LIBRARY UNIVERSITY <$J CALIFORNIA i SAN DIEQft THE PROGRESS OF EDUCATION IN ENGLAND. THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT LIBRARY. VOL. I. The Registration of Voters : A practical Guide to the Preparation of the Lists of Voters, by Mr. MOLONEY, Revising Barrister . Price 6/- net. VOL. II. The Evolution of Local and Imperial Government, by Mrs. FORDHAM. Price 6/- net. VOL. III. The Progress of Education in England, by J. E. G. DE MONTMORENCY. Price 6/- net. OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION. THE PROGRESS OF EDUCATION IN ENGLAND: A Sketch of the Development of English Educational Organization from Early Times to the Year 1904. BY J. E. G. DE MONTMORENCY, B.A., LL.B., Of St. Peters College, Cambridge, and of the Middle Temple, Barrister at Law. LONDON : KNIGHT & CO. LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LUDGATE HILL, E.G. 1904. PREFACE- THIS book is intended co fill what seems to be a blank in the literature of education. No volume among the many volumes that have recently appeared on the subject of national education has attempted to supply a compen- dious non-controversial and non-technical statement of the progress of education in England from early times up to the present day a statement calculated to clear away some of the many misapprehensions that surround the subject, and to enable the reader, if he so desires, to regard this great social problem from without, and not from within. The writing of such a survey is beset by difficul- ties, and the intention is necessarily more worthy of the kindlyconsideration of the critic than the result. Two chief difficulties presented themselves to the present writer the difficulty of selection among facts and the difficulty of eliminating the personal equation of bias. With respect to the latter, it will be sufficient to say that conscious bias has certainly been eliminated, and that no fact has been intentionally suppressed that bears upon any controversial question. The question of selection among historical facts requires a somewhat fuller com- ment. Written history is a sequence of selected facts, which, by the deductive faculty of the historian, combined with his method of expression, is intended to suggest though it more frequently does not suggest the life and manners, the moving actualities, of the period surveyed. If this be a fair definition, it is obviously a dangerous task to try to write history. The combination of style and v. PREFACE. deductive faculty is almost certain to give a totally false impression as to the life of the period with which the historian deals. There is, however, a way out of the difficulty. If a writer is content with the humbler and more useful position of a chronicler, he rids himself of responsibility both as to style and deduction, and as to the actualities that they suggest. He is only responsible for the selection and the accuracy of the facts. This is the position that the present writer has adopted. With respect to selection the chief difficulty, of course, occurs in modern times. The object of this book is to place modern educational movements into their true proportion with relation to earlier educational movements, not to dismiss the latter in a few lines and make the former bulk in gigantic shape before the reader. The mass of material available since, say, the year 1802, makes the writer ask for consideration from the critic. To say what will ultimately prove to be of historical importance in this period of a hundred years and what will not is a task that cannot be confidently undertaken. Time alone can decide. Meantime an attempt to bring the whole picture into perspective may not be without value. The public will not read highly technical works on education. They, indeed, can hardly be expected to peruse the amorphous works on the law of education that are now so plentiful, while technical and shapely volumes on the history and the practice and the theory of education, interesting though such works are, can only appeal to the specialist. With great misgivings the present writer has ventured to produce this book, which is intended to appeal to many who would not in any circumstances read a VI. PREFACE. purely technical work. It is certainly necessary that the subject of education should not be confined to the minds of the specialist and the administrator. A child can only be properly educated when it takes an interest in the subjects and things that are comprised in the term education. An interest, not in the component parts of education, but in education as a whole, must be acquired by the nation if the nation itself is to be edu- cated in the highest sense of that word. It is the want of interest in education as a national problem that has made it so difficult for the nation to offer to its children an education that is attractive and full of personal interest. In order to give a continuous narrative it has been felt to be desirable to omit as a rule footnote authorities for the facts set forth, though every effort has been made to secure accuracy. The authorities for many of the facts contained in that part of the book which deals with the period before 1833 w ^ be found in the present writer's volume, " State Intervention in English Education," published by the Cambridge University Press in 1902, while subsequent facts are almost without exception drawn from the Statutes of the Realm, Blue Books, and Hansard. Some new facts and results have been added to the earlier period, such as the hitherto little noticed letter of Pope Alexander III., and a fuller statement of the relationship of education and the Lollard movement. Gratitude is due to Mr. W. A. Casson and Mr. W. G. Howell for their useful sugges- tions given after perusing the proof sheets. J. E. G. DE MONTMORKNCY. 3, New Square, Lincoln's Inn, February, 1904. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE PREFACE v. CHAPTER I. THE DAWN OF LEARNING. Prae-Roman Britain 1-5 Greek Influence in Britain ... ... ... ... 5-6 The Arts of the Bronze Age ... ... ... 6-8 The Earliest Script in Britain ... ... ... 8 Roman Britain ... ... ... ... ... 9-10 The Coming of the Saxons ... ... ... ... 10 The Introduction of Christianity ... ... ... n Augustine (596 A. D.) ... ... ... ... ... n Theodore and Adrian (668 A. D.) ... ... ... 11-12 Bede and Alcuin ... ... ... ... ... 12 Greek in the Eighth and Nin;h Centuries in Britain 12-13 The Saxon School at Rome I3- J 4 Educational Canon of Eugenius II. (826 A.D.) ... 14 Saxon Educational Canons ... ... ... 15-16 -iElfric's Eleventh Century Latin-Anglo- Saxon Grammar ... ... ... ... 16 CHAPTER II. MEDIAEVAL EDUCATION. The Anglo-Norman Dialect ... ... ... 17-18 The Saxon and Norman Parochial School System ... ... ... ... ... ... 18-20 Norman Educational Canons (1138 A.D., 1200 A.D.) 18-20 IX. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Pope Alexander III.'s Letter on English Education (1170 A. D.) ... ... ... ... 19-20 Education in the Twelfth Century ... ... ... 21 Roger Bacon ... ... ... ... ... 22 Beverley Grammar School Case (1305) ... ... 23 Higden's Polychroiicon ... ... ... ... 23-25 The Black Death (1348-9) and National Education ... ... ... ... ... 24-26 The Use of English in the Schools ... ... 25 The Education Petition of 1391 ... ... ... 27 The Education Act of 1406 ... ... . . 28 The Gloucester Grammar School Case, 1410 ... 30 The Wycklif Movement and Education ... ... 28-33 The Decline of Learning in the Fifteenth Century ... ... 33-34 The Renaissance and Education ... ... ... 34-35 CHAPTER III. EDUCATION FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE REVOLUTION. The Reformation 36-37 The Monasteries and Education ... ... ... 37 The New Learning at the Universities ... ... 37-39 The Chantry Legislation of 1547 ... ... ... 40-41 The Lack of Schools in 1563 ... ... ... 41-42 The Increase of Schools by 1581 ... ... ... 42 The Educational Work of Queen Elizabeth ... 42-44 The Origin of the Conformity Legislation (1562) 41 The Act of Uniformity, 1662 ... ... ... 45-46 The Educational Result of the Uniformity Legis- lation ... ... ... ... ... ... 46-47 x. TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. EDUCATION FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE REFORM ACT. The Reaction from the Conformity Legislation . . . 48-49 The Decay of Education in the Eighteenth Century 5Q-5 1 . 57 The Elementary Endowed School Movement (1660-1730) ... ... 51-52 The Charity School Movement ... ... ... 52 The Origin of the Voluntary Schools ... ... 52-55 Parliament and Education in the Eighteenth Cen- tury ... ... 56 The Sunday School Movement 58 The Monitorial School Movement ... ... ... 59-66 Parliament and Education in the Early Nineteenth Century ... ... ... ... ... ... 66-67 The Factory Act, 1802 ... ... ... ... 68-69 Mr. Whitbread's Bill of 1807 70 The Select Committee of 1816 ... ... ... 70-71 Mr. Brougham's Bill of 1820 ... ... ... 71-72 The First Parliamentary Grant (1833) ... ... 73 CHAPTER V. NATIONAL EDUCATION FROM 1833 TO 1870. The Treasury System of Administration (1833- 1839) ... ... 74-88 Lord Kerry's Educational Inquiry (1833-5) 7^ Select Committees on Education, 1834-7 ... ... 77-82 Lord Brougham's Educational Charities Bills, 1835-7 79-& 1 The Education Committee of the Privy Council, 1839 ... 84 XI. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE The Education Debate of June, 1839 85-87 The 1840 Scheme of the Education Committee 88-89 The 1846 Scheme ... ... ... ... 89-90 " The Empire of Ignorance," 1849 ... ... 90 The Education Bills of 1850-1855 90-93 The Position in 1856 ... ... ... ... 93-94 Formation of the Education Department in 1856 95 The Education (Cities and Boroughs) Bill, 1857 95-96 The Royal Commission of 1858 ... ... 97 The Factory Act Education Movement ... 98-101 The Science and Art Movement ... ... 102-106 The Secondary School Movement ... ... 106-107 The Public Libraries and Museums Movement 108 The Technical Instruction Movement ... ... 109-112 The Report of the Royal Commission, 1861 ... 114-117 Mr. Lowe's Revised Code ... ... ... 118-126 The Education of the Poor Bill, 1867 126-129 Earl Russell's Resolutions of December and, 1867 129-130 The Education Bill of 1868 ... ... ... 130-132 The Public Schools Act, 1868 I 33' I 35 The Educational Position in the Great Towns in 1868 136-139 The Educational Estimates for 1869 ... ... 139-141 CHAPTER VI. NATIONAL EDUCATION FROM 1870 TO 1903. The Elementary Education Act, 1870 ... ... 142-149 The Policy of the Great School Boards ... 149-152 The Elementary Education Act, 1876 ... ... 152-153 Industrial and Reformatory Schools I 53' I 56 Poor Law Schools 156-158 XII. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE The Elementary Education Act, 1891 ... ... 159-161 The Elementary Education Act, 1897 ... ... 161-162 The Voluntary Schools Act, 1897 ... ... 162-163 Educational Results, 1870-1901 ... ... ... 163-164 The Training of Teachers ... ... ... 164-170 The Financial Position of the Schools ... ... 171-173 The Controversy as to the Policy of the Act of 1902 174-181 The Education Act, 1902 181-202 The Cockerton Case ... ... ... ... 187 The Position of the Non-provided Schools ... 189-196 The Finance Clauses of the Act of 1902 ... 196-202 CHAPTER VII. EDUCATION IN WALKS. The Bardic Stage of Education in Wales ... 203 The Laws of King Howel (tenth century) ... 203-205 The Gradual Amalgamation of Wales and Eng- land (completed in 1830) ... ... ... 205-206 Evangelisation of Wales from 1550 ... ... 207-209 The Story of the Welsh Bible ... ... ... 207-210 Whales and the Commonwealth Parliament ... 209 Gouge's Schools (1672) 210 Wales and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge ... ... ... ... ... 210 Griffith Jones' Schools (1730-1779) 210 Wales at the Opening of the Nineteenth Century 211 Mr. Tremenheere's Report of 1840 211-214 Educational Revival in Wales (1854) 2I 4 Bangor University College (1862) ... ... 214 The Welsh Committee of 1 881 214 XIII. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE The Welsh Intermediate Education Act, 1889 215-217 The University of Wales Act, 1902 ... ... 218 The Education Act, 1902 ... ... ... 218 CHAPTER VIII. EDUCATION IN LONDON. Roman London ... ... ... ... ... 219 The See of London ... ... ... ... 219-220 Magister Scholarum in London ... ... ... 220 Fitzstephen's London (twelfth century) ... 220-223 The Three London Grammar Schools ... 223-224 The Petitions of 1446 and 1447 ... 224-227 The New St. Paul's School 228-229 London Education in the Eighteenth Century 229-232 London in 1785 ... ... ... ... ... 231 The Charity and Monitorial Schools in London 232-233 London in 1818, 1835 and 1870 ... ... 233-234 The First London School Board ... ... 234-236 The London School Board Rate, 1876 ... 236 The Necessity for Compulsory Education ... 237 The Policy of the London School Board ... 238-239 The Education Act, 1902 ... ... ... 239 The Education (London) Act, 1903 240-244 Statutory Schools for Blind and Deaf Children (1893) ... ... ... ... 244-246 Statutory Schools for Defective and Epileptic Children (1899, 1903) 246-248 CHAPTER IX. UNIVERSITY EDUCATION. The Early History of Oxford and Cambridge 249 The Lenten Parliament of 1305 ... ... 249-250 XIV. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Poor University Scholars in the Middle Ages ... 250-251 The Universities in the Fifteenth Century .. 251-254 The Universities at the Reformation 254-255 Queen Elizabeth and the Universities ... ... 255 The Universities in the Seventeenth Century ... 255-257 King James II. and the Universities ... ... 257-258 The Universities in the Eighteenth Century ... 258-259 The Nineteenth Century University Revival 259-260 The Development of Honour Schools and Triposes ... ... ... ... ... 260 The Royal Commissioners of 1850 ... ... 261-262 The Universities' Tests Act, 1871 262-263 Oxford and Cambridge and Middle Class Education ... ... ... ... ... 263-264 The University Extension Movement ... ... 264-265 Durham University ... ... ... ... 265 The University of London ... . . ... 265-266 The Universities of Liverpool, Manchester, Yorkshire, Birmingham, and Wales ... 266-7 The University Colleges ... ... ... 243, 267 The Universities and a National System of Education ... ... ... ... ... 267-268 CHAPTER I. Clu Dawn or teaming IT is a sufficiently remarkable fact that while we can trace civilised society in Egypt through a period of some seven thousand years, our own authentic history is covered by barely twenty centuries, though this is not so startling as the parallel fact that the history of New Zealand only began with Tasman's Pisgah sight in 1642. Behind the Christian era we can look with no certain vision. It is true that the hinterland of English history is not totally obscured. But all that we see is distorted ; we behold men like trees walking in a land without any order. It is, however, profitable to disen- tangle, as far as may be, the believable fact from the legends with which our chronicles swarm. The value of legend in the writing of history is perhaps not yet fully realised. Even late legends contain some sediment ot early truth, and there can be little doubt that one branch of scientific historical research will be the application of tests (derived from ethnological, linguistic, philologic and even biologic sources) for truth to the legends and tradi- tions that surround the dim origin of every nation. These dim beginnings are of infinite value to the historian, for they lighten secular processes that would otherwise remain obscure ; and they may explain national charac- teristics in cases where all other explanations fail. No apology is therefore needed for some brief reference to pre-Roman Britain. The Progress of Education in England. For some seven thousand years the Stone Age can be traced back in Central and Western Europe. What lay behind the unknown backward limit of that age is scarcely open even to conjecture, though we may believe that a new geologic era was beginning, and man was emerging from the beast. But of the Stone Age and its peoples we have some knowledge. It is possible that its races survive in the Laplanders and the pure Basque, while it is more than surmise to suppose that the Basque tongue is the direct descendant of tongues then spoken and still living to-day in England in certain names of places, such as the Mendips and the Grampians. Tools and weapons of the Stone period survive in the flint implements which are now studied with so much assid- uity, and there are preserved to us wooden handles of such instruments, and even a boat fashioned in days when the use of metals was unknown. " The Stone people themselves have been occasionally dug up dressed in skins, sewn together merely with strips of skin, pieces of hide serving for shoes. Their trinkets, as we find them still, were knobs of bone and amber beads, sometimes formed into chains."* These Stone peoples buried their dead, and the cromlech burying places containing the dead of fifty centuries ago remain to this day. It has been conjectured that these peoples came from the East. There is, however, no evidence whatever on the point. It is, perhaps, not unremarkable that the vestiges in Britain of this vanished primitive race have left upon our tongue an impress at least as deep as that of the Roman occupation. Probably there are as many words *See Mr. Henry Morley' English Writers, vol. i., whence I have derived some of the facts in the earlier part of this chapter. The Dawn of Learning. in our language directly derived from the Stone Age as from the Roman occupation of Britain. The date of the great influx from the East, and the consequent end of the Stone Age, is, perhaps, largely conjectural, but recent investigations have given us something more than mere guesswork. We may believe that approximately two thousand years before the Christian era a race of Asiatic origin, possessing a limited knowledge of the use of metals, first entered these islands. Ancient Irish Gaelic manuscripts tell us this in so many words, and there can be no doubt that these manuscripts possess some historical value. Much that they tell us is confirmed from other and most unexpected sources, and though this actual date is, with our present knowledge, without verification, yet it is not negatived by any patent improbability. Indeed, it has probability in its favour. The facts from other sources appear to be these. At some very remote period, a race, whom the earliest Greek writers, such as Homer, Callinus, and Herodotus, called Cimmerians, appears to have swept across Europe from the East. In the eighth century before our era, it is apparently moving East once more from Northern and Central Europe. We have definite Greek evidence of the activity of the Cimmerians at this date, and this activity was especially directed against Asia Minor. This movement precipitated a new Asiatic invasion of Europe. Before we consider this, we must note what had happened in the extreme West. A race the Celtic Gaels had spread from Spain to Ireland, and thence to Scotland, Wales and England. Spanish and Irish legends traditions and traditional histories, and philological and ethnical evidence, render this certain. Tht Progress of Education in England. Tradition in all cases in these Gaelic tribes finds their origin in the East. It is certain that their tongue had a common origin with the tongues of the later hordes. It is therefore suggested that these Celtic Gaels were the residue left in the western extremities of Europe, when the Cimmerians, in the ninth or eighth century before our era, moved East once more, and it is further suggested that the Gaelic manuscript evidence, which places the arrival of the Gaels in Ireland at about the year 2000 B.C., is worthy of some credence. In the sixth century B.C. the Cimmerians were re- pulsed from Asia, and were again swept westward by what has been called the " Scythian torrent." Professor Rawlinson has suggested that it was as a result of this flight through Europe that Spain and Ireland received their Gaelic inhabitants. But this can scarcely be so. There seems to be evidence of the existence of Celts in Western Europe at the very date of the repulse of the Cimmerians from the Ukraine. The Bronze Age certainly arrived in Britain from its Asiatic home long before 600 B.C. It was the Cimmerian repulse from Asia and the second westward movement with the Scythian onslaught behind it, that appears to be responsible for a second and third Celtic invasion of Britain invasion by hordes of the late coming Iron age, hordes that knew the uses of iron and of silver. The Cimmerians in their flight West spread over Central Europe, and became the Cymry who were dislodged by a third Celtic movement from the East. The Gaelic Celts in Britain were gradually driven out by the flood of the Cymry Celts. In the time of Tacitus the Gael was still holding Wales, while the Cymry were working up our East coast and across Northumberland The Dawn o) Learning* to Cumberland, under the pressure of the third Celtic movement. The Belgae " the ravagers " from the Rhine had long ages before swept down on Gaul, and when Caesar came to Britain, had been time out of mind settled in Kent. The position then, in 55 B.C., was a curious one, and not without importance in the history of English letters. A long- established Celtic race was being driven to its last western retreat in Ireland. This race, at any rate, as we shall see directly, had attained a measure of culture. A second Celtic race occupied all Britain except the South-East, while in the South-East was a race possessing a considerable culture of apparently a distinct character to the culture of the Gael. That the island at this date was thickly inhabited we have the possibly reliable word of Diodorus Siculus, and that it had been for centuries in trading contact with the Mediterranean appears from Herodotus, who speaks of the Cassiterides as the place from which the Greeks derived their tin. We are not without some curious vestiges of Greek influence on British manners. If, as seems to be the better opinion, the so-called British coins found in this island are really British, the Greek influence is sufficiently marked, for these coins follow the Greek type, and must have been based upon Greek coins current at an early date in Britain. But the legends on these coins are in the Roman, and not, as might have been expected, in the Greek character, thus proving that a considerable Latin influence was at work in Southern Britain long before the coming of Caesar. But the Greek influence had by no means at that date died out, for Caesar himself tells us that the priests or Druids used for The Progress of Education in England. the purposes of education, when writing was necessary, the Greek character. The fact is a remarkable one, and coupled with the undoubted evidence in the coins of Cunobelin of considerable artistic ability, would seem to point to some period in early British history, when either the traders from the Mediterranean to the southern and western parts of Britain had brought with them some measure of Greek culture, or else the latest or Belgic Celts had carried with them into Gaul and Britain some of the knowledge gained in the course of earlier raids into Southern Europe. Perhaps both sources con- tributed something to the social system that Csesar found. But that system certainly did not owe everything to the races of the Mediterranean. The Bronze Age had its own peculiar civilisation long before Rome was founded or Homer sang. Professor Henry Morley has given an account of their arts that may be quoted here. " The men who used bronze, or copper hardened with a slight admixture of tin, made axes of the shape still common, picks, sickles (that suggest corn growing), celts (from the Latin celtis, a chisel), which are chisel or axe heads, hollowed to receive their wooden handles, and sometimes provided with an ear through which to pass a thong for binding them more firmly. There are found also in their tombs bronze swords about two feet and a half long, or shorter, two-edged, with the thickness in the middle of the blades, and no guards to their hilts ; the hilts, which were very small, were sometimes of wood and nails, sometimes of bronze spread over clay, some- times even covered with gold plate or woven about with gold wire. The scabbards were of wood usually tipped with metal and sheathed with leather. These Celts had The Dawn of Learning. spearheads a foot long, and there has been found the end of a battle-axe that is fifteen inches long, and weighs seven pounds. There have been found also a few large round shields in thin plates of ornamented bronze, the edges turned over a thicker frame of metal wire, the handle a crossbar within the central boss. But of the more common shields of leather-covered wood, there are left only the metal borders, or the small round plates of metal with which they may have been studded and strengthened. There are dug up also the long curved lures or war trumpets of the Bronze period, which stand about three and a half feet high in their curved shape, curved for shouldering musketwise when played, with the broad round of their flat mouths by the players' knees ; they would be six feet long if straightened. Several of these old British war trumpets, blown by the antiquaries of to-day, have played a ghostly music in a tone not absolutely dull something between a trumpet and a bugle-note. In peace this people wore trinkets and ornaments, hairpins a foot long, adorned and inlaid with gold, combs of bronze and bone riveted together, hair rings, circlets, diadems, neck rings, elastic spiral armlets like great corkscrews. These things, often adorned with characteristic spiral, ring, and wave patterns, are found in the tombs covered with a greenish rust, the bronze below, when it is got at, shining like gold. But the true gold never rusts, and this metal also was used by the Celts in bracelets, finger rings, and even in some little cups about four inches high and seven wide across the mouth, which may possibly have been a luxurious form of cinerary urn for those whose heirs would not grudge burying their ashes in their gold." The Progress of Education in England. It is to this civilisation of the Bronze Age that we owe our earliest literature, if not our earliest knowledge of writing. The Gaelic Celt, in his secure Irish retreat, had centuries in which to develop a literature, and there is no doubt that we possess at the present time the remains and echoes of a considerable literary period. This Gaelic literature had its script characters that bore the impress of an Asiatic origin. " The first writing in this country of which there is record," says Professor Morley, "was by the Ogham characters, still to be seen on stone monuments and in some ancient books. The Ogham marks upon stone blocks are chiefly Irish ; there are only about a dozen in Scotland. Professor Stephens, of Copenhagen, thinks them a faint and distant echo of the arrow-headed characters once used in Babylon. Taking Babylonian as one branch of the oldest stave writing, and Phoenician as the other : of the Babylonian branch the Ogham characters are the only Western representative ; but the Phoenician is in the old Runic, the modern Greek, Latin, and other alphabets." This Ogham alphabet was in use in Ireland until the ninth century of our era, for secret if for no other purposes, and may be taken to be the representative of the earliest literary age, the first educational period in these islands of which we have any knowledge. The literature of the Gaels is, as Professor Morley points out, inseparable from that of England. Without contact with the Celt " Germanic England would not have produced a Shakespeare." But while the Gaels in Scotland and Ireland had the peace necessary for the growth of something approaching culture, this was not so throughout the larger island. The coming of the Romans checked for a long period the 8 The Dawn of Learning. Belgic or Germanic raids upon Britain. For a time an unstable equilibrium was maintained, and the Cymry, who occupied the east, north, and the interior, retained their lands under the continued control of the Roman. But, by the year 364, the Cymry were beginning to feel a double pressure. The Gaelic race in Scotland, who had known little of the Roman overlordship, had turned upon their former pursuers ; while the Belgae, under the names of Franks and Saxons, had once more attacked the Southern Coast. After the Roman withdrawal, the Cymry, in or about the year 449, joined hands with the Saxons, and succeeded in driving the Gaels finally, after a long struggle, from Western Britain to Ireland. Then the Belgae once more turned upon the Cymry, and for a century drove them north and west to their present resting places of Cornwall, Cumberland and Wales. The presence of Gaels in South Wales, who mixed with the Cymry, probably accounts for the difference of dialect in the north and south of the Principality. The struggle between the Cymry and the Saxons, or Belgae, was long and bitter, and it is this prolonged conflict that first stirred the Cymric Celts, or, as we should now say, the Welsh, to song and lasting literature. In the conflict on the Scottish border Urien Rheged was the British or Cymric leader, and some of the songs of his warrior bards Llywarch Hen and Aneurin and perhaps of his simple bard Taliesin, are still extant. At this same date, the end of the sixth century, King Arthur in the south, we may believe, led the Cymry against the Saxon. Urien was murdered in 592 A.D., and Llywarch fled to Shropshire, only to see the Britons again slaughtered near the Wrekin. In north The Progress of Education in England. and south alike the Saxon pressed the Briton west. Before the end of the sixth century the conflict is over. But it lives to-day, and will always live in the songs of Llywarch, and of Aneurin, the singer of "the Gododin." We thus see that both the Gaelic and the Cymric branches of the Celtic race possessed a literary class dur- ing the period, at any rate, of the Roman occupation, and of the century and a half of strife that followed the Roman abandonment of Britain. The Romans, widely as they occupied the land, greatly as they developed it with roads and towns, added nothing directly to the growth of the tongue or the literature of the island ; and this is the more surprising since it is on record that Latin was spoken by many of the natives. On the other hand, the Saxon brought with him that power of song and narrative which we have seen in the Gael and the Cymric Celt. Whether the poem " Beowulf" relates or does not relate to English scenery, it was the work of the race that had now over-run England. At the end of the sixth century we have, therefore, in England a people or peoples who were in no sense purely savage or uncultured. They one and all recognised the existence of a learned caste. They gave a host of words to our modern tongue, and scorned the claims of neither literature nor learning. However, though the Roman occupation contributed nothing of a direct and permanent character to the tongue or life of the peoples of the island, the occu- pation made one contribution of immeasurable value. It secured the introduction of Christianity. Early in the third century the Christian faith has estab- lished its footing in this country. It is in Kent, in Cornwall, in Wales, in the Western Isles, and in 10 The Dawn of Learning. Ireland. From Ireland it first spreads to certain parts of the Continent. Christianity means monasteries. It is in the Monastery of Llanfor that the broken-hearted old warrior and bard Llywarch is said to have died in the first half of the seventh century. The heathen learning and literature, broken with the clash of races and tongues, does not vanish, but is saved, and put to new uses in the centres of learning raised by the new faith. The Latin tongue, which the surge of intestine war destroyed as the lan- guage of the people, survived as the tongue of learning in these centres. The monks taught it to their pupils. We have early Irish manuscripts of the grammar of Priscian. It is clear enough that the monasteries from the first were used as schools, and taught those who in an earlier generation would have been Gaelic or Cymric, or Saxon bards. Rome, that had abandoned Britain in the year 410 A.D., came back in quite other guise in the year 596 A.D., when Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, landed. His purpose was chiefly the bringing of the British Church within the Roman organization. The effect of his mission, and of the mission of Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, and the Abbot Adrian, who arrived in 668 A.D., was at any rate the reorganization of the existing monastic system. The monasteries became true schools of learn- ing. The British Church, as reorganised by Augustine and his successors, maintained its old independence, and when Theodore of Tarsus deposed Wilfrid, Bishop of York, Pope Agatho was unable to compel either King or Archbishop to restore him to his seat. But Rome certainly, even in this dark age, had the educational problem at heart, and the efforts of Theodore and Adrian ii The Progress of Education in England. made each of the larger monasteries an educational centre. Indeed, the first historical period of English culture was at hand. The emissaries of Rome brought with them both Greek and Latin culture to supplement the knowledge that the Church had retained during the civil struggles of the fifth and sixth centuries. The work of Theodore and Adrian was not lost. Its effects were felt for centuries. Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History, tells us that in the year 732 there were living in England disciples of Theodore and Adrian who knew Greek and Latin as familiarly as their own tongue. The use of Latin had indeed become so habitual that Bede speaks of it as " the vernacular" ; " The Creed and Our Father I have myself translated into English for the benefit of those priests who are not familiar with the vernacular." He himself taught in the Monastery School at Jarrow, and wrote small treatises on the Trivium and Quadrivium for use in monastic schools. Alcuin was born into this first spring of learning in 735 A.D., and he boasts of the learned men and noble libraries of England. Charle- magne did all that he could to benefit by the scholarship that existed in our island, and, in securing the services of Alcuin, he started that earliest movement of Gallic culture which resulted in the creation later of the University of Paris. The eighth and ninth centuries were indeed not altogether dark centuries for England. It has been generally assumed by learned writers that all knowledge of Greek was extinct in England from the eighth century to the Renaissance. This is, however, by no means the case. An examination of the earliest English Psalters and Books of Antiphons shows that Greek was used in parts of the Church services through 12 The Dawn of Learning. the Saxon period, and even later. We find that the Gloria in Excelsis, the Nicene Creed, and the Pater Nosier were in certain cases sung in Greek. Curiously enough, however, the Greek character, with which the Druids were familiar, had vanished from the land, except in the occasional use of uncial letters, as in the case of an extant Greek and Latin Dictionary of the seventh century. The Psalter of King Ethelstan contains the Litany of the Saints, the Pater Noster, and the Apostles' Creed in Greek ; while in the Winchester copy of the Gloria belonging to the first half of the eleventh century, we find the heading " Ymnus Angelicus Greca lingua compositus." The text is given in phonetic Greek, while it is followed by the Nicene Creed in Greek and Latin. This evidence of a culture that even the Danish terror did not destroy, is supported by the "Colloquium" of Aelfric, the Gram- marian, written in the beginning of the eleventh century, for the purpose of helping young scholars to speak correctly by giving them descriptions in the Latin of the daily life of men in various occupations. Mr. Oswald Cockayne has pointed out that this book and other glos- saries cite Greek words by the hundred, and though the Greek character is not used, the Greek origin is some- times denoted by the use of the letter "G." He has also shewn, from an eighth century manuscript, that Hebrew or Syriac words were similarly used, with a full know- ledge of their meaning and origin. Sufficient therefore has been said to prove that the scholarship introduced by Theodore and Adrian was of no mean order, and was of lasting value. Rome, indeed, did not cease to interest herself in Saxon England. The Saxon school at Rome must have 13 The Progress of Education in England. existed from a very early date, for we know from the Saxon Chronicle that it was destroyed by fire in the year 8 1 6. This school must have supplied England with scholars. The need of scholarship was well recog- nised at Rome, and in the canon de scholis repamndis pvo studio titeramm, promulgated by Pope Eugenius II. in 826 A.D., a revival of learning was clearly contemplated. To no one more than to our Alfred did such a policy seem wise, and we find that in the year 884 he induced Pope Marinus to free the Saxon school in Rome from tribute. It was necessary that the flow of scholarship into England should receive no check. It was also necessary that England herself should cherish the highest learning. Alfred had found his land in dire disorder. " There was a time," he wrote, " when people came to this island for instruction ; now we must get it from abroad if we want it." He went on to say that there were very few south of the Humber who could even translate the Church service or an ordinary Latin letter into English, and there were not many north of the Humber. Even in the north, John Scotus Erigena, Greek scholar and heretic, was a rare exception to the general ignorance. The Danes, in their devastating path, had ruined much learning and many opportunities of learning. To mend this was Alfred's plan, and he seems to have felt that the creation of a class capable of teaching was his first duty. He founded, and endowed with an eighth of his revenues, an important school for the children of his nobility. This, and the freed Saxon school at Rome, not only promised to provide a learned class, but offered also an example to the land. The example of the highest inevitably per- meates society. Alfred's attempt at creating what would The Dawn of Learning. now be called a secondary system of education was, there can be little doubt, an attempt to supplement and provide teachers for an elementary system at that date in force so far as the tides of war would allow throughout the country. The evidence for such an elementary system is obscure and scanty, but it is sufficient. There is reason to believe that certain laws collected by Bishop Theodulf of Orleans at the end of the eighth century were observed in England as well as in France. One of these laws (translated into Anglo-Saxon by Archbishop Aelfric at the end of the tenth century) ran thus : " Mass priests ought always to have at their houses a school of disciples, and if any good man desires to commit his little ones to them for instruction, they ought very gladly to receive them, and kindly teach them." The authorities on the subject consider that this law was followed in England, and indeed there is direct evidence of this, for Spelman gives us a Saxon canon of unknown but very early date on this very point. This Saxon canon, which is evidently an earlier form of the canon of Theodulf, runs as follows : " If any priest should wish to put his nephew or other relation to school in the Church, we grant him a license to do this, in so far as it is a matter within our cognizance." Theodulf s canon is evidently an extension of this, and it is practically certain that in the ninth century there was a complete system of these Church schools under the control of the parish priests. It was doubtless part ot the policy of Rome to encourage such schools, and that they rapidly spread after the time of King Alfred is shown by canons of the tenth century. A canon of the year 960 A.D. provides, " That the priest diligently instruct the youth, and dispose them to trades, that they The Progress of Education in England. may have a support to the Church." This is significant, both with respect to the efforts made by the Church to root itself in the hearts of the people, and with respect to these parochial schools. That these schools multiplied and competed one with another is also shown by a further canon of the year 960 A. D., which enacts "That no priest receive a scholar without the leave of the other by whom he was formerly retained." There is, therefore, every reason to believe that before the Norman invasion we had in this country an elaborate elementary system of education, primitive enough doubtless, and primarily designed to bind the people to the Church, but a system destined to have a far-reaching influence on the history of education in England. That education was at this date, at any rate in the larger schools and the grammar schools, then beginning to appear, more thorough than might at first sight seem probable, is shown by the Latin-Anglo-Saxon grammar and the Col- loquy produced at the beginning of the eleventh century by Aelfric the Grammarian, Abbot of Evesham. These books, Aelfric declares in his preface, were designed for the use of the youth of England, and they certainly exhibit a standard of learning higher than was reached in later centuries, when the spread of scholasticism had done so much to make learning the cult of the few and the bug- bear of the many. In the late Saxon times the darkness of the land was lifted. It fell again with the devastation of the Norman invasion, which represents the final westward movement of that Germanic flood which began perhaps fifteen centuries before to drive the Cymry, as the Cymry had driven the Gael, into the ultimate Occi- dental lands. 