We have lavished immense sums on the poor, which we have every reason to think have constantly tended to aggravate their misery,… It is surely a great national disgrace that the education of the lowest classes in England should be left to a few Sunday Schools, supported by a subscription from individuals, who can give to the course of instruction in them any kind of bias which they may please. (R 296.)
[Illustration: FIG. 184 REV. T. R. MALTHUS (1766-1834)]
Agreeing thoroughly with Adam Smith that a general diffusion of knowledge was a safeguard to society, he urged the teaching of the elements of political economy in the common schools to enable people to live better in the new type of competitive society. [15]
In 1791-92 Thomas Paine published his widely read Rights of Man. He expressed the French Revolutionary political theory, holding that government, while capable of great good were its powers only properly exercised, was, as organized, an evil. In a well-governed nation none would be permitted to go uninstructed, he held, and he would cut off poor- relief and make a state grant of £4 a year for every child under fourteen for its education, and would compel parents to send all children to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Each of these three books had a long and a slowly cumulative influence, and a small number of young and powerful champions of the idea of popular education as a public charge began, early in the nineteenth century, to urge action and to influence public opinion.
II. THE PERIOD OF PHILANTHROPIC EFFORT (1800-33)
CONDITIONS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. This second period in the history of the organization of English education begins with the publication, in 1797, of Dr. Andrew Bell's An Experiment in Education, describing his work in educating large numbers of children by means of the so-called mutual system, at the Male Asylum at Madras, India. The period properly ends with the first Parliamentary grant for education, in 1833. In its main characteristics it belongs to the eighteenth rather than to the nineteenth century, as the prominent educational movements of the eighteenth (charity-schools, Sunday Schools, schools of industry) continue strong throughout the period, and many new undertakings of a similar charitable nature ("Ragged Schools"; associations for the improvement of the condition of the poor, etc.) were begun.
The period—during and after the Napoleonic wars—was one of marked social and political unrest, and of corresponding emphasis on social and philanthropic service. The masses were discontented with their lot, and were beginning to be with their lack of political privileges. Numerous plans to quiet the unrest and improve conditions were proposed, of which schemes to increase employment (industrial schools; evening schools), to encourage thrift (savings banks; children's brigades), and to spread an elementary and religious education (mutual schools; infant schools) that would train the poor in self-help were the most prominent. "The Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor." founded in 1796, became a very important early-nineteenth-century institution. Branches were established all over England. Soup-kitchens, clothing-stations, savings banks, and schools were among the chief lines of activity. In particular it extended and improved Sunday Schools, encouraged the formation of charity-schools and schools of industry, and later gave much aid in establishing the new monitorial schools. Educational interest steadily strengthened during the period, though as yet along lines that were deemed relatively harmless, were inexpensive, and were largely religious in character.
The eighteenth-century conception of education as a charity, designed where given to train the poor to "an honest, upright, grateful, and industrious poverty," still prevailed; there was as yet little thought of education as designed to train the poor to think for and help themselves. The eighteenth-century conception of the educational process, too, which regarded education as something external and determined by adult standards and needs, and to be imposed on the child from without, also continued. The purpose of the school was to manufacture the standard man, and the business of the teacher was to so organize and methodize instruction that the necessary knowledge could be acquired as economically, from a financial point of view, as possible. The Pestalozzian conception of education as a development of the individual, according to the law of his own nature, found but slow acceptance in England. Mental development, scientific instruction, the habit of thinking, the exercise of judgment, and free and enlightened opinion were ideas that found little favor there, and hence had to be handled carefully by those who had caught the new conception of the educational process.
In the political reaction following the end of Napoleon's rule the upper and ruling classes of England, in common with those of continental lands, became exceedingly suspicious of much education for the masses. To secure contributions for schools it became necessary "to avow and plead how little it was that the schools pretended or presumed to teach." [16] England now experienced a great development of manufacturing and commerce, a great material prosperity ensued, and the growing demand for education was met by a counter-demand that the education provided should be systematized, economical, and should not teach too much. Such a system of training was now discovered and applied, in the form of mutual or monitorial instruction, and was hailed as "a new expedient, parallel and rival to the modern inventions in the mechanical departments."