Paterfamilias to the Editor of the “Cornhill Magazine.”
Sir,—To a person returning to England after an absence of many years, few things can be more striking than the progress which has been made in the art and practice of education since the commencement of the present century, the methods and contrivances which have been ingeniously and mercifully invented for imparting with greater ease the rudiments of knowledge to the young, and the new books and new devices which really merit the Old World title of Reading made Easy.
Formerly, any old paupers, who could read or write more or less intelligibly, and who were too worn or too weak to earn their subsistence in any other manner, used to be considered as perfectly qualified to instruct the rising generation of the parish to which they belonged in those necessary arts; and dire used to be the sufferings which the unhappy village children underwent, solely because their broken-down and incompetent teachers knew but little themselves, and knew not at all how to impart that little to others.
To do them justice, however, their pupils were not entirely neglected. If they could not read fluently, neither could they seat themselves with any degree of comfort; and if they were backward in summing and spelling, they seldom failed to return home at night with swollen eyes and scored palms. The tree of knowledge in those days was only valued on account of the tough and elastic materials which it furnished for the manufacture of instruments of childish torture.
The normal aspect of a village school used then to be, an aged crone in the chimney-corner, spectacles on nose, and rod in hand; a loutish boy, crowned with a fool’s cap, whining by her side; a class of trembling dunces before her, endeavouring in vain to shirk unchastised through lessons which they were as unapt to learn as their mistress was to teach; and, in the background, the body of the school, ignorant, rude, dirty, and of evil savour—just such a brutal and unpromising brood as the incapable old hen who presided over them might be expected to rear.
In the present year of our Lord 1860, a village, nay, a workhouse school, in any district of England, presents a very different, and a much pleasanter sight. Order, cleanliness, and intelligence now predominate; the active and experienced teachers—young men and women in the prime of life, carefully trained to teach—understand their duties thoroughly, and are proud of their success in discharging them. Punishments are now rare, and never cruel; the children have a happy and cultivated look, and the result of this improved system of school-teaching obtrudes itself gratefully on the eye and ear of the visitor in well-written copies and careful drawings, in distinctly enunciated reading, in harmonious singing, and in arithmetical calculations of surprising accuracy and rapidity. And all these valuable results have been produced by a very moderate degree of judicious encouragement and vigilance on the part of the legislature, which has, in the first place, taught the teachers of the children of the poor the art of teaching—an art until lately entirely neglected in this country; and, secondly, has kept them up to their work by a careful system of school inspection. Every school which now benefits by a grant of government money is examined and reported on, publicly and periodically, by the government inspectors of schools, able and accomplished men, as thoroughly versed in the art of examination as the teachers they overlook are in the art of teaching.
It is a deplorable and strange fact, that whilst all this care and forethought has been so properly bestowed on the children of the English poor, the children of our wealthier classes have been in that respect altogether neglected. Their teachers are never trained to teach at all; no government inspector ever reports on the educational merits or demerits of our old-established upper-class schools, which remain, for the most part, mere money speculations, in which the welfare and progress of the pupils are held altogether subservient to the pecuniary profits of the masters. All is left in those important establishments to self-interest and to chance; and there would even now be small hope of a change in their system for the better, were it not for external circumstances, to which I will presently advert.
Many years ago I was myself a pupil at Harchester College, one of our most celebrated public schools. It was indeed a pleasant place for a sturdy, quick-witted boy; though for a boy who was neither sturdy nor quick-witted, it was neither pleasant nor profitable: clever, studious boys did very well at it, as clever, studious boys will generally do anywhere; but boys of average ability and application learnt very little there, and dull or idle boys learnt positively nothing at all.
Nor were these unsatisfactory results surprising, when the system and the staff of the school were critically examined. The Harchester tutors were all Fellows of one small and not very distinguished college at Oxbridge, which possessed a sort of vested interest in Harchester. They came thither as masters, not because anybody believed them to be clever men, or because they were supposed to possess any natural or acquired aptitude for teaching, but solely as a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. They wished to make money rapidly. The profits of a master at Harchester were known to be very great; and the Fellows of —— college had, according to their seniority, a prescriptive right to that position, if they pleased.