Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country

by T. H. S. Escott

CHAPTER XI

FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS

State irresponsibility for national education on, and after, the Queen’s accession. Summary of early movements towards educating the people. Lancaster and Bell as pioneers of educational systems. Samuel Whitbread’s faint foreshadowing of W. E. Forster’s Education Act. Brougham as educational pioneer. First State grant to Church and Nonconformist schools. Increased in 1839. Education Department completed on the principle of State aid to all schools, Protestant or Roman, satisfying State examiners. Mr Lowe at the Education Office and the grant stationary. National education the law of the land by the Forster Act of 1870. Free education under Lord Salisbury 1891. Elementary education now organized. External change in the English landscape. Secondary education waits. Details of progress recently made towards this.

Those processes of organization which seem in all departments of national activity the special features of English life during the last half of this century have nowhere been more visible than in the educational arrangements for the long neglected mass of the English people. Slowly, with occasional relapses, yet upon the whole with sure and steady progressiveness, there is being prepared, there now seems within measurable distance of completion, the ladder that will enable any English boy and many English girls to accomplish the ascent from the gutter to the highest teaching of the University, and so to gain a position from which merit and industry, favoured by fortune, will command the highest career open to either sex. All this has been accomplished within little more than half a century. Till 1833, the educational responsibilities of the State practically were ignored. In that year there was made for teaching purposes a grant of £20,000. The sum with annual increments was thenceforth dispensed annually by the Treasury to the National Society in Broad Sanctuary, as representing the Church of England, and for the Nonconformists to the British and Foreign School Society. Till a twelvemonth after the passing of the first Reform Act, the most active of organizations for teaching the people had been the Church of England and the great Dissenting bodies as in the case of the School Society just named. The Roman Church on both sides of St. George’s Channel never neglected its educational duties. The Sunday School system, to which, on the eve of the Queen’s accession, thousands of working men and women owed practically all the teaching they had received, were started towards the close of the eighteenth century by a Gloucester printer, Robert Raikes. In the last year of William IV. there had died a Nonconformist, a member of the Society of Friends, Joseph Lancaster. To him and to the English clergyman associated with him, Andrew Bell, founder also of the Bell Classical Scholarship at Cambridge, were due the first beginnings of a scheme of instruction for the whole English people.

Two or three decades earlier than the grant of 1833, Parliament fitfully recognized its educational responsibilities. In 1807 Samuel Whitbread, the son-in-law of Earl Grey, tentatively anticipated the spirit of Mr W. E. Forster’s reforms, three score and three years afterwards. By his proposal of parochial schools throughout the Kingdom, Whitbread ranks as the earliest education reformer of the nineteenth century. Within a decade, in the year 1816, Brougham took up the question, obtained a committee to enquire into the educational resources of London, and in 1820 himself brought forward an early Education scheme of the nineteenth century. The project perished amid the denominational tempest of religious rivalry which it evoked. Nothing after this was done till the date at which we have already arrived, 1833. Then, in faint forecast of the £7,000,000 now spent by the State on the teaching of its youthful subjects, a grant for that purpose of, £20,000 was for the first time made, distributed as we have seen between the Protestant Churches of the country. After an interval of six years, in 1839, Lord Melbourne’s Administration excited much obloquy, and raised the ‘No Popery’ cry against them, by allowing a share in a grant, now increased to £30,000, to Roman Catholic schools. The House of Lords, in an address to the Queen, condemned this new policy of religious emancipation. The vote was only carried in the Commons by a majority of two (the figures being 275 for, 273 against). Together with certain other changes that endure to this day, it became law. Hitherto, the State grant had been administered by the Treasury. Now for the first time an Education Department was organized under the Lord President of the Council, and four other members of the body. The Vice-President was appointed in 1856. During Lord Palmerston’s long term of office, in 1857, the Education grant rose to £451,000. It became more expressly understood that henceforth the specific duties of Education Minister were vested in the Vice-President.[34] With the steady increase of the annual grant, its province of usefulness was extended also. Subject always to the principle of State inspection, where State aid was received, the grant was no longer limited to assist the erection of new schools. Even before 1857 it had been allotted in due proportion to help schools already in existence. Portions of it were also received by training colleges for teachers. The quality of the instruction supplied in the schools had not improved in proportion to the liberality shown by the State. In 1859-60, the grant was more than a million. A Commission reported most unfavourably as to the efficiency of the schools. Hence in 1862, the then Vice-President of the Council, Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, enforced the Education reforms which he had already drafted, and initiated the policy of payment by results; in other words, the regulation of the amount of the grant in schools by the success of the scholars in the yearly examination. The teachers grumbled, but the taxpayers were relieved. The rate of increase in the grant ceased automatically. In 1870 the Education Vote amounted to one and a quarter millions instead of, as, but for Mr Lowe’s drastic, if indirect, retrenchment, it would have done, to something like thrice that sum.