16 CHAPTER II. mediaeval education. THE most significant sign of the thoroughness with which England was subdued by the Norman is the entire dearth of information on the subject of education that pervades all the records for some seventy years after the Conquest. The only event connected with education with which we are acquainted in the years immediately follow- ing the Conquest, is one related by Higden, writing in the year 1 327. Throughout the country Norman-French was substituted for Anglo-Saxon in the schools. The children were taught in French, and had to construe from the Latin into French. The position was exactly the same throughout the country as it would be now if a Welsh child, who could not speak English, were taught by an English master, and had to do all its work in English. Doubtless William I. considered that this was the best of all plans for subjugating his new subjects, and for bringing them into touch with his Continental dominions. He knew that the dialect was capable of literary results, for the Chanson de Roland was written in it perhaps in England and he believed it was possible to impose it on the people. In this he was mistaken. It took sufficient root in this country to become a separate dialect to the Norman-French, and it seems that this Anglo-Norman The Progress of Education in England. dialect itself took different dialect forms ; it left a perma- nent impress upon the laws of the country ; it was used as a spoken tongue in the courts as late as the sixteenth century, or even later, and is to-day, for certain purposes, used in law phrases and spoken in constitutional cere- monials. To have achieved so much was no mean thing, but it was impossible for an unstable dialect, itself not three centuries emerged from the Latin, to compete with a fully organised language such as Anglo-Saxon a tongue spoken by the people and capable of literary and poetical use. Anglo-Norman slowly died away during a period of three centuries, until in 1362 an Act of Parliament declared it to be " much unknown in the said realm." During the whote of this period it was the language ot the schools, and there can be no doubt that education suffered through such a disastrous policy. The ignorance of the English Middle Ages was directly due to this cause. Had the Anglo-Saxon schools continued in their accustomed course the history of English education would have been very different and far more admirable. The parish school system, however, must have con- tinued in some form, and we get a direct reference to this system in the canon promulgated at Westminster in 1138, during a vacancy of the See of Canterbury, by the Papal legate and a large number of English Bishops and Abbots. " We ordain," runs the canon, " that if school- masters hire out their schools to be governed by others, they be liable to ecclesiastical punishment." This canon shows that the schools were at this date under the immediate control of the Church, and that the profession of a schoolmaster was remunerative. The system of fees Mediceval Education. was, in fact, in existence. The canon of 960, previously quoted, seems also to have been passed in view of such a system. The interest of Rome in education was particularly manifested in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the year 1170 Pope Alexander III. had provided, with respect to the Gallican Church, that " no money should be demanded for a license to teach, even if there were a custom to that effect." And we may therefore assume that it was about the same year that he wrote his extant but undated letter on the same subject to the Bishop of Winchester. If it was written in this year it was written to the famous Henry de Blois (grandson of the Conqueror), Bishop from 1129 to 1171, the greatest ecclesiastic in England during the period when Winchester was capital of the country. It is improbable that the letter was later than 1171, as from that year until 1181 (the year of Alexander's death) England was in a condition of chaos, and an educational question would scarcely have been broached. We may therefore take it that in or about the year 1170 Alexander wrote to Henry de Blois the following letter : "In future be more careful to see that nothing be demanded or even promised for the license to teach anyone. If hereafter anything is either paid or promised, take care that the promise is remitted and payment restored, such charge being null and void knowing what is written, ' freely thou hast received, freely give.' Indeed, if anyone by reason of such a prohibition delay the institution of masters in fit places, you may, by our permission, disregarding all gainsayings or appeals, appoint in such places, for the instruction of the people, prudent, honest and discreet men." Alexander 19 The Progress of Education in England. was certainly an educationalist who looked largely at the problem that Europe in those times presented, for not only did he make these special provisions for the encouragement of parochial teaching in France and England, but at the third Council of Lateran, in 1179, he passed a canon conferring special privileges on those of the clergy who were engaged in educational work. Alexander's letter to Henry de Blois came too late for anything then to be done. The Bishop died, the land was in disorder, and nothing could be effected for educa- tion. But the Pope's wishes were not long delayed. At a general council held at Westminster in the year 1200 it was ordained by canon viii., " Let nothing be exacted for licenses to priests to perform divine offices, or for licenses to schoolmasters. If it have been paid, let it be re- stored." This canon, while it certainly implies as was the case that a schoolmaster need not be a priest, asserts with no uncertain voice the authority of the Church over all education. From this date, for at least one hundred and fifty years, all schools were either Church schools or schools licensed by the Church, and in all of them teaching was conducted in the Anglo- Norman tongue. Something of the teaching given in the thirteenth century may be gathered from the school book, De Utensilibtis, by Alexander Neckam (who died in 1217). This is a school book or vocabulary in Latin, with a gloss in Anglo-Norman, in which English words occasion- ally occur. The book deals elaborately with the details of every-day life, and was probably a necessity in an English school, where the boys and girls were compelled to learn in Anglo-Norman. We can see the rapid break- down of the Anglo-Norman dialect by a mid-thirteenth Mcdiccval Education. century vocabulary, containing the Latin names of plants, with explanations in both Anglo-Norman and English. At the end of the thirteenth century we find a school book for teaching French to children of noble birth, while in the next century we get a Latin-English voca- bulary. The tongue as a form of speech was dead by the date of the Black Death (1349). However, despite the fact that through all these changes the schoolmasters taught in Anglo-Norman, the profitableness of keeping school, thanks to its encouragement by the Church, became an undoubted fact. The need for education, its power as a key that could open the doors between class and class, were felt ever more and more, and in face of all disadvantages education was sought by the ambitious of all classes. In the twelfth century Walter Map was sneering at and fearing the educational ambitions of the serfs : " The more skilled they become, the more dangerous they are" while the laws of the manors, and indeed of the land itself, as witness the Constitutions of Clarendon, placed obstacles in the way of the educational advancement of the servile population. But the Church was surely and certainly opening the way. Whatever may have been the faults and errors of the mediaeval Church, and they were sufficient, no charge can be made against it in the twelfth century and the early part of the thirteenth, of darkening the prospects of the people. In the twelfth century we find that the national educational system expanded in a remarkable fashion. Each collegiate church established its grammar school, and the aspiration of King Alfred for a secondary system of education was realised. Indeed, this was not an English movement only. By the 21 The Progress of Education in England. Fourth Council of Lateran in 1215 it had been ordained that every cathedral church should have its licensed schoolmaster, and this law was but a sanction to a great movement. Moreover, in the twelfth century, the idea of a complete national scheme found its natural realisation in the uprising of the University system in England. The origin of Oxford and Cambridge is hidden in obscurity, but we know definitely that both were highly organised communities in the thirteenth century. The Memoranda de Pavliamento* gives us petitions to Parlia- ment in 1305 from both Universities, asking for special powers and privileges in the University towns. Cam- bridge in the same year petitioned the King in Parliament to protect and endow a college of poor scholars. Few, then, as are the facts that are available for the history of education in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it is clear that a great educational system was in process of formation, and this, in spite of the scarcity of books, the rarity of paper, the absence of general scholarship, the troubles of the times, and the absurd restrictions on teaching through the enforced use of Anglo-Norman. It was the age that produced one of the greatest thinkers Europe has known Roger Bacon, the age which laid the foundation of the greatest constitutional system that the world has seen. The influence of Bacon on every aspect of thought was remarkable. We find his treatises in regular use in England between his day and the Reforma- tion. He and the little group of philosophers, and Hebrew, Greek and Latin scholars that he gathered together, were the forerunners of the Renaissance in Europe. It is * Edited in the Rolls Series by Professor F. W. Maitland in 1893 see pp. 33-6 and pp. 44-7 22 Mediaeval Education. no exaggeration to attribute to his influence and the memory of his work the remarkable provisions made at the Council ot Vienne, in 1311, for the teaching of Hebrew in the Universities of Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca, and in the Roman Schools. The earlier part 01 the fourteenth century yields us little information on the subject of national education, but there is one reference in the records of Beverley Minster that throws a shaft of light through the darkness. Mr. A. F. Leach's invaluable Memorials of Severity Minster, published by the Surtees Society in 1898, gives us a full account of a series of law suits with respect to the Beverley Grammar School, between the years 1304 and 1312. These suits show that there was the keenest competition at that date for the right to teach, and that men were prepared even to defy the Church in their efforts to secure scholars. This was so, in spite of the costliness and scarcity of school books, parchment, paper, and ink, and in spite of Higden's complaint, in 1327, that "children in school, against the usage and manner of all other nations, are compelled to leave their own language, and to construe their lessons and their things in French, and so they have since the Normans came first into England." The effort to keep in touch with France at this date is almost pathetic. The children of the gentry, says Higden, are taught to speak French from the time that they are rocked in their cradles, while men of an upstart character speak French " with great besynesse," in order to be talked about and taken for persons of gentle blood. Two-and-twenty years later an event happened that changed all this, and stamped with a national stamp the speech and the natures of Englishmen. 23 The Progress of Education in England. In 1348 another onslaught from the East rolled upon England, an onslaught even more devastating than the successive Celtic waves. It was the Black Death. It first appeared at Southampton, and swept on to Bristol, from Bristol to Leicester, Leicester to Lincoln. Beast and man it destroyed with equal swiftness, and, with an ironical touch, it drove back the Scotch invaders. It was quite competent to undertake, unaided, the work of devastating England. The Great Death for the moment stopped the mechanism of society. Servants, tillers of the soil, and priests were destroyed in vast numbers, while the few who were left either refused to work, except at higher wages, or fled. We know from contemporary authorities that the mortality among the priests was great, that many priests fled, and that this was followed by a multitudinous rush of men to take holy orders men fit and unfit the ignorant and learned, including many who had lost their wives by pestilence, says the Chronicler. Now, the question is, who were likely to flee and who to remain and take up orders ? It is sufficiently obvious that the priests who fled were priests who had Normandy to fly to, the Norman priests who still infested the country. The men who remained were English by speech and instinct, at one in aspiration and thought with the people of the soil. " If this inference is true, it explains the rapid spread of Lollardy, and it explains the subsequent insulation and indepen- dent strength of England. But this inference from reasonable probabilities is more than an inference; it happens to be also an historical fact. The English tongue as an educational agency was born immediately after the Great Death." John de Trevisa, the editor of 24 Medicvval Education. Higden's Polychrom'con, writing in 1385, tells us, with respect to Higden's statement, in 1327, that French was still fashionable and in use in the schools, that "this manner was much used before the First Death (1349), and is since somewhat changed ; for Sir John Cornwaile, a master of grammar, changed the lore in grammar school, and construction of French into English ; and Richard Pencriche learned this manner of teaching of him and of other men of Pencriche ; so that now, the year of our Lord, a thousand three hundred and four score and five, and of the second Richard after the conquest nine, in all the grammar schools of England children leave French and construe and learn in English, and have thereby advantage on one side and disadvantage on another side ; their advantage is, that they learn their grammar in less time than children were wont to do ; disadvantage is that now children of grammar schools know no more French than their left heels know, and that is harm for them when they shall pass the sea and travel in strange lands and in many other places. Also gentlemen have now much left for to teach their children French." The change was immeasurable in its effects. New things were in the air, and the man who introduced into the Collegiate Grammar School at Penkridge in Stafford- shire this new reasonableness in the methods of teaching, was in touch with strange new aspirations. Oxford has always been, not so much the home of lost causes as of seemingly hopeless, yet unconquerable causes. Perhaps this was the reason that Friar Bacon, the first leader of a series of forlorn endeavours, loved her so well. He died half a century before the beginning of 25 The Progress of Education in England. the movement which we must now notice ; perhaps he himself, in his revolt against clerical ignorance and unreasonableness, was the origin and springhead of that movement. Mr. W. H. Stevenson, has (almost without doubt) identified John Cornwaile, the grammar master of Penkridge School, as a teacher of grammar at Oxford, in connection with Merton College in 1347. That fact in itself is interesting, for it shows that the universities were supplying the grammar schools with teachers. But the valuable fact is its corollary. The Richard Pencriche Richard of Pencriche to whom John de Trevisa refers, appears to have been a Merton student in 1367, and a con- temporary of Wycklif and of John de Trevisa. Cornwaile had sent his old pupil to his old University, and there he met the men who were destined to become the fathers of English prose, and, one of them, the forerunner of the English Reformation. It is difficult to understand from Trevisa's bare narrative why a change in one school should in five-and-thirty years have spread through the land. It is not difficult to understand when v/e know that the movers in the change were partakers in the beginnings of the first Oxford Movement. If England was to have a national Church, a national literature, a national character, the new movement must begin with the children. It began in the Staffordshire Grammar School. The moving hand was the hand of the almost unknown John Cornwaile, but the voice was that of Wycklif and Trevisa. The extraordinarily rapid growth of education through- out England that followed this change in the methods of teaching is most noteworthy. We know that the grammar school children were indiscriminately the children of non- 26 Mediaeval Education. gentle freeholders, of copyholders, and often enough of the villein in gross. It is true that in some parts of the country the villeins turned upon learning with bitterness and violence, and imposed an oath never to teach again upon the masters of grammar schools, but this was probably due to the restrictive legislation, attributed to lawyers, by which an attempt was made to solve the economic troubles that followed the Black Death. " Peri culosum erat" cries Thomas of Wal- singham, in his account of Littestere's rebellion at Norwich in 1381-2, " agnoscipro clerico, sed multo periculosius, siadlatus alicujus atramentarium inventum fuisset." The small land- owner, the small copyholder, or leaseholder, with an uncertain tenure, was afraid of the lawyer bearing an ink-horn instead of a sword at his side. But the people were rapidly realising that ink-horn must be fought with ink-horn, as sword had been fought with sword. The petition of the Commons of the realm of England in 1391 to King Richard II. is proof enough of this, and is not evidence of any national dislike of education. The Com- mons petitioned that it be ordained and commanded that no neif or villein shall henceforth put his children to school in order to advance them, par clergie. The Com- mons made this petition, they said, in order to maintain and preserve the honourable status of the free classes of the realm. But it was too late, as we have seen, to attempt to shut the door between class and class, and the King absolutely rejected the petition. Nor was this all. The position adopted by the Commons drew atten- tion to the existing customary restrictions on the rights of the unfree classes to education, and to the dangers involved in the brutal ignorance shown during the Littes- 27 The Progress oj Education in England. tere Rebellion and in other local risings. Therefore we find that in 1406 a Statute of Education was passed the first Statute on the subject. Parliament declared that " every man or woman, of what state or condition that he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any school that pleaseth them within the realm." The universal right to education was established. It was the first fruits of the Oxford Movement that had Angli- cised the English schools, and was in reality a triumph for Wycklifism and the Reformation. The Wycklif movement is intimately connected with the growth of national education, for while it was opposed to Rome it was not opposed to the Roman educational ideals. A movement that had its centre in Oxford could scarcely be opposed to education. The Wycklit preachers went through the country, we are told in a preamble to a contemporary Statute, " in certain habits, under dissimulation of great holiness," and, preaching daily in churches, churchyards, fairs and markets, drew great crowds unto them. In 1382 they were ordered by statute to desist, but without effect. The movement grew with extreme rapidity, and the fact is doubtless connected with the growth of English nationalism. The death of John Wycklif in 1385 in no way checked the avalanche that he had set in motion. He, while holding the anti-Roman doctrines long before professed by Ratramnus of Corbie, and John Scotus Erigena, had also set on foot a social movement. By the year 1401 this movement had seized many of the schools of England, for we find that the Statute of 1401 DC Haerctico Gomburendo forbad " divers false and perverse people of a certain new sect .... to ... in any wise hold or 28 Mediaeval Education. exercise schools ; and also that none from henceforth in any wise favour such holding or exer- cising schools." The Legislature and the Church felt it necessary to interfere with a sect which declared in the words of a Lollard document of 1395 that " Christian men should accept the determination of the Church of Rome, or of any other Church, only inasmuch as it is founded on Holy Scripture openly, either privily or in reason that may not fail." That was the first statement of the Protestant position, and the russet friars a class at first holding episcopal orders carried the doctrine through the land and into the schools. The State replied by the fierce Statute of Heresy, while the Church, acting through Lord Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, forbade any "book or treatise composed by John Wycklif, or by any other in his time, or since, or hereafter to be composed, be henceforth read in the schools, halls, inns, or other places whatsoever within our province aforesaid, and that none be taught according to such book unless it have been first examined, and upon examination unanimously approved by the University of Oxford or Cambridge. . . . . If anyone shall read book or treatise of this sort in the schools or elsewhere, contrary to the form above written, or shall teach according to it, let him be punished, according as the quality of the fact shall require, as a sower of schism and a factor of heresy." Oxford, it is plain, had turned back from the plough. She was as dead, as far as the new movement was concerned, as Wycklif himself. But the movement itself spread with the vigour that springs from persecution. Moreover it received it is, of course, only the educational aspects of the First Reformation that can be dealt with here aid 29 The Progress of Education in England. from an unexpected quarter. In the Gloucester Grammar School Case, decided in the Court of Common Pleas by three judges in the year 1410, it was held that by the Common Law of England anyone had a right to teach. The doctrine laid down by the Spiritual Courts in the Beverley Grammar School Case was repudiated. The common law of England recognised no exclusive right of the Church to license teachers. "To teach youth," said Mr. Justice Hill in this important case, " is a virtuous and charitable thing to do, helpful to the people, for which he cannot be punished by our law." The Common Law had slowly evolved this fundamental doctrine. As long before as the year 1343 the Crown, in the Ferendon Grammar Schools case, had definitely asserted that no ecclesiastical jurisdiction existed in the matter of pleas relating to the appointment of schoolmasters. Such pleas, it was declared by the King, belong " especially to us and to no other in this kingdom." The Court of Common Pleas in 1410 emphatically reasserted this doctrine, and asserted the absolute freedom of all men to teach. As we have seen, the right of all to learn had been already asserted by Statute in 1406. This perfect freedom to teach and to be taught was the Lollard oppor- tunity, and it undoubtedly also urged the Church into a process of educational activity that has left a definite mark on the fifteenth century. Lollardism in the schools, despite the haughty note sounded by the Church a note that rings through Lyndwood's Provinciate, completed in 1433 was not stamped out. A statute of 1414 shows us this. It gives power to " the Justices of the King's Bench, and Justices of Peace, and Justices of Assize ... to enquire of all them 30 Mediceval Education. which hold any errors or heresies, as Lollards, and which be their maintainers, receivers, favorers, and sustainers, common writers of such books, as well of the sermons, as of their schools, conventicles, congregations, and confederacies ; and that this clause be put in Com- missions of the Justices of the Peace." It would seem that by this time or a few years earlier distinct com- munions had been formed by the Lollards on what we should call a Presbyterian basis. This is doubted by various modern authorities, but these authorities do not seem to have reviewed the whole evidence. That there were definite congregations is clear from the Acts of 1401 and 1414. Capgrave, in his contemporary chronicle under the date 1414, sets forth Oldcastle's opinion that " The Pope is anti- Christ, bishops be his members, and friars be his tail." Episcopal laying on of hands could hardly have been acceptable to sects holding such views. Their priests, moreover, were not merely priests who had come over from the Church. Bishop Pecock, in his Jtepressor, issued in 1449, divides the Lollards or " Bible men " into three classes Doctrine-mongers, Opinion-holders, and Neutrals. In discussing the Lollard views, he says that " Some of the people . . . wish all the priests to be in one degree, and none of them be above other of them, and they wish that under priests be deacons, and no more orders, states or degrees in the clergy at all." It is scarcely probable that congregations holding such views would depend for ministers on priests who had abandoned the Episcopalian position. Indeed, there is evidence that long before this an effort had been made to establish a class of Lollard or non- Episcopalian priests, for Cap- grave tells us with reference to the year 1414 : "He (Old- The Progress of Education in England. castle) sent out priests for to preach which were not admitted by any Ordinary ; and he was present at their sermons ; and all they that said against his priests was he ready to smite with his sword." Under the date 1415, Capgrave refers to Oldcastle's flight with " a priest of the sect." Moreover, specific instances of ordination of Lollard laymen as priests by laymen, occur in the Chronicles, and Thomas of Walsingham records the general practice of lay ordination. The extent of the Lollard movement may be gathered from Capgrave's statement that in 1412 the Lollards fixed bills to the church doors, stating that a hundred thousand were ready to rise, and "destroy all them that would not consent to their sect and their opinions." It has been necessary to make this reference to the Wycklif movement, as it lies behind, not only the Reforma- tion, but all Dissent, and all that Dissent has written in the annals of the English education. "The wickedly infected school of heresy," as Pecock calls Lollardy, was in reality a freemasonry that honeycombed England. The Lollard party, despite internal dissensions, was united by a curious bond of fellowship. They called themselves " Knowun men," by a play upon the word "known " in the fourteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians. The " known " man could deal safely, and safely only, with the " known" man. They all " knew " each other and dealt with each other. The society was probably chiefly composed of those " unlearned " persons spoken of in the Epistle. It was a society which read the Bible in English, and made it the basis, not only of a new ecclesiastical order, but of a great social movement, which, as we know by the formation of the London 32 Mediaeval Education. Association of Christian Brothers, was still active in the early sixteenth century. The purely English character of the society is shown by the fact that Pecock in 1449 wrote his Represser in English for the express purpose of drawing back the Lollards to the true faith. This remarkable piece of early prose had an effect on English literature, and on the English Church, not incomparable with the effect of Hooker's prose. The work of the Lollards, and of those who, in order to rebut the Lollard position, were compelled to write in English instead of Latin, had an immense effect, since each party felt the necessity of schools. In the last quarter of the fourteenth century the multiplication of grammar schools began, and the new right to teach was from that time forward freely exercised. The competition among teachers in London (as we shall see in a later chapter) and the other great towns was very keen in the early part of the fifteenth century, and there is no doubt that a very complete system of primary, secondary, and University education obtained throughout the country at that date. The Wycklif movement had, however, in combination with other causes, a remarkable effect. Its main tendency was to break down the elaborate scholasticism that underlay all education. The new current of life that came with the birth of the tongue, as a teaching and literary agency, sapped the universal use of Latin. Men began to realise that life was possible without it. By the middle of the fifteenth century the grammar schools had again either diminished in numbers or in attendance, and the Universities were in a bad way. A petition of 1447 recites the decline in the number of schools, and we 33 D The Progress of Education in England. know from Anthony a Wood that in 1466 learning at Oxford was at a very low ebb, and that the University authorities were praying for a revival of grammar school instruction. It was, in fact, the end of the middle ages. The system of land tenures had broken down, the Privilege of Clergy had no longer any significance in letters, the sanctity of the mediaeval Church had been rudely shaken, the authority of the schoolmen no longer absorbed the intellects of men. English, not Latin, was destined to be the literary tongue ; and internecine war was uprooting the traditions and customs of the land, and changing the outlook of men. The note of change from old things to new was, moreover, emphasised by the coming of the printing press. It made all changes permanent. New ideas that might have evaporated were stamped with permanence by the multiplication of books. The new books, printed at home and abroadj disseminated the ideas of the New Age. Particularly noticeable was this in the matter of school books. Even a pathetic production like the " Promptuarium Parvu- lorum Clericorum," which one Geoffrey, the so-called Grammarian, compiled in 1440, when issued as a printed book, secured a large circulation. Its value to men was that it was an English-Latin grammar- dictionary, adapted to the uses of the meanest intellect. Men wanted to turn Latin into English without delay, and Geoffrey's book was the easiest helper extant. The need was recognised abroad, and an enterprising Flemish publisher produced about the year 1484 an English edition of the " RegulaeGrammati- cales " of Nicolas Perotti, the Renaissance Grammarian. 34 Mediceval Education. This was followed in the beginning of the new century by John Holt's admirable Mylkejor Children. The country, in fact, was turning from the old pedagogy to the new. The work of John Cornwaile in introducing English into the schools was at last bearing its complete fruit. Monastic Latin and all it meant (including much good scholarship) was passing away. The monks in the monasteries had "small understanding of Latin" in 1531. The new learning had, however, come to the Universities, and only time was needed for it to spread to the schools. The English Renaissance was, in fact, at hand, and literary English was already within a century of its prime. 35 CHAPTER III. education from tbe Reformation to tDe Revolution. WHEN we regard the great movement known as the Reformation apart from the local incidents that appear to have precipitated it, we seem to see the working of long ripening issues. The Crown in the fifteenth century had been glad enough to play off Rome against a rebellious and heretical Commonalty and a dangerous Baronage. The opening of the sixteenth century pre- sented a new scene of action, from which the feudal barons and the system of tenures had disappeared. The Commonalty and the King had now one thing in common the old standing hatred of Papal interference and foreign taxation ; while the moving forces of the New Learning and the spiritual revolt against Rome were urging both King and people, unconsciously enough perhaps, towards the same end. The Renaissance, the lessons of history, the gradual growth of a Puritan conception of religion, the hope of gain both material and spiritual, all combined to make men see in a free and purified Church that vision of national liberty and national isolation which had always been the ideal of English statesmen from Alfred onwards. So the Reformation came, affirming, only in more downright fashion, the policy laid down by Edward III. in the famous Statute of Provisors of Benefices. The 36 Education from the Reformation to the Revolution. independence of the Church of England, indeed, had been asserted over and over again from British times to Magna Charta, from Magna Charta down to the Reformation Parliament, which, in the seven years from 1529 to 1536, finally did away with the de facto Papal supremacy. The notable fact of the Reformation Legislation is that it finally broke the bond that Rome, despite the facts of history and the law, had bound round England. The Reforma- tion necessarily involved a breach with the mediaeval system of education. As we have seen, that system was of itself breaking up during the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The monks were no longer Latinists. John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, in his injunctions addressed as late as 1531 to the monks ot the monastery at Messenden, says, " And for that ye be ignorant and have small understanding of Laten, we have drawen our said Injunctions in our vulgare Englishe tong to the intent that ye shuld the better undyrstand and knowe them, and soo see them more surely observed and kepte in every parte." It was in the same spirit that Bishop Pecock had written to the Lollards " in hir modiris langage." The New Age was destined never to reach the monasteries, nor even the chantry schools and mediaeval collegiate foundations. All were to pass away or suffer transforma- tion. The battle between the old scholastic philosophy and the new learning, with its recognition of the literary capacity of the spoken word and the direct study of the Bible, had to be fought out in the Universities. The result of the combat would determine the course of study in the schools. Erasmus, writing from Cambridge about 1516, announces the victory of the new learning there, and under the date 1519 Anthony a Wood tells us that at 37 The Progress of Education in England. Oxford " the generality of Scholars rather hunger'd after the Greek than despised it," though the students gave the spiritual battle an outward and trenchant reality by dividing themselves into combatant parties of Greeks and Trojans. With respect to the next year, an eye witness tells us that " The students rush to Greek letters ; they endure watching, fasting, toil, and hunger in the pursuit of them." The change was great. During the reign of Henry VII. and earlier, the Oxford schools " were much frequented with querks and sophistry. All things whether taught or written, seemed to be trite and inane. No pleasant streams of Humanity or Mythology were gliding among us, and the Greek language from whence the greater part of knowledge is derived, was at a very low ebb or in a manner forgotten. Scholars were inconstant and wavering, and could not apply themselves to an ordinary search in anything. They rather made choice of, than embraced, those things which their reasons were capable of .... Those scholars that had anything extraordinary in them were tinged with Wiclivism, and therefore did not or at least could not, shew themselves so familiar or free in the Schools as others." It is difficult in face of this to realise how Erasmus found at Oxford in 1499 " So much polish and learning that I now hardly care about going to Italy at all." The society of Colet, Grocyn, Linacre, and Thomas More was the Oxford that he knew ; the full University revival had not come at that date. The students still regarded Greek as " devilish and damnable." The new culture spread slowly enough from the Universities to the schools. Logical, grammatical and scholastic training was given in the higher classes of the large grammar 38 Education from the Reformation to the Revolution. schools. The elements of the Trivium and Quadrivium were taught in these schools, and were later developed by a long University course extending to the age of forty. Grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric formed the Trivium, while the Quadrivium comprised music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. An early mediaeval couplet sums up the objects of this double course with unique brevity : " Gram, loquitur, Dia. vera docet, Rhet. verba colorat, Mus. canit, Ar. numerat, Ceo. ponderat, As. colit astra." It was an elaborate system of education, and it pro- duced fluent and even great Latinists, but it involved a bondage of the spirit that was intolerable, and against which the mighty soul of Roger Bacon was sacrificed, though not altogether in vain. The development of English as a teaching and a literary tongue, and the work of the Lollards in making English the medium of spiritual life, did what one individual could not do. A national educational pressure, almost as of set purpose, broke down the Roman mediaeval educational system. True grammar, plentiful Greek, a Bible to work at in its mother texts, gave the mind new matter to think of. A School of Grammarians, founded by William Lilly, grew up. An age of true classical culture, both Greek and Latin, was at hand, and an age of close and patient investigation into the text of the long-closed Bible. Before 1540 we find at Oxford lecturers or readers in Divinity, Civil Law, Physic, Philosophy, Humanity, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as in the Seven Liberal Sciences. Had the Tudors but taken advantage of this central revival of learning all would have been well indeed with English education. The mediaeval grammar schools, empty enough no doubt, 39 The Progress of Education in England. were waiting for the new scholars that the revival of learning and the demands of the Universities were bound to bring them. But by a lamentable perversion of political morality, Henry VIII. and the ministers ot his son, not only missed a great opportunity, but dealt a deadly blow at national learning. The dissolution of the monasteries was, as we have seen, in itself no blow to learning. Probably the final suppression of the Alien Priories in 1415 had done much more harm. . The Chantry Legislation of 1547 was a very different matter from either. It was an Act that gave to the King certain chantries, colleges, free chapels, and the possessions of the same thus ending the existing system of education given by these vast founda- tions and then proposed the " alteration, change and amendment of the same, and converting to good and godly uses, as in erecting grammar schools to the education of youth in virtue and godliness, the further augmenting of the Universities, and better provision for the poor and needy." This was exactly what was required to be done. It was an admir- able policy, and would have created (as the identical policy of the Endowed Schools Act of 1869 did create) an efficient grammar school system in constant touch with the Universities. But the Act was, in fact, made the instrument of spoliation. While a considerable number of old schools were continued and called new, or often enough, Royal, Grammar Schools, the chief part of the Chantry lands were sold, and the moneys applied to personal purposes extremely remote from either charity or education. The loss was very great. Mr. A. F. Leach has estimated 40 Education from the Reformation to the Revolution. that there were some three hundred grammar schools in 1535, most of which were swept away or plundered and damaged by Henry VIII. or the ministers of Edward VI. It is a severe indictment, though it seems sounder to believe that many of these grammar schools were lost to learning a hundred years earlier in the storm and stress of the fifteenth century, and the rapid breakdown of mediaeval learning. But that very great loss in foundations, that might have been made efficient, was caused by the Chantry legislation there can be no doubt. Henry VIII., against his better judgment, destroyed where he should have reaped. He could not do the things that he would. He, and indeed none of the Tudors, had any desire to injure national education. The advancement of learning was a thing dear to all of them, but learning inevitably fell before the progress of a definite, possibly necessary, but certainly a destructive political policy. The abolition of Papal authority in England in no way altered the relationship of religion and education. During the temporary revival of Roman Catholicism, Queen Mary (in 1553) caused measures to be taken for ensuring the Roman orthodoxy of all schoolmasters, and this policy was by no means reversed under Elizabeth. The Pro- testant orthodoxy of all teachers was dear to her, and to secure that she had recourse in 1562, and again in 1581, to legislation that was the seed of the wretched Con- formity Legislation of 1662. At the same time she did all that was possible to secure an efficient educational system. In 1563 the lack of schools was very noticeable. In that year the Speaker of the House of Commons declared, "I dare say a hundred schools want in England 4 1 The Progress of Education in England. which before this time have been." But in 1581 Richard Mulcaster could write, "We have no great cause to complain for number of schools and founders. For during the time of Her Majesty's most fortunate reign already, there hath been more schools erected, than all the rest be, that were before her time in the whole realm." Nor did the founding of schools stop in 1581. An exam- ination of the figures given in the Digest of Schools of 1842 shows that during Elizabeth's reign 108 grammar schools were founded and 27 were additionally endowed, while 40 non-classical schools were founded and seven additionally endowed, giving a total of 182 foundations. Elizabeth's anxiety for the establishment of a sound educational system was very evident. Shortly after her accession she published special injunctions on the subject of education, while the Bishops through- out the reign closely enquired into the character and quality of the teaching in their dioceses. Par- liament, moreover, in 1558-9, specially excepted all educational foundations from annexation on religious grounds, and also by the Statute of Apprentices of 1562 exempted "a student or scholar in any of the Universities or in any school" from the strict provisions of that Act. Moreover, Commissioners for Charitable Uses were appointed a Commission that still occasionally sat as late as the nineteenth century to enquire from time to time into abuses connected with educational founda- tions, and a Statute of 1588, which is still in force, attacked with vigour and good results the dire corruption of educational foundations, both in the Universities and elsewhere. Such foundations were, moreover, relieved from the burden of subsidies and other taxation. Nor 42 Education from the Reformation to the Revolution. was this all. The Queen in 1571 incorporated by Statute the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in order to secure " the maintenance of good and godly literature, and the virtuous education of youth within either of the same Universities." It is interesting to note that this quotation from the preamble to the Act uses, so far as can be ascertained, the word " education " for the first time in its modern sense. We may say, then, that the great Queen did much to restore the system that her father had destroyed; she removed, in so far as in her lay, all artificial drawbacks to education ; she opened up all educational endowments to the fittest scholars, and she gave a new, and as yet unexhausted, impetus to the University system, while she inspired both Church and State with a new interest in educational matters. It is true that learning was still hampered by the traditions of the middle ages. Bacon's complaint, as to University teaching and methods, is confirmed by the more advanced school books of the late sixteenth century, which still based their range of learning on the Trivium and Quadrivium, sup- plemented by instruction in French and (at last) Greek. But it is also true that England was taking its educational system very seriously at the beginning of the seventeenth century. New methods of teaching were springing up. The monitorial system was introduced into the country schools, while the teaching of grammar was made easier, more thorough, and more attractive. The Universities were crowded. In the twenty -four col- leges of Oxford, there were in all in 1612 in the long vacation no less than 2,920 students in resi- dence. This, too, was at a time when a University 43 The Progress of Education in England. education had become very expensive. Nor were the results produced ineffectual. Learned men abounded. Joseph Mede, of Christ's College, Cambridge, was a type of the learned tutor of his day. The first half of the seven- teenth century was indeed no mean period of English learn- ing. Before the coming of the Commonwealth the shackles of the middle ages had fallen away, and men were thinking for themselves as perhaps never before in England. It had been the effort of the age that produced Hooker to supply, not only a learned, but a teaching clergy. Canon Ixxviii., of 1604, provided that in every parish where there was no public school foundation, and where there was a curate "which, as a Master of Arts or Bachelor of Arts, or is otherwise well able to teach youth, and will willingly so do, for the better increase of his living, and training up of children in principles of true religion, we will and ordain, that a license to teach youth of the parish where he serveth, be granted to none by the Ordinary of that place, but only to the said curate." This provision (which recalls the Saxon provision for parochial teaching) followed the Canon which declared that " No man shall teach either in public school, or private house, but such as shall be allowed by the Bishop of the diocese, or Ordinary of the place, under his hand and seal, being found meet as well for his learning and dexterity in teaching, as for sober and honest conversation, and also for right understanding of God's true religion," and also subscribed a declaration admitting the King's supremacy over the Church. At Common Law these Canons were illegal, but they were passed in pursuance of a Statute of 1603, which made the licenses of all schoolmasters by a Bishop a condition precedent to teaching. This Act and 44 Education from the Reformation to the Revolution. these Canons show, first, that sound and universal elementary teaching was the policy of both Church and State, and secondly, that such teaching was to be under the exclusive control of the Church. On the one hand, in the idea of universal parochial schools we see the legitimate development of the Elizabethan idea ; while on the other, in the introduction of the licensing system, which the Common Law had repudiated two centuries before, we see the beginning of that Laudian Erastianism which was destined to suspend the Elizabethan system of education, and to undermine the Church itself as the Reformation had understood that institution. The Civil War, of course, interrupted the develop- ment of any continuous educational policy. The period of the Commonwealth was not, however, in any sense, educationally sterile. In 1649 Parliament passed a Welsh Education Act, providing for the appointment of schoolmasters. A further Act of the same year allocated the firstfruits and tenths, created by Henry VIII., to trustees for preaching and teaching purposes, and to the maintenance of the masterships of the University colleges. Under certain circumstances, the Act provided for the augmenting of the allocated fund out of the Exchequer. The Restoration, of course, undid Cromwell's legislation, which remains on record as an example of what might have been done two hundred and fifty years ago for education had the wiser minds of that age prevailed. Had Cromwell's policy, or even the policy of Elizabeth and James I., been pursued along legitimate lines, the English educational position would have been very different and far more advanced than it is to-day. