. There is nothing that reflects a man's personality more truthfully, more brutally, than his collection of books. A man can see himself in his books more adequately than in his mirror. If they are his deliberate choice he sees himself, his whole self and nothing but himself nothing but his attenuated self it may be in the row or rows of them. The child should be brought up to look at himself in the face in this way and to be able to look without shame. There are a hundred best books for every person, but the National Education and Free Libraries 179 century varies with every person. Our educational system should, with the help of the public library and its gifted librarian, and with the continual stimulus of school classes dealing with the choice of books, enable every child to collect the hundred books that best reflect his true and nobler personality. So life will acquire for the many a new interest, a new inspiration, and culture will leaven the living dough that Time is always kneading. EDUCATION AND INSPIRATION MATTHEW ARNOLD, in his famous critical essay of 1853, declares that " What is not interesting is that which does not add to our knowledge of any kind ; that which is vaguely conceived and loosely drawn ; a representation which is general, indeterminate and faint, instead of being particular, precise and firm. Any accurate representation may, therefore, be expected to be interesting ; but if the representation be a poetical one, more than this is demanded. It is demanded, not only that it shall interest, but also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader ; that it shall convey a charm and infuse delight." This truth with respect to poetical representation applies indeed to all art, and with peculiar force to that representation of accumulated thought which is the result of education. Education is the process by which a series of representations is given a place in the human 180 Education and Inspiration 181 mind. If the education is to be efficient the representations must be ' ' particular, precise and firm/' and not " general, indeterminate, and faint," while the series of representations must constitute an organicary related whole. In this way there is built up around the consciousness a world definite, distinct and organic a living microcosm reflecting or representing to the individual mind all the things which to that mind are knowable and true in the great indefinite, indistinct and apparently inorganic universe in which it thinks and seeks to live. Such a world varies in its range with the individual mind. We may conceive of a mind whose world of actuality may approximate to the universe itself, of a mind that feels the pulse of ordered life throbbing through the whole range of experience and thought, a mind that is never misled by the phenomena of the indefinite, indistinct outward range of things ascer- tainable. Indeed, there have been minds that seem to have transcended even the obscure limits of the universe of experience, 1 82 National Education and National Life and to have realised in imagination worlds evolved from other premises than those that lie behind ourselves and our environment, in daring illustration of the infinite choice that lay before the Geometrician of the Universe. On the other hand, the range of the mind may be, and, as a rule, must be, very limited. But the world within that range can, by the aid of education, be made definite, distinct and organic. All that is for the time being knowable and true to the particular mind can be collated and co-related until the mind can be said to know itself in having discovered all that itself can, at that particular stage, know. Self-recognition and self-revelation are, indeed, the end and aim of all true education, as much as the recognition and revelation of God are the end and aim of all true religion. We must, however, remember that though the mind (the capacity of the ego) varies within very large limits in considering different individuals, it also in any particular individual has a large range of variation and is a developing or retrogressing fact. It has, of Education and Inspiration 183 course, its upward limit, and this limit in particular individuals or particular races may be very low ; but no one can say to what extent any specific mind can be developed or what its ultimate capacity may be. Each stage of full self-recognition and self -revelation is but the nucleus of a larger sphere. If education is what it should be, whether in the man or the child, worlds waiting to be realised are continually, in ordered succession, looming beyond the definite, distinct and organic world that he has made his own. What has been already won creates a divine hunger for new conquests. He is inspired with a restless longing for a larger life, he is perpetually acquiring a larger hope. His personality opens out on every side, and he begins to realise those potential powers and joys which dwell in every man, but which in few men are awakened out of sleep. It is often said, with truth, that interest is the key of education. But there is something more than interest. To arouse interest is essential, if there is to be any true education at all ; but 184 National Education and National Life interest is limited to the bringing into constant