No fundamental change took place till the Education Act of 1870, always associated as that will be with the name of W. E. Forster. Dealt with as to its provisions, its working and its results, in elaborate detail in the author’s preceding work, England, the Measure now rather more than a quarter of a century old will here be summarized sufficiently by reminding the reader that this legislation empowered the election of School Boards throughout the Kingdom, but maintained the system of voluntary subscriptions, and only compelled the institution of School Boards where voluntary effort had failed, and in the Time Table Conscience Clause provided a security for individual liberty. Mr Mundella’s Act of 1880 made education absolutely compulsory throughout England and Wales, whereas before then the power of compulsion was left to the local authorities. In all State-aided schools, religion was to be taught either at the beginning or end of school hours, so that, without disturbance to the general curriculum individual children could be withdrawn from the sacred lesson at their parents’ will, without incurring any disability on that account. These provisions met with the usual fate of legislative compromises. They deeply offended many sections. They entirely pleased none. The battle between religious and irreligious training, between what have been called the National and the Denominational systems was not decided in 1870. It has been fought over again more than once since then. It remains unsettled to this day.

During the whole of that decade, the Education Acts were supplemented with detailed legislation of a consolidating or modifying kind. No organic change took place till in 1891, the Government of Lord Salisbury adopted the first of the three Fs, long since propounded by Mr Chamberlain, and by abolishing the School pence which scarcely repaid the trouble of their collection, made elementary education as free to all children in the land, as by the law of 1870 it had practically become compulsory. The proposal to free the schools was not universally popular with the party to whose lot it fell to execute that policy. So, notwithstanding its exclusive traditions, that party had, under Mr Disraeli a quarter of a century earlier by its Household Suffrage Bill, recognized and established the English democracy. The plea on which those who had begun by resisting free schools finally accepted them was the expediency of accepting the inevitable first, and secondly the practical wisdom of obtaining credit for Conservatism by doing well and wisely that which at some future time the opposite party would have ingratiated themselves with the masses by doing badly. The results of free education were speedily visible in the increase of the children educated throughout the land. The increase of children in schools during the five years preceding the Free Education Act of 1891 had been 269,903. During the quinquennial period after the Act the increase was 421,860, or, in round numbers, just double. The first rung in the educational ladder for the benefit of all classes of the Kingdom had been fixed firmly by the Act of 1870. It was not, nor was ever, regarded by its authors as a complete Measure. It provided no regular system of higher grade schools intermediary between the most elementary teaching, and the more liberal culture of the grammar schools. The only supplement that it received from the Government under which it had become law was the Endowed Schools Act of 1874 for re-arranging the funds and remodelling the curricula in secondary endowed schools throughout the country. Private effort and local enterprise usefully came in where Mr Foster’s Education Act had stopped short. In various parts of England, and especially in the great northern counties of Lancashire, Durham and York, School Boards, fortunate enough to possess controlling spirits of exceptional enlightenment, exercised their legal power to establish schools of a higher kind specially for the teaching of science or art, and generally for the tincture of the youthful mind with a more generous training. Such schools received additional grants from the Science and Art Department at South Kensington.

In this way the 1870 Act at once partially enabled the child of the poorest parents to mount through the elementary schools, to the secondary schools of the Kingdom and thence to those seats of learning at which the picked youth of the country enjoy the choicest opportunities of mental culture, or are qualified for the highest posts in after life to which English ambition can aspire. The problem now to be solved, which is in actual process of solution and of which a few years more may probably dispose, is the completion of the national ladder of learning by a more thorough organization of the agencies for advanced knowledge throughout the country, and for the passage of the pupil from schools of the lowest, to schools of the higher grade. Just as, during recent years of the present reign, successive Reform Bills have increasingly nationalized the legislative Chambers at Westminster; so the tendency and the result of the transformations undergone by the great public schools and by the Universities, that they feed, is to draw more closely together the bonds uniting these institutions with the nation as a whole, to widen their curriculum, to infuse a popular element into their governing bodies, and to make them not merely the instructors, but the representatives of the intellectual interest of the land. By remodelling the governing bodies of Eton, Winchester and Harrow, the Public Schools Act of 1868 appreciably quickened and deepened the sense of public responsibility inherent in these corporations. Nearly thirty years’ experience of the Endowed Schools Act justifies the statement that the work accomplished for the grammar schools of the country is analogous to the results which the earlier legislation has yielded in the case of the more famous seats of youthful study.[35] A wholesome spirit of competition now animates the governors of these old if often still obscure endowments,[36] and daily causes fresh usefulness to be extracted from money resources, long suffered to remain idle. Later legislation, whose general aspects have already received attention in these pages, has conspired to deepen the sense of obligation, and to stimulate to efforts, most salutary for the taught, alike the governors of and the teachers in the schools.

