The Scottish Education Act of 1872 distinguished certain burgh and parish schools as “higher class public” or secondary schools. The act of 1908 deals in some detail with secondary education, modifying and strengthening Secondary education. the framework in various ways, but without introducing organic changes. “Secondary” schools are distinguished from “intermediate,” the former being defined as providing at least a five years’ course; the latter as providing at least a three years’ course in languages, mathematics, science and such other subjects as may from time to time be deemed suitable for the instruction of pupils who have reached a certain standard of attainment in elementary subjects under the code. Intermediate and secondary schools may be provided and maintained either by school boards or otherwise, and provision is contained in the act for the transfer of endowed schools to the school board. Thus secondary (as well as elementary and continuative) education is organized upon the basis of the parish or burgh; it receives, however, grants in aid through the agency of county (or large urban) authorities (called district committees) constituted under schemes of the Scottish Education Department. For the purpose of such grants in aid the funds available under the various local taxation acts, together with parliamentary grants, other than a fee grant at the rate of 12s. per child in average attendance, form a fund called the Education (Scotland) Fund. After provision has been made for (inter alia) grants for universities, higher technical education and training colleges, the fund is allocated to the district committees according to a scheme laid before parliament and approved by the king in council. Out of the “district education fund” the school board receives (ordinarily) a sum equal to one-half of the amount by which the net cost to the school board (after deducting income from grants made by the department and from fees) exceeds the amount which would be produced by such rate per pound upon the district of the school board as the committee may determine, not being more than a rate of twopence in the pound. Important powers are also conferred upon the district committee for organizing and aiding within their district the provision by the school boards of medical examination and supervision of school children, the supply of bursaries for purposes of all forms of higher education, and the provision of instruction in special subjects, such as agriculture, &c.
Ireland.
The full development of a system of public education in Ireland has been hampered and retarded by the general difficulties inherent in the problem of Irish government. In consequence of the fundamentally different social, Special difficulties of Irish education. religious and political conditions in the two countries, the English and Irish systems have developed down to the present time upon divergent lines. In England, popular education was founded in the first instance upon individual initiative combining in organized voluntary effort, and, though the voluntary agencies have been first supplemented and latterly to a large extent supplanted by public action, the tendency has been in the direction of municipalization rather than in that of central state control. In Ireland, on the other hand, education has suffered in the past from the general absence of individual initiative and local interest almost as seriously as from the mistakes of the English government. These causes, more directly perhaps than the prevailing poverty of the country, made it necessary to throw the burden of supporting the schools to an increasing extent upon the state, while the want of local self-government precluded any devolution of powers and duties upon municipal authorities.
State intervention is actually of earlier date in Ireland than in England. From the reign of Elizabeth onwards, English Protestant schools were founded by the government in a sporadic and intermittent fashion in pursuance Historic retrospect. of its Anglicizing policy. To mention briefly one or two historical features, the great religious educational enterprise of Edmond Rice in founding the well-known Irish Catholic order of the Christian Brothers in 1802 forms an exception to the general lack of initiative among the people themselves. About the same period the Kildare Place Society (founded in 1811 while the first commission of inquiry into Irish education was sitting) attempted to grapple with the peculiar difficulties of the religious situation upon lines somewhat similar to those just laid down by Lancaster and his followers in England. This organization comprised both Roman Catholic and Protestant schools upon a common religious basis of Bible reading without note or comment, and received government grants which rose to £30,000 a year before they were discontinued in 1833. The religious compromise which the system embodied broke down in consequence of Catholic dissatisfaction, and that it was at first fairly successful may seem extraordinary in view of the later attitude of the Catholic Church towards the question of common schools and combined religious instruction.
In 1833, as the result of a second commission of inquiry (1824) and a select committee of the House of Commons (1828), Mr Stanley inaugurated the national system of elementary schools under a board of commissioners nominated The national system. from the different religious denominations. The government appears from the outset to have aimed at combined secular and separate religious instruction for Roman Catholics and Protestants. At the same time, an attempt was inconsistently made to provide an ethical basis for the secular instruction by means of Bible extracts. The story of the preparation of these extracts by an ingenious compound of the Protestant Authorized and Douai versions of Scripture is in its way one of the curiosities of religious history. The extracts were designed to meet the recognized Catholic objection to the indiscriminate reading of the Bible without note or comment. In practice they were chiefly used in the Protestant schools (in which their use is now practically extinct), and the growing Catholic objection to the policy of the National Board in this respect found authoritative, though somewhat cautiously worded, expression in a decree of the Roman Congregation De Propaganda Fide of January 11, 1846, declaring that non-sectarian religious instruction was dangerous to youth. “Tutius multo esse ut literarum tantummodo humanarum magisterium fiat in scholis promiscuis, quam ut fundamentales, ut aiunt, et communes religionis Christianae articuli restricte tradantur, reservata singulis sestis peculiari seorsum eruditione. Ita enim cum pueris agere periculosum valde videtur.” The religious difficulty in Irish elementary education may be said to have been solved in process of time by the conversion of the national system in practice, though not in theory, into a system strongly denominational and therefore widely different from the design of its founders, combined Biblical instruction being discarded, and separate schools for the most part taking the place of common schools for the two creeds. In the latter respect the like tendency has been noted in the case of Germany.
The following are the chief specific points upon which the Irish system of elementary education differs from the English.
Finance.—The state still makes building grants to the extent of two-thirds of the cost. Such grants are only made to what are called vested schools, that is to say, schools of which the premises are vested in trustees or in the Irish elementary education. commissioners themselves. The state further pays in the case of all national schools the entire cost of maintenance except only the upkeep of the building, and the provision of books after the exhaustion of a first free grant.
Appointment and Payment of Teachers.—For the purpose of promotion the state through its inspectors undertakes the duty of classifying the individual teachers in four grades, passage from one grade to another being secured by examination. Appointments of teachers to schools are made by the school managers subject to the approval of the commissioners. Rights of dismissal are reserved to the local managers and also to the commissioners independently. Lastly, the teachers’ salaries are now paid directly by the state. The old system of payment by results was abandoned in 1900, and the teacher is paid (a) a fixed salary according to grade, (b) a continued good service salary which may be increased triennially, (c) a capitation payment.
Convent Schools.—In addition to the national schools supported as above, there are a considerable number of convent or monastery schools which receive capitation grants after the English plan, but not direct salaries. There were 308 such schools in 1908, with an average attendance of 70,003. There were also 83 other convent or monastery schools paid by personal salaries, with an average attendance of 11,075.