activity of capacity already largely developed. The proper work for children, and, indeed, for men and women, is the work in which they are interested : in other words, the work which is rightly suited to their mental and physical capacity. Education must see to that if it is to justify its name. But education must go further. It. must not only supply the work in which the mind is interested, but work which will also create inspiration, work which continually enlarges the limits of the definite, distinct and organic world implied in the word interest ; work which brings into view sphere after sphere towards which the mind yearns with an inspired desire for possession. Concerning the representation of the universe that surrounds the mind, ' ' it is demanded not only that it shall interest, but also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader; that it shall convey a charm and infuse delight." Surely such a doctrine has a practical application in schools of all types. The mind of the child is the most delicate and the most Education and Inspiration 185 responsive of all articulate combinations. Its ultimate capacity, its power for good or evil, no man can measure. An Alexander, a Timur, a Paul, a Mohammed, an Aristotle, a Euripides, a Shakespeare, a Newton may be veiled in some little ragged ill-fed urchin in the teeming schools of the great cities, or the little schools of the great rural districts. When one reflects upon the six million children that England is educating, imagination stands aghast. In this vast, ever-recruiting army, whose numerical strength the mind is not capable of fully appreciating, the whole range of human capacity, one would think, must be represented. Lying latent is the power to transform the social world, to extend almost indefinitely the limits of science, philosophy and art, to make England not only the most powerful, but the most happy, of nations. Yet how much of this latent power will be awakened into action, how much into right action ; how much will be awakened and directed so that its maximum of result will be produced ? More, perhaps, than we could i86 National Education and National Life possibly have expected ten years ago, and infinitely more than England had any right to expect forty years ago if it thought upon the subject at all at that time. The progress that has been made in national educational matters in the last few years has been so great that we can no longer measure the possibilities of the English race by any standard drawn from educational results even ten years old. The solidarity of national education is a new fact. The nation at last refuses to recognise the existence of human waste-heaps thrown aside by the machinery of national life. It is a new attitude. The nation for centuries has played with the minds of children as children play with the works of watches. Looked at as mere machinery one might expect the mind to be treated with something of scientific care. Yet the upbuilding efforts of Nature have had perpetually to be diverted from their proper purposes to the work of undoing the results of man's clumsiness in dealing with mechanism vastly more delicate than the finest instrument that he could produce. Natural growth and Education and Inspiration 187 development is throughout creation heavily handicapped. Nature has normally to deal with disadvantages such as under-feeding and overcrowding. A being from Mars, regarding the whole struggle from without, might reasonably imagine that man, with his powers of administration and combination, would assist Nature by modifying her natural dis- advantages, thus leaving her free to develop, as she alone knows how, the machinery of her subtlest creation. So far from this being the case, the Martian has beheld man hampering Nature at every turn, intensifying her natural disadvantages, and adding others of his own invention the most terrible and the most obstinate of all being the schoolmaster of all the ages. What ever else may have changed in this conservative world of ours since the Stone Age, the schoolmaster has not changed until, at any rate, very recent years. The history of education in all times and climes is a variant of the old saying that " God made the meat and the devil the cooks." The brilliant exceptions merely prove the rule. Even the 1 88 National Education and National Life eighteenth century, with its teeming army of schoolmasters who were marksmen in the legal meaning of the term, had its brilliant exceptions. The age of Bede and Alcuin, the revival of schools in the late fourteenth century, a similar revival in the late sixteenth and early* seventeenth centuries, the rule of Busby, the Nonconformist schools of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of Arnold and Thring, all prove what happens when a sound tradition of teaching obtains a grip of the national mind and calls able men into the teaching profession. But these and other brief periods were shining oases in the dead desert of foolishness. The history of English education tells us that for three centuries from the Conquest all children in the schools were taught in a foreign, lifeless dialect the Anglo-Norman dialect . It seems unbelievable , but it is not more unbelievable than the fact that children have ever since been