Shortly after the Local Government Act of 1888 was passed, important functions, educational and financial, were given to the new County Councils. The grammar schools were quick to perceive a new opportunity. In 1889, thirteen representatives of the Councils, in some cases at the instance of their older colleagues, received seats on the governing bodies of the Secondary Schools. The corporations thus reformed have already begun vigorously to deal with an abuse inveterate in their smaller schools. Where the value of the endowment, from charges on the property of which it consists or from a fall in the value of land, has fluctuated the governors have been in the habit of farming out the school to the headmaster. They have, that is, assigned to him the income of the trust, and such fees as he can charge. In return, the pedagogue takes upon himself the charges of working the school, and of the teaching of a fixed number of free boys. The tendency of this arrangement is, of course, to repeat in the present day the experiences of Do-the-boys Hall under Mr Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. The headmaster has upon him the burden not only of his educational work, but of the solvency of his daily business. His own stipend is too small to admit of his paying competent assistants. He becomes a pensioner on the caprice of well-to-do parents, and the instrument of their not generally very enterprising will, or of their too enlightened pleasure. The only chance for the small secondary schools thus circumstanced is their rescue by some of the more public-spirited and opulent of the governors. But this relief is forthcoming so rarely that the Commissioners generally recommend the closing of all schools existing under these conditions and the application of their endowments to purposes less obviously foredoomed to failure. Other instances of the waste of existing resources for secondary education are even more frequent and not less serious. Grammar schools of competent calibre are often geographically crowded so close together as to obstruct and paralyse their mutual efforts. Thus in South Devon there is at Chudleigh a grammar school of considerable repute. Within a radius of sixteen miles, e.g. at Ashburton, Totnes, and Bovey Tracey, there are similar schools capable of good work, but lacking a population of parents and children to fill their empty benches. A like experience has often occurred in the case of establishments which, not being endowed grammar schools have not come under the notice of the Commissioners. Bath, for instance, has long possessed more educational opportunities than most other cities in the West of England. The oldest of her proprietary colleges, that in the district known as ‘Grosvenor,’ to some extent became merged in the less ancient Sydney College. That in due time produced a successful offshoot, the Somerset College. These two latter institutions during some time were healthily stimulated by mutual competition. At last the rivalry became profitable only to the prestige and numbers of the secondary schools that, managed on the same principles, had come into existence first at Cheltenham, then afterwards on the Clifton downs, near Bristol. In 1885,[37] the Somerset and Sydney Colleges were amalgamated under a single headmastership by the title of the Bath College. This to-day is doing an excellent work. But it is the North and East of England where by the needless reduplication or ill-advised contiguity of schools of the same grade the most flagrant breaches are committed against the first laws of educational economy. Thus, in the West Riding, the grammar school of Ossett has a fair endowment but practically no scholars. Again, Walsingham in Norfolk, with less than 1,000 inhabitants, possesses a substantially endowed school, the boys attending which had decreased from 32 in 1884 to 11 in 1894. Not far off at Ipswich, Norwich, and Bury St Edmunds, are establishments of historic fame, and of present competence. As an alternative to the continued waste of such opportunities, and to promote the local completion of the educational ladder indicated in the beginning of this chapter, the Commissioners suggest that the Walsingham school should be transferred bodily to Fakenham, a prosperous and not distant town, or that the Walsingham funds should be converted into scholarships and exhibitions to be held at other places of education within the County. There are other small grammar schools which, while just paying their way, have evidently no considerable career before them. Here the spirit of commercial impatience is apt to suggest the conversion of these places of teaching into elementary schools of the better sort. But the places now spoken of often have honourable traditions, and resemble families that, through no fault of their members, have, by misfortune, come down in the world. Local patriotism dwells fondly on the creditable past of such institutions, and would be wounded by their irrecoverable degradation. Surely, therefore, these schools might have the chance of retrieving their position. That, in effect, is what the Commissioners say. Assign to the decayed grammar schools their exact place in a reorganized system of secondary education. On condition of their adapting themselves to the place thus appointed to them, assist them out of the public funds to regain full effectiveness, and, together with that, to renew their past prosperity.