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 at once carried the policy 45 The Progress of Education in England. of the Acts of 1562, 1581, and 1603, forward to an extent that crippled teaching. It provided that "every school- master 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," should subscribe a declaration that he would conform to the liturgy as by law established. Fine followed by imprisonment was the penalty for breaking the law. The House of Lords in vain endeavoured to mitigate the part of the Act that dealt with education. The loyal and Erastian House of Commons was determined to secure an Erastian if not a loyal England. The Five Mile Act followed in 1665. It forbade Dissenters to teach in any school, under the ruinous penalty of ^40, while, in the same year, Archbishop Sheldon created machinery for the inquisitorial visitation of every possible educational agency in the country. The Bishops were to see 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 Govern- ment of his Majesty, and the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England." This policy involved such a peering into the lives of schoolmasters, such a course of inquisitorial folly, that the position became intolerable. Men would not become schoolmasters, and practically all secondary and (apart from a certain new movement to be referred to in the next chapter) primary education, ceased to exist. Educa- tion has no meaning when none but the political and religious hypocrites are allowed to teach. The 46 Education from the Reformation to the Revolution. Restoration campaign against Dissent and Roman Catholicism may possibly be defended on political grounds, but from the point of view of national educa- tion the result was lamentable. For the third time national education was destroyed. At the end of the seventeenth century it seemed an almost hopeless task to try and evolve a new national system in the face of political forces that were discrediting religion, and of religious forces that were definitely separating from the State religion. Yet at this very time our modern system was bursting from the dark. 47 CHAPTER IV. A FOURTH national system was in process of formation at the very time that the Elizabethan system received its death blow at the hands of the Conformity legislators, and, fortunately, though at a late date, this new system was able to draw to itself much of the wrecked materials of the system it replaced. The Uniformity legislation that followed the Restoration was so severe in character that a reaction or revolt from its operation was inevitable. This reaction perhaps first became visible in the decisions of the law courts. The courts in 1670 held in Bate's Case, that if a schoolmaster were a nominee of the founder or of the lay-matron of a school, he could not be ejected from the school for teaching without the Bishop's license. In Cox's Case it was decided, in the year 1700, that there was not, and never had been, any ecclesiastical control over any schools other than grammar schools ; that the Church, in fact, had no exclusive control over elementary education. Moreover, in Douse* s Case, decided in 1701, it was held that it was not a civil offence to keep an elementary school without the Bishop's license. Hence the elementary school could escape the inquisition of the Bishop, whether imposed by Statute or ecclesias- tical law. The Legislature also began to follow the trend 48 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. of the courts and of public opinion. An Act of 1714 (13 Anne, c. 7) exempted elementary schools from the penalties of the Conformity legislation. Such schools were therefore free to multiply. Moreover, we see a further happy and distinct sign of reaction in the provision of an Act of 1713 (12 Anne, c. 5, s. 9), which provided that aliens belonging to the foreign reformed churches should be allowed to instruct the children of any such aliens as tutors or schoolmasters. These were the educational gains that accompanied the Acts of Toleration of 1689 and 1711, and comparatively slight as was the relief, it was invaluable. We may note here that it was not until many years later that any further relief was granted to Dissenting or Papist schoolmasters. By an Act of 1779 (19 George III., c. 44) Dissenters were given a general permission to teach, except in any endowed school not especially founded for the use of Protestant Dissenters. But such teachers had still to take a certain Declaration of Allegiance. The same relief was granted by an Act of 1790 (31 George III., c. 32, s. 13) to Roman Catholics, subject to the taking of certain oaths. This obligation on Roman Catholics to take these oaths of allegiance and abjuration has been cancelled by statute (34 & 35 Viet., c. 48). The obligation to make a Declaration is, however, still binding on Protestant Dissenters, and it may be doubted if either Dissenters or Roman Catholics are legally qualified to teach in any endowed school. It is certain that they are excluded from the headmastership of any endowed school, save (in the case of Dissenters) in the schools specially reserved to Dissenters by the Act of 1779. It is, perhaps, a matter for surprise that at the 49 E The Progress of Education in England. present day the Dissenters are still under certain obliga- tions with respect to teaching that do not apply to Roman Catholics. We must now return to the general educational position that followed the Restoration. As we have seen, the first, and perhaps the chief, result of the conformity legisla- tion was the destruction of the Elizabethan system. It is true that the Courts, and later the Legislature, freed the elementary schools from the burden of this legisla- tion. But the Elizabethan system was really the endowed system. The secondary or grammar school system obtained no relief. It was practically withdrawn during more than two .centuries from the national life. From 1662 to 1870 the grammar schools of England were utterly inefficient. They were shamefully abused, and the funds were diverted to the private use of the ignorant persons who were appointed nominally to carry out the duties of teaching. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that any real attempt was made by the Legislature to remedy the abuses of these founda- tions. " Whoever will examine," said Lord Kenyon in 1795, "the state of the grammar schools in different parts of this kingdom will see to what a lamentable condition most of them are reduced Empty walls without scholars, and everything neglected but the receipt of the salaries and emoluments." It is true that in any specific case the aid of the Court of Chancery could have been called in to enforce the due execution of the trusts. But the state of the Court of Chancery was such, that it would have ruined any individual (as well as the endowment itself) to have brought any specific case before the courts. These foundations, with 5 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. hardly an exception, lay dormant until better days till the days of the Grammar School Act, 1840, and the Endowed Schools Act of 1869. It may be stated, generally without fear of contradiction, that it was not until after 1870 that the ancient grammar schools and endowed schools the numerous secondary schools of the country which are now proving of such vast import- ance in the new co-ordinated system of education of all grades became in any sense efficient. Indeed, it may be said that many of these schools in the smaller towns and villages are even now inefficient, and will remain so until the Act of 1902 is in full and active operation. Yet we have to look to a certain class of endowed schools for one source of the modern elementary system. When the Commissioners of Inquiry into Charities reported in 1842, they presented a huge volume, con- taining, county by county, a full statement of the various endowed schools in the country. If anyone cares to analyse this volume they will find that there are in all some 3,000 endowed schools in England and Wales, and that of these nearly 1,100 were founded between the years 1660 and 1730. This is a truly remarkable fact, for it was in this very period of seventy years that the Conformity Legislation was occupied with the interesting task of destroying the educational system that Queen Elizabeth had built up. This extraordinary school-endowment movement at such a time is very diffi- cult to understand. Years before the Revolution, Church and State had practically suppressed endowed education, and yet, in the face of that suppression, a huge endow- ment movement took effect. One explanation is cer- tainly JSat&'s Case, referred to previously, which decided in The Progress of Education in England. 1670 that a schoolmaster presented by the founder of a school or by a lay patron could not be ejected from his office by reason of his not holding the Bishop's license. This case was a direct incentive to all Dissenters, in- deed to all who hated the cold, Erastian state of the Church of England at that time, to found schools where children could be safely and religiously educated. This appears to be a reasonable explanation of a movement which was as remarkable as it has been unnoticed by historians. This explanation finds support in the fact that the charity schools movement was largely supported by Dissenters, and to some extent synchronised in its early rapid development with this school endowment move- ment. The Act of Uniformity of 1662, as we have seen, pressed with great severity on the Dissenting school- masters, and in order to give them relief, Dean (after- wards Archbishop) Tillotson, and Richard Baxter, the famous writer and Dissenter, combined in 1674 to draft a " Healing Act " that should secure the spread of elementary education. Nor was this the only effort in this direction. " Healing Acts " that came to nothing were the order of the hour. The Bishops refused to accept any compromise, but it is probable that these efforts for peace had some indirect effect, for the Church made few attempts to interfere with Dissenting schools. Such schools, indeed (such was the intense irony of the position), were often enough attended by the children of the most cultured and distinguished Erastians in the country. The above reference to the charity schools brings us into contact with the origins the dim and distant origins of the voluntary system. The voluntary system finds 5 2 Education from the Revolution to the Refoim Act. its source, we may believe, in the social work of Vavasor Powell in Wales during the Commonwealth, and perhaps goes back to the pre-Elizabethan times (1550), when William Salesbury, one of the most learned men of a learned age, translated the epistles and gospels into Welsh, and pressed forward the movement which led to the translation, under the patronage of Parliament (5 Eliz., c. 28), of the entire Bible. It was a descendant, so to speak, of this first Welsh Bible that played so important a part in the great Voluntary School movement in Wales of 1672. In the meantime the ground had been prepared by the dissemination of Welsh Bibles, by the educational work of the Commonwealth Education Com- missioners, and by the social work of Powell. In 1672 Thomas Gouge, a clergyman of the Established Church, who had been ejected from his living in London on that foolish and fatal Bartholomew's Day, 1662, under the provisions of the Act of Uniformity, undertook educational work in Wales, The Bishops, who could not but be aware of the value of his efforts, sanctioned his schools, and, almost certainly as a result of the joint labours of Baxter and Tillotson, a strong committee of Churchmen and Dissenters was formed in 1674 in London to carry on the good work. In 1675 there were no less than 1,850 children at school, of whom 538 were educated by Welsh voluntary subscriptions. John Strype, writing before 1720, definitely connects this work with the charity school system, started in 1698 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. This latter movement was immensely successful, and spread all over the country. In the face of its success the Act of 1714, excluding the elementary schools of the land from the absurd Con- 53 The Progress of Education in England. formity Legislation, was a necessity. By 1729 there were no less than 1,658 schools, containing 34,000 chil- dren. I have elsewhere* estimated that, allowing a considerable margin for over-lapping between the endow- ment movement and the charity school movement, there were over 2,500 schools of all classes founded in England and Wales between 1660 and 1730 ; that over 100 schools received supplementary endowments, and that 650 un- attached educational schools were created. These schools supplied the poor with such education as was to be had in the eighteenth century. This education was sufficiently ineffective, but it was something at least, and it carried with it the elements of true Christian teaching. The religious revival under Wesley owed, perhaps, more than is generally suspected to the Christian teaching in these new and humble elementary schools. Special efforts were made in heathen Wales. We have seen the successive efforts of Salesbury, Powell, the Commonwealth Government, Gouge, and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In 1730 these efforts were renewed. Griffith Jones, a clergyman of the Established Church, in 1730 started " circulating schools" in the towns, villages, and wild country districts. The teachers stopped in each place a few months only, and then passed on to other centres, leaving behind them a tradition of teaching and a desire for learning. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge helped the movement, and the funds, which at first consisted merely of small Church offertories, were supplemented by outside help. Large sums were contributed by Mrs. * See "State Intervention in English Education" (Cambridge University Press, 1902). 54 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. Bevan, who herself carried on the schools after Griffith Jones' death in 1761. At that date there had been 3,000 schools opened, in which 150,000 scholars had been taught. There were 10,000 children in the schools in 1760. In 1779 Mrs. Bevan died, and bequeathed her large property to the carrying on of the work. Her heirs disputed the will, and the estate was thrown into Chancery, with the result that these invaluable schools were closed for thirty years, and much of the benefit of a great and noble enterprise lost. Lost, indeed, it was to an extent that we can measure, since we know that at the opening of the nineteenth century Wales was tjtie most ignorant area in the civilised parts of Europe. Reference must be made here to another educational movement that dimly took shape in the eighteenth century. We find that the vestries throughout the country were taking an interest in parochial, and some- thing more than parochial education. The poor children of the parish were often enough taught at the expense of the parish, and parochial schools, apparently supported out of the rates, were not very uncommon. Moreover, the rates were not infrequently drawn upon for the pur- pose of sending promising scholars to the Universities. It is difficult to know the legal grounds on which the over- seers so employed the public money, but it must be re- membered that it was an age when these officials were not liable to surcharge, and it is a pleasure to record, in a time of great public corruption, irregularities of so creditable a character. It was perhaps legal, for a parish has in its own affairs certain quaint legislative characteristics, and could certainly make voluntary, and possibly compulsory, rates for purposes that had never been contemplated by Act of 55 The Progress of Education in England. Parliament. Voluntary rates for extraordinary purposes are not unknown now. The parish of Edale, in Derby- shire, until quite recently supported a parochial mole- catcher out of a voluntary rate. But Parliament itself in the eighteenth century was not entirely quiescent as an educational force. By virtue of the London Poor Law Act of 1662 the Common Council of the City of London erected a workhouse school for 400 children, and workhouse schools under various Acts seem to have been raised in various parts of the country *. The Greenwich Hospital schools were set going as a result of the Register Act of 1696, while the school of the Foundling Hospital was founded by Royal Charter in 1739, and this foundation was confirmed by statute in 1740. Moreover, an Act of 1767 which established the important prin ciple of " boarding out " for poor law children enabled the poor parish children of London to be maintained and educated at the cost of the rates. We thus realise that Parliament was already seeing, though with a coloured vision, the duty that lay upon the Legislature to supply education to those who by no fault of their own were unable to obtain it in any other way. In these Parlia- mentary and local educational efforts, discontinuous and arbitrary though they were, we see a sense of social dis- content which wise statesmanship would have encouraged and developed. Had the nineteenth century in its early days followed up the suggestions of the mid-eighteenth century, education in this country would have advanced far more rapidly than has been the case. Such, in brief, were the changes and chances in educa- * The author of this book would be very glad to be informed by local officials of instances of such schools under local Acts. 56 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. tion in the eighteenth century a century that sowed broadcast, in every field of intellectual and social activity, the seed that it was destined never to reap. It was an autumnal age, and the air was heavy with apparent decay in national institutions, in national religion, in national education. But we are to-day beginning to reap the harvest which the eighteenth century sowed. The little actual progress we have noticed in that century was in elementary education. All higher education, as part of a system, was asleep. The work of individuals, such as Newton and Cavendish, in science, and Porson in scholar- ship, was often great, while the Universities, by the foundation of chairs, that have since been of infinite value to learning, and of definite schools of teaching, such as the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, were pre- paring themselves for the awakening of learning. But secondary and higher education, as an actual fact in the lives of the people, did not exist. An Erastian Church, a corrupt Government, and inefficient Courts of Justice had stifled all education that depended upon the ancient educational foundations. These foundations were com- pelled to hide their usefulness until the Old Age had wholly passed away. The New Educational Age, the revival of letters among the people, had its origin in the three movements to which I have referred the new foundations, the charity schools, and the half-hearted efforts made by the Legisla- ture to aid national education. Three new movements united with these earlier efforts to produce, or rather to realise, the revival, the origin of which has been already indicated. The first new movement was really the connecting link between the charity schools which, 57 The Progress of Education in England. until late in the nineteenth century, maintained their specific character and the modern voluntary schools. This movement was the Sunday school system, first tried by John Wesley, in Savannah, in 1737, but only introduced into England in 1763, made a national system by Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, in 1780, and brought to London about 1785, when the Sunday School Society was founded. Whether the idea of a Sunday school cannot be traced back far earlier in our history than the efforts of John Wesley, may well be asked. This is not the place in which this interesting question can be discussed, but it may be useful to refer those interested in the subject to a Bill introduced into the House of Commons by the Attorney-General (Sir Heneage Finch) on February 27th, 1672, which enjoined " all persons that are in ecclesiastical preferment, under a penalty, to catechise and instruct the youth .... every Sunday, in the afternoon, in the Church Catechism." The catechism prescribed to be used at this time was certainly the small catechism of Dean Nowel, originally printed in 1570. It seems, therefore, more than pro- bable that the House in 1672 was asked to make compulsory and universal a custom of Sunday school teaching at least as old as the days of Queen Elizabeth. If this is so, the Sunday school was killed as effectually as the grammar school, and it had to wait for resurrection until the end of the eighteenth century. The movement grew and flourished. In 1834 there were about 1,500,000 children, with 160,000 voluntary teachers, in the Sunday schools of England and Wales. The secular work done by these schools was valuable indeed. In Manchester we find that in 1834 Sunday schools were open for 58 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. secular instruction for five and a half hours on Sunday and for two evenings in the week, and that the age of the scholars varied from five to twenty-five years. Man- chester in those days was still writhing under the scourge of universal child labour, and the Sunday schools did work that secured the social salvation of thousands. In Mr. Benjamin Braidley's Manchester Sunday school there were 2,700 scholars, taught by 120 unsalaried teachers, all, save two or three, former scholars. The self-sacrifice to be found in the Manchester of those days perhaps more than balanced the sorrows involved in the economic blunders of the age. The second movement that played a part in the revival of national education was what may be called the reintro- duction (between 1798 and 1803) of the monitorial system by Andrew Bell, a clergyman of the Established Church (who subsequently founded, in i8n,the National School Society), and Joseph Lancaster, who received the close support of King George III., and from whose work sprang, in 1814, the British and Foreign School Society a society that had existed in one form or another since 1808. These two men worked with immense energy at their task of spreading monitorial schools over the country, and they quarrelled with no less energy as to their respective rights as discoverers of the system. Neither possessed any right of discovery. It is usually pointed out that both were preceded in the idea by Chevalier Paulet, who organised a monitorial school in Paris as early as 1790. It is also probable that Bell, who brought his idea from Madras, had in reality adopted a very ancient Hindoo method of sub-dividing the labour of teaching. But it may also be pointed out, 59 The Progress of Education in England. as perhaps has not been pointed out before, that the monitorial system was in active use in England in the Elizabethan times. John Brinsley, in his " Ludus literarius, or the Grammar Schoole " (published anony- mously in 1612), lays down the monitorial principle in explicit language. This interesting book consists of a dialogue between two masters of a "poore country schoole." It insists that school days should begin early, "The time of their entrance with us, in our countrey schooles, it is commonly about seven or eight years olde ; six is very soone." In the latter part of the book Brinsley deals with the working of the school. There ought to be a master and an usher, and their work should be supplemented by " sub-doctors" (pupil teachers) and " seniors " (monitors). Each form was to be divided into two parts, and each part was to elect (out of its number) two "seniors." These "seniors'' were to be "as ushers in that fourme, for overseeing, directing, examining, and fitting the rest every way before they come to say ; and so for overseeing the exercises. Also, in straights of time, to stand torth before the rest, and to heare them. The master to have an eieand see carefully that they deale faithfully, and make some short examina- tion after. And in all lectures those two seniors to be blamed principally for the negligence of their sides, and contrarily to be commended for their diligence." In the case of the higher forms (where necessary through the absence of the usher) sub-doctors were to be appointed, " everyone to be his day instead of an usher to do those things which the usher should ; and so to observe the behaviour of all under them." Brinsley then goes on to commend one of the chief evils (according to our modern 60 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. ideas) of the monitorial system: "For my fourmes I would put so many in a fourme, as possibly can goe together, as was noted ; the better will be continuall helpers to the other, and much draw on the worse." This was precisely the monitorial system with which Lancaster and Bell covered England. Applied to secondary education it may have had its good points ; as a rapid diffuser of very elementary education it had also, as Bell and Lancaster proved, a curious and wonderful power. But as the basis of an organised system of education it was bad in the extreme, because it failed to recognise the fact that the most skilled teaching is required in the most elementary classes. The teaching of child by child is never intellectual ; it is instinctive and competitive, and invariably fails to enlarge the mental outlook. It is the method of teaching employed by animals, and is exactly fitted to intellects with final and definite limitations. Moreover, it tends to create such limitations. This was guarded against by Brinsley, who suggested a system of continual checks on the child-teachers. The fundamental evils of the system, indeed, do not affect higher educa- tion, which necessarily involves individual thought, and cannot be acquired by mechanical operations or instinc- tive appreciation. The monitorial system as reintroduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century was, however, for a time an immense numerical success. Mr. James Bonwick, in his interesting book, entited " An Octogenarian's Reminis- cences" (published in 1902), gives us a very vivid account of the famous Borough Road School, Southwark, to which he was admitted as a pupil at the age of six years " one Monday morning in 1823." The building consisted of 61 The Progress of Education in England. " a central Home for the training of Teachers, with two wings, one for boys, and the other for girls The rooms tor the boys could accommodate 500 scholars. The windows were six feet from the floor. The central part was occupied with desks and forms, fixed by iron supports. Spaces left around were for semi-circular drafts for some eight or ten lads, engaged under Monitors in reading, spelling, or arithmetic. Curtains of baize, suspended from the ceiling, were stretched across the upper space to prevent an echo. At the entrance end of the room was the long raised platform for the master's desk, etc The first desk, lower than the rest, was for little ones learning the alphabet, and imitating the letters hung in front by drawing with a stick or finger in sand, provided for the purpose in front of each child. The sand desk was nine inches broad, having a hole, with a tin slide for the sand, and a smoother of wood or stiff leather, as well as a stick for marking. Other desks were three inches higher. Though sloping for writing convenience, there was a narrow, flat top, for the reception of a pewter inkstand. A sort of slit, at the back of the desk, was for the reception of a slate, when not in use. The form had no back ; and the boy sat thereon, with his hat or cap tied behind him with a string. A clock was fixed over the platform, and a large bell stood on the Master's desk. Yet that was seldom used, as the sharp call " Halt ! " for order, was distinctly heard over the room. Each of the eight classes in the School was indicated by a board on an iron rod, fixed in a standard at the end of a desk. The first class was at the sand desk. The second included boys in two lettered words ; the third, in three letters ; the fourth, in four or five ; the 62 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. fifth, in two syllables ; the sixth, in three ; the seventh, in four ; the eighth being the highest. The drafts were marked out by semi-circular lines cut in the floor, or by chalk when necessary. The board, from which we read or spelt, was fixed on a brass-headed nail in view of the pupils, who stood with their hands behind them, the Monitor having his station at the end of the curve. The drafts were two feet apart, and left a passage way between them and the desks." Mr. Bonwick tells us his own experiences at the sand desk and in other classes. " In front of the row the Monitor held a board, on which were plainly painted the capitals and small letters of the alphabet. My little teacher pointed to a letter, and shouted its name, which we repeated aloud. He then told us to smooth the sand in front of us, and try and make the letter by mark- ing the sand. After this was done, we again shouted the letter. When the mark was removed by the smoothing flat stick, we took up another letter for copying. . . . When able to go into a draft at the side of the School, I stood before a printed card stuck upon a wooden board, and learned my A B, a fr, etc. My promotion from monosyllables to longer words came in slow process of time, after judgment, upon examination, had been pro- nounced by a superior Monitor. I know not how long it took me to ascend from class I through 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 to 8, carrying me round the sides of drafts. In the same way I had to pass the classes and drafts for arithmetic . . . The monotony of repeating parts of a word was afterwards relieved by meanings attached to the words. This was a great advance. These meanings, hunted out for the drafts, were loudly intoned by the The Progress of Education in England. boys, after being read out from the battledore by the Monitor, who swung his arms about and waved his body to keep time. The meanings were taken from Dr. Johnson. Little ones did the sing-song to "C A T, cat, a domestic animal," such being found in the dictionary by the Monitors. It was, however, easier for the child to say " a doorstick animal." The next advance came in the Instances. These were illustrations in the use of the word, and were usually made up by the seniors, aided sometimes by the "Young Men" Teachers, and with further reference to our Master. Most of our " In- stances " were taken from the Scriptures, and the few books to which we had access." Writing " was first practised in sand, then on slates, afterwards in copy books. The slates were ruled for three hands . . . There was great difficulty with pens, then only quills. When head Monitor, I often took my part in troublesome pen-mending. To do this for hundreds of boys was no trifle. Steel pens came later on as a blessed invention for busy quill parers. . . . Our only reading was from the Scripture Lessons, that is, selections from the Bible, not the Bible itself. ... At noon each day took place the Monitor's Reading Lesson. ... At times, at our noon gathering, a sudden and wild burst of applause would rise from the class at some extra fine rendering. School boys are not generally sentimental, but I have seen tears shed at the reading of a passage. Some boys' voices were simply perfect in expression." The first four rules of arithmetic were learnt from ciphering boards, but in the early 'thirties more advanced arithmetic with suitable books was introduced. Extra- ordinary results were often produced. " One lad could 64 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. square four figures by head." Map making and geo- graphy seem to have been well taught. Dr. Cornwell, the author of a well-known school " Geography," was a schoolfellow of Mr. Bonwick. History was at first entirely neglected, but before Mr. Bonwick left, Pinnock and Goldsmith had in rare copies got into the school. Only a few children in the highest class learnt any grammar. As we have seen, the days of the grammar school lay before and after. It is interesting to note that these schools, at first free, came by 1827 to charge the small fee of twopence a week. The tone of the Borough Road School, we are told, was good. Physical punish- ment was not allowed, but punishment by ridicule was the rule. "The idler and sluggard would be rocked in the cradle by a little girl. Shackles or logs would be applied to legs. The laggard would be tied to a desk. Bad boys were yoked together and made to walk backwards. The very doubtful were put into a basket and hoisted up by a rope to the lofty ceiling. During my time a dirty arrival would be washed by a girl sent for from the other School, to our amusement." It is a curious and interest- ing account, and speaks very vividly of the school life in the days between the new education and the old. We may believe, however, that the Borough Road School was the best of all these schools, and it is very certain that many were of a very inferior type. Dr. Bell's schools suffered deterioration after his death. The teachers were ignorant and the teaching was entirely by rote. In fact, the mechanical character of the monitorial system rendered it, except under the most skilled super- vision, a danger to the advance of real learning. It has left its evil effects upon our modern system. It was the 65 F The Progress of Education in England. parent of the pupil-teacher system, and gave perman- ence to the modern lamentable practice of employing untrained women teachers. The contest between Dr. Bell and Mr. Lancaster and their respective systems had, however, results far more important than the question of teaching, or of teaching methods. The quarrel had two vast issues. It created the modern religious or denominational controversy, which has had such a marked influence on the development of primary education, and it also brought education into modern politics. A fierce party conflict began to rage round these unimportant personalities. The Tory or Church party, with the aid of the Quarterly Review, supported the National Society, while the British and Foreign School Society secured the support of the Whigs and the Edinburgh Review. The dispute gradually awakened the Legislature to the need of action. The third movement that played a part in the revival of national education was this intervention of Parliament. As we have seen, Parliament, during the eighteenth century, had taken an intermittent interest in education, and had created, at any rate, a certain distinct power to charge the rates with the education of the destitute. But the closing years of the century saw the gradual reopen- ing of a new social problem. The invention and introduction of machinery into certain districts in the North of England, involved the aggregation of large masses of people in those districts. This broke down the parochial school system, and, moreover, in the end, did away with all education, for parents and employers rapidly discovered the value of child labour in mechanical production. Not only were all available children drafted 66 Education from the Revolution to the Rejorm Act. into the mills, but the destitute children of the great towns were purchased under a system of indenture by the manufacturers from the poor law authorities. Sir Samuel Romilly declared in the House of Commons in 1806 that parish apprentices were often sent by contract from London to the Lancashire cotton mills "in carts, like so many negro slaves." Until the year 1816 pauper children under the age of nine years could be compulsorily apprenticed in pursuance of statute 43 Eliz., c. 2, s. 5. It was not until 1833 that it became unlawful generally to employ in mills children who had not completed their ninth year, and this age was actually lowered by a year in 1844. Moreover, the Statute of 1833 reserved the case of silk mills, and until the year 1879 children from the age of eight years could be employed in such mills. This seems almost unbelievable. But the fact remains, and through half of the nineteenth century the country was face to face with the knowledge that an immense number of children were growing up as parts of a great industrial machine, without any knowledge of either religion or letters human beings brought up as beasts of burden ; housed, fed, and worked. Old Mr. Bon wick, in his " Reminiscences " before referred to, tells us that when he was a boy it was pitiful " to see the boy chimney-sweep, shivering and half-starved as a work- house apprentice, driven by a brutal master to clamber up the steep. What dreadful stories I then heard of the poor factory children, forced, as mere babes in the wintry darkness, breakfastless, to the mill ! " The intolerable character of the evil an evil of so profitable a character that both masters and parents rejoiced at its existence awakened the conscience of, at any rate, certain minds in 67 The Progress of Education in England. Parliament. It was felt that a generation was growing up that had no knowledge or appreciation of the forces that bind society together no knowledge of home life, of religion, of morality. The future depends on the children of the present, and the outlook for the nineteenth century looked dark enough in the year of grace 1802. On April 1 3th, 1802, a Bill was introduced into the House of Commons " for the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and others, employed in cotton and other mills, and cotton and other factories." This Bill, slightly amended and improved, received the Royal assent on June 22nd, 1802. The state of the factory children may be guessed from the provisions of this Act. It directed the mill rooms to be whitewashed twice a year, and to be ventilated ; it ordered an apprentice to have one suit of clothes a year, and not to work more than twelve hours a day, exclusive of meal times ; it forbade work between nine at night and six in the morning ; it provided that male and female apprentices should sleep in separate rooms, and not more than two apprentices should sleep in one bed ; it made medical attendance compulsory in the case of infectious disease ; it directed the mills to be inspected by visitors appointed by the justices, and ordered the chil- dren to be taught the elements of learning and the principles of Christianity. The sixth section of the Act runs as follows : " Every such apprentice shall be nstructed, in some part of every working day, for the first four years at least of his or her apprenticeship . . . in the usual hours of work, in reading, writing, and arith- metic, or either of them, according to the age and abilities of such apprentice, by some discreet and proper person, to be provided and paid by the master or mistress of such 68 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. apprentice, in some room or place in such mill or factory to be set apart for that purpose ; and that the time hereby decided to be allotted for such instruction as aforesaid, shall be deemed and taken on all occasions as part of the respective periods limited by this Act during which any such apprentice shall be employed or compelled to work." Section 8 provided that " Every apprentice or (in case the apprentices shall attend in classes) every such class shall, for the space of one hour at least every Sunday, be instructed and examined in the principles of the Christian religion, by some proper person, to be provided and paid by the master or mistress of such apprentice." Church of England children were to be examined at least once a year by the clergyman of the parish, and presented to the Bishop for confirmation between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years. Moreover, divine service was to be attended every Sunday, and not less than once a month at an Established Church. This reformatory measure was petitioned against in the following year by manufacturers and parents, and it was never enforced. Many generations of little seven-year- old slaves were to be worn away in the mills before effective relief came. At the present time every child in the country who is not specially exempt on the ground of adequate private teaching, sickness, the inacces- sibility of the public school, or other reasonable excuse is compelled to attend school full time between the ages of five and at least twelve years (save in the case of children employed in agriculture, when the child may be partially exempted at eleven years). Moreover, every local education authority may make bye-laws compelling school attendance up to the age of fourteen years. The 69 The Progress of Education in England. change in a century, from the early days of the slave- apprentice to this day of equal educational opportunities for all, has been great. The same change has not spread through the Anglo-Saxon world. In the Southern States of the American Union white child labour is as rife and as vile in its conditions to-day as it was in England a century ago. But though the Factory Act of 1802 seemed to be with- out effect, it, in reality, marked the birth of a great wave of public opinion. The most notable forces of an epoch are often enough voiceless and invisible. From 1802 Parliamentary interest in educational matters increased very rapidly. Mr. Whitbread's Bill of 1807 provided for the establishment of schools, and the appointment of schoolmasters in every district unpro- vided with schools. All poor children were to be entitled to two years' schooling between the ages of seven and fourteen. This Bill was mangled in the Commons, and lost in the Lords. But public opinion and educated opinion were in advance of the Legislature. The enlightened views of Adam Smith, Blackstone and Bentham on the subject of national education were finding an echo in the heart of the country. In 1816 a Select Committee of the Commons was appointed to report on the education of the lower orders. In 1818 it reported on the educational condition of the country at large. " The anxiety of the poor for education " was daily increasing, though the opportunities were very bad. As we have seen, the monitorial schools had rapidly spread over the country, and had given a desire for education. The single school (mostly Church school) dis- tricts showed, however, an increasing degree of 70 Education from the Revolution to the Reform Act. liberality, and the religious views of the school were not pressed upon the children of parents holding other views, provided that the children were really taught such other views. The Select Committee recommended the universal use of a conscience clause, the establishment of rate-supported free parochial schools in very poor districts the principle of the Act of 1870 and in well- to-do districts, the making of Parliamentary grants to aid in the building of schools, the maintenance of which would fall upon voluntary subscribers the principle adopted by Parliament in 1833. Had both of these suggestions been incorporated in an Act in 1818, educational progress in the nineteenth century would have been far more rapid. The only direct and immediate result of the labours of the Committee was an Act of 1818, appointing Commissioners to enquire into the educational charities of the country. The mass of information collected by the Committee, however, had the effect of stimulating public interest in the question, and brought before the public the tireless and dis- interested labours of the clergy of the Established Church in the cause of national education. In 1820 Mr. Brougham, inspired by the report of the Select Committee, introduced his first Education Bill. In his speech, despite the fact that he was a Whig and a supporter of the undenominational schools of the British and Foreign School Society, he fully recognised the labours of the clergy on behalf of education, and he noted the great improvement of the position since 1803. Then only one in every 21 persons in the population was at school, while in 1820 it was one in every 16 persons. The statistics collected by the Select Committee The Progress of Education in England. showed, moreover, that 500,000 children (including 53,000 at worthless dame schools) were receiving educa- tion in unendowed schools, while 165,432 were to be found in the endowed schools. The position was certainly improving, but every fifth person of the popula- tion was still without the means of education. Moreover, London remained " the worst educated part of Christen- dom." Mr. Brougham's Bill proposed the universal establishment of parochial schools, with efficient teachers. Funds were to be found by local rates, and by the diver- sion of old endowments. The religious teaching was to be undenominational, but the teachers were to be members of the Church of England. The Bill was unfortunately opposed by both the Dissenters and the Roman Catholics, and in deference to this opposition Mr. Brougham felt compelled to withdraw his measure. Thirteen years now passed with- out legislative effort, but those years saw the growth of a great volume of public opinion, and an immense increase of school attendance. On January 2gth, 1828, in the debate on the King's Speech, Mr. Brougham declared in the House of Commons that ''there had been periods when the country heard with dismay that 1 the soldier was abroad.' That was not the case now. Let the soldier be ever so much abroad, in the present age he could do nothing. There was another person abroad, a less important person, in the eyes of some an insignificant person, whose labours had tended to produce this state of things the schoolmaster was abroad, and he trusted more to the schoolmaster, armed with his primer, than he did to the soldier in full military array, for upholding and extending the liberties of his country." By 72 Education from the Revolution lo the Reform Act. 1833 the number of children in unendowed schools was no less than 1,030,000, and this enormous increase induced Lord Brougham to abandon the principle of compulsory education, on which he had based his Bill of 1820. The idea of education was in the air ; Dissenters in London in 1825 founded the Christian Instruction Society, which did a great educational work among the very poor ; petitions for a national educational system began to appear before Parliament ; Mr. Brougham's pamphlet of 1825, entitled " Observations on the education of the people," ran through twenty editions in less than a year, and on all sides the importance of the problem received recognition. Mr. Roebuck, in 1833, urged upon the House of Commons the necessity for a compulsory system of education for the whole people. He set forth a scheme of infant schools, evening schools, schools of industry and normal (or training) schools, to be provided in school districts and controlled by an elected school committee for the district. His proposals, though they helped to form the character of public opinion, had no direct legislative result. But the year 1833 neverthe- less produced the first fruits of the Educational Renais- sance. On Saturday, August xyth, the House of Commons voted the sum of ^"20,000 " in aid of private subscriptions for the erection of school houses for the education of the children of the poorer classes." The new era of definite State intervention in the education of the people may be said to have opened with this annual vote, which was destined to increase, until in the year 1903-4 it reached the sum of ^"11,249,806. 