We have to consider the means whereby the children of the less well- to-do classes of our population may be enabled to obtain such secondary education as may be suitable and needful for them. As we have not recommended that secondary education shall be provided free of cost to the whole community, we deem it all the more needful that ample provision be made by every local authority for enabling selected children of poorer parents to climb the educational ladder…. The assistance we have contemplated should be given by means of a carefully graduated system of scholarships, varying in value in the age at which they are awarded and the class of school or institution at which they are tenable.
The Act of 1902 unified control of both elementary and secondary education. Any private or endowed secondary school was left free to accept or reject government aid and inspection, but, if the aid were accepted, inspection and the following of government plans were required. Secondary education must provide for scholars up to or beyond the age of sixteen. No attempt was made to unify the work and character of the secondary schools, it being clearly recognized that, in England at least, these must be suited to the different requirements of the scholars, the means of the parents, the age at which schooling will stop, and the probable place in the social organism of England which the pupils will occupy. By 1910, out of 841 secondary schools in England receiving grants of state aid, 325 were supported by local authorities and were the creations of the preceding four decades. Most of the others represented old Latin grammar- school foundations, thus incorporated into the national system, and without that violence and destruction of endowments which characterized the transformations in France and Italy.
[Illustration: FIG. 195. THE ENGLISH EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM AS FINALLY EVOLVED The years, for the divisions of English education, are only approximate, as English education is more flexible than that found in most other lands.]
A NATIONAL SYSTEM AT LAST EVOLVED. It is a little more than two centuries from the founding of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (1699) to the very important Fisher Education Act [39] of August, 1918. The first marked the beginnings of the voluntary system; the second "the first real attempt in England to lay broad and deep the foundations of a scheme of education which would be truly national." This Act, passed by Parliament in the midst of a war which called upon the English people for heavy sacrifices, completed the evolution of two centuries and organized the educational resources—elementary, secondary, evening, adult, technical, and higher—into one national system, animated by a national purpose, and aimed at the accomplishment for the nation of twentieth- century ends on the most democratic basis of any school system in Europe. In so doing Huxley's educational ladder has not only been changed into a broad highway, but the educational traditions of England (R. 306) have been preserved and moulded anew.
The central national supervisory authority has been still further strengthened; the compulsion to attend greatly extended; and the voice of the State has been uttered in a firmer tone than ever before in English educational history. Taxes have been increased; the scope of the school system extended; all elements of the system better integrated; laggard local educational authorities subjected to firmer control; the training of teachers looked after more carefully than ever before; and the foundations for unlimited improvement and progress in education laid down. Still, in doing all this, the deep English devotion to local liberties has been clearly revealed. The dangers of a centralized French-type educational bureaucracy have been avoided; necessary, and relatively high, minimum standards have been set up, but without sacrificing that variety which has always been one of the strong points of English educational effort; and the legitimate claims of the State have been satisfied without destroying local initiative and independence. In this story of two centuries and more of struggle to create a really national system of education for the people we see strongly revealed those prominent characteristics of English national progress—careful consideration of new ideas, keen sensitiveness to vested rights, strong sense of local liberties and responsibilities, large dependence on local effort and good sense, progress by compromise, and a slow grafting-on of the best elements of what is new without sacrificing the best elements of what is old.
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?