Paterfamilias to the Editor of the “Cornhill Magazine.”
Sir,—To a person returning to England after an absence of many years, few things can be more striking than the progress which has been made in the art and practice of education since the commencement of the present century, the methods and contrivances which have been ingeniously and mercifully invented for imparting with greater ease the rudiments of knowledge to the young, and the new books and new devices which really merit the Old World title of Reading made Easy.
Formerly, any old paupers, who could read or write more or less intelligibly, and who were too worn or too weak to earn their subsistence in any other manner, used to be considered as perfectly qualified to instruct the rising generation of the parish to which they belonged in those necessary arts; and dire used to be the sufferings which the unhappy village children underwent, solely because their broken-down and incompetent teachers knew but little themselves, and knew not at all how to impart that little to others.
To do them justice, however, their pupils were not entirely neglected. If they could not read fluently, neither could they seat themselves with any degree of comfort; and if they were backward in summing and spelling, they seldom failed to return home at night with swollen eyes and scored palms. The tree of knowledge in those days was only valued on account of the tough and elastic materials which it furnished for the manufacture of instruments of childish torture.
The normal aspect of a village school used then to be, an aged crone in the chimney-corner, spectacles on nose, and rod in hand; a loutish boy, crowned with a fool’s cap, whining by her side; a class of trembling dunces before her, endeavouring in vain to shirk unchastised through lessons which they were as unapt to learn as their mistress was to teach; and, in the background, the body of the school, ignorant, rude, dirty, and of evil savour—just such a brutal and unpromising brood as the incapable old hen who presided over them might be expected to rear.
In the present year of our Lord 1860, a village, nay, a workhouse school, in any district of England, presents a very different, and a much pleasanter sight. Order, cleanliness, and intelligence now predominate; the active and experienced teachers—young men and women in the prime of life, carefully trained to teach—understand their duties thoroughly, and are proud of their success in discharging them. Punishments are now rare, and never cruel; the children have a happy and cultivated look, and the result of this improved system of school-teaching obtrudes itself gratefully on the eye and ear of the visitor in well-written copies and careful drawings, in distinctly enunciated reading, in harmonious singing, and in arithmetical calculations of surprising accuracy and rapidity. And all these valuable results have been produced by a very moderate degree of judicious encouragement and vigilance on the part of the legislature, which has, in the first place, taught the teachers of the children of the poor the art of teaching—an art until lately entirely neglected in this country; and, secondly, has kept them up to their work by a careful system of school inspection. Every school which now benefits by a grant of government money is examined and reported on, publicly and periodically, by the government inspectors of schools, able and accomplished men, as thoroughly versed in the art of examination as the teachers they overlook are in the art of teaching.
It is a deplorable and strange fact, that whilst all this care and forethought has been so properly bestowed on the children of the English poor, the children of our wealthier classes have been in that respect altogether neglected. Their teachers are never trained to teach at all; no government inspector ever reports on the educational merits or demerits of our old-established upper-class schools, which remain, for the most part, mere money speculations, in which the welfare and progress of the pupils are held altogether subservient to the pecuniary profits of the masters. All is left in those important establishments to self-interest and to chance; and there would even now be small hope of a change in their system for the better, were it not for external circumstances, to which I will presently advert.
Many years ago I was myself a pupil at Harchester College, one of our most celebrated public schools. It was indeed a pleasant place for a sturdy, quick-witted boy; though for a boy who was neither sturdy nor quick-witted, it was neither pleasant nor profitable: clever, studious boys did very well at it, as clever, studious boys will generally do anywhere; but boys of average ability and application learnt very little there, and dull or idle boys learnt positively nothing at all.
Nor were these unsatisfactory results surprising, when the system and the staff of the school were critically examined. The Harchester tutors were all Fellows of one small and not very distinguished college at Oxbridge, which possessed a sort of vested interest in Harchester. They came thither as masters, not because anybody believed them to be clever men, or because they were supposed to possess any natural or acquired aptitude for teaching, but solely as a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. They wished to make money rapidly. The profits of a master at Harchester were known to be very great; and the Fellows of —— college had, according to their seniority, a prescriptive right to that position, if they pleased.
Such an arrangement as this was bad enough, but the fact that the proportion of masters to boys was dishonestly small, was worse; there were not nearly enough of them even to hear the pupils the daily tasks which were assigned to them; and as for any moral or social supervision out of school-hours, none was ever attempted—so perplexed and overwhelmed were the teachers with the burden of their scholastic duties. If the elder boys in a tutor’s house chanced to be gentlemanlike and well-conditioned lads, the juniors had a pretty good time of it, and fared tolerably; if they chanced to be roughs or snobs, which they occasionally were, the juniors had a bad time of it, and fared ill. But the whole thing was a complete matter of chance. A tutor, who from seven in the morning till ten at night, with very brief intervals for food and exercise, was occupied in teaching and hearing lessons, in examining maps, in correcting themes and verses, and who could not in that space of time hear one-fifth of the lessons his pupils were supposed, by a wild stretch of tutorial imagination, to learn, was not in a position to bestow much attention on either the morals or the manners of the boys. During the daytime they were left entirely to themselves, to ferment, and purify or corrupt, as the case might be; and at night they were in some degree supervised and controlled by the confidential servants of the houses in which they boarded.