taught in an^equally lifeless dialect the dialect of the schoolmaster, of the man who was intrusted with the care of children because he was not Education and Inspiration 189 competent to be intrusted with any other care. But in the early days the loss was not so great as it appears to us. The need of the schoolmaster was not so apparent. Life was simpler and nearer Nature. Nature could claim her own and clean the scholastic slate. On the land, or apprenticed to a trade, the lad could get an outfit for life. At school, for the most part, he had lain fallow and heeded nothing but the intermittent rod. The girls were in no worse case, for they got their outfit for life in their own homes. But as soon as life becomes complex school education becomes vital. Education can no longer be given on the land, in the shop, or in the home. The school- master is all important. He alone can solve the problems that lie at the base of national life. It is the true function of human effort to minimise the disadvantages that naturally follow the aggregation of individuals into crowded centres. Nature deals with the evils of great societies in her own ruthless, lavish 190 National Education and National Life way. Her primary weapons are famine, pestilence, the sword, and the curse of barren- ness. Human effort can arrive at the result which Nature aims at without such convulsions, but unless it does, in fact, arrive at that result, it is worse than useless to have warded off the devastating, but ultimately cleansing, forces of Nature. But man cannot arrive at that result without the inspiration which accompanies the highest efforts of education. Anything that is mere patchwork in dealing with the life of a nation only postpones the evil day and lengthens out the decline. To render the indefinite multiplication of a race temporarily secure by measures of relief that mitigate particular evils as they arise is ultimately useless, unless we can ward off those subtle processes of physical, mental, moral and spiritual deterioration by which Nature secures the destruction of a race that has escaped her swifter forces. Education in its noblest sense alone can secure the safety of any nation. Race after race has dis- appeared in the conflict with Nature. One Education and Inspiration 191 people only, the Jewish, has come through intact from the further confines of history. The Jew has survived the entire gamut of testing stresses by which Nature proves the fitness or unfitness of nations. His race was organised ere the Bronze Age had displaced the Stone Age in Britain, and it has sur- vived, apparently unimpaired, the successive civilizations of Asia, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and mediaeval Europe. The Renaissance of the Fifteenth Century, which is still feeling its way across Europe and America, is but one of many re-incarnations of society that the Jew has seen and aided. How can such a phenomenon be accounted for ? The answer seems clear. The typical Jew realises the world of his consciousness. To him, however contracted it may be and it is often contracted enough it is definite, distinct, and organic. All that to him at the moment is knowable he knows. Self-recognition, self-revelation are his. He knows his world, and therefore knows himself. The typical Jew feels also that his world is but the nucleus of an organic whole, 192 National Education and National Life and the leaders of each generation from the earliest times have dwelt upon the relation of this outer, greater world to the sphere of daily toil and suffering. The Jew not only sees life clearly, and sees it whole, thus realising his present being, but in the exercise of his religion, that finds its expression in a tongue common to the Jews of all nationalities and known even to the poorest, he is feeling after worlds not realised but very vividly conceived. He believes, and has always believed, that there is a God watching over Israel, who neither slumbers nor sleeps, and is therefore content to suffer dispersion through- out the world. He arrived long ago by an inanalysable process of deduction at conclusions that the Greek also found in pure thought after laborious verbal analysis; and it was the combination of Hebraic prescience and Greek science that rendered possible an organised basis for the spiritual and intellectual development of Christendom. The Jewish people presents a perpetual lesson in national education. For centuries Education and Inspiration 193 without local habitation, without temporal power, down-trodden in most lands, and respected by the multitude in none, with servitude and too often the vices of servitude, the badge through many ages of all its tribes, it has yet preserved a vital sense of nationality and of a national religion even in the many abject and undesirable members of its world- scattered community. In consequence of this, and in spite of (or perhaps because of) never-ceasing disadvantages, it has produced a higher percentage of high average ability and possibly a higher percentage of absolute genius than any of the nations among which it inhabits. The race enters everywhere ; the walls of Jericho are perpetually falling before it. In most of its incursions it brings with it squalor and increased competition. But it erects its schools