73 CHAPTER V. Rational education from 1833 to 1870* THE grant of ^"20,000 made by the House of Commons on August i yth, 1833, marked the beginning of a new era in the history of English education. To what system it would lead was necessarily uncertain ; but that the vote would lead to some all-pervading national system was never in doubt. The grant was no spasmodic exhibition of philanthropic feeling. For more than a quarter of a century the mind of the Legislature had been exercised with the educational problem, and the experiences of those years were now being dimly translated into action. The House of Commons has ever been conservative in its movements, and has proceeded with reluctance from the known to the unknown. Large schemes, involving the adoption of a complete national system of education, could command its sympathy, but could not at that date receive its sanction. Legislation by experiment had, in the early part of the nineteenth century, become the necessary antecedent of all social measures. But the caution shown in the matter of education in 1833 was excessive. The policy adopted by Lord Althorp's Government had already been tried and found wanting in Ireland. The first English Parliamentary grant for Irish education had been made in 1816 to the Kildare 74 National Education from 1833 to 1870. Street Society, and in the year 1832-3, after large sums had been spent in grants to various educational societies, the system was abandoned, and Mr. Stanley (afterwards Lord Derby), the Chief Secretary, appointed an indepen- dent and responsible Board of Commissioners, with absolute control over the funds annually voted by Parliament for Irish education. These Commissioners were instructed to grant aid towards the erection of schools, to appoint inspectors and an adequate staff, to award gratuities to teachers, to establish a model and training school, and to edit and publish suitable school books. The grants made to the Commissioners were to depend upon the amount of voluntary funds raised locally, It was a strange thing that the very Government which had abandoned the method of grants to private school societies in Ireland, on the ground that such societies could not adequately administer a great national system of education, should have deliberately adopted this method for England. It was an error due to that neglect of history and experience which has caused so many other errors in the modern developments of education. The grant was made on the understanding that it was to be applied to school buildings only, and the Treasury was left to devise a scheme for the administration of the grant. This scheme was set forth in a Treasury Minute, dated August 3oth, 1833. The scheme applied the money to school houses (excluding residences for teachers) only. Half the estimated expenditure had to be raised by private contributions, expended and accounted tor before an application for a grant could be entertained. The 75 The Progress of Education in England. application had to be accompanied by a specific recom- mendation from either the National School Society or the British and Foreign School Society. The applicants were to bind themselves to submit to a Government audit if required, and to supply, if called for, periodical reports on the school. Applicants from the large towns were to have a preference. This scheme was important, as it formed a check on the School Societies, and brought the schools into direct touch with a Government depart- ment. The National School Society at once brought forward 33 applications, all of which were granted, in addition to the two applications of the British and Foreign School Society. At the end of the year 1833, 62 schools, 44 ol which were Church schools, had been aided at a cost to the State of ,8,280 143., and at a total cost of ^19,380. The scholars in these first State- aided schools numbered 12,191, and the population of the areas aided 402,045. Some reference to the figures contained in the complete returns (issued on March 2oth, 1835) to Lord Kerry's educational inquiry must be quoted here. The figures refer to the period of the first grant. The population of England and Wales was taken to be 13,897,187. There were 2,985 infant schools, containing 89,005 children ; 35,986 day schools, containing 1,187,942 scholars, thus giving a total in "daily schools" of 1,276,947 scholars; 16,828 Sunday schools, with 1,548,890 adult and child scholars. These figures related to Church schools alone. There were also 925 day and infant Dissenting schools, containing 51,822 children ; and 6,247 Dissenting Sunday schools, containing 750,107 children. These figures appeared to show that one person in every ten of the 76 National Education from 1833 to 1870. population attended some form of day school, while an immensely larger proportion than this was attending either day or Sunday school. These figures, unfor- tunately, were very misleading, and so misled Lord Brougham that they induced him to abandon his advocacy of a compulsory system. The corrected figures for Manchester showed that probably not one in twenty of the population attended a school of any value. At least one-third of the children of the country had no education at all. The new grant system, however, at once stimulated voluntary effort. The first grant had drawn applications in all for the establishment of 236 new schools, and local funds amounting to ^"66,492 6s. had been raised to meet the first grant of ^"20,000. Want of funds compelled the Treasury to leave unbuilt 185 proposed schools to accom- modate 33,189 scholars. The total cost would have been ^"51,729, and the Treasury were asked to give ^24,526 of this. The grant had justified itself. The country was hungering for education, and the rich and well-to-do people were prepared to supplement, in the proportion of three pounds to one pound, any grant made by the Government. The Treasury, with unhappy but characteristic parsimony, only recommended a further grant of ^"20,000. On June 4th, 1834, however, a Select Committee on Education was appointed, and a report, consisting solely of evidence, was issued on August yth. In his evidence before this Committee, Lord Brougham refused to limit elementary education to reading, writing and ciphering. " The elements of historical and geographical knowledge, a little natural history and drawing, with grammar and 77 The Progress of Education in England. singing, I regard as essentially necessary in even the most elementary education." He proposed a definite scheme for the formation of normal schools at London, York, Lancaster and Exeter. He believed that his scheme would give a regular supply of 500 trained teachers every year. From the evidence of Mr. Benjamin Braidley we gather that the Factory Act of 1833 was a complete failure in the neighbourhood of Manchester. The education clauses of the Act were regarded as a grievance. There were not enough schools to take the factory children. The manufacturers considered that it would be better to forbid children to work in factories than to require an education certificate for each child every week. Mr. Braidley's evening schools were a success, but the children were often too tired to think. " I have frequently seen some of them asleep before they have gone home at half-past nine." It is interesting to note that at this date the manufacturers were favourable to the instruction of children, " and many of them the most liberal contributors to our Sunday and other schools." Mr. Braidley, moreover, considered that a compulsory measure of education would not be unpopular among the operatives of Manchester. Meantime the work of the Lords of the Treasury grew apace. The number of applications for grants was so large that the Treasury on September nth, 1835, decided to give an additional preference to those applicants who proposed to supply schools contain- ing two scholars for every pound applied for. The whole system of discrimination was in favour of very large schools, and this unfortunate fact has had a bad effect on English education from that day to this. A 78 National Education from /tfjj to 1870. further discrimination in favour of towns with a popu- lation exceeding 5,000 had, on nth July, 1834, already been made. This was necessary if the Government grant were not increased. There is, how- ever, every reason to believe that the grant would have been increased had the Treasury recommended it. The preference of town to country districts was, of course, an obvious discrimination, but it may be doubted if it was a sound policy. Rural educational inefficiency has greatly complicated the whole problem of national education in the present day. In 1834 Parliament made a grant of ^"10,000 for the erection of model or training schools in England. This grant was left unemployed until 1839, when it was handed over to the great school societies. A similar grant for Scotland was successfully administered by the Treasury without the intervention of any School Society. On March 3rd, 1835, on tne motion of Mr. Roebuck, a further Select Committee of Education was appointed, and this Committee reported with evidence only on August 3rd. The evidence is chiefly valuable as giving a clear account of the social conditions of London at that date. The figures with respect to Manchester are quite unreliable. On May 2ist, 1835, Lord Brougham made his great speech on national education in the House of Lords. He advocated the creation on a large scale of infant schools in the great towns, as the best preventive against the manufacture of the criminal classes. He moved, at the end of this important speech, fourteen resolutions dealing with general defects in national educa- tion, with the foundation of normal schools, and the creation of an Educational Board of Commissioners 79 The Progress of Education in England. possessing power to deal with secondary educational charities. These resolutions were withdrawn on June 3 has raised the lower limit of age for employment to 152 National Education from 1870 to igoj. twelve (with certain exceptions in the case of agricul- tural employment), and that this lower limit has been very generally raised by bye-laws to fourteen years. It is to be feared, however, that these bye-laws are still very gravely evaded, if we may judge by the employment returns of the census of 1901. It is to be hoped that the Employment of Children Act, 1903, will, however, reach a good many of these cases, though it may be doubted if that Act will be able to mitigate the case of very young girls employed in household service. The Act of 1876 has also provisions as to non-attendance that would, of course, apply in areas where no suitable bye-laws have been framed. The Act for the first time made compulsion universal, and not dependent on the policy of a particular School Board. This was necessary in 1876, but to-day bye-laws are universal, for the idea of compulsion has been universally accepted, and so it is rather by virtue of bye-laws than by virtue of the general principle that lies behind these local enactments that attendance is enforced. But it must not be forgotten that the general principle of education as a parental duty was incorporated into the law of England in 1876, and that the Common Law which denied this duty was then, and then only, swept away. The Act of 1876 also dealt with the question of industrial and reformatory schools. Reformatory schools possess a lengthy history. They were founded by voluntary effort in the eighteenth century, and in the earlier years of the nineteenth were recognised by the State as proper places for the reception of youths sen- tenced to transportation, but pardoned with the condition of education in such a school. A State school of this The Progress of Education in England. class was sanctioned by Parliament in 1838, and in part supported by the Treasury. " In a minute of December 2ist, 1846, the Committee of Council on Education offered grants for industrial training, and schools of the reformatory class availed themselves of these privileges until the end of 1857, when those institutions which had begun to receive aid and inspection from the Home Office, were handed over altogether to its consideration." * In 1854 the first Reformatory Act was passed. It enabled the Home Secretary to certify reformatory schools useful and efficient for the purpose of training convicts under the age of sixteen. In the same year a private Act estab- lished the Feltham Industrial School for convicted chil- dren under fourteen. An Act of 1856 gave parents the choice of the Industrial or Reformatory School to which their children should be sent. By an Act of 1866 the Acts relating to Reformatory Schools were con- solidated and amended, and ten years was the lower limit of age fixed for the children sent to those schools, save in certain special cases. The age limit was raised by an Act of 1893 to twelve, and the upper limit to nineteen years. Children sent to Reformatories are, and were always, offenders against the law, but since 1899 it is not necessary that a child should have been previously imprisoned, so that the question of age is the only real distinction between these schools and Industrial Schools. The latter, as we have seen, had been helped by the Education Department since 1846, and these grants were largely extended by Minutes of * See Mr. Graham Balfour's invaluable book, The Educational Systsms of Gnat Britain and Inland. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1903. (and Edition.) '54 National Education from 1870 to 190$. 1856 and 1857. In 1860, however, the schools were transferred to the Home Department. Before this, in 1857, they had received special legislative powers. Chil- dren from the age of quasi-responsibility to fourteen years were liable to be sent to a certified Industrial School if convicted of vagrancy, and if the parents refused to be liable for their good behaviour. An Act of 1861 enabled children under fourteen to be sent to these schools on suspicion, and under twelve if guilty of an offence, but not if previously convicted. Unmanageable children, at the cost and expense of the parents, could also be sent. The Acts were consolidated in 1866, when destitute orphans or the children of convicts became eligible if such a term of irony may be used for these schools. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 gave School Boards power to contribute to or establish Industrial Schools, and to enforce the Act. The Act of 1876, with which we are now dealing, applied to these schools. It enabled a child sent to an Industrial School to live out whilst attending school, but it limited the powers of a School Board to found such schools by requiring the con- sent of the Home Department to any such formation. School Boards weae, however, directed to enforce in their district the Act of 1866, and were empowered to form day Industrial Schools, where a child could obtain "industrial training, elementary education, and one or more meals a day, " at the cost, in most cases, of the parents . These schools, containing some 3,000 children, have proved an unmixed blessing, but it may be said that the whole and necessary system of Reformatory and Industrial Schools is a somewhat bitter commentary on the neglect of edu- cation in England previous to 1870. Doubtless any society *55 The Progress of Education in England. under any circumstances would produce a certain num- ber of children that could only be dealt with in such institutions, but it is certain that social conditions in England throughout the nineteenth century absolutely fostered this class a class that modern educational con- ditions may well be able to reduce to its economic mini- mum. The fact that in all these schools the Code of the Education Department has been in force since 1896, and that class subjects, such as history, are now taught, is hopeful. A special educational system inevit- ably tended to perpetuate the stigma that attached itself from the beginning to these unhappy waste products of our society. We have learnt the uses of waste products in industry ; it is certainly not less important to learn the same uses in relation to the children in Poor Law and semi-penal schools. Some brief reference must be made to Poor Law schools. Vestry and workhouse schools for poor children can be traced back to the late seventeenth century. Some were maintained under the provisions, as we have before noticed, of local Acts ; others were maintained, possibly illegally, out of local rates. Under the new Poor Law, by the Regulations of 1835, provision was directed to be made tor the elementary and religious education of poor children in workhouses for three hours a day. Power to form school districts for Poor Law unions was given to the Poor Law Commissioners in 1844, but this could only be done with the consent of the Guardians, and no child could attend such schools without the consent of the parent. A special grant of ^15,000 for the payment of workhouse teachers was made by the House of Commons in 1846, and its distribution was 156 National Education from 1870 to 1905. placed in the hands of the Committee of Council. This grant was doubled in 1847, and the system of certificated masters encouraged. Moreover, in 1847, the Committee of Council appointed four inspectors of Poor Law schools, and from that date until 1863 the Committee were in full touch with this class of education. From 1863 the Poor Law Board took over the full control of these schools, but the Act of 1876 made out-relief dependent on the provision of elementary education in reading, writing, and arithmetic for the children of the applicant, and directed the Guardians to give such further relief as would secure this. From the year 1878, the standard of education in the Poor Law schools was assimilated to that of the Education Depart- ment. On the whole, however, these schools have had no marked success, and the great barrack district schools, despite great efforts, were formed on a wrong principle. They, like the Reformatory and Industrial Schools, but with less necessity, tended and tend to perpetuate a stigma. Pauper children should be educated with other children, so that they may thereby acquire efficiency, and lose the taint of the pauper environment. This policy is being largely adopted. The Education Act of 1891 offered a financial inducement to public schools to take these, as well as other children, and the Education Act of 1900 enabled Guardians to contribute to the expenses of any public school taking pauper children belonging to the union. One-third of the 18,000 Poor Law children are in public elementary schools, and an effort is being now (1903) made to bring the Poor Law schools up to the level of other schools, by the ranking of Poor Law teachers with other certificated teachers. '57 The Progress of Education in England. This digression has been made in order to show that the general principle of placing all classes of the community even the worst in possession of equal educational opportunities has become in the last quarter of a century the policy of the Legislature. It is the only sound policy, and one that is rapidly securing repayment by results. Some further reference must be made to the important Act of 1876. Section 18 offered a new inducement to parents to keep their children longer at school. It enabled the Education Department to pay for children of, or under, eleven years, who had attained a certain standard, the school fees for a period of three years. The problem of a too brief school life was still facing the Legislature, and it endeavoured to grapple with this evil with a definite step in the direction of free education. Moreover, Parliament felt that the financial difficulties of School Managers and School Boards stood in the way of efficiency. It therefore fundamentally modified the con- ditions of the central grant. It introduced the condition that the Parliamentary grant should not in any year be reduced by reason of its exceeding the other income of the school if the grant did not exceed the amount of seven- teen and sixpence per child in average attendance at the school during the year. It was, however, stipulated that it should not exceed that amount per child, except by the same sum by which the income of the school, derived from voluntary contributions, rates, school fees, endowments, and any source whatever other than the Parliamentary grant, exceeded the said amount per child. Moreover, the very small rural schools were helped by a special annual grant, varying from 10 to ^15, and National Education from 1870 to 1905. this help was extended in 1890 to somewhat larger rural districts. The seventeen-and-sixpenny limit is supposed to have met the needs of the case until 1897, but even with their additional grants both the rural Board schools and the Voluntary schools were extremely inefficient. No part of any Parliamentary grant was applicable to structural purposes, while voluntary subscriptions and small school rates were unable to meet the growing structural and maintenance necessities. One final reference to the Act of 1876 may be made. It created special machinery for the enforcement of school attendance by Inspectors of Factories or Mines, or by School Boards, or by School Attendance Com- mittees appointed, in every school district not within the jurisdiction of a School Board, by the Town Council or Urban Sanitary Authority, or (in the case of a parish) the Board of Guardians. In the educational stage that had been reached in 1876 it was necessary to bring the provisions of the new Law home to every parent, and to prevent the evasion of the Act by parents and employers. Such evasion had rendered the education clauses of the Factory Acts practically valueless, and the future of education depended upon the strict enforcement of the compulsory system. In no other way could the edu- cational deficiency of 1870 the non-attendance of above a million children of school age be met and conquered. We may pass by the Elementary Education Act, 1 880 a machinery Statute of the most valuable kind since it introduced no new principle, and may be content with noting that the Education Code (rSgo) Act, by specifically allowing higher education to be the principal part of the education given in an evening school, gave 159 The Progress of Education in England. substance to the illusion under which the great School Boards were suffering with respect to their educational policy. We must notice more fully the great change in national policy introduced by the Elementary Education Act, 1891. It enacted that there should be paid, out of moneys provided by Parliament under the regulations of the Education Department, a fee-grant in aid of the cost of elementary education in England and Wales, at the rate of ten shillings a year for each child of the number of children over three and under fifteen years of age in average attendance at any public elementary day school, the managers of which were willing to accept the same, and where the average rate of fees did not exceed ten shillings per head in average attendance on January ist, 1891. In such schools, if the fee-grant (to be reckoned as school pence) was accepted, no fees, except in certain cases with the express sanction of the Depart- ment, were to be charged for children over three and under fifteen years of age. Where the average rate of fees was in excess of ten shillings per child, such fees could still be charged as would, with the IDS. fee grant, secure the school from financial loss through the new principle. No school erected in or after the year 1891 could charge any fees at all. The result of the Act has been a rapid diminution in the number of fee-paying schools. There are now about 20,116 public elementary schools, con- taining 5,760,659 children. In only 2,659 of these schools, containing 644,275 children, are fees paid, and of these children only 141,756 pay as much as threepence a week. It is, however, a somewhat remarkable com- mentary on the extraordinary increase of education since 1870 to note that there are now almost as many children 1 60 National Education from 1870 to 1903. paying fees as were paying fees and reaping a benefit therefrom inefficient State-aided schools in 1870. The freeing of education was a great departure, and it is even yet too early to measure its effect. It is the logical complement of compulsory education, and is perhaps open to the same ethical objection namely, that it tends to lessen the innate sense of parental responsibility. The facts that exist in great societies cannot, however, and unfortunately, be dislodged by considerations that obtain in the realm of ethics, and since social conditions had obliterated the sense of parental responsibility to some considerable extent in the class that earned low wages, it was necessary to make the responsibility statutory. This logically involved free education, though it may be doubted if the education is not really dearer than before, for it appears to have involved perhaps only temporarily in the great towns a disproportionate increase in rent, based upon the increase of rates paid by the landlord. In order to bring home to the parent the fact that he is still in reality paying for the education of his children, and is person- ally fulfilling his responsibilities, it would seem desirable to devise such an alteration in the machinery of the rating system as would make him realise that he is a ratepayer. When we reach the year 1897 we find that the general problem of national education is again presenting, in an urgent form, a particular case for solution. As we have seen, when dealing with the period 1835 to 1870, the rural schools offered difficulties that neither the ingenuity of Mr. Lowe, nor the earnestness of Mr. Forster, could meet. It was these schools, indeed, that rendered the 161 M The Progress of Education in England. Act of 1870 necessary. It is conceivable that special Legislation might have dealt separately with the great cities, but the parlous condition of the rural schools called for general intervention. The threepenny rate of which Mr. Forster spoke was the rate that was expected to be the salvation of the rural districts. Section 97 of the Act of 1870 had provided that if this rate for any school district produced less than 20, or less than 73. 6d. per child in average attendance, the School Board should be entitled to a Parliamentary grant that would make the rate up to ^"20, or 75. 6d. per child, as the case might be. In 1897 the Education Department discovered the well-known fact that necessitous School Boards and necessitous Voluntary Schools abounded in the rural districts. In entirely rural districts the School Boards were even more necessitous, starved, and inefficient than the Voluntary Schools. Like the daughters of the horse-leech, they cried " More, more " ; and with a measure of success. By the Elementary Education Act, 1897, it was provided that the sum of 75. 6d. per child should be increased by the sum of fourpence for every complete penny by which the School Board rate for the year exceeded threepence, with the stipulation that the sum of 73. 6d. should not thereby be increased beyond i6s. 6d. It was supposed that this would meet the case of the starved Board schools. The case of the voluntary schools was met in a different fashion. The Voluntary Schools Act, 1897, repealed the " seventeen and sixpenny limit," and thus abolished the relation of the Parliamentary grant to the income ot the school. The grant was to be made on the merits of the case, and not on the philanthropic merits of the sub- 162 National Education from 1870 to 1903. scribers. The policy of bribed philanthropy was thus abandoned, and the doctrine of 1833 finally consigned to the criticism of history. The doctrine of utilitarianism in education was, indeed, at last abandoned. The Voluntary schools were, moreover, exempted from rates, thus re-introducing the principle that Queen Elizabeth had established ; and an aid grant of 53. per scholar was added to the previous boons. Thus a real attempt was made to place both the rural Board schools and Voluntary schools upon a sound financial basis. In principle it was not unlike the attempts made by Mr. Lowe and others to create a Revised Code that would meet what proved to be impossible cases. The policy of the old Revised Code was perhaps not much more helpless than the policy of 1897. The growth of educational requirements made it as impossible to deal with the case of rural schools by doles as it had been to deal with these cases by ingenious variations of the old Code. It is time, and this is a suitable place, to turn back, and look at the results of the new educational system. The following quotation from Mr. R. E. Hughes' useful book, " The Making of Citizens : A Study in Compara- tive Education" (1902), is a valuable summary. "In 1870 there were 8,281 schools, all voluntary, now there are 20,100 ; there was accommodation then for 1,878,584 scholars, now there is room for 6,544,092. The children enrolled then constituted 7-66 per cent, of the estimated population, they now constitute 177 per cent. The average attendance then was 68-06 per cent, of the number enrolled, the percentage now is 82-06 [87^ per cent, of the children over seven years enrolled]. In 1876 three- fourths of the schools taught their scholars singing by 163 The Progress of Education in England. "ear" only, now less than one-seventh do so. In 1876 there were over 200,000 half-timers, in 1900 there were only 89,036. In 1870, of the teachers only 12,467 were certificated, now 64,038 are. In 1870 there were only 1,262 assistant teachers, now there are 32,436 ; there were then, too, 14,304 pupil teachers, there are now 29,393. In 1891 the number of school banks was 2,629, and of libraries 4,967, now the respective numbers are 7,133 and 8,114. Finally, whereas in 1870 the sum dis- persed by the central authority to the schools was ^562,61 1, the annual grant now amounts to ten times as much. There has been progress in every direction but one, and that is in the increasing number of un- qualified teachers who are entering the schools. In 1876 there were only 543 such persons, now there are 17,512." Fortunately the increase in pupil teachers is only absolute, and not relative. The percentage of pupil teachers is slowly falling, and the disappearance of this class will be witnessed by many educationalists with satisfaction. They are neither efficient nor cheap, and qualified assistant teachers are in every way more satis- factory. It is obvious that the younger children are, the more highly trained should the teacher be. A child is stamped for life with the character of its earliest training. The difficulty of the position is the temptation to employ "Article 68 " teachers young women over 18 approved by the Government inspectors, but without any standard of training. Such teachers may be very good, but rarely are, and form a distinct blot on our elementary system, though probably the blot is not more harmful than the very general employment of untrained teachers in the 164 National Education from 1870 to 1905. best secondary schools. The employment of uncer- tificated adults has rapidly increased in the last ten years, and more than counterbalances the good resulting from the decline in the pupil teacher system. Want of funds has been the cause of this increase, and it is sincerely hoped that the extension of the rating system to all schools will remedy a very great evil. Fortunately, the employment of certificated teachers has also rapidly increased in the same decade, and the time will probably soon be reached when there will be no uncertificated teachers in the national elementary schools. The same hope can hardly yet extend to the higher secondary schools. " It must be frankly admitted," says Mr. A. C. Benson in his volume " The Schoolmaster," " that the intellectual standard maintained at the English public schools is low ; and whit is more serious, I do not see any evidence that it is tending to become higher." The reason is perhaps not far to seek. Those who control the curriculum and the teaching in these schools are, like Mr. Benson, " somewhat sceptical about the training of teachers." "The fact is," he tells us, "that the boys who have been through a public school themselves have practically been trained as teachers as far as training can be given. They have seen innumerable lessons given, and they can to a certain extent discriminate methods." It is this position that was at the root of bad teaching and bad results in the elementary schools, and it is at the root of the alleged low intellectual standard of the public schools ; though many of us may be inclined to think that that standard is higher than Mr. Benson's interesting volume would lead us to believe. The middle class endowed schools discovered the need for trained teaching at their 165 The Progress of Education in England. reformation after 1869, and it is a growing practice in such schools to employ highly-trained teachers. Moreover, recent Legislation has aimed at procuring a higher standard both in teachers and in teaching in all secondary schools. The Board of Education Act, 1899, provided for the establishment by Order in Council of a Consultative Committee, consisting, 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 (a) framing, with the approval of the Board of Education, regulations for a register of teachers to be formed and kept in the manner provided by Order in Council ; provided that the register so formed shall con- tain the names of the registered teachers, arranged in alphabetical order, with an entry in respect to each teacher showing the date of his registration, and giving a brief record of his qualifications and experience ; and for the purpose of (b) advising the Board of Education on any matter referred to the Committee by the Board. By an Order in Council of 7th August, 1900 (which came into operation on October ist, 1900), a Consultative Committee of eighteen educationalists, including two women, was appointed, and this Committee at once framed the regula- tions for a register of teachers. By a further Order in Council of March 6th, 1902, as modified and altered by an Order of nth August, 1902, it was provided that for the purpose of forming and keeping such register of teachers, there should be established a registration authority, called the Teachers' Registration Council, to consist (provisionally) of twelve members, six to be appointed by the President of the Board of Education, and one each by the Conference of Headmasters, the 166 National Education from 1870 to 1903. Incorporated Association of Headmasters, the Associa- tion of Headmistresses, the College of Preceptors, the Teachers' Guild of Great Britain and Ireland, and the National Union of Teachers. The duty of this Council is to establish and keep a register of teachers in accordance with the regulations, framed by the Consulta- tive Committee and approved by the Board of Education in the schedule to the Order. These regulations provide, in addition to the statutory alphabetical list of teachers, two columns or classes, known as Column A and Column B. Column A contains the names of all persons for the time being recognised by the Board as certificated teachers under the Code of Regulations for Elementary Day Schools. Column B contains the names of all persons who have satisfied certain conditions of registration ; namely (i) that he or she has obtained a degree granted by some University of the United Kingdom, or one of certain diplomas or certificates, or has attained some other approved standard of general education ; and (2) has undergone a course of training for secondary teaching, and can show other evidence of a knowledge of the theory and practice of secondary teaching, or has been engaged for ths three years preceding the application as a teacher at a " recognised " secondary School. Special provision is made for the registration of existing secondary teachers between now and March 6th, 1906. The Board of Education now makes it a rule to insert in new schemes for endowed secondary schools, a provision obliging the headmaster or headmistress to be registered in Column B. After March, 1906, a teacher cannot be registered unless he or she possesses, in addition to a University course (or its equivalent), a knowledge of the theory and 167 The Progress of Education in England. practice of teaching, evidenced by certificates obtained in the course of a year of training, and also a year of practical teaching. Registration in the teachers' register is effected by the Teachers' Registration Council, and all communications on the subject should be addressed to the Registrar, Teachers' Registration Council, 49 and 50, Parliament Street, London. A Memorandum of the Board of Education of January, 1903, pointed out that service at a recognised school for various periods is among the con- ditions prescribed for the registration of teachers in Column B of the Register. The Board intimated that it would recognise such schools as are efficient for the purposes in respect of which recognition is required, and that such schools would be recognised for periods of not more than three years as occasions for recognition arose, whether through the application of a teacher for regis- tration or otherwise. The Board will, either formally or informally, test the efficiency of the school. It will clearly be an advantage to a secondary school to claim recognition, and this fact will probably induce many assistant masters in the interests of their schools to apply for registration. The Act of 1899, however, offers to secondary schools other opportunities of attaining efficiency. Section three provides that the Board of Education may, by their officers, or, after taking the advice ot the Consultative Committee, by any University or other organisation, inspect any school supplying secondary education and desiring to be so inspected, for the purpose of ascertaining the character of the teaching in the school and the nature of the provisions made for the teaching and health of the 168 National Education from 1870 to 1905. scholars, and may so inspect the school on such terms as may be fixed by the Board of Education with the consent of the Treasury. The Council of any county or county borough may, and frequently does, out of any money applicable to technical education, pay or contribute to the expenses of inspecting any secondary school within their county or borough. The Board of Education have issued rules regulating the system of inspection. Two months' notice must be given to the Board. The in- spection will cover the administration of the school, the condition of the school buildings (including boarding houses) and the education given throughout the school. The minimum charge (for a school with not more than fifty scholars) is ^"5, and it rises at the rate of 2s. for every scholar over fifty scholars. Where there are over 400 scholars the charge will be is. for each scholar over 400, and where a school has a School of Science Department (now known as a Secondary Day School, Division A), the scholars in that department are charged at the rate of is. a head, with a minimum for the school of ^"5. The Board of Education anticipates great results from this system of inspection, and, as we shall see, such results may well arise from the new secondary system created by the Acts of 1902 and 1903. Whether the great secondary schools will adopt the system of inspection may be doubted, but all other secondary schools will, during the next few years, be compelled by the pressure of competition to come within it. That the boarding houses of the great public schools require inspection is generally admitted, but there seems to be no demand for such inspection either by parents, govern- ing bodies, or house masters, nor indeed for the general 169 The Progress of Education in England. inspection of such schools. In these circumstances, they, unlike the Universities, will stand outside from the national system. The question of the training of elementary teachers has led to this necessary digression on the general problem of training and inspection. Before passing on to current legislation it is, however, desirable to refer to some other aspects of the great primary system. We must notice first the remarkable fact of the rapid increase in the number of women teachers. Three-quarters of the total number of teachers are now women and girls, and more than three-fifths of the certificated teachers are women. The fact is not one that need be regretted if the " Article 68 " woman teacher could be eliminated from the system. Certificated women teachers have a peculiar gift of teaching often not shared by men, and this especially appears in the teaching of very young children. Some reference must be made as" to training colleges. There are thirty-two Church of England colleges with 2,916 students, two undenominational with 269 students, six British with 590 students, two Wesleyan with 236 students, and three Roman Catholic with 274 students. These are all resident colleges, but they can be attended by day students who, in the case of the denominational colleges, are protected by the conscience clause. There are only 182 such students. In addition to the residential colleges there are 19 day training colleges which are unde- nominational, and in 1902 were training 1,607 teachers. The Government make an annual grant of ^"50 for men and ^"35 for women in the residential colleges, and ^35 and ^"30 for men and women respectively in the day colleges. These colleges do not supply a sufficiency of teachers, 170 National Education from 1870 to igoj. and the Nonconformists have expressed a great sense of grievance at their inability to attend at the Church colleges without conforming. On the other hand, it is replied that the Church of England founded these numerous training colleges with the distinct under- standing that the sectarian character of the college was to be maintained, and that the various Nonconformist bodies could in like manner have multiplied their own colleges. Into the merits of the dispute it is not the purpose of this book to enter. The fact remains that the number of the existing colleges is insufficient. The Education Act, 1902, has, therefore, given the local education authorities power to establish, or aid, existing undenominational colleges. It is to be hoped that this will reduce or, perhaps, extinguish the grievance brought forward by the Nonconformists. It is necessary to turn to the financial position both generally and with respect to particular classes of schools. This will throw open the way to the Act of 1902. The supply grants for the salaries and expenses of the Board of Education, and of the various establish- ments connected therewith, including sundry grants in aid, tor the year ending March 3ist, 1904, were in all ^11,249,805. The identical supply grants for the year ending 3ist March, 1901, amounted to ^"9,585,099. The great increase in three years is mainly due to the new impetus of the Act of 1902. The advance on the position since 1870 is very great, but not greater, nor even perhaps so great, as the exigencies of the position demanded and demands. Mr. Hughes gives us some interesting information about rating and other local sources of income. "The rate is at or above a 171 The Progress of Education in England. shilling in the pound in 20 per cent, of the English boroughs, 17 percent, of the English parishes, in 8-7 per cent, of the Welsh boroughs, and in 23-4 per cent, of the Welsh parishes. The system is capricious and often harsh. It has all the vices that any system of rating might reasonably be expected to possess. The amount per child thus raised by local rates of course varies according to the locality, but the average amounts are as follows : For English counties, 195. 4d. per child ; for Welsh counties, igs. 8d. per child ; for English county boroughs, 318. 