The regular business of the school consisted solely in the study of Latin and Greek, which was taught in the precise manner in which it had been taught to our fathers and grandfathers; for no newfangled or short cuts to knowledge found favour in the eyes of the Principal of Harchester: of modern history, modern geography, modern languages, English composition and literature, arithmetic, or mathematics, we learnt nothing. There was, indeed, a slight pretence made of teaching some few of those branches of education, and French and mathematics figured occasionally as extras in our bills; but it was but a pretence—they formed no part of what was termed “the regular business of the school,” and proficiency in them obtained for a boy neither credit nor position at Harchester. Straws often show which way the wind blows. The Harchester boys were never required to touch their hats to the French or the mathematical masters; whilst to the classical masters, who alone conducted the discipline of the school, they were required to be always hat in hand.
The insufficient number of masters, and the overwhelming number of pupils, enabled the latter to shirk their lessons with great facility; and the consequence was, that the masters, conscious of the evil practice, yet unequal to prevent it, quieted their consciences by inflicting corporal punishments to an incredible amount; notwithstanding which, it is no exaggeration to say, that for one pupil who left Harchester a fair scholar, a dozen left it with scarcely any education at all.
But as the Harchester boys had plenty of holidays—as their amusements were many and varied, and as they were liberally fed and well lodged—they liked the system and the place well enough. Fives, rackets, cricket, boating, hockey, and football kept them healthy and active; they dressed well and expensively, had every opportunity they could desire for running in debt at the pastrycooks’ and the public-houses of the town, and, I am sorry to say, equal facilities for becoming initiated into some of the vices of maturer age.
The masters were scarcely to blame for this; it was the system that was mainly in fault. They had themselves been brought up under that system; they sincerely believed in it. They worked from morning till night, and more could not be expected of mortal men. If they could, they would have educated all their pupils thoroughly; they would have watched over them and kept them out of debt and difficulty of all kind; but they could not—their numbers were so few. It is true that their numbers might have been doubled, nay, trebled, with undoubted advantage to the school; but then their profits must have been proportionably diminished; and it was too much to expect from human nature that a reform, which could only be attained at such a heavy cost, should be initiated by the very individuals who would suffer from it. Government inspection would at once have shown the propriety of such a step, and would have necessitated its immediate adoption; but to talk of government inspection for such a distinguished school as Harchester would have been rank sacrilege. It might do very well for the schools of the poor, but Harchester would never have submitted to it.
Harchester was a very popular school. The sons of half the nobility and gentry of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were sent thither, because their fathers had been there before them; and because, although it was known not to be a very good school—for learning—there was no other upper-class school which was known to be decidedly better. It used to be hinted, too, that between each generation vast improvements had taken place in its system. The high social position of the Harchester boys was sure to obtain for them a remarkably good start in the race of life, and whenever any one of them distinguished himself signally at college or in parliament, the admirers of Harchester fondly attributed his success to the excellence of the Harchester system. It never seemed to occur to them that the boy might have thriven in spite of that lax and dishonest system, and not in consequence of it. Harchester men had also a great reputation for being gentlemanlike, and on that quality they prided themselves much more than upon their scholarship. But as the sons of the best noblemen and gentlemen of England all went to Harchester, it was not very surprising that they should grow up gentlemen. They would probably have done so had they all been educated anywhere else. At any rate, the masters could claim no credit for the gentility of their pupils—unless, indeed, gentility be a plant which is best cultivated by entire neglect.
Numbers of the wealthy of the middle classes sent their sons to Harchester in imitation of their betters. It was the most expensive school in England. They imagined that its associations secured to their boys great advantages in after life; and, in truth, like their betters, they knew of no other upper-class school that was decidedly superior to it. Mothers liked it because it was fashionable, and was supposed to make their boys “gentlemen;” and country squires, who had been educated there themselves, and were not particularly conscious of their own deficiencies, were quite satisfied if their sons, after passing four or five years in happy idleness, left it accomplished oarsmen and expert cricketers.