forthwith, cares for its poor, and secures the living continuity of the Hebrew tongue. Heine's gibe at the Gentile that every nation gets the Jew that it deserves is true enough. He partakes of the squalor that he finds and he is haunted with the sin of Saul. 194 National Education and National Life But he generally rises above the dead level of the poverty that he finds. The perennial hatred of the Jew by the multitude in continental Europe is probably due to this fact. The average Jew of all classes realises to a much higher degree than the average man in all classes of other nations the potentialities of his nature. He thrives at the expense of his Gentile neighbour because he has made as much of his gifts as his environment allows, while his neighbour too often has made as little of his gifts as is consistent with bare living in the same environment. No doubt the Jew's success is often enough accompanied by the vices and degradation of servitude, and the harshness that springs from endless struggle. Too often his duty to his neighbour ends with his own nation. The preservation of himself and his nation are his ends. The rest are, in fact, Gentiles. But, reckoning with all this and the dislike that it naturally engenders, the Jewish nation is successful mainly because throughout history the Jew has recognised the first essential of national education the Education and Inspiration 195 realisation by the individual of his personal powers, the need to see that there is no waste in life. That lesson is to be learnt from the Jew. But the object lesson does not end with this. The Jew of history has not stopped at realising his existing powers, has never only lived in a definite, distinct, organic world. Speaking broadly of the race, he has also possessed the inspiration which is essential to the ever-widening outlook not only of an individual but of a nation. What he has, whether material or spiritual, has ever been to him only the nucleus of something more worth having. If the English nation would but take to its heart the principles that have preserved the Jewish nation intact and vigorous through centuries of ill-report, it is difficult to see what limits there would be to the expansion of the race. We, like the Jews, are scattered throughout the world ; but, unlike the Jews, we have, and have had for a thousand years, organised Government and Imperial Power. The English race has no temptation to fall 196 National Education and National Life before those vices of servitude that have smitten Jewry, and it possesses a religion that in its noblest aspect is the highest possible development of the Jewish faith. Deep- founded and possessing a measure of power and influence never before accorded to any nation, we might well become under a great educational influence not only immune from racial disaster and dissolution, but, by virtue of our unbroken constitutional traditions and our concentrated power, the greatest civilizing force that the world has known. No other organised nation in the world has such a record of free development as that which we possess. Our organisation and constitution have stood the tests of many centuries, and, accommo- dating themselves to all tests, are unbroken to-day. The same thing cannot be said of any other Power in the world. Such a past must count enormously in the contest of the future. But it is not everything. It is, indeed, nothing, if it is not brought to bear on the actual conditions of the contest. New nations have arisen, old nations have been Education and Inspiration 197 resuscitated. If these nations lay hold of the one thing needful and we do not, the fittest will survive and we shall not be among the fittest. We must see that national waste is reduced to a minimum ; that the nation realises itself in the self-realisation and self-revelation of the enormous majority of its units. We must see also that our educational system creates that sense of inspiration without which a widening national outlook becomes impossible. The horizon of the individual and of the nation must ever move outward. There must ever be rising on the horizon new lands and seas, new continents of know- ledge and belief, new oceans of adventure. Rabbi ben Ezra spoke not only for the individual Jew, or for Jewry, but for the whole world when he cried : " Grow old along with me ! The best is yet to be, The last of life for which the first was made." Education, self-realisation, must go linked with inspiration. We are at the opening 198 National Education and National Life of a new day as well as of a new century. Darkness is round us yet. The fumes of night still hang over the land and wrap the lower levels. But far off there is an horizon that we never saw before. Yesterday was the day of the few. To-day and to-morrow are the days of the many, when every man shall have the opportunity that is his birthright. At least, that is the dream of the educationalist and might well be the goal of the statesman. THE EVOLUTION OF THE RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY THE modern controversy as to religious teaching in schools had its formal beginning in the opening of the nineteenth century, but the regrettable bitterness that characterises that controversy has its origin in events that lie deep down in the