3d. per child ; for Welsh county boroughs, 2OS. 4d. per child." Mr. Forster's forecast was thus singularly beside the mark. What rates did for the Board schools, fees and voluntary subscriptions were sup- posed to do for the Voluntary schools. In 1900 fees, books, &c., produced (per scholar) is. 4d. for Church schools, 45. lod. for Wesleyan schools, yd. for Roman Catholic schools, 2S. i id. for British and other Voluntary schools. In the Church schools voluntary subscriptions produced (per scholar) 6s. yd., Wesleyan 35. 2d., Roman Catholic 6s. 2d., British and other Voluntary schools ys. id. Thus the total income to set against rates were in these four cases per scholar ys. nd., 8s., 6s. gd., IDS. The Volun- tary schools were, in fact, ten to twelve shillings per scholar poorer than the Board schools, and special grants from the Treasury became necessary. Even with these grants on the average there was us. 3d. more spent on each scholar in a Board school than in a Voluntary school. Ten shillings of this went in better teaching. The one school could afford certificated teachers ; the others had to;be satisfied with "Article 68 " teachers. The Voluntary schools, thus handicapped, maintained, it is generally 172 National Education from 1870 to 1903. admitted, a better standard of efficiency than would at first sight seem possible. Every effort was made to keep these schools going. There was a double inducement in the " single school " districts. In these rural districts experience proved that the introduction of a School Board not only abolished the denominational teaching, which is, of course, dear to denominationalists, at any rate in rural districts, but it did so without securing more efficiency. In these districts the rate produced so little money that the new schools were as starved as the old, and the Act of 1 897, which aimed at helping these rural Board schools, was as ineffective as the Voluntary School Act of the same year. In fact, by the year 1 902 the position showed that the compromise of 1870, as far as small rural schools went, had entirely failed to secure efficiency. There were, in the year 1902, 7,470 parishes, each possessing only one elementary school. Of these, 5,592 were National or Church of England Voluntary schools ; 418 were undenominational Voluntary schools; 62 were British Voluntary schools ; 37 were Wesleyan, and 35 Roman Catholic Voluntary schools ; and 1,326 were Board schools. On the whole the Board schools appear to have been less efficient than the Voluntary schools, for while they were equally starved, they roused less local enterprise and enthusiasm. Legislation was evidently needed, and, as it happened, the Act of 1899 (which had amalgamated the Science and Art Department and the Education Department, had endowed the new Board of Education with the educa- tional powers of the Charity Commissioners, and had provided some of the machinery of secondary education), combined with the crisis created by the Cockerton Case The Progress of Education in England. (which, as we have seen, had limited the powers of the great School Boards), and combined with the secondary powers obtained under various Acts by Borough and County Councils, supplied an occasion for general legisla- tion. The time had come for creating the machinery of a great educational system, dealing both with primary and secondary schools a system that would draw unto itself and reinvigorate rural education, one that would give equal educational opportunities of the widest kind to youth of both sexes throughout England and Wales. That, at any rate, is the aspect in which the Act of 1902 presents itself to educationalists. To the Churches other considerations presented themselves, with which it is impossible to deal here, though we may be permitted to hope that the Act at work will not operate so injuriously to the Nonconformist interests as has been prophesied, and that where any injury does occur in practice, the Legislature will lose no time in remedying the evil. It is essential to the future of the country that sectarian bitterness be allayed, and all practical grievances removed ; the children have everything to gain by the re- conciliation of the Churches. The logical development of the various steps that we have traced was to replace the School Boards by the County Councils (and County Borough Councils), and thus make the local administrative authority an intermediary in the case of all (and not only secondary and certain forms of primary) grades of educa- tion between the schools and the Board of Education. There was the possibility, of course, of reversing the process by taking from the local administrative authority all its educational powers, and of handing these powers over to the School Boards. There were (apart altogether 174 National Education from 1870 to 1903. from the political bitternesses, with which, of course, this book has nothing to do) two objections to this course. Many parochial School Boards in rural districts were extremely inefficient, and the local administrative authority alone had power and influence enough to turn inefficiency into efficiency. Doubtless School Boards for whole counties could have been formed, but such Boards, unlike the great School Boards of the towns, would have started without even the educational experience of the County or Borough Councils. It was, therefore, a reasonable pro- posal in rural districts to extend the powers of the exist- ing county educational authority by giving it control over the inefficient rural schools, whether Board or Voluntary. This reasoning did not apply to the great town School Boards. They had unrivalled experience of elementary and higher grade education, and had done work that has a definite place in the history of English education. They and their local managers know, as none others could know, the elementary educational needs of great congested areas. Not unnaturally these Boards would have welcomed the addition of statutory powers in relation to secondary education, and the new work would have been performed with the same zeal as the old. On the other hand, these School Boards had set before them a secondary educational ideal which most educationalists condemned, while the true functions of secondary educa- tion were worthily realised by the County and Borough Councils especially by the secondary educa- tional authority that had been created for London by the London County Council. Statutory limitations had necessarily limited the outlook of the School Boards as to The Progress of Education in England. secondary education, while on the other hand the only know- ledge that the County and Borough Councils had of primary education was of the primary education given in the sub- sidised secondary schools. It was, therefore, a difficult question to decide whether the School Boards should absorb the powers of the local administrative authority, or whether the reverse process should take place. The balance was at last cast in favour of the local administrative authority, from the fact that it was almost necessary in rural districts for the local adminis- trative authority to be the educational authority ; from the further fact that it is, in theory at any rate, very desirable to make national education a thing indissolubly built into the structure of national life, and that this is more likely to be attained by making education a function of the immemorial system of Local Government that had been revived by the Acts of 1888 and 1894, than by entrusting the work to elected bodies standing outside the Local Government system. Such bodies ad hoc bodies as they are barbarously called are compelled by their nature to regard education and the cost of education apart from the general facts, and the general administra- tion, and the general cost, of Local Government. That, it was argued, with considerable show of reason, was good neither for education nor Local Government. It was, therefore, decided to bring the education of the great towns under the local administrative authority, and this had the not unimportant advantage of creating a symmetrical system for the whole of England and Wales. That the Board schools should have felt injured was inevitable, for their labours and the results of their labours had been great ; had the decision gone the other 176 National Education from 1870 to 1903. way the County and Borough Councils would also have been bitterly aggrieved; for they, too, had done a great, though a less noticeable work. The disappoint- ment of the Board schools will certainly be justified if elementary education in the large towns becomes less efficient, and perhaps this fact will prove a great stimulus to the new elementary educational authorities. The Bill roused bitter opposition from another direction. It was alleged that it gave undue, and indeed improper, help to the elementary denominational or Voluntary schools. Two chief complaints were levelled against the Bill. The first was that it gave the Voluntary schools Rate aid without placing that aid under the complete control of popularly-elected bodies ; the second inveighed against the fact that, despite the Rate aid, denominational considerations would decide all appointments to head-teacherships in the Voluntary schools. These facts were and are a grievance. The denominational reply was based upon history. It was admitted that were an educational system being started ab initio these grievances would not exist, but it was alleged, with truth, that the Government could not start a new system. The cost, and the disruptive tendencies involved, rendered it impossible. The existing Voluntary school system was necessary, in the circumstances, to any national scheme. The owners and managers of these schools claimed assistance out of local rates, on the ground that they were doing work which, if the Voluntary schools did not exist, would have to be done by new Government schools. Moreover, they refused to alter the denominational character of the schools, as this would amount to confiscation. Thus, on the one hand, 177 N The Progress of Education in England. it was alleged that a fundamental constitutional principle would be vitally infringed by the giving of Rate aid with- out complete public control of the rate fund, while on the other hand it was alleged that the giving of such control would be an invasion of the constitutional rights of private property. Moreover, the allegations that the unconstitutional handing over of a rate fund to a quasi-public body would involve the further injustice of excluding persons of particular denominations from the headship of particular schools and from participation in the benefits of particular training colleges, and would (despite the conscience clause) bring children of one denomination into the contagious atmosphere of another, were answered by the allegation that the denominationalists had, for more than thirty years, suffered from the fact that in the Board schools children were continually subjected to undenominationalising tendencies, which drew them away from the faith of their fathers ; that the hardship as to the head-teacherships and the training colleges could not be imputed as a fault or objection to the denominations, for had it not been for the self-sacrifice of the denominations these schools and colleges, with their great record of noble work, would not have existed. In fact, the denominations asserted that they ought not to be punished for having done the work that the Government had neglected to do. To which it was replied: "This may be all true, but it does not affect our position ; we shall be wronged as ratepayers, while our consciences at every turn will suffer wrong by the application of Rate aid to religious teaching." In answer to this it was asserted that in fact the Rate aid and State 178 National Education from 1870 to igoj. aid would be applied only to secular education. Volun- tary subscriptions and endowments would be applied in the future, as in the past, to the support of the religious teaching ; moreover, these subscriptions and endowments were also to maintain the school buildings. In return for that and for the use of the buildings the denominations claimed the right to teach their creeds (subject to the conscience clause) in the schools. To which it was again replied that the conscience clause is no protection against a denominational atmosphere, and this was met by the retort that that presumably was the reason why children in the Board schools were not protected by a conscience clause from that undenominational atmos- phere which, it was alleged, tended to undermine true religion. So the long, tedious, and bitter controversy pursues its way. It recalls to the lawyer those " mutual altercations between the plaintiff and defendant," which of old time constituted pleadings. The declara- tion, the defence or denial, the licentia loquendi with a view to peace, the view of the thing in question, the prayer oyer, the prayer in aid, the voucher, pleas dilatory, or pleas to the heart of the action by confession, or by denial on the general issue, or on a special plea, the plaintiffs replication, traversing or confessing and avoiding the plea, the defendant's rejoinder, the plaintiffs sur-rejoinder, the defendant's rebutter, the plaintiffs sur-rebutter, they are all here and more also. The decision of history between the parties may well be awaited with curiosity. The conflict seems to be the clash of sound constitutional principles one with another, and to the non-partisan both sides seem to be 179 The Progress of Education in England. right from their own particular and legitimate point of view. The party that from the lawyer's point of view is wrong is the tertium quid, which, under the name of passive resistance, refuses to accept the decision (always open to revision) of Parliament on the question. The passive resister's reply to the lawyer's condemnation is not without weight : " If we accept without protest a law that we believe to be unconstitutional, we not only violate our conscience, but all chance of revision is gone. In passive resistance we find a weapon that has historical sanction in controversies of this type." That may be so, but it must be remembered that the use of the same weapon in support of denominational teaching might be justified later by the same argument in the event of Parliament withdrawing the protection given to denominational teaching by the Act of 1902. The refusal to pay education rates on conscientious grounds, first by one party and then by the other, would certainly be very bad for education at large. All men have by nature a conscientious objection to paying rates, but the good of the country at large demands that in this matter conscience should be kept in check. It has been thought desirable to state, with the same brevity and detachment as has been applied to earlier controversies, the case for and against the legislation of 1902, in so far as the religious question is concerned. Doubtless each reader has his own opinions on the controversy. It is hoped that all the more salient opinions have been reflected here, though no analysis can suggest those dim inherited recollections of ancient wrongs and rights that lie behind, and perhaps un- consciously inspire, much that is undesirable in this 1 80 National Education from i8jo to 1903. controversy. Before dealing with the question, we went somewhat fully into the character of the changes in the organisation of national education that the principles of the Act of 1902 would involve. Before passing on to a detailed account of the Act, it may finally be remarked that the practical or approximate solutions of all these various questions must be found in the schools themselves. However good or however indifferent the Legislation of 1902 may be, matters comparatively little compared with the honesty, the learning, the administrative capacity, and the enthusiasm with which the machinery is worked. If and where these qualities are brought, by teachers, parents, and educational authorities, to bear on the educational problem the fears of both parties as to the future will be, must be happily disappointed. "A plague on both your houses ! " many an educationalist is tempted to exclaim to-day, but he is restrained by the intense sincerity and earnestness with which both parties are inspired. To bring that sincerity and earnestness to bear on practical education is the hope of the educationalist. The Education Act, 1902, offers a solution for all these many controversies, and for the many ills from which national education is still suffering. The measure of its success can only be known after some years of practical working of the new machinery. We are now in a position from our knowledge of the various movements that led up to the Act to pass from the principles of the Act to its machinery. The Act (2 Edw. 7, c. 42) is divided into four parts. The first deals with the local education authorities, the second with higher education, the third with elementary education, and the 181 The Progress of Education in England. fourth with the establishment of education committees, and financial and other questions of a miscellaneous character. The first schedule to the Act provides for the regulation of the proceedings of education committees and bodies- of managers ; the second deals with the transfer of property and officers to the new education authorities and the adjustment of property and liabilities ; the third provides the necessary modification of preceding educational Legislation ; while the fourth schedule repeals a large number of previous Statutes or sections of Statutes, the place of which has been taken by the provisions of the new Act. In pursuance of the first three sections of the Statute, 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 ; the local education authority for higher education is the County Council or the County Borough Council, but in the case of all non- county boroughs and urban districts, the Borough or District Council may supplement the work of the County Council by supplying or aiding the supply, within their financial limits, of higher education. The control of the County Council over the elementary education in the county is, as we have seen, excluded by other authorities in certain boroughs and urban districts. But we must notice that in the non-county boroughs with a population under 10,000, and in urban districts with a population under 20,000, the County Council, in addition to its authority over higher education, controls elementary education. This system is not symmetrical, 182 National Education from 1870 to 1903. but seems necessary in order to meet the unsymmetrical grouping of population. It is useful to note certain facts concerning the various classes of educational authorities. In England and Wales (apart from London) there are 61 counties and 69 county boroughs ; there are 138 boroughs with a popula- tion that exceeds 10,000, and there are 63 urban districts with a population exceeding 20,000. The population is determined by the census of 1901. County Councils are creatures of the Local Government Act, ifc88; county boroughs (which must contain at least 50,000 inhabitants) of the same Act, and of the Municipal Corporacions Act, 1882. Both County Councils and the Councils of county boroughs include co-opted alder- men, and are thus not altogether directly representative of the statutory electorates. This fact, however, has not as yet drawn forth any complaints from those who advocate direct representation as the only proper principle to apply to a body entrusted with the duty of applying rates to educational purposes. Non-county boroughs are the creatures of the same two Acts, while Urban District Councils were created by the Local Govern- ment Act, 1894. The Act of 1902 having created these 331 education authorities, goes on to deal with higher 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 con- sultation with the Board of Education, to supply or aid the supply of education other than elementary, and to promote the general co-ordination of all forms of educa- tion, and for that purpose shall apply all or so much as they deem necessary of the residue under section one of 183 The Progress of Education in England. the Local Taxation (Customs and Excise) Act, 1890, and shall carry forward for the like purpose any balance thereof which may remain unexpended." Thus the Act of 1902 brought the new secondary system, with which we have dealt at length above, into definite and permanent relationship with the revised national scheme of elementary education. Section two of the Act of 1902 was in effect the keystone which finally drew to- gether all the forces of the arch that was intended to bridge the stream of ignorance. For this section went beyond the assimilation of the existing secondary with the existing primary system. It gave the local education authorities new rating powers for purely secondary and other higher educational purposes. County Borough Councils were enabled to make any necessary rate for higher education, but the County Councils were (apart from the consent of the Local Government Board to a higher rate) limited to a rate for this purpose of twopence in the pound, or possibly threepence in cases where the County Council takes up the powers relinquished by a non-county borough or an urban district uuder Section 20, with respect to the supply of education other than elementary. The Councils of these districts can, for the purpose, make a rate of one penny in the pound, and can relinquish this right, it would seem, in favour of the County Council. The Act gives some slight suggestion as to, or possibly suggests a limitation on, the wide meaning of higher education. It is provided that the local education authority, in exercising its power under Part II. of the Act, must have regard to any existing supply of efficient schools or colleges, and to any steps already taken for the 184 National Education from 1870 to 1903. purposes of higher education under the Technical Instruction Acts of 1889 and 1891 repealed by this Act. Sections 22 and 23 suggests a further aspect of higher education. It includes in "the power to supply, or aid the supply, of education other than elementary. . . A power to train teachers, and to supply or aid the supply of any education except where that education is given at a public elementary school," and power to make provision for the supply of higher education outside the area of the Council " in cases where they consider it expedient to do so in the interests of their area, and shall include power to provide or assist in providing scholarships for, and to pay or assist in paying the fees of students ordinarily resident in the area of the Council at schools or colleges or hostels within or without that area." It will be observed that these provisions deal in a skilful way with various difficulties which have been already considered above. A considerable grievance had been founded on the fact that the training colleges were in the main denominational, and refused residence to students who would not conform. The Church of England felt it impossible to yield on this point, as the object of her training colleges was to produce conforming Church teachers, and though, of course, grants to such colleges could have been made conditional on the with- drawal of a conformity condition, yet it was felt that to do so, in the face of the intense opposition, would have destroyed one of the efficient sources of teaching supply, and would have done an injustice to vested interests that had been earned by great services to the State. All other denominational training colleges are, of course, in the same position, but they are greatly outnumbered 185 The Progress of Education in England. by the colleges of the Established Church. An effort was, therefore, made by the Act of 1902 to remedy the Nonconformist grievance by giving the local authority power to supply undenominational training colleges. The authority has also, under Section 23 of the Act, power to aid colleges already provided, whether denomina- tional or not, and to pay scholars' fees in such colleges. In places of higher education, including training colleges, receiving a grant from or maintained by a local education authority, the religious aspect of the teaching is made the subject of special provisions, and a carefully drafted conscience clause protects all classes of pupils. In order, moreover, to make the power to give higher education applicable to all classes (even the poorest) of students, Section 23 provides the local education authority with power to supply vehicles, or the payment of reasonable travelling expenses, for teachers or children attending school or college when- ever the Council considers such provision or payment required by the circumstances of their area or of any part of that area. It must be noted that this power of supplying means of transit applies to elementary as well as to higher schools, and is designed to meet the case of schools that supply the needs of large or scattered areas, and of children who are too far from a school to come within the compulsory clauses of the Act of 1876, or the bye-laws under the Education Acts. The fact that the Act enables the local education authority "after consultation with the Board of Education, to supply or aid the supply of education other than elementary, and to promote the general co-ordination of all forms of education," makes it appear certain that the local authority 1 86 National Education from 1870 to 1903. could pay for the education of suitable pupils at any English University. If this is so, it is a revival of an old practice, for during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was not an uncommon practice for a local body to pay out of the rates for the whole or part of the University course of certain promising pupils. The famous Dr. Richard Busby was helped by the West- minster Vestry in this way. These provisions as to higher education solve also another problem that which became ripe with the decision in JZ. v. Cockevton. The Act definitely states (section 22) that the expression "elementary school" shall not include any school carried on as an evening school under the regulations of the Board of Education, and that the power to provide instruction under the Elementary Education Acts, 1870 to 1900, shall, save in certain special cases, be limited to the provision in a public elementary school of instruction given under the regulations of the Board of Education to scholars who, at the close of the school year, will be not more than sixteen years of age. Thus the Act retains the higher elementary school, but insists on its retaining the elementary form. The local education authority will not be able to continue, as a part of elementary educa- tion, the science and art schools and classes, to which the decision in R. v. Cockerton applies, nor will it be able to continue, as a part of elementary education, the night schools, advanced or otherwise. All advanced work must be dealt with as secondary or higher work. The night schools, the science and art schools and classes, the very advanced elementary schools, will dis- appear, as they ought to disappear, from the realm 187 The Progress of Education in England. primary education, and they will reappear, as they ought to reappear, as part of the realm of secondary or technical education, stamped with the definite stamp of advanced education, and co-ordinated with the existing secondary schools. Dil/etanttsm will thus cease to be associated with primary education, and the present harmful competition between the endowed secondary schools and the rate-aided secondary schools will give place to healthy and equal competition. At least, this is what ought to happen, and this is what can happen under the provisions of the Act of 1902. Whether it will happen depends upon the capacity of the new educational authorities to equal the surprising and admirable energy of the great School Boards which they succeed. This transformation takes place by virtue of section 5 of the Act of 1902. This section provides that the local education authority shall throughout their area have the powers and duties of a School Board and School Attend- ance Committees, under the Elementary Education Acts, 1870 to 1900, and any other Acts, including local Acts, and shall also be responsible for and have the control of all secular instruction in public elementary schools not provided by them, and that School Boards and School Attendance Committees shall be abolished. We see that this provision still keeps up the old division of schools. We have our old friends with new faces. The Board schools become "provided" schools; the voluntary schools become the " non-provided " schools. All schools become in effect, as far as secular education goes, County or Borough Schools, and will be known by these names. The Act goes on to declare that the provided schools are of two classes those provided by a County Council, 1 88 National Education from 1870 to 1903. and those provided by a Borough or Urban District Council. The former are in each case to have a body of managers, consisting of a number of managers, not ex- ceeding four, appointed by the County Council, together with a number, not exceeding two, appointed by the minor local authority, name'ly, the Council of any borough or urban district, or the Parish Council, or (where there is no Parish Council) by the parish meeting of any parish which appears, in the judgment of the County Council, to be served by that school. In the case of schools provided by a Borough or Urban District Council, such Council may, if they think fit, appoint for any school provided by them, a body of managers, consisting of such number of managers as they may determine. These provisions as to the management of provided schools were not extended in their integrity to the non-provided schools. The trustees or owners of these Voluntary schools declined under any circumstances to place the entire control of a school that had not been provided out of the rates in the sole hands of popularly elected repre- sentatives of the ratepayers. No one appears to have suggested the creation of a managing body representing the ratepayers, but bound by contract with the old trustees or managers to maintain in perpetuity the religious or denominational characteristic of the school. It could have been provided in the contract that in the event of Parliament attempting to destroy the denomina- tional character of the school at any future period, the status quo ante bcllum should be restored. However, such a compromise was unhappily impossible. Neither the denominations nor the undenominationalists would trust managers appointed with this contractual limitation on 189 The Progress of Education in England. their powers. The provisions as to management actually adopted in the Act of 1 902 are as follows : The non- provided school will in future have, in place of the former managers, a body of managers consisting of a number of foundation managers not exceeding four, appointed under the provisions of the trust deed of the school, save that where provisions in the deed as to the appointment of managers are insufficient, inapplicable, or inconsistent with the provisions of the Act, or there is no such trust deed available, the case is met by a special Order of the Board of. Education on the application of the local authority, or any other person interested in the manage- ment of the school, and such Order becomes part of or is treated as part of a trust deed. To these managers under the trust deed are added a number of managers, not exceeding two, appointed where the local education authority are the Council of a county, as to one by that Council, and as to the other by the minor local authority. Where the local education authority are the Council of a borough or urban district, both the public representatives are appointed by that authority. Thus, for the first time, representatives of the rate- payer will sit upon the board of management of every assisted school in the country. The fact that these representatives form a minority of the managing body is, perhaps, in practice a less grievance than it appears on paper. The managers forma public body that will and must prove entirely susceptible to the pressure of public opinion. Moreover, in the majority of parishes the actual managers would be the same in any event, whether they be repre- sentatives of a popularly elected body, or whether they be appointed under a trust deed. This Committee of six 190 National Education from 1870 to 1903. (or such larger number, containing the same proportion of classes of representatives, as the authority think requisite) will be men and women who know each other and the needs of the parish, and it will be practically impossible for the four representatives of the trust to over-ride rough-shod the two representatives of the ratepayers. Political and religious difficulties disappear in a wonder- ful way when a small committee sit down in earnest to consider the good of the school. It must be remembered that a woman is not disqualified by sex or marriage for being on a body of managers, and experience during the last thirty years has shown, not only that women are extremely valuable members of educa- tional administrative bodies, but that their presence often tends to the smooth despatch of business on small committees. But the powers for evil of these managing bodies are as limited as their power for good namely, continual personal interest in the school is unlimited. The efficiency of the school may be increased, but it cannot be diminished by the managers. It is the duty of the local education authority to maintain and keep efficient all necessary public elementary schools within their area, and to control the expenditure required for that purpose, except where in the case of non-provided schools the managers provide, and make reasonable alterations, improvements, and repairs (subject to the payment of the local authority for fair wear and tear in the course of public elementary school user) of, the school houses. Thus we see that the managers of the non-provided schools have still a sufficiently heavy burden to bear, since the demands of the local education authority in 191 The Progress of Education in England. respect of the structure of school buildings is not likely to grow less with the passage of time. But in respect to secular education these schools, like the undenominational schools, are absolutely under the control of the local education authority. The managers of a non-provided school must carry out any directions of the authority as to secular education, including any directions with respect to the number and educational qualifications of the teachers to be employed for such instruction, and as to the dismissal of any teacher on educational grounds, and if the managers fail to carry out such direction the authority may themselves carry out the direction as if they were the managers. The authority may, more- over, inspect the school. These provisions secure such standard of secular teaching as may be imposed by the Board of Education and the local education authority. On the other hand, the denominational character of the school is preserved by the provision that no direction given by the authority shall interfere with reasonable facilities for religious instruction during school hours, and by the further provision which declares that the consent of the authority to the appointment of teachers by the managers shall not be withheld except on educational grounds, and enables the managers to dismiss a teacher on grounds connected with the giving of religious instruction in the school. The question of the character of a teacher would, of course, be both an educational and a religious ground for dismissal or non-appointment. The assistant teachers in non-provided schools may be appointed without reference to religious creed and denomination, and in any case where there are more candidates for the post of pupil teacher than there are places to be filled, the 192 National Education from 1870 to 1903. appointment is made by the authority, who must deter- mine the respective qualifications of the candidates by examination or otherwise. The religious instruc- tion given in a non-provided school must be in accordance with the provisions (if any) of the trust deed relating to such instruction, and is under the control of the managers, save that where the deed provides an appeal to a superior denominational authority for the purpose of deciding whether the religious teaching in the school is that intended by the deed, the Act preserves such appeal from the managers. " The lack of pence that vexeth public men " is still likely to be felt by the managers of voluntary or non- provided schools. The expenses of structural mainten- ance, combined with the cost of religious teaching, which of course does not fall on the rates, will still have to come from the old sources. These are donations and subscrip- tions, endowments which are ear-marked for religious teaching or for school building in all other cases the local education authority impounds the endowment for elementary education under section 13 of the Act of 1902 payments from the authority in respect of the teacher's residence when it forms part of the school premises, an agreed proportion of school fees in those cases where the local education authority, under section 14, allows fees to be charged, and any profits that may accrue from the letting of the school premises in the hours when such premises are not in use as a public elementary school, or are not used for other educational purposes (such use being limited to three days a week) by the local educational authority. The Council of a non-county borough or 193 o The Progress of Education in England. urban district, when not a local education authority, in regard to higher education, will, however, be liable to pay rent for the use of the school for purposes of higher education. Some smaller but important matters may be noticed. The furniture and apparatus, perhaps including books, in use in the school and belonging to the trustees at the time that the Act came into force are at the disposal of the local education authority for school purposes, but the same authority has in future to provide all new or additional furniture and apparatus required for school purposes. This furniture may be used by the managers out of school hours, but they must make good any damage arising by reason of that use other than damage arising from fair wear and tear. The managers, that is to say, are not liable for damage caused by temporal decay or by waste arising in connection with ordinary and normal user. They are responsible only for extraordinary damage. They are, however, responsible for all damage done to any schoolroom used by them or their licensees out of school hours, while the local education authority, must make good any damage done to any schoolroom arising in the course of the ordinary user of that room for the purposes of a public elementary school damages, that is, due to tair wear and tear and any extraordinary damage done to the room when used by the authority for other educa- tional purposes. To what extent this provision, shielding the managers of non-provided schools from the expense of making good damage in schoolrooms arising in the ordinary course of user for the purposes of public elementary education, applies to structure awaits legal 194 National Education from 1870 to 1903. decision.* The Attorney- General, in the course of the debates on the Bill, said that the managers are liable for structural repairs. That doubtless is so as a rule, but can it be said that damage arising from legitimate user is never structural ? If the roof is blown off in the course of secular experiments during school hours, it would seem that the cost of replacing the roof would fall on the local education authority as certainly as it would fall on the managers if it were blown oft in the course of experi- ments undertaken by classes using the school by way of hire. A very important question is involved in this part of sec- tion 7. During school hours the cost of lighting and warm- ing falls upon the local authority, who will have to make the necessary arrangements for this purpose. At other times the cost and arrangement will fall upon the managers. Upon whom would fall the cost of making good an uninsured school destroyed by fire which is traceable to the lighting or warming arrangements of the local education authority ? The cost of insuring the school building was, by the wish of Parliament, not placed upon the school managers by the new Act. Would destruc- tion by fire be wear and tear, and, whether it is or not, would the local education authority of the managers be responsible for the replacing of the school ? Moreover, if the building were insured, would the local authority be justified in treating the new school built out of the insur- ance moneys as a provided school ? The question is one * See Green v. Kelly (1845. New Jersey Reports Law Vol. xx. p. 544) ; the Manchester Bonded Warehouse Co. v. Carr (5 C., P. D. 507) ;Torriano v. Young (6 P. and C. 9) ; Yellowby v. Gower (n Ex. 274) ; Proudfoot v. Hart (25 Q.B.D., 43) ; Daviesv. Davies(38 CD. 499)- 195 The Progress of Education in England. that simply bristles with legal difficulties, and requires to be dealt with by specific enactment. As the matter stands at present, it would really appear that a new school built by the authority out of fire-insurance moneys the premiums having been paid by the authority would be a provided school. This case and analagous cases is commended to the attention of trustees and voluntary subscribers. We have seen that the work of securing efficient secular elementary education has now been taken out of the hands of School Boards and Voluntary Managers, and given to local education authorities controlling a large rateable area. We may finally remark on this point that the machinery exists under section 8 for the provision, on the motion of the local education authority or any other persons, of new public elementary schools, where a necessity is shown, of either the provided or the non -provided type. We must now turn from the provision of elementary education to the cost of that provision. Parliamentary grants for ordinary purposes now as heretofore are intended to supplement the rates. The rates themselves, as we have seen, have been extended for certain purposes from the provided to the non-provided schools. The Parliamentary grant will not, however, be paid any longer to the schools. This grant includes no building grant, and so it is naturally paid to the authority which is locally and penultimately responsible for the efficiency of the secular education. All receipts, says section 1 8 of the new Act, in respect of any school maintained by a local education authority, including any Parliamentary grant, but exclud- ing sums specially applicable for purposes for which 196 National Education from 1870 to 1903. provision is to be made by the managers, shall be paid to that authority. We have already noted the funds that managers can receive and allocate to special purposes. The funds receivable by the local education authority are the income from endowments hitherto paid to School Boards and from endowments that cannot be allocated by managers of voluntary or non-provided schools to special purposes ; moneys arising from fees or from things made in the schools (such as needlework) and sold to the children ; money arising from the letting of provided schools; the "block" Parliamentary grant paid in respect of all children by virtue of the Code a grant paid on average attendance and varying from i6/- to 22/- per head ; special grants to girls in respect of cookery, laundry work, dairy work, and household management ; special grants to boys in respect of cottage gardening and manual instruction ; the grants formerly paid by the Science and Art Department and now paid by the Board of Education ; the fee grant under the Act of 1891 ; and, finally, a new aid grant created by the Act of 1902 in substitution for the aid grants (to which we have already referred in detail) given by the Elementary Education Acts of 1870 and 1897 to starved Board schools, and by the Voluntary Schools Act, 1897, * starved Voluntary schools. This Act of 1902 by section 10 provides a grant (in lieu of these aid grants of 1870 and 1897) annually to be paid to every local education authority, of a sum equal to four shillings per scholar, supplemented by an amount per head varying with the wealth or poverty of the various districts concerned. This grant in supplement of the four shillings per head consists of a sum per scholar which is three-quarters of the difference between ten shillings per 197 The Progress of Education in England. scholar and the product per scholar of a penny rate in the educational area. In order to arrive at this product, the total product of a penny rate is divided by the average number of scholars in receipt of the four shilling grant. This is an ingenious solution of the difficulty of dealing in an equitable manner with the financial needs of districts of varying financial capacity*. A further provision secures that at least half the current cost of secular elementary education must fall on the rates. The problem of starved rural schools seems at last settled after the efforts of more than a century. The further provision for the grouping under one management of sets of provided and of non-provided schools will also tend to strengthen rural education. This fact, and the fact that the new aid grant will add something like ^"1,350,000 annually to the ^"850,000 formerly available under this grant for the special behoof of rural schools, may make even educa- tionalists hopeful about rural education. The fourth part of the Act of 1902, is chiefly important to us as creating the machinery through which the local education authority will act. By section 17 every local education authority that exercises authority in respect to primary education must establish an Education Com- mittee or Education Committees constituted in accord- * Mr. W. A. Casson, in his able edition of the Act, has given the following illustration : " Let the District A. have an assessable value, according to the county rate basis, of /6,ooo, and 100 scholars in average attendance at the public elementary school ; (he product of a penny rate would be 25, which would be equal to 53. a head for each scholar ; this sum falls short of IDS. by 30 complete twopeuces. The sub-section directs that for every twopence per scholar of this deficiency three-halfpence are to be paid out of moneys provided by Parliament, so that out of the deficiency of 55., 35. gd- will be made up by the Government, and thus the sum payable in respect of the school in the supposed case would be 35. 