Thirty or forty years ago such a system as this did very well for our governing classes; well or ill educated, the Houses of Lords and Commons, the Army, and the Civil Service, received with open arms the children of the powerful and the rich; eldest sons, after a couple of years’ additional idleness as gentlemen commoners at Oxbridge, went into parliament and voted all the more steadily with their party, because they were confirmed and incurable dunces; whilst younger sons obtained commissions in crack regiments, or stools in the Treasury and Foreign Office, and rose through the money and the parliamentary influence their fathers could command, rather than through their own merits and exertions. From such causes, and for such reasons, did Harchester College prosper, and set an example which was followed by most of the upper-class schools in England.
But in the present day, circumstances have arisen which must ere long shake the time-honoured Harchester system to its very foundations. The improvements which have of late years taken place in English education, have, indeed, been first made manifest in the schools of the poor; but they are swiftly surging upwards, and if Harchester, and our other great public schools, are to maintain the position which they have hitherto held, the sooner they call in the government inspector the better for them. Middle-class schools are rising around them—in London, in Liverpool, at Cheltenham, at Bradley, at Marlborough, at Bradfield, and elsewhere—which are readily adapting themselves to the altered requirements of the age; and unless Harchester means to be left in the lurch, that venerable establishment must conform also.
No boy can now enter the Army or the Civil Service until he has proved by an examination before government examiners, not only that his parents have paid for a good education for him, but that he has profited by it. The standard of education which has been erected by the Civil Service Commissioners and the Board of Military Education, is, indeed, a low one; but it has been constructed by the advice and with the concurrence of the masters of our largest schools, it is firmly based upon public opinion, and it is far more likely to be heightened than to be reduced. And there it will henceforward remain—a sure though not a severe test of the honesty and abilities of masters as well as of scholars. From a youth of seventeen or eighteen years of age it requires but little, but it insists that that little shall be well and thoroughly learnt. A correct knowledge of his mother tongue and of arithmetic, a fair acquaintance with history, geography, mathematics, and French, as well as with Latin and with Greek, if the candidate volunteers the latter, is all that is asked; and if an upper-class school does not teach that much to a boy between the age of twelve and eighteen, it is not unreasonable to inquire what it does teach him? But these are just the educational items which Harchester has hitherto evaded teaching. They are not yet part of the Harchester “school business;” the sooner they are, the better for the future prosperity of Harchester.
As matters now stand, what happens to a Harchester boy the moment he receives the promise of a commission or a clerkship, is just this: he is hastily removed from that celebrated school, and is handed over to “a crammer”—an educational empiric—who can have no pride in his calling; who deals only with full-grown and avowed dunces; and who undertakes to teach them in a few months what it is shameful to their teachers that they should not have learnt years before. The “crammer” teaches at a manifest disadvantage; he and his pupil are strangers to each other; he knows nothing of his constitution, his disposition, his capacity, or his temper; he has, and can have, no influence or control over him; all he can do, all he undertakes to do, is to hustle him, by fair means or by foul, over the low educational barrier which debars the youth from entering the profession of his choice. Sometimes he succeeds—generally after one or two mortifying failures; but very often the poor lad has been allowed to become so incurably idle as to be unable to acquire at eighteen those rudimentary parts of education, which ought to have been imparted to him when he was a child, and in which the sons of his father’s tradesmen are now mostly proficient; and he is in consequence shut out from the career to which he and his parents have for years been looking forward with eager satisfaction. In either case his friends are unfairly exposed to great expense, anxiety, and mortification. And all this happens because our old public school system is too deeply rooted in vested interests to accommodate itself readily to the altered habits and requirements of the age.
I know very well that I shall be told that our public school system is not what it used to be, and that what I have here written refers rather to what was than to what is. I am prepared to test the justice of this reproof in the manner most disadvantageous to my argument. I have before me the statistics of half-a-dozen of our largest upper-class schools; I will take up those of the most costly, the most renowned, the largest. They are those of Eton.
I find that that school lately contained between 800 and 900 boys. To teach them everything, save mathematics and French, there were twenty-one masters. But of those, one, the head master, takes no pupils: nor does the assistant master in college teach any of the boys. Upwards of 800 boys, therefore, are taught by nineteen masters. Now much economy of scholastic labour may undoubtedly be effected by teaching boys in large droves; but I am assured that the system of instruction at Eton is rather wasteful than economical of scholastic labour. All the teaching is done out of school, in the private houses of the tutors, and the boys only go into school to repeat what they have previously learnt, and to exhibit exercises that have been already examined and corrected. Therefore, as each master has a few pupils in every class in the school, each master is compelled every day to go through the entire business of every class in the school; and some of them undertake single-handed the private tuition of as many as seventy boys!
It seems absolutely impossible, under such conditions, that nineteen masters can do justice to 800 or 900 boys; and the questions naturally arise,—Do they do justice to them? Can they do justice to them? And if they do not, and cannot, why are their numbers not doubled or trebled at once? Ought not the liberal sum paid for the education of an Eton boy to ensure to him the fullest educational advantages? Ought any “crammer” to be required to prepare him for his appearance before the Civil Service Commissioners or the Board of Military Education?
