Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters / A Contribution to the History of Educational Development in Great Britain

by William Carew Hazlitt

Both the Quineys and the Shakespears were persons of substance and of local consideration; and in this case, at any rate, the explanation seems to be that such ignorance was usual, and did not prejudicially affect the position and prospects of a gentlewoman.

The institution in England of elementary schools for girls only dates back to the neighbourhood of the Restoration; but the number of establishments long remained, doubtless, very limited, and the scheme of instruction equally narrow. The frontispiece to Anthony Huish’s Key to the Grammar School, 1670, presents us with an interesting interior in the shape of a girls’ school, where the mistress is seated at a desk surrounded by female pupils.

Goldsmith’s Poems for Young Ladies, “Devotional, Moral, and Entertaining,” 1767, partly arose out of Dr. Fordyce’s Sermons for Young Women. The editor assures his fair readers that the Muse in this case is not a syren, but a friend; and there is plenty of the religious element in the volume. But there are, on the other hand, extracts from Pope’s Homer, stories from Ovid and Virgil, Addison’s Letter from Italy, and a selection from Collins’s Oriental Eclogues. The source from which it came was a guarantee that its pages would be agreeably and sensibly leavened with matters not divine; it surpasses the average intellectual nutriment provided for women a century ago. Dr. Goldsmith was a decided improvement on Dr. Watts, and he could scarcely escape from being so, whether he offered them his own poetical compositions, or, as in the present case, merely exercised his judgment in selecting from the works of others. No one can object to Pope’s Messiah or his Universal Prayer, which constitute the prominent features in the devotional section, when they are in such excellent company as Gay, Swift, and Thomson. But there is nothing in this volume to have prevented the editor offering a copy to either of the vicar’s daughters.

The universal and unchanging aim of the ecclesiastical authority is manifestly temporal, and Henry VIII. and his coadjutors, and their immediate successors in the foundation of Protestantism, acted wisely in making it part of their scheme to furnish the realm with public seminaries based on an improved footing in the earliest endowed grammar schools, which set the example to private individuals and corporate bodies.

These schools, which, as we know, had been preceded—and doubtless suggested too—by that at Magdalen College, Oxford, and others framed on a humbler scale or (like the City of London and St. Paul’s) under different auspices, opened the way to a partial secularisation of teaching throughout England. The preceptors employed were more often than not academical, unbeneficed graduates with a certain clerical bent; but the Statutes laid down rules for the management of the Charity and for the limitation of the subjects to be taught; and the scheme was assuredly at the outset, and continued down to the last thirty or forty years—in fact, within the recollection of the present writer—so narrow and imperfect, that it supplied what would now be regarded as the mere groundwork of a genteel education.

III. But a farther and still more important step toward the emancipation of scholastic economy and discipline from Church control was taken when, first in Scotland, and subsequently, and also in a more limited degree, in England, after the union of the kingdoms, proprietary establishments were opened for boys or girls only, or for boys and girls, where the religious instruction, instead of being, as under the archaic conventual and Romish system, the primary feature, became a mere item on the prospectus, like Geography or History. This was the commencement of an entrance upon modern lines, and struck a fatal blow at the monastic and academical ideas of instruction, by widening the bias and range of studies, and liberating the intellect from religious trammels.

The success and multiplication of these new institutions obliged the old endowments to reform themselves, and to meet the demands of the age; and the pressure was augmented, of course, by the concurrent rise of large public gymnasia of a novel stamp, as well as by the development of some of the already existing institutions conformably to the great changes in political and social life.

The proprietary system, which had started by adopting, as a rule, the mixed method, or rather by the reception of pupils of both sexes under the same roof, was eventually, and, except so far as dame-schools were concerned, finally modified in favour of the dual plan, and independent colleges for young gentlemen and for young ladies were the result.

In these latter the drift is certainly more and more lay; and as knowledge and culture spread, and the influence and fruits of masculine thought make themselves more and more appreciable, the Church in England will gradually loosen its grasp of the national intellect, and will probably owe to the higher education of women its collapse and downfall.

The ladies of England have propped up the tottering edifice long enough, and no one whose opinion is worth entertaining will lament the inevitable issue. But whether the consequences of this vital movement will be otherwise beneficial, it has scarcely yet, perhaps, been in active operation a sufficient time to enable us to judge. If it involves the sacrifice in any important measure of feminine refinement and dependence, we shall be forced to confess that the help to be rendered by our daughters and grand-daughters to the cause of intellectual enfranchisement and victory will have been bought at a cruel price.