90!. x too ^18 153." 198 National Education from 1870 to 1905. ance with a scheme made by the Council and approved by the Board of Education. All matters relating to the exercise by the Council of their powers under the Act of 1902, except the power of raising a rate or borrowing money, stands referred to the Education Committee, and the Council, before exercising any such powers, must, unless in their opinion the matter is urgent, receive and consider the report of the Education Committee with respect to the matter in question. The Council may also delegate to the Education Committee, with or without any restrictions or conditions as they think fit, any of their powers under the Act, except the power of raising a rate or borrowing money. Every scheme for the constitution of an Education Committee provides for the appointment by the Council of at least a majority of the Committee, and this majority must be members of the Council, unless in the case of a county the Council decides otherwise. The scheme further provides for the appointment by the Council, on the nomination or recommendation, where it appears desirable, of other bodies (including Associations of Voluntary Schools) of persons of experience in education, and of persons acquainted with the needs of the various kinds of schools in the area for which the Council acts. Every scheme also provides for the inclusion of women as well as men among the members of the Committee, and for the appointment, if desirable, of members of School Boards existing at the time of the passing of the Act, as members of the first Committee. This provision was introduced to secure continuity of administration. These schemes and Committees may on the one hand deal with parts of counties only, or on the other hand with areas 199 The Progress of Education in England. formed by a combination of counties, boroughs, or urban districts, or of parts of those educational areas. A Council that only possesses powers for the purposes of higher education are not obliged to act through a Committee, though they may do so. Except with respect to raising rates, and borrowing money, the Education Committees throughout the country may be regarded as the local education authority. The dependence of the Committee for money on the Council rids it of some of the objections levelled at "ad hoc " bodies, while the fact that a majority of the Committee are also members of the Council secure the continual consideration of education as a function intimately related with all the other functions of local government. Were the duties of guardians of the poor and of licensing justices likewise committed to special committees of the local authority, the scheme of local government would become homogeneous and organic, while its relationship with the Government for the time being "the brain" of the leviathan through the great departmental ganglions, would become simpler arid less productive of administrative waste. It only remains to refer to the important question of the local raising of money for educational purposes. In the case of a County Council, educational expenses, in so far as they are not met out of the other sources before dealt with, such as Parliamentary grants, must be paid out of the County Fund. As we have seen, the amount that can be spent by a County Council on higher education out of the rates is limited, but there is no definite limit in respect to elementary education. In the case of the Council of a borough, the same expenses are paid out of the Borough Fund or rate, or, if no borough rate is 200 National Education from 1870 to igoj. levied, out of a rate levied in the same way that a borough rate would be levied. In the case of a county borough, there is no rating limit for either higher or elementary education, but in the case of a non-county borough, while there is no rating limit for the purpose of elementary education, where it is an authority for that species of education, yet there is a rating limit of one penny in the pound for the purposes of higher education. In the case of an urban district the expenses will be raised out of the poor rate by means of precepts issued by the Council on the overseers (in pursuance of section 33 of the Elementary Education Act of 1876), who will levy and collect the education rate as part of the poor rate, and pay it over to the Urban District Council. There is no limit on the rate for the purposes of elementary education, where the Urban District Council is the authority for that branch of education, but there is the same rating limit for higher education as in the case of the non- county boroughs. We may note generally that in the case of County Councils imperfect machinery is provided for charging expenses for higher education on the parishes benefited, while effective machinery is created for charging parishes benefited with the capital expenditure for providing or improving any school. The Act for the first time brings the Municipal Corporations affected within the principle that local accounts should be submitted to a Government auditor. Separate education accounts must be kept by the boroughs, and be subject, like County and Urban District Council accounts, to a Government audit. It must finally be noted that any local education authority can borrow, on the security of the fund or rate out of 201 The Progress of Education in England. which the expenses of the Council are payable, for the purposes of the Elementary Education Acts, or of the Act of 1902. This borrowing power is made applicable to current expenses by a special Act of 1903. It is clear that this power is necessary in order efficiently to carry out the design of the Legislature. To tell what that design has been and is, to describe the slow steps by which this country has at last reached a position from which it will be possible to organise for all classes (except, perhaps, the richest class) an efficient and an ennobling type of education, has been the object of the preceding chapters. When we have considered the position in Wales and London, and finally in the Universities, we shall then be in a position to summarise results. That those results, as far as machinery is con- cerned, are satisfactory, is certain. But much, perhaps all, depends upon the engineers the parents, the teachers, the administrators, the denominations. 202 CHAPTER VII. education in BOTH the Principality of Wales and the County of London require some special notice, though much that has been written in previous chapters applies either generally or specifically to both these educational areas. In Wales we noticed that what might be called the bardic stage of national education was replaced in, perhaps, the fifth century by the monastic stage. The bard, who long survived those days, doubtless remained an educator, but monasteries became the repositories of learning. The historically valuable laws of King Howel the Good throw some light on this, though we have not got these laws in their original tenth century form, and cannot with accuracy tell how much was added and varied between the date of the completion and that of the extant twelfth century Latin MS., how much was due to the compilers, how much belonged to earlier laws. But certainly some of the references to education in these laws are due to much earlier days than the eleventh century. Three privileged arts are recognised "bardism; metallurgy; and learning or literature." The acquisition of these arts made the bondman tree. Hence we find the provision so often found in English manorial customs that no son of a villein should 203 The Progress of Education in England. study these arts without the license of his lord. The classification is early and significant, and this fact is emphasised by the formal division of literature into three branches the literature of the lawyer, of the chronicler, and of " one who is informed in book and letter, and in correctly writing and reading the Welsh language, and in imparting instruction thereupon, and in preserving a literary record in respect to the three records of the bards of the isle of Britain. And these are the genealogy of descent by marriages ; territorial divisions ; and praiseworthy actions and sciences." These were the reasons and objects of learning from the earliest times. But we have reached a later date in the history of letters, when we find included among "the Thirteen Things that corrupt the world," "a married priest a people without instruction ; a country without law ; a bishop without knowledge." The following passage in praise of Latin may be attributed to Howel's own time : " Three causes which render it advantageous to use Latin : first, that the law might be explained to the Pope, lest it should be in opposition to the law of the Church, so as to obscure it ; the second one is, to guard against its being understood by everybody ; because many things may be in writing which it may not be proper should be heard, and yet may be necessary ; the third is, to procure for such as shall understand it, in Latin, superior respect, compared with a laic, because it has been, on that account, said in the book, whatever judge is acquainted with the three columns of the law, and the other particulars, called the rudiments of judicature, shall never give place to a laic." These uses of Latin show the mingling, or perhaps rather the parting of the ways. 204 Education in Wales. Latin was to be useful first as the universal language of the Church, secondly as a secret language to take the place of the Ogham characters, about this very time falling out of use in Ireland as a hieroglyphic script, and thirdly as the language of the law. The literary caste of the Druidic and bardic days was to be maintained, and it was to include the Church and the law. King Howel likewise tells us that there are "three ornaments of a social State : a learned scholar ; a scientific artist ; and a righteous judge." The scholar, moreover, was to be the scribe of the law courts the English courts had their official scribes, as we have known from the existence of the Year Books and was not to be compelled to bear arms. King Howel gives us in these and similar passages a very vivid idea of the functions of learning in the period before the Norman occupation of Britain. Wales in those days seems to have had an ideal of culture in part derived from the Gaelic and Celtic races that had passed through her marches, and in part from the influence of the organised Christian Church. That the educational ideals of Wales had some influence on the applica- tion of learning to daily life the life of the Church and of the Law Courts we may well believe. Wales was annexed to England in 1284, and it is perhaps not altogether unworthy of notice that it was shortly after the union (1307) that prothonotaries, or chief scribes began, at the expense of the Crown, to form the Year Book Collection of Law Reports, which extends with little break to the year 1537, and forms an invaluable contribution to the social history of that long period. The making of such reports was part of the common law of Wales. 205 The Progress of Education in England. With the extinction of the Welsh dynasties, and the deadening of national life, we find, though the harp was never hung up nor its strings snapped, that Wales made little progress. Though no longer independent, the Welsh did not become English except on two occasions they were not represented in the English Parliament and while retaining a measure of freedom that excluded the introduction of English culture, they acquired a measure of disability that hampered the extension of their own. Between the statute of Wales of 1284 and the year 1536, Wales rather lost than benefited by the union with England. In the latter year the Principality was finally incorporated with the Kingdom, its peculiar and disabling land tenure was abolished, and the freedoms, liberties, rights, privileges, and laws of England extended from the Wash to the Irish Channel. In one matter only was Wales still distinguished from England. By a statute of the year 1542 the Principality was given its own legal system, under which Courts of Great Session administered the criminal law, the Common and Statute Law, and dealt out equity. It was not until 1830 that Wales in this respect was assimilated to the rest of England, and this was in itself a serious drawback especially to a nation that had for long associated national law with national learning and progress. Despite the fact that the same Statute which gave to Wales its own system of judicature gave her also her modern county system and regular representation in Parliament, she never became merged until after 1830 in the intellectual life of the country, though in individual instances she produced scholars of the first rank. The savagery of Wales from the time of the Tudors to 206 Education in Wales. within living memory has been a matter for remark. The reports of the school inspectors in ths mid- nineteenth century were not less despondent than the comments of Elizabethan or Jacobean philanthropists. Almost immediately after the final Parliamentary Union of England and Wales, we find a movement beginning for the evangelising of the Welsh. Good King Howel's fear lest, without the use of Latin, the people might be corrupted with the knowledge of sacred things, had worked all too well. The prae-Keformation Church in Wales had little hold over the people. In 1550 William Salesbury, a man almost as encyclopaedic in his learning as Roger Bacon, and with a like passion for languages and philology, published a Welsh trans- lation, largely but not wholly based upon the Vulgate, of the Epistles and Gospels directed to be read in churches throughout the year. This was the first time, so far as can be ascertained, that any part of the Bible had been translated into Welsh. In 1 562 he translated the Litany into Welsh and published it. In the meantime he was leaving no stone unturned to bring the Legislature to the aid ot Welsh spiritual life. He was successful. In 1563, by Statute (5 Eliz., c. 28) Parliament ordered the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, under the direction of the Bishops of Hereford, St. David's, St. Asaph, Bangor and Llandaff, to be translated " into the Brittishe or Welshe tongue," lest the W T elsh (it was explained) should sink into an even more benighted condition than had been the case under the influence of Rome. It was ordered that the new translation should be printed, and before March ist, 1566, be placed in every cathedral, collegiate, and parish church or chapel of ease where the Welsh tongue 207 The Progress of Education in England. was commonly spoken or used, and that thenceforth in such places the whole divine service should be in Welsh, and that in the meantime the Gospel and Epistle and certain other parts of the daily service, such as the Creed, should be read in Welsh. The Act further directed that the parishioners should pay half the cost of the books, and the parson and rector, or one of them (if there were but one), the other half. It was further provided that a Bible and Prayer Book in English should be placed in every church for the use of those who understood or wished to learn English, so that the latter should, " by conferring bothe tongues together, the sooner attayne to the know- ledge of the Englyshe tongue." The five Bishops though they were not less learned than King Howel would have desired seem to have entrusted the statutory translation of the Bible into Welsh to Salesbury. In 1564 he had completed a large part of the New Testament, and at the same time he and "Richard Davies, Bishop of St. David's, rendered the Psalms and Prayer Book into Welsh. In order to complete the New Testament within the statutory period, Salesbury was compelled to seek the assistance of Thomas Huett and Davies. The work, however, was not actually published until October yth, 1567, when it appeared with an English dedication by Salesbury to Queen Elizabeth. This interesting and rare work was displaced from general use by a translation of the whole Bible (based as to the New Testament on Salesbury's version) by William Morgan, Bishop of St. Asaph. This translation the first com- pleted Bible in Welsh was finished in 1587, and appeared in London in 1588. It included the Apocrypha- Morgan was helped in his great work by Archbishop 208 Education in Wales. Whitgift, William Hughes, later Bishop of St. Asaph, Hugh Bellot, Bishop of Bangor, Dean Goodman, Dr. Davies Powel, Edmund Prys, who also produced a Welsh metrical version of the Psalms, and Richard Vaughan, successively Bishop of Bangor, Chester, and London. Bishop Parry's Welsh Bible, issued in 1620, was in effect a second edition of this Bible. In 1630 there was issued, " printed at the expense of one or more citizens of London," probably through the influence of Vaughan " a portably-sized Bible." This lengthy story as to the evangelising of Wales is important in the history of Welsh education. The good work of "one or more citizens of London" is particularly important, for Wales was destined from this time forward to gain its educational stimulus from the metropolis a stimulus it certainly repaid with interest. Not very many years after the issue of this London Welsh Bible, Vavasor Powell began active evangelising work in Wales. Parallel with his work were the educa- tional efforts of the Commonwealth Parliament. This Parliament, by an Act of 1649, appointed Church and School Commissioners for Wales, to grant, among other work, certificates to schoolmasters in order that " fit persons of approved piety and learning may have encouragement to employ themselves in the education of children in piety and good literature." Certificated schoolmasters were to have a yearly salary of forty pounds. The Cardigan Free Grammar School was founded and endowed by these Commissioners in 1653, and the school remains to this day, though the endow- ment at the Restoration was restored to its original owners. Nor did the movement for the education and 209 p The Progress of Education *in England. evangelisation of Wales stop with this Act. The " portably- sized Bible " was reprinted in an edition of 5,000 copies in 1654, an d the edition was presumably distributed in Wales. A movement of such considerable magnitude could scarcely die out. The London Bible of 1620 had not reached, in its second edition of 1654, the limits of its usefulness. We have seen in an earlier part of this book, whilst tracing the development of the Voluntary schools, the work of Thomas Gouge in Wales, beginning in 1672. He preached, catechised, and largely distributed the Bible, the liturgy, The Whole Duty of Man, and other books printed in Welsh. Throughout South Wales he formed schools, and engaged men and women teachers, " paying them at the rate of id. or 2d. a week per scholar." We have seen how a Trust was formed for the founding of schools and distribution of religious literature in Wales. In 1677 came the third edition 8,000 copies, 1,000 to be given to the poor, and the rest to be sold at 45. a piece of the Bible of 1620. In 1675 there were 1,850 children at school, of whom 530 were educated by voluntary Welsh subscriptions. The movement did not stop with the death of Gouge in 1681. The distribution of the Bibles went on, and schools were founded. John Strype, writing before 1720, tells us that there were schools in 86 of the towns and parishes of Wales, and that this was due in great measure to the " favour of Londoners." It is difficult not to believe that this work was definitely connected with the Welsh efforts of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which, from its forma- tion in 1699, na cl its correspondents in Wales. Successive editions of the London Bible in 1690, 1718, and 1727 seem to show the activity of the Society, and 210 Education in Wales. prepared the way for the next impulse. The charity schools of the Society rapidly spread over England and Wales, and probably made a connecting link between Gouge's schools and the schools of Griffith Jones. These " circulating schools " were started in 1730, and the work rapidly prospered. Before Griffith Jones' death in 1761, 3,000 schools had been opened, and 150,000 scholars taught. The work was continued by Mrs. Bevan with great success, and she left her large estate for the purpose of securing its continuance in perpetuity. As we have seen, the estate in 1779 was thrown into Chancery, and the schools closed until 1830. It was an end to a great work, an end worthy of the methods of the eighteenth century. But the work in Wales was not lost, for in it we find the spring-head which gave a new elementary system to the whole country. Wales herself, however, after 1780, relapsed into something approaching savagery. In and before 1803 Mr. Brougham declared in his great speech of 1820 that not one in 26 of the population in Wales, was at school, and even in 1820 not one in 20 was receiving education. Improvement was, moreover, very slow. Wales, with England, came within the Parliamentary scheme of State- aid that began in 1833. Mr. Seymour Tremenheere's report on the educational condition of the mining districts of South Wales, presented to Parliament in 1840, paints a deplorable picture of ignorance and social degradation among a people earning high wages. His conclusion was that over seventy per cent, of the children of the working class of school age did not attend any day school at all. The children in attendance attended school for a period not exceeding three years, and during that period only The Progress of Education in England. intermittently namely, for one, two, or three months, continuously followed by absences for similar periods. Moreover, the schools were bad. The dame schools were really only places for confining children while their parents were at work, and the common day schools were educationally nearly valueless. The payments ranged chiefly between 3d. and 8d. a week. The schoolrooms were, for the most part, dirty and close, and were in some cases also used for domestic purposes. The school books, provided by the parents, were mere fragments a few soiled leaves of the spelling and reading books of Vyse, Guy, and Murray. In many schools silence was only maintained by continual exclamations and threats. In most, the mechanical processes of reading and writing were alone taught, supplemented by a little arithmetic, with, in some instances, Bible teaching. Attendance was very irregular. In one of the best schools the admissions within the year nearly equalled the numbers on the books. An inquiry made by Mr. Tremenheere in 24 representative households showed that of 20 families, 17 were Welsh ; of these 17 Welsh families, ten husbands could read Welsh (six imperfectly), and seven could not read at all. None of the 17 husbands could write. Four of the wives could read the Welsh Bible : one other said she could read, but could not understand. In three families the children sometimes read to their parents. Thirteen of the families possessed a Welsh Bible ; in two there were religious tracts ; in none were any other books. The work that brave old William Salesbury had begun three centuries before was still alive in a fashion, but little else. Three centuries of evangelising effort had planted the Welsh Bible beyond 212 Education in Wales. disrooting, but of other educational force there was practically none. Of 34 children in these families ii were under five years and 23 between five and fifteen years. Of these 23, five only could read, two had been at a day school, one still went, and one was beginning to learn to read Welsh at home. Fourteen (including the five at day school) went to Sunday school. None could write. There were practically no news- papers read in the whole district. The agent for three Welsh newspapers sold 72 copies a month, and 62 copies weekly of English newspapers printed in Wales. A few other periodicals, chiefly religious, were sold. The only publisher in the district had a catalogue of 720 books, of which 606 were religious. The parents did not in any way value education. Ignorance was no obstacle to good employment. Moreover, parents disliked the trouble of making the children clean every day for school. The children went to work at eight years, and became very soon mentally stupid, and without the knowledge of right and wrong. The wages rapidly got fairly high, and the boys became independent and left home to board with friends. The residue of the wages were spent on smoking, drinking, and gambling. At sixteen, men's wages were earned. The families were well fed and clothed, but all surplus money was spent on self- indulgence, There was no recreation, nor any desire for knowledge. The whole district of over 85,000 people could show only 90 adults in evening schools. The one hope of the district was the religious and Sunday school teaching. There were 12 churches of the Establish- ment, 93 of Dissent, six Church Sunday schools, and 80 Dissenting Sunday schools. The former gave good 213 The Progress of Education in England. teaching to nearly a thousand children, while the latter were attended by many adults as well as children. The position was felt to be intolerable by some of the men, who were applying to the iron-masters to fit up school- rooms for their children. It has been thought worth while to go thus fully into the Welsh educational position of 1840, for it shows how backward education was in even the most prosperous districts sixty years ago, and it may be contrasted with the very different position that obtains throughout the Principality to-day. The educational darkness in Wales between 1840 and 1850 was the darkness before the dawn. The race that seemed so dull to Mr. Tremenheere had its own educational ambition. In 1854 the idea of a Welsh University College was in the air, but it was wisely felt that the first necessity was a training college. This was opened at Bangor in 1862, and the growing efficiency of national elementary education began to make some mark in Wales. Ten years later the University College was founded at Aberystwyth, and modern Welsh education began to take shape. The backwardness of secondary or intermediate education, as well as of educa- tion of the University type, came under the consideration of a Committee of the Education Department in 1881. The Committee declared that the problem could only be solved by Rate-aid or State-aid, or both. The first step taken was the opening of two more University Colleges one at Cardiff in 1883, and one at Bangor in 1884. The three Colleges were practically endowed by Parlia- mentary grant. But this did not solve the question of the necessary intermediate education between the elementary schools and the University Colleges. In 1889 214 Education in Wales. the Government were compelled to sanction the Welsh Intermediate Education Act, which created a symmetrical system not unlike that adopted in 1902 for the whole country. The object of the Act was to make further provision for the intermediate and technical education of the inhabitants of Wales and the county of Monmouth. It defined " intermediate education" to mean " a course of education which does not consist chiefly of elementary instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but which includes instruction in Latin, Greek, the Welsh and English language and literature, modern languages, mathematics, natural and applied science, or in some of such studies, and generally in the higher branches of knowledge." The Act, however, secured the continuity between elementary and intermediate education by rendering it possible for the authorities under the Act to establish scholarships in higher or other elementary schools. Technical education was defined to include any subject applicable to the purposes of agriculture, industries, trade, or commercial life and practice, including science and art classes. The creation of this grade of education was a great step forward, a step that threatened to leave England far behind. In order to give this grade an effective place in the educational system, every County Council in Wales and Monmouth had to create a Joint Education Committee consisting of three persons nominated by the Council, and two other persons acquainted with local educational needs appointed by the Government. It was the duty of this Committee to submit to the Charity Commissioners (now to the Board of Education) a scheme or schemes for the intermediate and technical education of the The Progress of Education in England. inhabitants of the county and of adjoining districts ; to specify in each scheme the local educational endowments that ought to be used for the purposes of the scheme ; and, on the recommendation of the County Council, to insert in the scheme a rate-provision for the purposes of the scheme not exceeding a halfpenny in the pound. The scheme had to include the conscience clause of the Endowed Schools Act, 1869, and provided for the undenominational character of all religious teaching to day scholars and in schools established or regulated by a scheme. Each school aided by the county and subject to a county scheme was entitled to a share of a Parlia- mentary grant, which in the aggregate for all schools under the scheme was not to exceed the total amount raised out of the county or borough rate. The scheme might, on the recommendation of the County Council, contain certain provisions for the creation of scholarships out of the county or borough rate. The Education Committee had no administrative powers. It existed for the purpose of creating machinery. The schemes con- stituted or recognised governing bodies, whose duty it was to administer the funds and govern the schools that came within the scheme. Where under a scheme any part of the expenses of the establishment or maintenance of a school, or of scholarships attaching thereto, was defrayed out of county or borough rate, the scheme had to provide for the adequate representation of the County Council on the governing body of such school. The system of administration under the schemes was somewhat complex, as indeed was inevitable where the provisions of the Endowed School Acts were grafted on to the modern system of local government. In the boroughs the scheme 216 Education in Wales. was carried into effect by one governing body, but in the counties the work was divided between a central educa- tional body for the whole county and local bodies for particular schools or districts. In the central or County Governing Body the County Council nominated a majority of the members, but representatives of the University of Wales were also included. The residue of the central body consisted of representatives of any county borough in the county and of co-opted members. The local bodies were composed of representatives of the County Council and the local district councils, of the local elementary schools, and, presumably, if it dealt with an existing foundation, of the governing body of that foundation. On both the central and local bodies women were either eligible or necessary. In 1892 the Lords of the Treasury by a somewhat obvious return to the control of 1833-39 issued regula- tions as to the inspection and examination of the schools formed or assisted under the Act of 1889. It was pro- vided that this work could be undertaken in 1897 by a Central Welsh Board for intermediate education, and in the interim the work was undertaken by the Charity Commission. In 1895 tnere were 30 such schools. In six years the number had increased to 95, educating 7,668 children, almost half of whom were girls. In 1881 a wretched secondary education had been given to only 1,540 boys and 265 girls. The change was almost miraculous ; and it was a change that the Welsh people helped on with a good will. The large sums paid in fees in these secondary schools, and the initiative of the Councils, is complete evidence of this. All education was moving together. The fee grant of 1891 necessarily gave 217 The Progress of Education in England. a new impulse to the elementary system, while two years later the incorporation of the three Colleges into the University of Wales tended to strengthen the feeling in Wales that the Principality possessed almost a national system of education. The University of Wales Act, 1902, by placing this University in possession of all the privileges of the elder Universities, seemed to give a general sanction to this conception. The Education Act, 1902, in bringing Wales within the larger national system, by transferring the powers of the County Governing Body under the Act of 1889 to the local educational authority, constituted for all English and Welsh counties and boroughs by the Act, did nothing to detract from the Welsh national educational ideal. It made the system of the Act of 1889 simpler and more effective, and added to the Welsh system the wider educational powers which, as we have seen, the Act. of 1902 has given to local authorities throughout the country. The lesson that we have to learn from Wales is a very important one. In forty years a land educationally arid to the last degree has become fertile to an almost astonishing extent. Education has become in Wales a household word. The movement is in the heart of the people. Perhaps it was always there, for the miners in 1840 begged mine-managers for schoolrooms. It certainly remains to be seen if it is in the heart of the Saxon also. 238 CHAPTER VIII. education in Condon. LONDON, "The King's Chamber, the Heart of the Commonwealth," has an interesting, but disappointing educational history. Though, doubtless, it was a centre of commerce before the coming of Caesar, we first hear of it in 61 A.D., when, unwalled and undefended, its merchants and merchandize were scattered by Boadicea and the Iceni. In the third century it attained some importance, for from it issued the coins of the Imperators Carausius and Allectus. Some time between 350 A.D. and 369 A.D. it was surrounded by a wall more than three miles long, enclosing some 380 acres. Before this date it seems to have become a Christian Bishopric, if we may believe that a Bishop of London was, in 314 A.D., at the Council of Aries. In any event, it was, under the name Augusta, an important centre, perhaps, indeed, the Roman capital of Britain, from the completion of the wall till the year 410 A.D. After the departure of the Romans, we know that an attempt was made to defend it against the Saxon onslaught, with presumably no measure of success. Early in the seventh century London again emerges from the darkness. It is the ecclesiastical capital or Metropolis of the East Saxons, and we may date the diocese of to-day 219 The Progress of Education in England. from the same century. This is a matter of importance, for, as we shall see, education in London until after the Reformation was strictly a diocesan affair. The Danes, as has been told in an earlier chapter, swept education from the land. London was not spared, and in the restoration of the Metropolis by King Alfred we see the final establishment of the city as the centre of trade and government. The adaptation, by King Edward the Confessor, of the Abbey Church of Westminster, as " The place of the King's constitution and consecration for ever," gave to the twin cities a new importance, and from that date to our day with the exception of the brief period when Winchester was the capital London has been the Heart of the Commonwealth. I now pass to the extant material slight enough for the history of education in London. The date of the foundation of St. Paul's as the Cathedral Church of London (610 A.D.) is important, because from that date, or at least from the year 826 A.D., when Pope Eugenius II. promulgated his canon, " Dt scholis repavandis pro studio literarum," the organization of education was largely diocesan. There is evidence to show that the Chancellor of a diocese, in England at any rate, was the controlling educational authority, under the title of Magister Scholarum. The Chancellor of the Church of St. Paul's was styled in old records Magistev Scholarum, and he both claimed and exercised complete control over grammar learning in the City of London. We have definite contemporary evidence as to the state of such learning in London in the twelfth century. William Fitzstephen, who died before the end of that century, prefixed to his life of Archbishop Becket a close description of the London of 220 Education in London. his age that most noble city, as he calls it. As in duty bound, he describes the great grammar schools of the great city. Stow's translation, in modern form, may be given here : " In London three famous schools are kept at three principal churches, which they retain by privilege and ancient dignity. Notwithstanding, by favour of some persons, or teachers, who are known and well-reputed for their philosophy, there are other schools* upon good- will and sufferance. Upon the Holy Days assemblies flock together about the church, where the master hath his abode. There the scholars dispute ; some use de- monstrations, others topical and probable arguments ; some practise enthimems, others are better at perfect syllogisms ; some for a show dispute, and for exercising themselves, and strive like adversaries ; others for truth, which is the grace of perfection. The dissembling sophisters turn verbalists, and are magnified when they overflow in speech ; some, also, are entrapped with deceitful arguments. Sometimes certain orators, with rhetorical orations, speak handsomely to persuade, being careful to observe the precepts of art, who omit no matter contingent. The boys of divers schools wrangle together in versifying, and canvass the principles of grammar, as the rules of the preter perfect and future tenses. Some, after an old custom of prating, use rhymes and epigrams ; these can freely quip their fellows, suppressing their names with a festinine and railing liberty ; these cast out most abusive jests, and with Socratical witnesses, either they give a touch at the vices of superiors, or fall upon them with a satirical bitterness. The hearers prepare for laughter, and make themselves merry in the meantime." *Thebest text of Fitzstephen says "many other schools." The Progress of Education in England. It is a delightful picture of men and boys dead and gone these seven centuries. London was certainly a seat of learning scholastic learning in its ripest and least arid form. There was little Greek it is true, though there certainly was some ; but Latin scholarship was at a height that Erasmus would not have despised. The Latin of Fitzstephen was itself no mean achieve- ment, and he based his scholarship on the best authors. He was familiar with Tully and Sallust, with Virgil, Persius, Horace, and Ovid. The salt of Socrates flavoured his speech, and in his school days he, with the rest, had written Latin verse, and had racked his brains with preterites and supines. Certainly London has not fulfilled the promise of the middle ages, of the ages that gave her a great educational system, crowned with a magnificent University of Law, that persisted right down to the Reformation. For these schools of which Fitz- stephen speaks did not vanish even amid the crash and chaos of the Lancastrian wars. Without entering here into a difficult question of research, it may be said that the three great grammar schools to which Fitzstephen refers, but does not name, may be considered as satis- factorily identified with the School of St. Paul's, of. St. Mary le Bow, and of St. Martin le Grand.* In the Gloucester Grammar School case, decided in 1410, the counsel for the plaintiff asserted that 'The Masters of St. Paul's School claim that there shall be no other master in the City of London competing with them.' In 1393 the Crown had been petitioned to recognise only *I have set out the evidence for this identification in my volume State Intervention in English Education, issued by the Cambridge University Press in 1902. 