Of late years we have been told that the study of modern languages has been much more attended to at our public schools than formerly; and H.R.H. the Prince Consort has kindly and thoughtfully encouraged it by offering prizes for the best scholars in that branch of knowledge at Eton. But the authorities at that school do not appear, from their published statistics, to be sensible of the importance of such acquirements, although they absolutely constitute the only current coin which will be received at the educational turnpike which the government has recently erected, and through which every boy entering on public life as a soldier or a civil servant must now pass. At that turnpike Greek and Roman money is no longer exclusively taken.
The class of youths who are educated at Eton can scarcely be said to have received the education of gentlemen, if at seventeen or eighteen they have not acquired a moderate knowledge of French. Yet to teach 800 or 900 boys French, but one master has hitherto been provided by the authorities of that school; and for their fractional share in his services, his pupils each pay 10l. 10s. a year extra. At King’s College, London,—one of the best of our middle-class schools—there are three French masters kept to instruct 880 boys, without any extra charge. At Charter-House—which enjoys the advantage of the independent supervision of its distinguished governors—there is one classical master to every twenty boys; and French—not an extra—is as well cared for as it is at King’s College; whilst at Eton there is not one classical master to every forty boys. I will, however, enter into no further comparisons of this kind. I am fearful of falling into technical errors, which might weaken the force of what I wish to say. I have no right to suppose that Eton is a bit worse than others of our public schools, or that it is not better than many of them: but I do say that the statistics to which I have here adverted call for immediate attention and explanation. It is of the utmost importance to every man in England that the schools at which our future legislators are educated should be good schools, and that the governors of this country should be at least as well educated as the governed. If they are not, in the course of a few years deplorable results must ensue.
I will now relate the accident which has decided me on calling, through your means, public attention to this matter.
Some months ago I visited one of our newly established schools, where about one hundred and fifty boys were receiving their education. The principal of it, a very distinguished man, well known for his energetic intelligence in the cause of education, told me that he felt he could not do justice to his boys unless he had one master to every twelve of them. I inquired what he paid his masters, and I found his maximum was about 800l. a year, and his minimum 300l., board included. For these sums, he assured me, he secured the best men the universities produced. All the arrangements of his school appeared to me excellent; and the conveniences and opportunities for cricket, football, and other athletic amusements, were quite equal to those we used to enjoy at Harchester. The principal himself took no part in the teaching—he merely exercised a general superintendence over the whole. I should much like to name this admirable establishment; but as I have not his permission to do so, I forbear.
Shortly afterwards I chanced to read in The Times the list of the successful competitors at one of the highest open examinations held by the Government Examiners. The boy whose name stood at the head of that list was named as having been educated at this gentleman’s school, and as having come direct from thence into the public examination room. He had won in a canter, as the number of marks assigned to him proved. Last but one on the list of sixty was the only Etonian candidate, and to his name was added, “Educated at Eton, and at subsequent private tutors’.”
In conclusion, sir, I will offer a suggestion. I do so with extreme diffidence, and with entire deference to those who are, I know, more competent to judge of educational questions than I am. I merely throw it out for consideration.
Compulsory inspection of our great schools is, I imagine, out of the question; but I would ask whether a voluntary system could not be devised which should place at the disposal of such schoolmasters as chose to avail themselves of it, accredited government inspectors, who, being invited, should repair to a school, examine its system and its pupils, and report formally and publicly upon both.
Supposing that at this moment Eton, or any other great school, confident in its system and its educational integrity, were to avail itself of this privilege, and that the government inspectors should report that they had examined that establishment; that its educational staff was abundant; that its fifth and sixth forms were generally not only good classical scholars, but so well grounded in English, French, arithmetic, and mathematics as to be able to present themselves without the intervention of “crammers” for examination for the Army or the Civil Service, with every prospect of success—what an advantage such a report as that would be to the school and to the pupils: what a load it would remove from the bosoms of hundreds of doubting and anxious parents: what a stimulus it would give to other less faithfully conducted educational establishments!
And if the inspectors’ report should happen to be not quite so favourable to its existing system,—if it recommended that the number of tutors should be at least trebled, and that modern languages, arithmetic, and mathematics, should be made part of the “regular business” of the school, would not its publicity render immediate improvement and reform the best policy—no matter at what present pecuniary sacrifice?
My suggestion is, perhaps, a crude one; nevertheless, I earnestly commend it to the attention of H.R.H. Prince Albert, and of those in authority who interest themselves in the education of this great country.
I am, Sir, your humble servant,
PATERFAMILIAS.