English educational evolution has in consequence been slow, and changes and progress have come only in response to much pressure, and usually as a reluctant concession to avoid more serious trouble. A strong English characteristic has been the ability to argue rather than fight out questions of national policy; to exhibit marked tolerance of the opinions of others during the discussion; and finally to recognize enough of the proponents' point of view to be willing to make concessions sufficient to arrive at an agreement. This has resulted in a slow but a peaceful evolution, and this slow and peaceful evolution has for long been the dominant characteristic of the political, social, and educational progress of the English people. The whole history of the two centuries of evolution toward a national system of education is a splendid illustration of this essentially English characteristic.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EDUCATIONAL EFFORTS. England, it will be remembered (chapter XIX, Section III), had early made marked progress in both political and religious liberty. Ahead of any other people we find there the beginnings of democratic liberty, popular enlightenment, freedom of the press, religious toleration, [1] social reform, and scientific and industrial progress. All these influences awakened in England, earlier than in any other European nation, a rather general desire to be able to read (R. 170), and by the opening of the eighteenth century we find the beginnings of a charitable and philanthropic movement on the part of the churches and the upper classes to extend a knowledge of the elements of learning to the poorer classes of the population.
As a result, as we have seen (chapter XVIII), the eighteenth century in England, educationally, was characterized by a new attitude toward the educational problem and a marked extension of educational opportunity. Even before the beginning of the century the courts had taken a new attitude toward church control of teaching, [2] and in 1700 had freed the teacher of the elementary school from control by the bishops through license. [3] In 1714 an Act of Parliament (13 Anne, c. 7) exempted elementary schools from the penalties of conformity legislation, and they were thereafter free to multiply and their teachers to teach. [4] The dame school (R. 235) now became an established English institution (p. 447). Private-adventure schools of a number of types arose (p. 451). The churches here and there began to provide elementary parish-schools for the children of their poorer members (p. 449), or training-schools for other children who were to go out to service (R. 241). Workhouse schools and "schools of industry" also were used to provide for orphans and the children of paupers (p. 453).
THE CHARITY-SCHOOL SYSTEM. Most important of all was the organization, by groups of individuals (R. 237) and by Societies (S.P.C.K.; p. 449) formed for the purpose, and maintained by subscription (R. 240), collections (R. 291), and foundation incomes, of an extensive and well-organized system of Charity-Schools (p. 449). The "Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge" dates from the year 1699, and the "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts" from 1701. The first worked at home, and the second in the overseas colonies. [5] Both did much to provide schools for poor boys and girls, furnishing them with clothing and instruction (R. 292), and training them in reading, writing, spelling, counting, cleanliness, proper behavior, sewing and knitting (girls), and in "the Rules and Principles of the Christian Religion as professed and taught in the Church of England" (R. 238 b). The Charity-School idea was in a sense an application of the joint-stock-company principle to the organization and maintenance of an extensive system of schools for the education of the children of the poor, the stock being subscribed for by humanitarian- minded people. The upper classes had for long been well provided, through tutors in the home and grammar schools and colleges, with those means for education which have for centuries produced an able succession of gentlemen, statesmen, governors, and scholars for England, and many of the commercial middle-class had, by the eighteenth century, become able to purchase similar advantages for their sons. These now united to provide, as part of a great organized charity and under carefully selected teachers (R. 238 a), for the more promising children of their poorer neighbors, the elements of that education which they themselves had enjoyed.
The movement spread rapidly over England (p. 451), and soon developed into a great national effort to raise the level of intelligence of the masses of the English people. Thousands of persons gave their services as directors, organizers, and teachers. Traveling superintendents were employed. A rudimentary form of teacher-training was begun. The preaching of a Charity Sermon each year [6] with a special collection, became a general English practice.
THE VOLUNTARY SYSTEM. The rise of the Methodist movement, [7] after 1730 (p. 489); the earthquake shocks of 1750; the rise of the popular novel and newspaper; the printing of political news, and cheap scientific pamphlets (p. 492); and the growing tendency to debate questions and to apply reason to their solution—all tended to give emphasis in England to these eighteenth-century charitable means for extending education to the children of those who could not afford to pay for it. Unlike the German States, where the State and the Church and the school had all worked together from the days of the Reformation on, the English had never known such a conception. The efforts, though, of the educated few, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to extend the elements of learning, order, piety, cleanliness, and proper behavior to the children of the masses, formed an important substitute for the action by the Church-State which was so characteristic a feature of Teutonic lands.
We see in these eighteenth-century efforts the origin of what became known in England as "the voluntary system" and upon this voluntary support of education—private, parochial, charitable—the English people for long relied. Of action by the State there was none during the eighteenth century, aside from an Act of 1767 (7 Geo. III, c. 39) relating to the education of pauper children. This established the important principle— unfortunately not followed up—of providing that poor parish children of London might be maintained and educated "at the cost of the rates."
THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL MOVEMENT. One other voluntary eighteenth-century movement of importance in the history of English educational development should be mentioned here, as it formed the connecting link between the parochial-charity-school movement of the eighteenth century and the philanthropic period of the educational reformers of the early nineteenth. This was the Sunday-School movement, first tried by John Wesley in Savannah, in 1737, but not introduced into England until 1763. The idea amounted to little, though, until practically worked out anew (1780) by Robert Raikes, a printer of Gloucester, and described by him (1783) in his Gloucester Journal (R. 293), after he had experimented with it for three years. [8] His printed description of the Sunday-School idea gave a national impulse to the movement, and Sunday Schools were soon established all over England to take children off the streets on Sunday and provide them with some form of secular and religious instruction. [9]
The movement coincided with new religious, social, and economic forces which were at work, and which awakened an interest not only in the education of the children of the poorer working-classes, but caused the upper and middle classes in society to feel a new sense of responsibility for social and educational reform. The cold and unemotional religion of the English Church in the early eighteenth century had created an indifference to the simple truths and duties of the Gospels. The great religious revival under Wesley and Whitefield had challenged such an attitude, and had done much to infuse a new spirit into religion and awaken a new sense of responsibility for social welfare. The rapid growth of population in the towns, following the beginnings of factory life (p. 493), had created new social and economic problems, and the neglect of children in the manufacturing towns had shocked many thinking persons. The way in which parents and children, freed from hard labor in the factories on Sundays, abandoned themselves to vice, drunkenness, and profanity caused many, among them Raikes himself (R. 293), to inquire if "something could not be done" to turn into respectable men and women "the little heathen of the neighborhood." The Sunday School was his answer, and the answer of many all over England. [10]
In 1785 "The Society for the Support and Encouragement of Sunday Schools in the different Counties of England" was formed with a view to establishing a Sunday School in every parish in the kingdom, and the Queen headed a subscription list, following a general appeal for funds. By 1787 it was estimated that 234,000 children in England and Wales were attending a Sunday School, and by 1792 the number had increased to half a million. The Parliamentary return for 1818 showed 5463 Sunday Schools in existence, and 477,225 scholars; in 1835 the returns showed 1,548,890 scholars, half of whom attended no other school, and approximately 160,000 voluntary teachers. [11] In Manchester, then a city scourged with almost universal child-labor, the schools (1834) were in session five and a half hours on Sunday and two evenings a week. The moral and religious influence of these schools was important, and the instruction in reading and writing, meager as it was, filled a real need of the time.