QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Show that the English method of slow progress and after long discussion would naturally result in a plan bearing evidence of many compromises.
2. What does the extensive Charity-School movement in eighteenth-century England indicate as to the comparative general interest in learning in England and the other lands we have previously studied?
3. Show how the Sunday-School instruction, meager as it was, was very important in England in paving the way for further educational progress.
4. What do all the different late eighteenth-century voluntary educational movements indicate as to comparative popular interest in education in England and Prussia? England and France?
5. Can you explain the much greater percentage of city poor in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than in French or German lands?
6. Can you explain why periods of prolonged warfare are usually followed by periods of social and political unrest?
7. Can you explain why Pestalozzian ideas found such slow acceptance in England?
8. Explain, on the basis of the English adult manufacturing conception of education, why monitorial instruction was hailed as "a new expedient, parallel and rival to the modern inventions in the mechanical departments."
9. To what extent do we now accept Robert Owen's conception of the influence of education on children?
10. Show how the many philanthropic societies for the education of the children of the poor came in as a natural transition from church to state education.
11. Show the importance of the School Societies in accustoming people to the idea of free and general education.
12. Show how the Lancastrian system formed a natural bridge between private philanthropy in education and tax-supported state schools.
13. Why were the highly mechanical features of the Lancastrian organization so advantageous in its day, whereas we of to-day would regard them as such a disadvantage?
14. Explain how the Lancastrian schools dignified the work of the teacher by revealing the need for teacher-training.
15. Assuming that there may be some validity to the arguments of Kay- Shuttleworth, what are the limitations to such reasoning?
16. What theory as to education would naturally lie behind a "payment-by- results" plan of distributing state aid?
17. Show how English educational development during the nineteenth century has been deeply modified by the progress of democracy.
18. Show how the English have attained to minimum standards without imposing uniform requirements that destroy individuality and initiative.