For this reason Mr. C. P. Trevelyan is for me the most interesting and hopeful of all the new Labour Ministers. With his family tradition of high scholarship and liberal innovation, and with the new ferment of modern creative ideas in his mind, we may hope for a very bold and broad handling of the problems of British education. To him is given the opportunity of welding the disconnected parts, some quite good and some extremely inadequate or defective, which make up the British educational resources of to-day, into what may be the first completely comprehensive modern educational system in the world.
The first thing needed for the achievement of such a task is a complete and final recognition of the fact that such an education must go on at least to the age of sixteen, and that it must include a general knowledge of the history of the world and mankind, the elements of political and economic science, some knowledge of the methods and scope of biological and physical science, and a reasonable acquaintance with and use of at least one foreign language. The raising of the leaving age to sixteen was promised some years ago by Mr. Fisher, probably the feeblest statesman who has ever been overruled by his political associates. That promise was made when Britain was to become a land fit for heroes under the eloquent gestures of Mr. Lloyd George. It is for Mr. Trevelyan now to make that promise a reality.
But it is not only upward that the school age should extend, but also downward. It should be possible for poor parents who cannot afford a nursery to send their children to the people’s schools at a quite tender age. The children of prosperous people have a governess, or in towns go to some properly equipped infant school, by the time they are four or five. The children of the working-class woman knock about at home with a mother too busy to give them sufficient educational attention, and their only open air is the street. They miss the beginnings of drawing and modelling and such-like play; they do not get sufficiently talked to; they get little or no music; they start with that much handicap. Vile attempts at economy in British education have meant a grave retrogression in this respect. The schools have to be reopened to infants, and the facilities for infant teaching restored and extended. The public infant school must be the day-nursery of the poor.
Both these extensions of the school age will require more teachers. And even as it is, the British schools are scandalously understaffed. Not only is that so, but many of the existing staffs are under-trained and under-educated for their work. I cannot conceive of British education as a satisfactory system with less than quadruple the number of teachers at work than are now employed.
Moreover they have to be better teachers. When British elementary education was organised in the ’seventies of the last century it was done in the shabbiest and cheapest way possible. Those were the days when Englishwomen of the prosperous classes would become half frantic with jealousy and hate and derision at the idea of a housemaid wearing a fringe or the cook going out in pretty clothes on a Sunday. That was the spirit of the time. It was intolerable to them that the poor man’s “brats” should be taught by really educated persons. The prospective teachers of the general public, therefore, were not sent through the Universities and made a part of the general comity of educated men and women. They were put apart into mean, bleak, restricted training colleges of their own, and everything was done to establish and maintain a sense of social inferiority in their minds. They were intended to feel the superiority of the parson and the lordship of the manufacturer and the squire. Never has a profession risen to self-respect against such obstacles and disadvantages as the British elementary teachers. It is for Mr. Trevelyan to complete the expansion and liberalisation of these training colleges, to see that they get at last the staffs, libraries, laboratories, and facilities of interchange necessary to incorporate them completely in the university system of the land. Or else to hand them over to the local authorities as lunatic asylums or something of that sort or to reconstruct them to meet the housing shortage, or just simply to dynamite them and send the whole of the next generation of teachers through the Universities.
Having secured an adequate supply of soundly trained and educated teachers, and with the whole youthful population—except those attending the many excellent private preparatory schools in Britain—going up to the age of sixteen, at least, to the publicly maintained schools, it will be possible for Mr. Trevelyan to give his mind to the very urgent problem of grading schools. The organisers of elementary education in Britain, like the American fathers, seem to have thought that a school was just a school. But children under the age of twelve require very different educational surroundings from those between twelve and sixteen. The Junior school may well be a mixed village school as close to mother as possible, a small school, bright and homelike. The Second school needs to be larger, and with a various staff; children are already differentiating after twelve, there must be a choice of studies, one child’s education is another child’s poison. Moreover, the equipment needed at the second stage is greater and more various. Educational centres are indicated here, and the automobile to collect the youngsters comes happily into the world at this stage to enable both Britain and America to meet the demands of an advancing civilisation upon rural youth.
Over most of Britain the market towns lie at eight or ten miles apart; the roads converge upon them, they are the natural places for the Second schools. Here is a very pretty and, I should think, a very congenial task of reorganisation for Mr. Trevelyan. Like Edward VI of England, it may be his destiny to write his name upon England with a trail of new and reconstructed schools.
But an educational system that secures merely a proper education for every British boy or girl up to the age of sixteen is only the broad foundation of a complete State education. The English “Public Schools,” which are not really public at all, and which retain their boys in a state of loutish athleticism two years or more after they should be at college; the miscellany of “upper-class” girls’ schools; the Universities, that are partly continuation colleges and partly Universities for real intellectual work and interchange, much incommoded by undergraduates’ “rags,” solemn athleticism, and a pervading adolescent clamour; the antiquated and boring legal and medical professional training; and, indeed, the whole tangle of class-conscious, middle- and upper-class educational institutions in Britain, would be enormously benefited, and I hope will be benefited, by a bold—even though it were at the time an entirely unsuccessful—attempt at reorganisation upon modern lines.
Once people have been set thinking about these things they will never stop as they are. The mischief at present is that we take the most preposterous arrangements for granted because we are used to them. It will not be necessary to stir the venerable quiet, the tradition, and ripe usages of Oxford and Cambridge very greatly. Somewhere the fine traditions of classical scholarship and stylistic mathematics should be preserved, and these seem to be their appointed refuges. But there is now a constellation of other and more conveniently situated provincial Universities which are still miserably cramped and poor. For all that, several are doing quite first-class University work. And there exists now in London, in spite of neglect and misdirection, a great group of literary, artistic, scientific, and legal institutions which cry aloud to be grouped and correlated upon broad and congenial lines as the effective intellectual nucleus of the British Empire, and even perhaps of the English-speaking world. It is to the loosely co-ordinated institutions within and without the present so-called University of London that I hope Mr. Trevelyan will chiefly direct his attention as the apex of the pyramid I hope to see arising, based on the existing preparatory school, on the re-fashioned “Public School,” relieved of its too mature seniors, and on the revised and strengthened free Junior and Second schools which should take the place of our existing elementary schools.