A RUGBY FOR NEW SOUTH WALES.
(To the Editor of the Herald.)
Sir,—In your issue of Saturday, May 9th, Mr. Edwin Bean, of All Saints’ College, Bathurst, brought under serious consideration the suggestion made by your correspondent “A. N.,” as regards what he called “A Rugby for New South Wales.” Anything that a schoolmaster of Mr. Bean’s talent and experience has to say must be interesting to those of us (alas, too few!) to whom the question of secondary education, whether in England or Australia, is a care. He will understand, then, that when I pass over, almost without notice, his criticisms on the individual aspects of the “reproduction” here “of that which is certainly best,” as he says, “in the English Public schools, viz., what is called the Public school spirit”—that the only reason of my doing so is the fear of encroaching too much on your “valuable space.” For, interesting as these criticisms are, the interest which lies in what I take to be the two real points at question here is, I must think, greater: these two points being (1), the growing sense in all competent judges of discontent with the present condition of middle-class secondary education in Australia; (2), the means of ameliorating this condition.
As regards the first point, I must here almost take it for granted, in the face of the fact that, so far as I am aware, there is not a single colonial politician who seems to realise that if the education of the People, the rulers of the future, is of vital importance to us all, the education of the Middle-, or, as we should say now, the Upper-class, the rulers of the present, is of importance at least quite as vital. The mass of intelligent men here, then, or, as we are wont to say, the intelligent public, naturally enough, holds the same opinion about upper-class secondary education that their political representatives do. “It is all right,” they say. “What are you grumbling at in these ‘private adventure schools,’ as you call them? They do well enough, we think, for us upper-class people; and if you want your son to have a really first-rate education, why, are there not plenty of fine Denominational schools about—the King’s School, Newington, and so on, and our splendid Grammar-school?” The only answer to “prophesyings” of this sort is, that the Upper-class, as a class, are, whatever they may think themselves, simply abominably educated; their education is, even when judged by its own miserable standard, superficial, incoherent, impalpable; and the sole necessary proof of this is, that a good three-quarters of the knowledge acquired by an average boy at an average private adventure school is of no subsequent use whatever to him, either in the culture of himself or in the prosecution of his business or trade. As for the best Denominational schools where a secondary education is to be obtained, if inadequate, at any rate much superior to that of the private adventure schools, these are out of the reach of the pockets of the average upper-class people, who, even if they appreciate this misfortune (which, as a rule, they do not), are unable to remedy it.
Here, then, as it seems to me, lies the difficulty; and we have now to look at the solution which the apparent tendency of things is proffering to us. “If ‘A. N.,’” says Mr. Bean, “had resided in Victoria, he would have learnt that the Public schools (as they are there called) of Geelong and Melbourne are already taking something of the position, and aspiring to fulfil the functions, of the English public schools.... And,” he goes on, “at Paramatta, Stanmore, Bathurst, Bowenfels, and elsewhere, there are already boarding-schools, not private, but belonging to Denominational corporations, which, if fostered by private assistance, will eventually grow into something resembling the Public schools of England.” Mr. Bean is, of course, right. If things progress in the way in which they are now progressing, if our colonial statesmen turn all their attention, and as much of ours as we will give them, to the education of the People, and from that of the Upper-class, then, I say, more and more will the Upper-class be thrown into the hands of schools which are mere private speculations, which are really under no control but that of personal caprice (and the personal caprice, great heavens! of what a stamp of intellectual and spiritual man), which, accordingly, provide an education, even when judged by its own miserable standard, superficial, incoherent, impalpable. And these other schools, I say, the best Denominational and Corporation schools, the Australian Public schools of the future, will become more and more the educational monopoly of the professional and wealthy portion of the Upper-class, just as in England they have become that of the aristocracy and these portions of the Middle-class. These “great schools,” exclaims Mr. Bean justly of the English Public schools—“which have done so much to form the character of the English gentleman.” Of the English gentleman? Yes, and alas! of the English middle-class man, that terrible and pathetic being whom Mr. Arnold has taught us to know as the British Philistine. “I declare,” says General Gordon, the hero-elect of this very class, “I declare I think there is more happiness among these miserable (Soudan) blacks, who have not a meal from day to day, than among our middle-classes. The blacks are glad of a little handful of maize, and live in the greatest discomfort. They have not a strip to cover them; but you do not see them grunting and groaning all day long as we see scores and scores in England, with their wretched dinner-parties and attempts at gaiety where all is hollow and miserable.”
What a future for the Upper-class, the by far largest class of Australia! What an appalling solution to an educational difficulty is this:—A small class made up of our squatters, professional men, and wealthy tradesmen, forming a sort of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy; our Upper-class not only itself intellectually and spiritually dull and debased, but debasing and dulling all the better spirits which, in their social ascension, pass into it from the ranks of the People. The thought of such a future to those of us to whom the progress onward and upward, whether of England or of Australia, is a care, is appalling, heartrending, unendurable! There is nothing that we could do, by the devotion of our powers, energies, and means, that we should not, would not, do to prevent it. And we should be, and are, encouraged in our struggle against it by the reflection that the real deep true spirit of the time is against all monopoly, practical and physical, intellectual and spiritual—that once the Upper-class, and after them the People, is aroused to the realisation of the fact that there is a danger here of the formation of a new aristocracy, an aristocracy which, with all its charm (let us suppose) of social manners and of intellectual and spiritual culture (and this is supposing a very great deal), means nothing less than the materialisation, the dulling and the debasing, of everything beneath it—when the Upper-class and the People, I say, are aroused to the realisation of this, we may be sure that they will not rest till they have prevented it.
And how, it is asked, is such a future to be prevented? how such a present to be ameliorated? By the formation, not of Denominational and Corporation schools at a charge which places them out of the reach of all save the richer among us, but by the formation of Public State schools that provide a secondary education as good, and, we will hope, better, than that of these others, and at a charge that is within the reach of the average upper-class people. “Yes, but,” at once is answered, “such schools already exist in the High schools, and they have not been a success.” I will not here contest, although I well might, the first assertion; but I cannot, if I would, contest the second. I began by noticing the cause of it, this general satisfaction of “the intelligent public” with the educational pabulum provided for its offspring. I deplore it; I hope for the day of its removal to the gulf of oblivion. In the meantime all that can be done is to strive to assist this “consummation devoutly to be desired” earnestly and perpetually.
One word more. No one is more in sympathy (if I may be pardoned for speaking of such an unimportant entity) than I am, with the efforts of such men as “A. N.” and Mr. Edwin Bean to reproduce, or try to reproduce, in Australia as far as may be, “that which is certainly best in the English Public schools, viz., what is called the Public school spirit.” I have not the least prejudice against English Public schools, at one of the oldest and most conservative of which I was myself educated, and from which I almost entirely derived the circle of my most valued friends; nor yet against the Denominational and Corporation schools here. I have only to remark to Mr. Bean, what I am sure he will at once admit, that if the danger of State schools is the excessive interference of the State, the danger—nay, the absolute abuse—of endowed Public schools is that they become mere feeders of the universities; and in England to such an appalling extent was this the case that the State absolutely had to alter and narrow its Indian Civil Service examinations in order to bring them within reach of the Public schools, which were being quite left out in the cold! Doubtless, then, the Australian endowed Public schools would have their danger too, a danger which “even no less a thinker than Herbert Spencer,” as Mr. Bean says, has not perhaps, in the application to artificial civilization of the laws of the natural “struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,” quite comprehended.
With all apologies to you for the amount of your “valuable space” on which I have encroached in even this far too perfunctory consideration of the matter in hand,
I am, etc.,