history of England and of English Education. At the beginning of the fifteenth century the schools of the Nonconformists were attacked by the Legisla- ture. The Statute de Hceretico Comburendo of the year 1401 forbade " divers false and perverse people of a certain new sect . . , to . . . .in any wise hold or exercise schools ; and also that none from henceforth in any wise favour such .... holding or exercising schools . ' ' The Constitutions of Arch- bishop Arundel in 1408 forbade any book from the pen of any dissenter to be read in any school. A further Statute of 1414 directed the justices 199 2OO National Education and National Life to make inquiry into local heresies and local heretical schools thus beginning a policy of inquisition that lasted for four centuries or more. The orthodoxy of teachers, the imposition of tests for teachers, was thenceforward incor- porated into the national educational position. In 1553 Queen Mary took measures to place all schools under the governance of sound Papists, while Queen Elizabeth in 1562, and again in 1581, took care that Parliament should provide schoolmasters in full accord with the new Protestant Establishment. All this was in direct antagonism to the common law which had been fearlessly declared by the Court of Common Pleas in the year 1410 when the Lollard controversy was at its height. The common law of England gave to all men, sufficiently qualified in secular knowledge, the right to teach. The Canons of 1604, which declared that an episcopal licence was necessary to a schoolmaster, would have been totally illegal at common law had they not been passed under the cover of a Statute of 1603 which made such a licence a condition Evolution of the Religious Controversy 201 precedent to the adoption of the teaching profession. This Statute and these Canons were the legitimate development of the Statute de Hcerdico Comburendo, and the logical antecedents of the Act of Uniformity. The Act of 1662 was intended finally to stamp out that movement of dissent which had then pervaded England for some three centuries. Dissent had never stood still and was not more contented with a Protestant than it had been with a Roman Catholic Establishment. It had ignored the Statute of 1382 ; it had declared in 1395 that it took its stand on Holy Scripture ; it paid no heed to the fierce Statute of 1401, or the inquisi- torial Act of 1414 ; it exhibited its energy by that rapid multiplication of sects which later aroused the horror of Bossuet ; it repudiated episcopacy and (as Thomas of Walsingham tells us) instituted a system of lay ordination. Throughout the fifteenth century Lollardy or Wyclifnsm pervaded England, and at the end of the century such life as the universities possessed was due to Lollard perseverance. 2O2 National Education and National Life The London Association of Christian Brothers, in the early sixteenth century, definitely connects pre-Reformation with post-Reforma- tion Dissent. The period of the Common- wealth shows us these anti-episcopalian sects for a moment, and in a manner, united and in possession of political power. The Restoration reveals them to us scattered once more and resuming their essential function of maintain- ing spirituality alive in a nation that had assumed Erastian fetters. The Act of Uniformity could not conquer so illusory a foe. But it made the attempt and maimed national education. It provided that "every schoolmaster keeping any public or private school and every person instructing or teaching any youth in any house or private family as a tutor or schoolmaster," must subscribe a declaration that he would conform to the liturgy as by law established. The sanction was imprisonment supplemented by fine. The House of Lords protested in vain, and the "Five Mile" Act of 1665 in terms forbad any Dissenter to teach under a ruinous penalty. Evolution of the Religious Controversy 203 The Church, under Archbishop Sheldon, adopted the policy of 1401 and 1414, and the bishops were directed to ascertain whether " the said schoolmasters, ushers, school- mistresses, and instructors, or teachers of youth, publicly or privately, do themselves frequent the public prayers of the Church, and cause their scholars to do the same ; and whether they appear well affected to the Government of his Majesty, and the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England."" Erastianism could no further go. It had sown the seed from which all later bitterness- was destined to spring. In 1410 the Court of Common Pleas had declared in the teeth of the Lollard persecution, the common law right of every man to teach. In 1670 and the succeeding years the Courts again intervened, declaring that the Church had no exclusive control over elementary education, and that a Bishop's licence was not necessary in any school if the school- master was appointed by the founder or lay- patron of the school. The result was a great 204 National Education and National Life school endowment movement that defied the Conformity legislation. More than one-third of the endowed schools in England were founded between the years 1660 and 1730. A reform movement within the Church which in 1698 took definite shape in the formation of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge combined with the