222 Education in London. three schools St. Paul's, the Arches, and St. Martin's. This is consistent with the Case of 1410, for the Peculiar of St. Mary le Bow and the Liberty of St. Martin were without the jurisdiction of the City. The battles between boy grammarians, so fiercely contested in the twelfth century, still lingered on in London into the seventeenth century, for Stow saw the boys disputing as of old time, but not by any means so learnedly, in the Churchyard of St. Bartholomew the Priory in Smithfield, on successive Eves of Saint Bartholomew. Indeed, in those later days, the schools were also less numerous. The multiplication of mediaeval schools must be con- sidered. We must remember the fact mentioned by Fitzstephen that in his day there were many licensed grammar schools in London. The licensing question, as we have seen, was a sore question throughout the king- dom. Education was remunerative, and unlicensed masters endeavoured, despite the pains and pangs of excommunication, to compete with the nominees of the diocesan Chancellors. London was no exception to the rule. The petition of 1393 shows this, and affords con- clusive evidence that the three schools we have named were the prescriptive grammar schools of London men- tioned by Fitzstephen. The petitioners were the Arch- bishop of Canterbury (the Church of St. Mary le Bow was his Peculiar, and therefore he controlled the school), the Bishop of London and the Chancellor of St. Paul's (who controlled the School of St. Paul's), and the Dean of the Free Chapel of St. Martin le Grand (who con- trolled the School of St. Martin's). They declared that by the laws spiritual, and by immemorial custom, the appointing, disposition, and examination of the masters of 223 The Progress of Education in England. certain schools of the faculty of grammar within the City and its suburbs belonged to them, and asserted that strange, unqualified masters of grammar had started general grammar schools in the City, to the deceit and illusion of children, and the prejudice of the people and the Church. The masters of the three schools had pro- ceeded against these daring men in the Ecclesiastical Court, and the strange schoolmasters in reply had begun proceedings in the secular courts for permission to teach without the assent of the Archbishop, the Bishop, the Dean, and the Chancellor. The petitioners therefore asked the King to forbid the City Courts to meddle in the matter. The petition remained unanswered by the King, but it was answered by the Gloucester Grammar School case of 1410, in which the Court of Common Pleas decided that any learned person could hold a school anywhere, save in a case of a University Corporation, or a school of ancient foundation. This, in the case of London, checked the progress of unlicensed schools. In the course of the next half cen- tury two more licensed grammar schools were created a school connected with the Hospital of St. Anthony founded, or more probably re-endowed, in 1441, by the appropriation of the Church of St. Benet Fink, and a school, at an earlier date, in connection with the Church of St. Dunstan in the East. These schools felt the pressure of unauthorised schools, and in 1446 the Crown was petitioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London to limit the number of grammar schools to these five, on the ground of " many and divers persons not sufficiently instructed in grammar pre- suming to hold common grammar schools in great deceit, 224 Education in London. as welt unto their scholars as unto the friends that find them to school." The King in his' wisdom granted the petition, and limited the number of London" grammar schools to the five named. The King and the Bishops were effectively answered in the following year, when the rectors of the parishes of All Hallows', St. Andrew's (Holborn), St. Peter's (Cornhill), and Colchirche peti- tioned for the establishment of grammar schools in their respective parishes. The petition must be set out, for it shows how the educational position in London had suddenly declined a decline from which it was not des- tined to recover till late in the nineteenth century. The petition of the four rectors ran as follows : - " Please it unto the full wise and discreet Commons in this present Parliament assembled to consider the great number of grammar schools that some time were in divers parts of this Realm, beside those that were in London, and how few be in these days, and the great hurt that is caused of this, not only in the spiritual part of the Church, where oftentimes it appeareth too openly in some persons, with great shame, but also in the temporal part, to whom also it is full expedient to have this same potent harmony for many causes, as to your Wisdoms appeareth. And forasmuch as the City of London is the common concourse of this land, wherein is great multitude of young people, not only born and brought forth in the same city, but also of many other parts of this land, some for lack of schoolmasters in their own country for to be informed of grammar there, and some for the great almesse of lords, merchants, and others, the which is in London more plenteously done than in many other places of this Realm, to such poor creatures as never should have been brought 225 Q The Progress of Education in England. to so great virtue and knowledge as they have, had it not been by the means of the alms above said ; wherefore it were expedient that in London were a sufficient number of schools and good informers in grammar, and not for the singular avail of two or three persons, grievously to hurt the multitude of young people of all this land ; for where there is great number of learners and few teachers, and all the learners be compelled to go to the same few teachers and to none other, the masters wax rich in money and the learners poor in knowledge, as experience openly sheweth against all virtue and order of well public." It is a remarkable document of the first importance in the history of English education, and is, moreover, a somewhat valuable specimen of fifteenth century English prose prose where the sentences in flocks move forward under the impulse of the writer. Allowing something for the earnestness of the rectors, we gather that many grammar schools presumably unauthorised schools had been closed during the immediate years throughout the country, and particularly in London ; that the learn- ing of clerics and incidentally of laymen had conse- quently suffered ; that London was an educational centre, where educational charity abounded, and that its reputa- tion had drawn thither a multitude of young people ; that the monopoly of the three or five schools had grievously injured learning. For more than two centuries the monopoly of the Church had been fought, and now four clerics themselves declared that the manner in which that monopoly was exercised was injurious to the great multi- tude that gravitated to London. We must remember that Lollardy was rife in London throughout the fifteenth 226 Education in London. century, that the scent of the dawn was in the air. In the very year of this petition Bishop Pecock, preaching at Paul's Cross, was ingenuously defending the non- preaching and non-resident Prelates of the Realm from the furious attacks of organised Dissent. London was weary of the shackles that scholasticism and clerical monopoly had forged upon the limbs of education. It was only seven years earlier that Geoffrey, the Grammarian, had issued his Latin-English handbook of education, a book designed to give to the humble that modicum of scholar- ship which they needed, and could not obtain in the schools or the Universities save by year-long delving in the lucky tub of scholastic learning. The learners were in revolt throughout the country. The Universities were practically dead dead of the plague, formalism, and corruption. The Archdeaconry of Oxford with the care of 20,000 souls was in the hands of a professional jester some Lord's fool. " Where thousands of students had been conversant in studies is now scarce one," wrote Anthony a Wood, the historian of Oxford, dealing with the year 1460. The grammar schools were so universally decayed, that Oxford petitioned for their revival. But Oxford herself, the University that filled the Bishops' sees, was indeed so faded from her former glory that the University of Paris, the University that Oxford's Roger Bacon had scoffed at, refused to recognise her. The savoury salt of Oxford was the persistence of Wycklifism. Lollard books " were spread in colleges and halls." In 1476 the King ordered the Lollards to be ejected, and something of this kind was done. But Oxford, in so far as it was alive at all, was Lollardised when Erasmus came. It is, therefore, not wonderful that the four rectors 227 The Progress of Education in England. made their woeful petition. That the petition should have been granted is perhaps more wonderful. The parishes could have their schools if the Archbishops and Bishops consented. Whether they consented or not is apparently unrecorded. The curtain of silence falls upon the stage of learning. We only hear noises from without, the clatter of the groundlings leaving the theatre. But the silence of the stage is after a time broken by a new sound, the sound of scene-shifting, so to speak ; the sound, in fact, of the printing press. When things were at their worst, when Universities and schools were full of the emptiness of despair, the New Learning came, and with it the multi- tudes of printed school books, one or two good, such as the Lac Puerorum of John Holt, the Regulae Gram- tnaticales of Nicolas Perotti, but mostly bad beyond dreams, such as the thirteenth century Doctrinale Puerorum of Alexander a Villa Dei, and the fifteenth century Promptuarium of Geoffrey. Amid a flood of such books, followed later by the cold, but reasonable, work of Stanbridge, Lilly, and Whyttington, Erasmus appeared ; was welcomed at the Universities by the rare scholars and the Wycklifites; fostered, with his hand- ful of friends, the new enthusiasm for letters ; watched at Oxford the awakened students "rush to Greek letters . . . . endure watching, fasting, toil, and hunger in the pursuit of them " ; saw John Colet re-found in London St. Paul's School. The petition of the four rectors had been full of meaning. After their time even this great central school had dwindled away. The net that Colet drew to land full of scholars, a hundred and fifty and three, was hardly a substitute for the great educational 228 Education in London. system that London had possessed three centuries before. It was significant of the Renaissance, of the revival of Greek, but a single school containing one hundred and fifty-three boys meant not much more than that. The Reformation and the Renaissance did little enough for London. Three of the other four grammar schools lingered on, but that of St. Anthony dwindled till in 1666 it had become a poor parish school, which was burnt in the great fire and never rebuilt. The rest had little better fate. Before 1660 the City of London had four grammar schools, including the new St. Paul's, West- minster had one, Southwark had two. In 1842 the City of London had six, Westminster two, and South- wark two. The Metropolis, indeed, fared badly at the hands of the Revival of Letters. Her culture, together with her means of elementary education, died before the sixteenth century, and was scarcely revived before the third quarter of the nineteenth. The fact is sufficiently astounding. When the eighteenth century opened, the Metropolis numbered within her narrow walls more than a million inhabitants, who paid more than a quarter of the taxation, local and imperial, of the Kingdom, and reared a hundred thousand or more children of school age. Eight to ten grammar schools sufficed for these. It is not, therefore, a matter for surprise that when a benevolent Government in 1690 made gin free of duty, the result was a perfect " pandemonium of drunkenness," and one half London sold gin to the other half. It must be remembered that there were practically no endowed elementary schools, and the private schools were useless, or merely for the rich. Before 1660 London had perhaps one endowed elementary school, Westminster had two, 229 The Progress of Education in England. and Southwark had none. Clearly a new educational movement was necessary. As we have seen in a former chapter, it came, though in utterly inadequate fashion. We there traced the two-fold educational revival of the last quarter of the seventeenth and the first quarter of the eighteenth century. It is obvious that the rich citizens who were so susceptible to the heathen ignor- ance of Wales could hardly remain obdurate to the claims of still more heathen London. Therefore, on the one hand, we get a London endowment movement, and on the other a London charity school movement. Between 1660 and 1730 thirty-four elementary schools were endowed in the city of London, twelve in the city of Westminster, and three in the borough of Southwark. It was an inadequate contribution to a vast and terrible problem. In the same period there were founded and endowed in the rest of England about a thousand schools, mostly elementary. On that scale London ought to have founded at least 250 elementary schools. Nothing less could meet her case. But, in fact, she and all her suburbs received by endowment in the seventy years under one hundred small schools. In 1699 the Society for Pro- moting Christian Knowledge "agreed to use their best endeavours to incline the hearts of generous and well disposed persons to contribute towards the erecting of schools," in the cities of London and Westminister and the parts adjacent, "for the instruction of such poor children in reading, writing, and in the catechism, whose parents or relations are not able to afford them the ordinary means of education." By the year 1715 there were 120 of these charity schools, containing 4,906 children in the cities of London and Westminster. The 230 Education in London. movement was invaluable, and it is not too much to say that, in indirect fashion, it saved the nation from eventual revolution. But it was inadequate. The average number in each charity school was only forty children. In the estimate of 250 schools to satisfy the educational needs of London in 1700, the number in each school was reckoned at 400. In 1729 there were, in the whole kingdom, 1,658 charity schools, containing 34,000 chil- dren an average of just over twenty per school. If all these little schools had been in London they would not have met, even with the help of the endowed schools, the educational needs of the metropolis. It is scarcely to be wondered at that in these schools " High Church and Ormond " was taught. It was necessary in order to introduce some leaven of orderliness into the barbarous and heathen mob of London. How revolution was avoided is difficult to understand. A brutal criminal law, the fact of continual recruiting to meet foreign aggression, the drain of war, alone preserved the unstable equilibrium. As the century progressed the charity schools could scarcely keep their position. They, to some extent, lost ground with the increase of population. London in 1785, if we may believe an eye-witness, Mr. Francis Place, who gave evidence before the Select Committee on Education of 1835, was in a fearful state. The pressure of the criminal classes threatened to shatter the foundations of society. The pressure was relieved by the press-gang, and later by the whole- sale exportation of pauper children to the factories of the North. It was a curious policy, for it left in London the least fit. The charity schools were the only reasonable check on the propagation of crime, and they 231 The Progress of Education in England. "taught poor children next to nothing, and nothing likely to be useful to them." It was not until after 1780 that the Sunday school came to the Metropolis, and it was not till 1785 that the Sunday School Society was founded. This new influence had a marked effect, and in the provision of both religious and secular instruction was of great social value. This work at the end of the century was aided by the introduction of the monitorial system. Dr. Bell first introduced this system into the Pro- testant Charity School of St. Botolph's, Aldgate, in 1798. Bell's schools, as we know, rapidly multiplied, and became, in 1811, the schools of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales. If it is true, as has been alleged, that this Society was a branch of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, we may regard Bell's work as a revivification of the charity schools. The schools answered a good purpose, but were, on the whole, very inefficient. The work of Bell in London lay side by side with that of Lancaster, who, after three years' intermittent teaching, in 1801 opened his first school. Lancaster's schools have been, in an earlier chapter, described at length, so it is sufficient here to refer to them as one of the forces that were trans- forming London. Other forces were the extraordinary and self-sacrificing work of the Established clergy, and the educational work among the very poor a new develop- ment of the Dissenting ministers. An instance of this is the formation by Baptists and Independents in 1825 of the Christian Instruction Society. This Society, in the course of visiting 40,600 poor families, drew many chil- dren to school. Further causes for the amelioration of 232 Education in London. social conditions in London were the new interest of Parliament beginning in 1833, anc ^ * ne reform of the Poor Laws in 1834. The London of the later thirties could not be recognised as the London of 1785. But nevertheless things moved very slowly. In his speech of 1820, Mr. Henry Brougham declared that Middlesex, the great metropolitan county of England, " was, beyond all dispute, the worst educated part of Christendom." In Middlesex, only one in every twenty-four persons of the population were at school, and if the worthless dame schools were omitted, this propor- tion fell to one in 46. " Middlesex was three times worse educated than all the rest of England." These were the results that Mr. Brougham deduced from the London returns of the Education Committee of 1818. In his speech in the House of Lords in 1835, he showed that London had improved, but that the improvement had been less than anywhere else. By the returns of Lord Kerry's Committee of 1833, it appeared that in that year one in every fifteen of the population of the metropolis were at school. This, of course, included dame schools. Lancashire showed a greater improvement than this. Each of the counties of Lancashire and Middlesex had a deficiency of 60,000 children . This was Lord B rougham's conclusion, and it is certainly an understatement of the true figures. London probably benefited less than any other place by the educational efforts of the Education Department and its predecessor during the period 1833 to 1870. The methods and results of that period have already been considered in some detail. Its final result in London was not satisfactory. Mr. W.E.Forster, on June 2oth, 1870, made the following statement in the House of Commons : 2 33 The Progress of Education in England. " I may also refer to an interesting little book, entitled, One Square Mile in the East End of London, which has lately been published by Mr. Bartlett. In that district of one square mile in the East End of London, containing about 1 50,000 persons, he made a house-to-house visitation for the purpose of investigating the actual extent of educational destitution, and of ascertaining the wants and wishes of the people themselves. As the result of the investigation and visitation so conducted, he found that the educational destitution was terrible quite as bad as at Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, or Birmingham. Taking the popula- tion at 150,000, the children between the ages of three and fourteen might be assumed at 40,000 in number, and of these 29,000 were growing up in almost, if not complete, ignorance." The investigation also showed that the parents of this class desired their children to go to school, and to receive religious iustruction of some sort, even if it were not the instruction of the sect to which they nominally belonged. In this very district, Mr. Mundella declared, on June 24th, 1870, ^"450,000 annually was spent on drink. Each family spent on the average 2^d. per week on education, and 45. 3d. on drink. The educational necessities of London were so well known that the Act of 1870 was at once put in force without the usual six months' delay. There was, as Earl de Grey and Ripon said, on July 29th, in the final Committee stage in the Lords, a " pressing necessity for avoiding delay in the establishment of schools." The fact had been well known to every Government during at least two centuries. The autumn of 1870 saw the first election of the London School Board a municipal election that for the 234 Education in London. first, and it must be hoped not the last, time in history (though only about 44 per cent, of an electorate of some 700,000 voters went to the poll at the County Council election of March 5th, 1904) really interested and attracted the apathetic London ratepayer. For the purposes of the election the Metropolis consisted of the City, the parishes and districts mentioned in the Metropolis Management Act, 1855, and certain extra parochial areas, such as Lincoln's Inn. The Metropolis was divided into ten (subsequently eleven) divisions namely, Marylebone, Finsbury, Lambeth (East and West), Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Westminster, South- wark, the City, Chelsea, and Greenwich. Each voter in each division had as many votes as there were candi- dates, and could give all such votes to one candidate. For financial purposes the rating varied according to the area. In the City it was levied by the Commissioners of Sewers, and came out of the consolidated rate. In the metropolitan parishes and districts it was levied by the vestries or district boards out of the general rate, and in the extra parochial areas out of the poor rate, on the mandate of the person in control of the area. The new Educational Authority found itself without data to work upon. The state of education in London had been so bad that the Government had apparently been afraid to obtain official returns even Mr. Forster had satisfied himself with unofficial samples intended to make the flesh of unhappy members of the House of Commons creep. An investigation of the position produced an estimate of 680,000 children in London between the ages of three and thirteen years. Of these, 106,000 were estimated to belong to the upper 235 The Progress of Education in England. and higher middle classes or to the quasi-criminal classes, and were assumed, by a pleasing fiction, to be in receipt of sufficient instruction. The residue were either not educated at all, or were educated in schools that might or might not be really efficient. The Board at once set to work to build and take over schools, and in 1874 the main features of the educational position emerged. There was accommodation in schools which the Board recog- nised as efficient for 382,493 children. The Board itself dealt with 98,625 of these children in 206 provided schools, while 920 efficient voluntary schools gave accommodation to 283,868 children. The Act had so far had the curious effect of greatly increasing the attendance at voluntary schools. The new guarantee of efficiency and the fear of rates may have caused this, coupled with a sudden and astonishing increase of energy on the part of the denominational leaders, who feared the London School Board and its gift of undenominational teaching. All these causes had their effect, and the rates were kept as low as Mr. Forster had anticipated. The School Board rate for the year ending March, 1875, was about ifd. in the pound on the then rating. Mr. Firth, writing in 1876, anticipated "that a rateof2^d. in the pound over the whole metropolis ought to defray the current cost, and to repay the loans incurred in respect of the enforce- ments of a complete and efficient elementary education for the metropolis." It was a rash prophecy, but it shows what the best opinion was in 1876 as to the probable cost of an efficient system. It was almost universally believed that the great towns, with their great and ever- increasing rateable area, would not need more than 3d. 236 Education in London. in the pound, though a larger sum might be necessary in shrinking and unproductive rateable areas. It was never anticipated that the London rate would ever exceed one shilling. Yet perhaps such a forecast might reasonably have been made. The returns of 1875 showed that there were in London 124,000 children between three and thirteen years still totally unprovided with education in recognised schools. It is true that a certain percentage had to be deducted for the children between three and five, the compulsory age, and that some were in in- efficient schools. But inefficient schools were for the most part patronized by the upper and middle classes. A very large part of the 124,000 had no school at all, and were of school age. Moreover, it was necessary to keep pace with a rapidly growing population, and with the growing requirements of the Board of Education and of the School Board itself. The latter from the first showed its determination to secure results worth having. In order to make the compulsory system possible, London was divided into districts under ten divisional committees, which controlled sub-districts, patrolled by some 200 visitors, who did their work with a success that varied with their tact. That the problem was no simple one may be gathered from the fact that in the year ending September 29, 1874, 77,985 notices as to the attendance of children were issued to parents. Of these, 36,288 were warnings, and 41,697 a demand for a per- sonal explanation. Every effort was made to secure possession of destitute children and send them to resident industrial schools, while the Board freely exercised its power under section 1 7 to remit fees where parents were too poor to pay. The experience of London showed long 237 The Progress of Education in England. before 1891 that compulsory education cannot take universal effect unless it is free. From the first the Board determined to do all that was possible to make education efficient. In addition to the ordinary subjects, it made music, drill, and needlework essential, and a course of elementary science was intro- duced as an introduction to the examinations of the Science and Art Department. We have considered else- where the general question of ex-standards, of Higher Elementary Schools, of advanced evening schools. All these means of education were developed by the London School Board of set purpose. Legal or illegal, it was the only way to solve the intolerable problem of London ignorance. The fact that in 1876 London contained at least a hundred thousand poor children of school age not attending school could only be destroyed by the creation of schools that would of themselves compel the children to come in compel by making education, in the mind of the people, synonymous with interest. To create such schools meant great cost, but it cannot be denied that the question of cost had to be swept aside in the face of the necessity. England could not afford, London herself could not afford, the social wastage involved in the existence in perpetuity of a large and almost totally ignorant class. The loss in production alone was enormous, while evils that form in the atmosphere of ignorance evils of disease, crime, and diminishing physical efficiency alone far more than counter-balanced low rates. The policy of the Education Department and of the London School Board by the year 1901 had justi- fied itself. There were in that year 476 efficient London Voluntary schools (333 of which were Church of Eng- 238 Education in London. land), with accommodation for 252,279 children. 217,026 children were on the Voluntary school registers, and 172,597 in average attendance. There were 486 Board schools, with accommodation for 556,609 children ; 538,223 children were on the Board school registers, with 446,520 in average attendance. In all there was accommodation for 808,888 children ; 755,249 were on the school registers, and 619,117 were in average attend- ance. In other words, one in seven of the population of London were in actual attendance at the public elementary schools of the metropolis, and one in six were on the school books. It will be remembered that in 1820 only one in 46 of the population of London were at school if school it could be called. The price paid for such a social revolution a revolution involving, we may seriously believe, the salvation of society has been low enough. The year of these figures was the year of the Cockerton Case. Reasons have been given for the belief that the stage had been reached when the changes involved in that case might not only safely, but with great gain be made. The permanence of an all embracing efficient elementary system having been secured, the time had come for securing an equally efficient secondary system open to all fit to profit by it. The Act of 1902 did not include London, which by enabling Acts still remained under the London School Board for elementary purposes ; while its secondary and higher systems were still supplied in part by the endowed schools, in part by the Technical Edu- cation Board of the London County Council, in part by the Board of Education as representing the former Science and Art Department, and in part by the Uni- 239 The Progress of Education in England. versity of London and its Schools, or affiliated colleges. The secondary education was thus still in an unco- ordinated state, without any scientific relation to the primary system. The Education (London) Act, 1903, was designed to bring the metropolis into line with the rest of the country. It declared that as from May ist, 1904 (or such later day, not being later than May ist, 1905, as the Board of Education should appoint), the Act of 1902 should so far as applicable apply to London. By virtue of this pro- vision, the London County C ouncil, which for so many purposes was the secondary authority, became on March 5th, 1904, the local Education Authority for London. Every public elementary school provided by the Authority in the metropolis will have a body of managers. The number of these managers, and the manner in which schools, in cases where it is desirable, shall be grouped under one body of managers, will be determined by the Council of the metropolitan borough in which the school or group of schools is situated, after consultation with the County Council, and subject to the approval of the Board of Education. Two -thirds of every such body of managers will be appointed by the Borough Council, and one-third by the County Council. At least one-third of the whole body of managers must be women, and the first body under the new Act must contain such propor- tion of the managers already in office under the old system as the Board of Education decide. This will secure a continuity of local management, and will (in conjunction with the Act of 1902) prevent any break in the existing excellent elementary system. It is further provided that the Borough Council shall be 240 Education in London. consulted as to the acquisition of new school sites, and that any objections it shall make to the compulsory acquisition of any selected site shall not be over-ruled, unless the Board of Education is of opinion that the con- currence of the Borough Council can be dispensed with. In all boundary questions as between different boroughs the Board of Education will decide which borough shall be considered to include the school in question. The conjoint results of the Acts of 1902 and 1903 with respect to the London voluntary or non-provided schools is that, as elsewhere in the country, these schools will have six managers four appointed in accordance with the trust deed, one appointed by the London County Council, and one by the local Borough Council. This will provide both local and central public representation on these managing bodies, "and thus the needs, deficiencies, shortcomings, and merits of these schools will be kept before those responsible for the efficiency of London education. Since more than one quarter of the children of London are still educated in voluntary schools, it is very necessary that these schools should receive every assistance, but at the same time should be conducted in the blaze of public opinion. The Act of 1903 can secure this if it is efficiently and vigorously administered. The Act has given, as we see, very important duties to the metropolitan Borough Councils. The fact that these Councils have a majority on the managing bodies of all provided schools (two-thirds of the members being appointed by the Borough Councils and one-third by the County Council one-third of the whole body being women), and are represented on the managing bodies of all non-provided, creates a responsibility to supply 241 * The Progress of Education in England. able and educated managers both men and women. The work done by school managers under the London School Board has been very valuable, but it was limited in its usefulness by the necessity of referring at every turn on the smallest matters to the Board. It is to be hoped that the new managing bodies will be given a freer hand. The decentralisation of authority in purely local matters is a much needed reform in metropolitan education. The responsibility cast upon the Borough Councils will do much to secure this. The educational work of the London County Council will, of course, be immensely increased by the Act of 1903. It now becomes the authority for elementary and higher education for the entire metropolis. The educational care of perhaps a million children and young persons is thrown upon it. The work, of course, in this case, as in the case of other County Councils will, save in respect to the raising of education rates, be delegated to an Education Committee, which in the case of London will probably be incorporated as a Board by charter, and will include, it would seem, a minority of co-opted members with special educational knowledge. The question of the rates and education funds need not delay us here, as that question has been dealt with in considering the general position outside London. It is to be noticed, however, that in the case of the London County Council there is no limit as there is in the case of other County Councils, to the power of rating for the purposes of higher education. The London Technical Education Board, the former Committee of the County Council, administered the London share of the moneys available for secondary 242 Education in London. education under the Local Taxation (Customs and Excise) Act, 1890, and funds raised under the rating power contained in the Technical Instruction Act, 1889. This Board already half controlled the endowed secondary schools of London by virtue of annual grants, without which these schools are now unable to continue their work. It was already directly represented on the managing bodies of these schools. Its successor has further power of representation, and, with its unlimited powers for secondary purposes, it will be able to encourage all aspects of true secondary education, so that in the future, if a sound policy is adopted, the School of Literature will not be sacrificed to the School of Science. In future, too, the Board will be able to help the University Colleges of London, which, despite the Treasury grant which they receive, stand in much need of financial assistance and of co-ordination with the secondary system. Higher educa- tion in London will certainly include the work of these colleges, and of the new University of which they form the schools. The machinery of University extension teaching will doubtless be used by the County Council for the purpose of bringing the University of London into teaching union with the secondary schools. The Act of 1903 secures the indissoluble connection between the elementary and the secondary schools. The County Council Committee or Board will find its earliest, and perhaps most laborious, work in defining the sphere of both classes of schools, in deciding which of the old Board schools shall remain elementary, which shall be of a transition type, capable of taking full advantage of the science and art curriculum and grants, which shall become first grade secondary schools. More secondary 243 The Progress of Education in England. schools are urgently needed in London, schools, that is, of a purely secondary type. When this work is accom- plished, as accomplished it must be if London is to fulfil to use the words of the Duke of Devonshire at the English Education Exhibition, January 5th, 1900 "the great national duty of providing .... for all the sons and daughters of our country, the noblest education, the best training, and the finest discipline that the wit of man and the love of God can together produce and inspire," the future of English Education will be secured. The same educational thinker declared on the same occasion that educationalists must "endeavour to show that our national education in England, with all its variety and heterogeneity, its diversions, and its cross- currents, is yet one and indivisible one in its common aim of furthering the highest welfare of every section of our people, and indivisible in its set purpose of providing, for each and all alike, that training of the mind, develop- ment of the faculties, and moulding of character which shall best fit each and all for effectively playing his or her part as a citizen of our Empire and a loyal subject of our Queen." These noble words may well lead to a few sentences with respect to an educational question in which London is peculiarly interested, though the Legislation on the subject applies to the country generally. We have seen in this chapter that London was from say 1660 to 1870 a forcing house for the inefficient and the vicious. The only hope for children of these types is education. Pro- vision as we have seen for the vicious and the children of the vicious is made by the system of Industrial, Reformatory and Poor Law schools. Whether these 244 Education in London. schools' are efficient as yet for their purpose may be doubted. It is certain that the barrack school system is sufficiently discredited. It was not, however, until 1893 that any effort was made by the Legislature to deal with children suffering from physical or mental deficiency. In 1893 an Act was passed to make better provision for the elementary education of blind and deaf children in England and Wales. The Act declared that efficient elementary instruction of a blind or deaf child must include instruction suitable to such child, and that the fact of blindness or deafness is not of itself, save in the case of a deaf child under seven years of age, a reason- able excuse for non-attendance at school, or for neglecting to provide efficient elementary education. A blind child, within the meaning of the Act, means " a child too blind to be able to read the ordinary school books used by children," and a deaf child is a child too deaf to be taught in an ordinary class. Such children must remain at school until the age of sixteen years. It is the duty of the local education authority to enable blind and deaf children resident in their district, for whose education efficient and suitable provision is not otherwise made, to obtain such education in a suitable school, to be provided or in part maintained by the local authority, and certified by the Board of Education. Where necessary or con- venient the local education authority must make arrange- ments, regulated by the Board of Education, for boarding out such children in a home conveniently near to the certified school. The Act does not apply to idiots or imbeciles, or to Poor Law children. The Board of Education will not grant a certificate to a school con- ducted for private profit, nor to a school not open to 245 The Progress of Education in England. inspection. It may, however, be a non-provided school, with certain limitations as to sources of income. Religious instruction is the subject of special provision. Not only is the child protected by a conscience clause, but it must, as far as practicable, have facilities for receiv- ing religious instruction and attending religious services conducted in accordance with the parents' persuasion. The parent is liable for certain expenses in relation to the upbringing of such child, and to the taking the child to and from school. The principle of this Act was extended in 1899 and 1903, when the Legislature decided to make better pro- vision for the elementary education of defective and epileptic children in England and Wales. The children that the Acts aim at are those who are neither imbecile nor idiots, but who, by reason of physical or mental defect, cannot receive proper benefit from the usual school classes, but can receive benefit from special classes. The child must be certified to come within this definition by a medical practitioner in a stated form. A parent who refuses to have his child examined for this purpose is liable to a fine of five pounds. In order to meet the case of these children the local Education Authority can provide special classes or special schools, with boarding-houses situated near to such certified classes or schools. The Authority may also provide guides or conveyances for children who, in its opinion, are by reason of any physical or mental defect unable otherwise to attend school. The Act affirms the obligation of parents with respect to such children, and makes education compulsory between the ages of seven and sixteen years. The parent is liable to contribute to any special expenses in this case, as in the 246 Education in London. case of blind or deaf children. The Act is perhaps open to the criticism that seven is too late an age to begin dealing with defective children. The very earliest training is the most successful in mitigating the results of either physical or mental defect. It is also a matter for regret that the education of so-called idiots and imbeciles should not receive special attention under the Education Acts. It appears to be now fully established that, by special and very early training, principally of a manual character, children whose personality appears inevitably to involve either idiocy or deficiency, have been rendered useful members of society. Certainly society has a peculiar duty to these victims of former and modern social conditions. In the case of London, the Act of 1903 makes the special provision, that where the schools provided for these special classes of children are not of a local character, they shall not be treated as public elementary schools in respect to the question of local management. This, however, does not, of course, exclude the creation of local elementary schools and classes for these children, and the schools which are not public elementary schools for the purposes of site selection and the management clause of the London Act are public elementary schools in all other respects. There were in 1902 19 day schools for the blind, 43 for the deaf, and 96 for defective children. For blind and deaf children there were 19 and 18 boarding institutions respectively, with accommodation for 1,237 and 1,966 children. In the day schools there was accommodation for 417 blind, 1,594 deaf, and 4,041 defective children. The total number of scholars and boarders was not far below the accommodation. The defective children are 247 The Progress of Education in England. entirely taught by women 225 in number. The active development of these schools is an important part of the work of the new Authority. It represents the bottom rung of that ladder of public education in London which may now extend up to, and perhaps beyond, post-graduate courses of study. The general elementary work of the new Authority will indeed involve special efforts, for there are still 120,000 children in London who are daily absent from school, though they are on the school books. Of this great army nearly half are still reaping very little benefit from State education. It will be interesting to observe the steps taken to deal with the apparently insoluble problem of irregular attendance. 248 CHAPTER IX. Universitp education* IT is not proposed to deal at any great length here with the history of the great English Universities. Any adequate treatment would be beyond the length assigned to this book, and would involve minute investigations that would be out of place. It is merely proposed briefly to trace the relationship of the Universities to the State from the end of the thirteenth century to the present time, and here and there to say a word as to their internal condi- tions. Whatever may have been the origins of the schools that developed into the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, we do not seem to find ourselves on any firm historical ground with respect to either before the twelfth century. We may believe that in the twelfth century the Universities were already flourishing institutions or republics of learning. Whether there was any Royal Charter for either University before the reign of Henry III. has been doubted. That, perhaps, is an over- cautious position to adopt, but it may at least be said that the first great University development was a thirteenth century movement. The Lenten Parliament of 1305, held at Westminster, is noteworthy as giving us the first record of relationship between the Legislature and the 249 The Progress of Education in England. Universities. In that year both Universities petitioned Parliament for especial powers and jurisdiction in the University towns. Cambridge, moreover, petitioned the King in Parliament to protect and endow a college of poor scholars.* This is interesting as showing that by this date the Universities were powerful quasi-corporations, and that they encouraged the presence of poor scholars. Doubtless through the thirteenth century they were fed with many scholars, both rich and poor, from schools such as the London schools described in the last chapter. The first actual statutory interference with the Uni- versities occurred in the year 1388, when by Statute 12 Ric. II., c. 7, it was provided that poor University scholars might beg if they carried testimonial letters from their Chancellor. This further evidence that the Universities welcomed poor scholars is a matter of some interest in days when the tendency of our educational legislation is to throw open the University doors by means of lavish rate-supplied scholarships to even the poorest class. The poverty of University scholars was notorious even as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. Wood tells us that in the year 1461 it was usual for Uni- versity scholars to go begging. Sir Thomas More, on surrendering the Chancellorship, said to his children, " Then may we yet like poor scholars of Oxford go a-begging with our bags and wallets." The statute of 1388 was confirmed by an Act of 1530 (22 Henry VIII., c. 12, s. 4) which ordered " scholars of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge that go about begging, not being authorised under the seal of the said University," to be *See the Memoranda de Parliamento, edited by Professor Maitland in the Rolls series, pp. 33-36, 44-7. 250 University Education. treated as " strong beggars " and punished. In those days, then, scholarship, if guaranteed by the University, was enabled to levy a sort of voluntary rate on all and several, and strange are the stories that may be read of scholars earning a meal in exchange for the writing of Latin dedicatory verses. In 1393 we find the University of Cambridge petitioning the King and Council of Parlia- ment to declare that stationers and bookbinders of the said University be adjudged servants of the scholars in the same manner as had been provided in the Charter of the Chancellor and Scholars of Oxford. To what Charter the petition refers is not clear, but the reference to stationers and bookbinders is important. The Universities at this date held the position later occupied by the Stationers' Company with respect to the licensing of books, and the University scriptores and illuminatores must have been a considerable source of profit. It will be remembered that Lord Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Constitutions of 1408, against the Lollards, placed a general embargo upon books, unless they had received a license from the Univer- sities of Oxford or Cambridge, and he gave to these Universities the sole right to copy and sell such books. The desire of both Universities to control all bookbinders and stationers in the University towns is therefore easy to understand. It was not until the year 1483 that foreign books were allowed by Statute (i Ric. III., c. 9) to be imported. By that date the Universities were at their lowest ebb, and when in 1534 (25 Hen. VIII., c. 15) foreign books were again excluded, the control of books passed into the hands of the Stationers' Company, created by Henry VIII. for that purpose, though it was 251 The Progress of Education in England. not incorporated until 1556. Even the Common Law rights of the Universities to copyright in their own books was destroyed in the eighteenth century by the decision in Donaldson v. Beckett (TJ^). In 1775, however, the Act of 15 Geo. III., c. 53, gave them perpetual copy- right in all books bequeathed to them, and they still retain this remnant of their mediaeval universal power overbooks. Legislation before the Reformation affected the Uni- versities as a centre of prescriptive government, rather than as a place of learning. In 1407, and again in 1411, Parliament refused to renew certain Oxford fran- chises. In 1421 Parliament, in consequence of armed students raiding the country, ordained that the Common Law should run in the University, and provided for the banishment of rebellious students. In the next year the turbulent behaviour of Irish students necessitated legis- lation. Restraints were placed by Parliament on their admission to the Universities, and they were prohibited from becoming principals of halls. The evil was not, however, cured by ordering Irish students to bring testi- monials, and therefore in the following year (1423) they were ordered to bring sureties. These acts of interference had on the whole little effect. Both Universities assumed something like sovereign power in their districts, and were rarely interfered with. Indeed, on one other occasion only did Parliament refer to the Universities in the fifteenth century, and that was for the purpose of granting a small privilege. A sumptuary Act of 1463, recalling a like Act of 1363, declared "that the scholars of the Universities of this Realm, and scholars of any University out of this Realm, may use and wear such array as they may use and wear by the rule of the said 252 University Education. Universities, notwithstanding this ordinance." At the moment anything that was likely to lend distinction to the Universities and their members was to be desired. Learning at the Universities was at this time (1466), according to Wood, much "decayed," and he quotes the despairing epistle of the University of Oxford to John Chadworth, Bishop of Lincoln, praying for the revival of grammar teaching in some way or another. The saving of Oxford was Wycklifism. The new sect and prophet that had been portended a century before in the month of October, 1365, by " the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in signo Scorpii," were still a living force in Oxford. In 1476 the King attempted to purge Oxford. One Thomas Smyth was actually purged of heresy in the Royal presence ; and the other heretics were ejected, excommunicated, or otherwise punished. But heresy was not rooted out, even though Edward IV. confirmed all the University Charters, and constituted himself Protector of the University. Dealing with the extreme end of the century, Wood tells us, as we have already seen, that " the Schools were much frequented with querks and sophistry. All things whether taught or written, seemed to be trite and inane. No pleasant streams of Humanity or Mythology were gliding among us, and the Greek language from whence the greater part of knowledge is derived, was at a very low ebb, or in a manner forgotten. Scholars were inconstant and wavering, and could not apply themselves to an ordinary search in anything. They rather made choice of, than embraced, those things which their reasons were capable of. ... Those scholars that had anything extraor- dinary in them were tinged with Wycklifism, and therefore 2 53 The Progress of Education in England. did not or at least could not show themselves so familiar or free in the Schools as others." The restlessness of the Renaissance was in the air. There were still a few faithful scholars left. There is reason to suppose that the study of Greek never utterly died out in Oxford. Bacon's learned tracts were still current. His " De Ccelo et Mundo " was in the library that Humphrey of Gloucester gave to Oxford, and his Greek grammar was as certainly available as his volume on mathematics. Erasmus in 1499, despite the un- doubtedly desperate state of the University, could find in the company of Colet, Grocyn, Linacre, More, Tonstall, Stopley, and Pace enough polish and learning to make him turn his eyes from Italy. By 1516 Greek had revived at Cambridge, and by 1519 the Oxford students hungered after it, and in Greek and Trojan riots fought for its re-establishment. They were willing to fight, as well as to watch, fast, toil, and hunger, in pursuit of the new learning. The Universities had awakened from more than a century of sleep the sleep imposed by the imperious hand of Archbishop Clarendon. An Act of 1536, amending an Act of 1529 intended to introduce reforms in Church and Universities alike by compelling men possessed of livings to reside in their benefices, instead of idling their time away in the University towns, draws a vivid picture of the activity of University life at this time. An Act of 1535 was, moreover, designed to encourage the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in addition to the Trivium and Quadrivium, while a further Statute of 1548 permitted for the encouragement of learning the recitation of common prayer at the Universities in any of these tongues. Henry VIII., despite his Chantry Legislation, 254 University Education. was a true lover of learning, and did much to revive letters in the two Universities. Queen Elizabeth, as we have seen, had no less desire to foster learning. It is true that in 1558 she imposed upon graduates the oath of supremacy in matters both temporal and spiritual, and so created a precedent that in time to come was destined to numb the conscience of learning, but in matters purely educational she did much. In 1562 University students and scholars were declared to be free from the operation of the Statute of Apprentices. In 1571, " for the maintenance of good and Godly literature and the virtuous education of youth within either of the same Universities," she confirmed their ancient privileges, liberties, and franchises, and incorporated them by Statute ; in 1588 she attacked by Statute the corruption of the collegiate foundations, and made them once more available for the poor scholars, to whose help they had been originally directed. The result of Elizabeth's tireless efforts on behalf of University and general national education is shown by the fact that there were nearly three thousand scholars in residence in the twenty-tour Colleges of Oxford in the long vacation of the year 1612. The late years of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century formed perhaps the most flourishing period that the English Universities have known, with the possible exception of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It is an inter- esting fact that during the seventeenth century University students were compelled to be in residence during the vacations. The appearance of Cromwell, though it roused the loyalty of the Universities and brought them certain losses and perhaps some gain for in 1649 a grant 2 55 The Progress of Education in England. of 2,000 a year was made (though perhaps not paid) by Parliament for the increase of the maintenance of the masterships of both Universities did not break the current of University life in any way. A writer of the year 1654 deals in elaborate detail with the curriculum of the Universities of that time, and attacks with vigorous pen an opponent of the current methods. In this long pamphlet there is no whisper of political disturbance, no suggestion of tyrannical oversight by a usurping Govern- ment.* We learn, too, that science teaching of a new order was beginning to flourish. Mr. Oughtred, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, was lecturing on mathe- matics, while Mr. Briggs, Professor of Geometry at Oxford, and others, were dealing with " arithmetic, geometry, and analytical algebra, the solution and application of equations." Moreover, the theory of optics was not neglected. " All sorts of radiation or vision," hitherto "counted magical," were ordinarily explained by lecturers and college tutors. The author of the pamphlet is all for new things. The lost cause of Ptolemaic astronomy has been finally abandoned at Oxford. " I believe there is not one man here, who is so farre astronomicall, as to be able to calculate an eclipse, who hath not received the Copemican system (as it was left by him, or as improved by Kepler, Bullialdus our own professor, and others of the ellipticall way)." He goes on to show that the empirical methods of Francis Bacon were in full favour in the teaching of science. The condition of Cambridge was not so good. A petition of the University to Parliament of about the year 1648 complains of the scarcity of funds, professors and students. Another tract (published *See Vindiciae Academiarum, Oxford, 1654. 256 University Education* between 1691 and 1708) tells us that a School of Chemistry was founded at Oxford about 1660. Dr. Wallis and Dr. Ward lectured regularly in their capacity as professors of mathematics ; systematised lectures were given by Mr. David Gregory, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy, from 1691 to 1708, and Mr. Caswell was a private "coach" in our modern sense. Oxford and Cambridge, by the opening of the eighteenth century, were, in fact, assuming their modern form, and were familiar with the latest aspects of current thought. Macaulay tells us (presumably on good authority) that at this very time Greek was in a poor way at both Universities. The contest between Oxford and James II., however, certainly strengthened Oxford in many ways. It was the policy of the King to turn Oxford into a Roman Catholic University. He claimed, in 1686, that this had been accomplished, and that the turn of Cambridge to suffer a similar transformation was at hand. The test of the efficiency of James' work came early in 1687. I* was illegal for a Romanist or a Dissenter to take a University degree. In February, 1687, the King ordered the University of Cambridge to admit a Benedictine monk to the Mastership of Arts The answer was a refusal, and this was followed by pains and penalties imposed by Jeffreys in his delicate way. In the autumn of the same year the King attempted to force the Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, to accept the Papist Bishop of Oxford as their president. On refusal they were ejected, and the College became a Roman seminary. The Universities, however, did not accept defeat, and on the accession of William and Mary, received their reward in the shape of the 257 s The Progress of Education in England. revival of the statutory right (created in 1605) of presenta- tion to benefices vested in Roman Catholics ; and in 1713 this right was extended to the case where livings were held by Protestants in secret trust for the Papists. The contest decided finally and for ever the political position in England of Roman Catholicism. The eighteenth century had as deadening an effect on education in the Universities as it had on all other forms of education in the country. That learned men some of the most learned men that the Universities have known appeared in this period is true, but such cases were rare exceptions. The oaths that Elizabeth had imposed became drugs for conscience, and education in the Universities ceased to be a living national force. That the century was historically valueless is, of course, not true. It was, in the Universities, valuable, as it was elsewhere, as a seed time when the harvest of the nine- teenth century was sown. We have seen how, in the later years of the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth century, scientific thought was progressing in both Universities. The machinery of this class of thought was steadily developed at Cambridge. In 1747-8 the Mathematical Tripos was initiated, and twelve Cambridge professorships were founded in the eighteenth century. It was not, however, until the early nineteenth century that mathematics became a living force, a weapon of science instead of a puzzle-solver, and the great work of the professorships belongs to the nineteenth century. The condition of both Universities at the opening of the nineteenth century was comparable to that which existed at the beginning of the sixteenth century ; but there was one noteworthy distinction. In the year 1500 the 258 University Education. Universities contained many Dissenters, or Wycklifites, while in the year 1800 Dissent and Roman Catholicism were rigidly excluded. The Universities were the strict preserves of the Established Church. Reform was a difficult matter. Mr. Graham Balfour* has pointed out that " the constitution of both Uni- versities seemed to have been devised to prevent any attempts at change." A single vote in the case of the Cambridge Caput Senatus, or the vote of the Vice- Chancellor or the joint-vote of the two proctors in the Oxford Hebdomadal Board, could veto any proposed change. Convocation at Oxford, and the Senate at Cambridge the general body of masters had power to veto, but no power to amend, proposals sent down to them ; while the Congregation of regent masters had ceased to have any constitutional force. The Elizabethan Statutes of 1570 still ruled Cambridge, and the Laudian Statutes of 1636, Oxford ; while behind these, as Mr. Balfour shows, stood the mediaeval regulations. Both University and College Statutes were practically immutable, except at the instance of the Legislature. The awakening came from within. Movements such as that of the Low Church at Cambridge and of the High Church at Oxford spiritual movements of great national signification could not be without effect on the educa- tional position. Apart from these successive movements there were educationalists at work, such as Airy and Whewell at Cambridge, and Cyril Jackson at Oxford, who brought new life to the old sources. In 1800 Oxford began to examine for the Bachelor of Arts degree, while three years earlier the Cambridge Mathe- *Educational Systems, p. 229. 259 The Progress of Education in England. matical Tripos had become a test of merit. Oxford Honour lists took definite form in 1807 ; in 1830 Honour and Pass Schools were separated, and in 1850 Moderations were introduced. In the meantime, at Cambridge, in 1815, the Civil Law Classes were started, and in 1824 the Classical Tripos was founded for those who had already taken mathematical honours. In 1850 it became an independent Tripos. New Triposes followed rapidly : Moral Science and Natural Science in 1851, Theological Examinations in 1856, Law in 1858, Theology 1874, Law and History in 1870, History in 1875, Semitic languages in 1878, Indian languages in 1879, Mediaeval and Modern languages in 1886, Mechanical Sciences in 1894, and Oriental languages in 1895. W e have seen that in 1660 a School of Chemistry had been started at Oxford. The modern counterpart of this was the Natural Science Honour School founded in 1853. In the same year Jurisprudence and Modern History became an Honour School, and this was followed by Theology in 1870. Two years later Jurisprudence and History were separated, and in the years 1887, 1891, 1896, 1897 respectively Indian, Semitic, Oriental, and the English languages were made the subjects of special Honour Schools.* These changes took place in changing times, and under both internal and external pressure. The signs of the times were shown significantly in a debate in the House of Commons on August i6th, 1833, as to a grant of ^"1,264 to defray the expenses of salaries and allowances to certain professors in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This grant had been made annually since *See Educational Systems, p. 237, and the Cambridge Calendar. 260 University Education. June 28th, 1821. In the course of the debate the grant was objected to on the ground that Dissenters were excluded from the Universities, and Mr. Ewart, a stalwart educationalist, declared that had they been admitted he would have wished to have seen a far larger grant. In the next year a Bill providing for the admission of Dissenters passed the Commons, but was wrecked in the Lords. Public opinion was allowed sixteen years in which to ripen, and at last in 1850 the Crown appointed two Royal Commissioners to inquire into the conditions of the Universities. Inquiry was resented with a vigour worthy of the City companies, and the Commission was compared with the unhallowed attempt of King James II. to restore Oxford to her pristine faith. Hampered as the Com- missioners were, the facts of the case and the prevalent abuses appeared in the Reports of 1852, and Oxford received in 1854, and Cambridge in 1856, their first revivifying Acts. " The constitutions were reformed ; the Hebdomadal Council and the Council of the Senate were to be elected in certain proportions from Heads of Houses, Professors and other Doctors and Masters of Arts. The Cambridge veto was abolished ; Convocation and the Senate were reformed. Oxford Congregation, the body of resident Doctors and Masters, was now constituted, although the Ancient House of Congregation, which grants degrees and appoints examiners, was, perhaps accidentally, still left in existence. Oaths and Declarations were abolished for all degrees at Cambridge except in Divinity, but no graduate could become a member of the Senate without declaring himself a member of the Established Church. At Oxford these tests were removed 261 The Progress of Education in England. from Matriculation and the Bachelors' Degrees, except in Divinity; for the M.A. and all Doctors' degrees they were retained."* Both Universities and Colleges were given power of internal reform, subject to the approval of the Crown and Council, and large possibilities of develop- ment were possible. The advance made was certainly insufficient, and a great struggle in and out of Parliament for complete freedom led up to the Universities Tests Act, 1871. This Act recited that " it is expedient that the benefits of the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, and of the colleges and halls now subsisting therein, as places of religion and learning, should be rendered freely accessible to the nation ; and whereas by means of divers restrictions, tests, and disabilities, many of Her Majesty's subjects are debarred from the full enjoy- ment of the same." The necessity of free access to the Universities was at last recognised, and the mediaeval position restored. The Act declared that persons taking lay academical degrees, or holding lay academical or collegiate offices, should not be required to subscribe any formulary of faith, or to conform to any religious observ- ance, or to attend or to abstain from attending any form of public worship, or to belong to any specified Church or sect or denomination. The Act did not affect the existing position of the Divinity degrees, nor did it inter- fere with any lawfully established system of religious in- struction, worship and discipline, and it directed the governing bodies of the colleges to provide sufficient religious instruction for all members in statu pnpillari be- longing to the Established Church. But no person was * Educational Systems, p. 233. 262 University Education. to be required to attend any College or University lecture to which he, if he were of full age, or if he were not of full age, his parent or guardian should object on religious grounds. In effect, while throwing open fellowships to all denominations, it secured through the medium of college offices a certain number of fellowships for profess- ing members of the Established Church. But while the great Universities were thus made freely accessible to the nation, and while an Act of 1877 regulated in a more equitable manner the financial relationship of the Uni- versities with their respective Colleges, nothing was done to fetter the University freedom to develop its educa- tional functions in its own way. It was felt that educa- tional liberalism was in the air, and that elasticity in matters of education would be checked by State interfer- ence. The rapid development in efficiency of both Uni- versities in the face of acute and growing financial difficul- ties has more than justified this policy. Oxford and Cambridge, by a continuous and wise policy dating from as early as 1856, have made themselves the natural sources of educational inspiration, though there are still some Educationalists who doubt whether Oxford's notable action in abolishing, on gth February, 1904, compulsory Greek was wise. Such thinkers urge that neither Oxford nor Cambridge ought to compete with the younger Universities, but should rather preserve a peculiar type of culture. As we have seen, it was on February nth, 1858, that Oxford, for the first time, held its middle-class examina- tion throughout the country. It was the birthday of the new education. Cambridge threw in its lot with the new movement, and joint examinations were held. Oxford 263 The Progress of Education in England. even granted a degree that of Associate in Arts to the advanced candidates.* In 1863 the Cambridge Syndi- cate extended the examination to girls, and from 1870 they were placed with both Universities on the same footing as boys. A junior or preliminary examination was subsequently added to the certificate examination. The popularity of these local examinations is great. In 1901 more than 24,000 candidates took the papers, and more than 16,000 passed.! The Universities in other ways brought themselves into contact with the secondary system. In the schemes for endowed schools, made in pursuance of the Endowed Schools Act, 1869, and the Amending Acts, annual examinations are made an essen- tial test of the curriculum. In order to provide an efficient examining body that would meet the needs of these schools, a Joint Board of the Universities was formed in 1873, and it was arranged that the certificates of this Board should exempt undergraduates from the first University examination. In 1878 girls were admitted to this examination a very necessary provision, in view of the number of endowed girls' schools governed by scheme. In 1873 a further development took place, with the establishment by the University of Cambridge of the University Extension system. In 1878 this work was placed under the control of the Local Examinations Syndicate. In 1876 a London society for the extension of University teaching was formed, and two years later Oxford followed suit. Cam- bridge has realized the possibility of University 'Educational Systems, p. 179. t Ibid. p. 180. 264 University Education. Extension development by recognising a three-year course in substitution for one year in residence, thus making it possible for the Cambridge degree to be taken with two years' residence instead of three. Moreover, the strength of the Extension movement has now been well tested by the foundation of colleges based on this system. The University Extension is rapidly developing in connexion both with the elder Universities and recent foundations, but it has not, as yet, fully obtained its place in an organized system of education. That there is ample room for it in that system is universally admitted. As we have already seen, under the Board of Education Act, 1899, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, by their ample representation on the Consultative Com- mittee, are brought into still closer contact with the secondary system, especially by means of examinations, and by the formation of the Register of Teachers. The fact that both Universities are now devoting special efforts to the training of teachers will be a further factor between the highest and what is known as higher educa- tion. The great work of knitting together all forms of higher education has, moreover, received an immense impulse by the development throughout the country of University colleges, offering a complete education to both men and women, and by the formation since 1873 of the special women's colleges at Cambridge and Oxford. Durham University, long designed, but not founded until 1832, has since that date done much for higher education and theological training in the North of England. Four years later the examining University of London came into existence, and it has 265 The Progress of Education in England. done good, if not very inspiring work, for the great Metropolis. Its matriculation examination has long been considered a satisfactory close to a secondary elucation, while the standard of its degrees has been kept high. Since 1900 various University Colleges and institutions, such as King's College, University College, Bedford College, the City and Guilds Institute, and others, have become Schools of the University, and to-da), whether in respect of its strictly University system, its University extension system, or its examina- tion of schools system, it ranks worthily in effort with the elder Universities. The North of England in, so to speak, its industrial capacity, is now fully equipped with the means of higher education. The Victoria University of Manchester was incorporated in 1880 as the successor of Owens College a College of the University type founded in 1851. University College, Liverpool. d Yorkshire College, Leeds, were admitted in 1884 and 1887 respectively to the Victoria University, but these Colleges have now grown into such local importance that the union has been dissolved, and to-day we have, instead of the Victoria University, the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester, and Yorkshire. These Universities are endeavouring with much success to follow the modern liberal policy and ideals of Oxford and Cambridge, and will therefore play a great part in binding together the secondary and the University system of the country. The same may be said of the University of Birmingham, which in 1900 succeeded Mason College, founded in 1880, This is the only University with a faculty of commerce, and it alone among these bodies is in part rate- supported. University work is also being carried on 266 University Education. by University Colleges at Bristol, Sheffield, and Nottingham, as well as by the important University of Wales referred to in the chapter on Wales. Moreover the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have, during the last quarter of a century, steadily developed a co- ordinating system of affiliation to all the most noteworthy universities, colleges, and institutions in the empire. The Educational Endowments founded by Mr. Rhodes, at Oxford, are one aspect of this movement. We therefore see that the national, indeed the Imperial, education system is not wanting in its University aspect. The various Universities, ancient and modern, can supply every possible variation of need, and can combine things local and peculiar with things universal and general. The machinery of national education is, so to speak, on the ground. We have now a universal compulsory free system of elementary education, and this is dove-tailed into a rich secondary system, which, in its turn, is dove- tailed into a poor, but efficient, University system. But the machine is not yet finally fitted together, is not yet in permanent work. All that has been done as yet has been experiment. The time has come when the great engines must take up their tireless course and turn, year in, year out, the raw product of humanity into men and women. A great national educational system is a factory of souls. England has been great in the past, in spite of intolerance, in spite of the Godless desolation of her cities, and the intolerable dulness of her villages. The Aide- burgh of Mr. George Crabbe, and the London of Mr. Francis Place, make the greatness of England an in- soluble mystery ; nor does the mystery grow clear when we study the York of Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, the London 267 The Progress of Education in England. of Mr. Charles Booth, or the records of the assize towns. But this, at least, we know, that the combination of races which make up this race has enabled it to be great, despite the rule of Ignorance and the horrors of her court. We cannot know what we shall be, but the infinite possi- bilities of the future are not altogether hidden from sight when, we lift our hearts from the dust and turmoil to a period that now seems not remote, when it will be pos- sible for every child to be so educated that it will be given the opportunity of completely realizing the noblest poten- tialities of its nature. There will then, at any rate, be fewer laws made and broken. THE END. TABLE OF STATUTES CITED. PAGE 10 Hen. II., Art. xvi. (Constitutions of Clarendon, 1164) - 21 27 Edw. III., stat. i., c. i (Statute of Provisors, 1353) - 36 36 Edw. III., c. 15 (Anglo-Norman Dialect, 1362) 18 37 Edw. III., c. 13 (Dress of Scholars, 1363) - 252 6 Ric. II., c. 5 (Against Lollards, 1382) - 28 12 Ric. II., c. 7 (Poor University Scholars, 1388) 250 2 Hen. IV., c. 15 (de Hantico Comburendo, 1401) 28 7 Hen. IV., c. 17 (First Statute of Education, 1405-6)- 28 9 Hen. IV., c. i (Oxford Scholars, 1407)- - 252 13 Hen. IV., c. i (Oxford Scholars, 1411)- - 252 2 Hen V., c. 7 (Against Lollards, 1414) - 30 9 Hen. V., stat. i., c. 8 (Oxford Scholars, 1421) - 252 1 Hen. VI., c. 3 (Oxford Irish Scholars, 1422) - 252 2 Hen. VI., c. 8 (Oxford Irish Scholars, 1423) 252 3 Edw. IV., c. 5 (University Gowns Act, 1463) - 252 i Ric. III., c. 9 (Importation of Foreign Books, 1483) 2 5i 21 Hen. VIII., cc. 5, 6, 7 (Reformation Statutes, 1529) - 38 22 Hen. VIII., c. 12, 5.4 (Poor University Scholars, 1530) - 250 22 Hen. VIII., cc. 15, 16 (Reformation Statutes, 153) - 3 8 TABLE OF STATUTES. PAGE 23 Hen. VIII., cc. 9, ig, 20 (Reformation Statutes, i53i) 38 24 Hen. VIII., c. 12 (Reformation Statute, 1532) 38 25 Hen. VIII., c. 15 (Exclusion of Foreign Books, 1534) - 251 25 Hen. VIII. , cc. 19-22 (Reformation Statutes, 1534) 38 26 Hen. VIII., cc. 2, 3 (Reformation Statutes, 1535) - 38 i Edw. VI., c. 14 (Destruction of Chantry Schools, 1547) - - 40, 41 i Eliz., c. 24 (Preservation of Schools, 1558-9) - 42 5 Eliz., c. i, s. 4 (Orthodoxy of Schoolmasters, 1562-3) 41 5 Eliz., c. 4 (Statute of Apprentices, 1562-3) 42, 255 5 Eliz., c. 28 (Welsh Bible, 1562-3) 53 13 Eliz., c. 29 (Incorporation of the Univer- sities, 1571) - 43 39 Eliz., c. 6 (Commissioners for Charitable uses, 1597-8) - 42 43 Eliz., c. 2, s. 5 (Compulsory Apprentice- ship, 1601) 67 i Jas. I., c. 4, s. 8 (Licence to Teach, 1603-4) - 44 Cromwell [unnumbered] (Welsh Education Act, 1649) - 45 Cromwell, c. 31 (Education Funds Act, 1649) - 45 14 Car. II., c. 4 (The Act of Uniformity, 1662) 45-6, 52 17 Car. II., c. 2 (The Five Mile Act, 1665) 46 i Will. & M., c. 18 (Act of Toleration, 1688) - 49 c. 26 (University Privileges, 1688) 49 7 & 8 W. & M., c. 21 (Greenwich Hospital School, 1696) 56 ii. TAPLE OF STATUTES. PAGE 10 Anne, c. 6 (Act of Toleration, 1711) - 49 12 Anne, c. 5, s. 9 (Teaching of Alien Chil- dren, 1713) 49 13 Anne, c. 7 (Freedom of Elementary Schools, 1714) 49 13 Geo. II., c. 29, s. 5 (Foundling Hospital School, 1740) 56 7 Geo. III., c. 39 (Education of Pauper Children, 1767) 56 15 Geo. III., c. 53 (University Copyright, 1775) - 252 19 Geo. III., c. 44 (Freedom of Dissenters to Teach, 1779) - 49 31 Geo. III., c. 32, s, 13, 14 (Freedom of Roman Catholics to Teach, 1791) - 49 42 Geo. III., c. 73 (First Factory Act, 1802) - 68-9 58 Geo. III., c. 91 (Charity Commissioners, 1818) 71 3 & 4 Will. IV., c. 103 (Factory Act, 1833) 9 8 4 & 5 Will. IV., c. 76 (Poor Law Act, 1834) - 156 3 & 4 Viet., c. 77 (Grammar Schools Act, 1840) - 106 7 & 8 Viet., c. 15 (Factory Act, 1844) 99 8 &9 Vict.,c. 43 (Museums of Science & Art, 1845) Io ^ 10 & ii Viet., c. 70 (Print Works Act, 1847) 99 13 & 14 Viet., c. 65 (Public Libraries, 1850) - 108 17 & 1 8 Viet., c. 8 1 (Oxford University, 1854) 261 17 & 18 Viet., c. 86 (Youthful Offenders, 1854) - 154 17 & 1 8 Viet., c. 112 (Libraries and Scientific Institutions, 1854) - 108 1 8 & 19 Viet., c. 34 (Education of Pauper Chil- dren, 1855) - 93 18 & 19 Viet., c. 70 (Public Libraries, 1855) - 108 1 8 & 19 Viet., c. 120 (Metropolis Management Act, 1855) - 235 in. TABLE OF STATUTES. 19 & 20 Viet., c. 88 (Cambridge University, 1856) - 261 19 & 20 Viet., c 109 (Reformatories, 1856) 154 19 & 20 Viet., c. 116 (Vice-President of the Council, 1856) 95 20 & 21 Viet., c. 48 (Industrial Schools, 1857) 155 24 & 25 Viet., c. 113 (Industrial Schools, 1861) 155 29 & 30 Viet., c. 117 (Reformatory Schools, 1866) 154 29 & 30 Viet., c. 118 (Industrial Schools, 1866) 155 30 & 31 Viet., c. 103 (Factory Act, 1867) 99-100 31 & 32 Viet., c. 118 (Public Schools Act, 1868) - 133 32 & 33 Viet., c. 56 (Endowed Schools Act, 1869) 106. 264 33 & 34 Viet., c. 75 (Elementary Education Act, 1870) - - 142 34 & 35 Viet., c. 26 (University Tests Act, 1871) 262-3 36 & 37 Viet., c 86 (Elementary Education Act, 1873) - - 152 37 & 38 Viet., c. 44 (Factory Act, 1874) 100 39 & 40 Viet., c. 79 (Elementary Education Act, 1876) - - 152 40 & 41 Viet, c. 48 (University Reform, 1877) 263 41 & 42 Viet., c. 1 6 (Factory and Workshop Act, 1878) 100 43 & 44 Viet., c. 23 (Elementary Education Act, 1880) - 10 1 47 & 48 Viet., c 37 (Public Libraries Act, 1884) 108 52 & 53 Viet, c 76 (Technical Instruction Act, 1889) 185, 109, no-i 53 & 54 Viet., cc. 56, 60 (" Whisky Money," 1890) - 109, no, 183-4 IV, TABLE OF STATUTES. PAGE 54 Viet., c. 4 (Technical Instruction Act, 1891) 185 54 & 55 Viet., c. 56 (Compulsory Education, 1891) - - 160-1, 237 54 & 55 Viet., c. 75 (Factory and Workshop Act, 1891) 101 55 & 56 Viet., c. 53 (Public Libraries Act, 1892) 108 56 & 57 Viet., c. 42 (Blind and Deaf Children, 1893) ' 245 56 & 57 Viet., c. 51 (School Attendance, 1893) IO1 60 Viet., c. 5 (Voluntary Schools Act, 1897) 162 60 Viet., c. 1 6 (Board School Act, 1897) - - 162 62 & 63 Viet., c. 13 (Robson's Act, 1899) - 101 62 & 63 Viet., c. 32 (Defective and Epileptic Children, 1899) - 246 62 & 63 Viet., c. 33 (Board of Education Act, 1899) - 103 63 & 64 Viet., c. 53 (School Attendance, 1900) 101, 148 1 Edw. VII., c. 22 (Factory and Workshop Act, 1901) - 101, 148 2 Edw. VII., c. 14 (The University of Wales Act, 1902) - - 218 2 Edw. VII., c. 19 (School Board Renewal Act, 1902) - - 239 2 Edw. VII., c. 42 (Education Act, 1902)- 181-202 3 Edw. VII., c. 10 (Education: Local Finance, 1903) - - - 202 3 Edw. VII., c. 13 (Defective and Epileptic Chil- den, 1903) - - 246 3 Edw. VII., c. 24 (Education (London) Act, 1903) 240 3 Edw. VII., c. 45 (Employment of Children Act, 1903) - 101 V. T INDEX (AND SEE TABLE OF CONTENTS AND TABLE OF STATUTES CITED). PAGE Aberystwyth University College 214 Adrian, the Abbot 1 1 Aelfric, the Grammarian - 13, 1 6 Agatho, Pope 1 1 Airy, Sir George, at Cambridge - 259 Alcuin 1 2 Alexander a Villa Dei, the Grammarian - 228 Alexander III., Pope (died 1181 A.D.) - 19-20 Althorp, Lord, Government of, in 1833, and Education - 74 Aneurin, the Bard 9 Anglo-Norman Dialect - 17, 1 8, 20-21 Apostles' Creed (not denominational) 145 Arches, School of the 223 Argyll, Duke of 121 Arundel, Lord Thomas, Archbishop 29 Augusta (Roman London), the City 219 Augustine, First Archbishop of Canterbury 1 1 Bacon, Francis 43, 256 Bacon, Roger 22, 25, 39, 207, 227, 254 Bate's Case 4 8 > 5 1 ' 2 Baxter, Richard - 52, 53 Bede, the Venerable 12 Belgse, The 5, 9 Bell, Andrew, Dr. 59, 61, 65, 66, 232 VI. INDEX. PAGE Bentham, Jeremy - 70 Beowulf - 10 Bevan, Mrs. 55, 211 Black Death, The 21, 24, 27 Blackstone, Sir William 70 Blind Children, Education lor 244-5, 247 Block Grant, 1902 - 197 Blois, Henry de, Bishop of Winchester (1129-71) 19 Boadicea, Queen - 219 Board of Education proposed in 1838 82 Bologna University 23 Bon wick, Mr. James, on Monitorial Schools 61-65, 67 Books, Universities, Controllers of - 251-2 Borthwick's, Mr., Education Bill, 1837 - 80 Braidley, Benjamin 59, 78 Briggs, Mr., i7th century Professor of Geometry at Oxford - 256 Brinsley, John (Pedagogist, 1612) 60 British and Foreign School Society 66, 76, 80 British Church, The 1 1 Bronze Age, The - 3, 4, 6-7 Brougham, Lord 71-3, 77-8, 79, 80-1, 112-3, 116, 124, 233 Bruce, Mr. - 127-9, 132-3 Bullialdus, the Oxford Astronomer - 256 Caesar's first visit to Britain 5 Cambridge University 22, 43, 44, 57 (and see chapter ix) Capgrave's Chronicle 31 Cardigan Free Grammar School - 209 Caswell, Mr., i7th century, Oxford private tutor 257 Cavendish and i8th Century Education 57 Cecil, Lord Robert 93, 121, 122, 123, 136 Celtic Gaels 3 VII. INDEX. PAGE Chadworth, John, Bishop of Lincoln 253 Chancery, Court of, and Education 50 Chanson de JRoland - 17 Chantry Schools, The - 40, 41 Charity Schools in England and London 53, 230-1 Charlemagne 1 2 Christianity, Introduction of - 10-11 Christian Instruction Society of London - 73, 232 Church, The, and Education in 1839 87 Church School Inspectors in 1840 89 Cockevtons Case - 151, 173, 187, 239 Code, Genesis of the, in 1839 88 Colet, John 228, 254 Cox's Case (1700) 48 Commonwealth, The, and Education 44, 254 Compulsory Education - I 5 2 -3> J 6i Conscience Clause, The - 144 Cornwaile, John - 26 Coutts, Miss Angela S. Burdett 124 Cromwell and Education - 45, 255-6 Cimmerians, The 3, 4, 6-7 Cymry, The 9 Danes, The, and Education 14 Deaf Children, Education for 244-5, 247 Defective Children, Education for 246-8 Derby, Lord 75, 120 Devonshire, Duke of, on National Education 244 Disraeli, Mr., on State Education- -85,130 Dissenting Schoolmasters, Legislation against 41, 46-7, 49-50 Donaldson v. Beckett (1774) - 252 Douse' s Case (1701) 48 INDEX. PAGE Education Act, 1870 - 142-9 Education Act, 1902 181-202 Education Audit - - 201 Education Authorities, under the Act of 1902 - 182-3 Education Bills, 1850-5 - 90-3 Education Committee of the Privy Council, formed in 1839 83 Education Committees 199-200 Education, Cost of Public - - 171-2 Education Department, formed in 1856 - 95 Education Grants - 197 Education in 1846- 89 Education in 1856 - - 93-4 Education of the Poor Bill, 1807 - 126,127-8 Education Petitions of 1446 - 224 Education Rates - - 184 Education, Religious 144-5 Educational Results (1870-1902) - - 163-4 Education Scheme of 1847 90 Elementary Education, no definition of - 149 Elizabeth, Queen - - 41-2, 51, 255 Eugenius II., Pope (Circa 826 A.D.) 14 Erasmus - - 37, 38 Erastianism 45 Erigena, John Scotus - 14, 28 Ethelstan, Psalter of King 13 Evening School Education 159, 187 Ewart, Mr. 102, 261 Factory Acts, The 98-101 Factory Children - - 66-67, 68-70 " Fair Wear and Tear " 191, 194-5 Fee Grants - 160 Fercndon Grammar Schools Case - 30 IX. INDEX. PAGE Fitch, Sir Joshua - - 150 Forster, Mr. W. E. 121, 135, 138, 142, 233-4, 236 Free Education - 160 Funds available for provided Schools 197 Funds available for Voluntary Schools - - 193 Geoffrey, the Grammarian - 34, 227, 228 George III., King - 59 Gladstone, Mr. W. E. 86, 97, 129 Gloucester Grammar School Case 30, 224 Goldwin Smith ,Mr. - 121 Gouge, Thomas - 53, 210 Grammar Schools, Mediaeval - 220-1 Grammar Schools, Abuse of 50 Grammar Schools, Revival of (1840-1903) 106-7 Granville, Lord - - 118, 123, 132 Greeks and Trojans at Oxford - 38 Greek Characters, Use of - 5, 6 Greek Influence in Britain- 5 Greek Influence in England 12 Greek, Phonetic 13 Greenwich Hospital Schools 56, 96-7 Gregory, David, Savilian Professor of Astronomy, at Oxford, 1691-1708 - - 25 Grocyn and the English Renaissance - 254 Hebrew in Saxon Times - 13 Henry VIII., King - 41, 45 Higden's Polychvonicon (1327) 17, 23, 25 Holt, John, the Grammarian 35, 228 Hooker, the Judicious - 33, 44 Howel, King, the Good - 2O 3~S> 20 7 Industrial and Reformatory Schools I 53-6> 2 44 Intermediate Education, Welsh - 215-217 x. INDEX. PAGE Inspection of Primary Schools 84, 88-9, 121, 131, 147, 192 Inspection of Secondary Schools - 112, 168-170, 217 Irish Education - - 74-5 Irish Students in the Mediaeval Universities 252 Jackson, Dr. Cyril, at Oxford 259 James I., King - 45 James II., King, and the Universities 257, 261 Jeffreys, Lord - 257 Jones', Griffiths, Schools - 54,211 Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James, and Pupil Teachers 96 Kepler at Oxford - - 256 Kerry's, Lord, Educational Inquiry of, 1833 -?6> 233 Lancashire Cotton Mills 67 Lancaster, Joseph, Mr. - - 59,61,66,232 Lateran, Third Council of 20 Latin, Decay of - 33 Latin, use of, in Wales in the tenth century - 204 Laud, Archbishop 45, 259 Leach, Mr. A. F., on Mediaeval Schools - 40 Libraries and Museums, foundation of - 108 Lilly, William, the Grammarian -39, 228 Linacre and the English Renaissance - - 254 Litany, The, in Welsh - - 207 Littestere's Rebellion at Norwich in 1382- - 27-8 Llanfor, Monastery of - 1 1 Llywarch, Hen, the Bard 9 Lollard Priests - 32 Lollardy 26, 33, 39, 226-7, 2 53"4 London (see Chapter VIII.) London Association of Christian Brothers (six- teenth century) . 32-3 London, Diocese of - 220 XI. INDEX. PAGE London Education Act, 1903 - 240-4 London in 1785 - 231 London Mediaeval Grammar Schools - 222-4 London School Board - - 234-8 London Technical Education Board 242 Longland, John, Bishop of Lincoln 37 Lowe, Mr. Robert - 112, 113, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 133 Lusk, Sir Andrew, and Compulsory Education - 129 Macaulay, Mr. T. B. 90 Magister Scholanim - - 220 Manchester, Education in, in 1833 - 77-8 Maryborough's, Duke of, Education Bill of 1868 - 130-1 Mary I., Queen 41 Mede, Joseph (Cambridge 1 7th century Tutor) - 44 Melly, Mr., on National Education, 1869 137-8, 140 Merton College, Oxford - 26 Messenden Monastery (1531) 37 Mill, Mr. John Stuart - 129, 134 Monitorial Schools 61-5, 70 Montague, Lord Robert - -132-3 More, Sir Thomas 250, 254 Mulcaster, Richard 42 Mundella, Mr., and London Education - - 234 Museums of Art and Science - 108 National School Society - - 66, 76 National System of Education, Mr. Lowe's Estimate in 1839 for a - 113 Neckam's de Utensilibus - 20 Newton, Sir Isaac - 57 Non-provided Schools 188-190 Norman Educational Canons - 18-20 XII. INDEX. PAGE Nowel, Dean, and the Catechism - 85 Northcote, Sir Stafford 118 Ogham Characters or Script - 8, 205 Osborne, Mr. Bernal - 121 Oughtred, Mr. (i7th century Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge) - 256 Oxford University- - 22, 23, 25, 29, 39, 43, 227 (and see Chapter IX.) Pace and the Renaissance in England - 254 Pakington, Sir John 95, 97, 125, 128 Palmerston, Lord, and Mr. Lowe- - 123 Paris, University of 12, 227 Parliament and Education in the Eighteenth Cen- tury - 56 Parry's Welsh Bible, Bishop 209 Paulet, Chevalier, and Monitorial Teaching 59 Pecock, Bishop - 31, 37, 227 Pencriche, Richard 26 Penkridge Grammar School 25 Perotti, Nicolas, the Grammarian 34, 228 Place, Mr. Francis, on London in 1785 - 230, 267 Poor Law Schools - 156-7 244 Person, Richard - 57 Powell, Vavasor, and Voluntary Schools - 53 Printing Press, The, in the i5th century 34 Provided Schools - 188-9 Pupil Teachers - 96-7, 164-5 Quadrivium, The, in Mediaeval Education- 39, 43, 254 Rates, The, and Higher Education - 200-1 Ratramnus of Corbie 28 Reformation, The - 36-7 Reformation, The, and London Education- 229 XIII. INDEX. PAGE Reformatory and Industrial Schools - 153-6 Religious Question, The - - 177-9 Renaissance, The English - 35, 254 Represser, Reginald Pecock's - 31, 33 Restoration, The, and National Education- 46-7 Revised Code, The, of July, 1861 - 118 Roebuck, Mr., and National Education in 1820 73 Rome and Mediaeval Education - - 19-20 Roman Schools or University 23 Royal Commission on Education of 1858- 97, 114-117 Runic Characters or Script 8 Rural Education, inefficiency of, in 1834 - 79 Rural Schools - 158-9, 161-3 Russell, Earl (Lord John) 82-4, 86, 90, 91-2, 93-4, 97, 127, 129, 132 St. Anthony's Hospital, School of - 224 St. Dunstan-in-the-East, School of 224 St. Martin's School 223 St. Paul's School, The Mediaeval - 223 St. Paul's School, The New 228 Salamanca University 23 Salesbury, William, in Wales (1650) 53, 207-8 Saxon Educational Canons - 15, 16 Saxon School at Rome - - 13, 14 School Boards and Secondary Education - 149 School Board Bye-laws - - 147 School Boards v. County Councils - - 174-7 School Commissioners for Wales in 1649 - 209 "Schoolmaster, The, was Abroad" 172 Schools Inquiry Commission, 1868 135 Science and Art Movement - 102-6 XIV. INDEX. PAGE Select Committees on Education of 1834, 1835, 1837 - 77, 79, 81 Shaftesbury, Lord - 118 Sheldon, Archbishop 46 Single School Districts - 173 Smith, Adam 70 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 53, 54, 210, 230 Stationers' Company, The - 251 Stone Age, The - - 2, 3 Stone People, The 2 Stopley and the English Renaissance - - 254 Strype, John 53 Sunday Schools - 58-9 Tacitus and Britain 4 Talmud, The, and Education - 138 Technical Instruction Legislation - 109-112 Temple, Dr. - 121 Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop - 1 1 Theodulf of Orleans, Bishop 15 Thomas of Walsingham, Chronicler 27 Tillotson, Archbishop - 52, 53 Tonstall and the Renaissance - 254 Training Colleges - - 78, 124, 170-1, 185- 6 Training, The, of Teachers - 166-8 Treasury Minute of August 3oth, 1833 - 75 Tremenheere, Mr. Seymour, Report on Welsh Education in 1840 211 Trevisa, John de (1385) - 26 Trivium and Quadrivium (Mediaeval Educa- tion) 39. 43 2 54 Universities and Middle Class Examinations - 263-4 xv. INDEX. PAGE Universities, Decay of, in the Fifteenth Century - 227 Universities, Origin of - 22, 249 Universities' Tests Act, 1871 - 262 Universities, The, and the Training of Teachers - 265 University Extension Movement - - 264-5 University Gowns Act (1463) - 252 University Mediaeval Illuminatores and Scriptores 251 University of Wales - 218 University Reform in the i9th Century 258-63 Urien Rheged, The Warrior Bard 9 Vestry Schools - 55 Victoria, Queen, on State Education (1839) 83-4 Vienne, Council of, in 1311 23 Villein, Education of the - 27 Vulgate, The, in Welsh (1550) - 207 Wales and the Commonwealth Parliament - 209 Wales, Education in - 54-55, 203, 218,230 Wallis, Dr., 1 7th century Professor of Mathematics at Oxford - 257 Ward, Dr., i7th century Professor of Mathematics at Oxford - 257 Welsh Bible, The - 53, 207-9 Welsh Board of Education, The Central - - 217 Wesley, John 54, 58 Whewell, Dr-, at Cambridge - 259 Wilfrid, Bishop of York 1 1 William I., King, and Education - 17 Wood, Anthony a - 34, 37, 253 Wycklif, John 26, 28, 29 Wycklif, The, Movement - 26, 28-34, 38, 226-8, 253-4 Wyse, Mr., on National Education in 1839 83 Year Books (Law Reports, 1307-1537) - - 205 LONDON : KNIGHT & CO. 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