EDUCATION IN NORFOLK.
THE debate held a fortnight since in the Norfolk Chamber of Agriculture on popular education was a very useful one. It will serve to warn politicians that all Englishmen are not quite so civilized or so philanthropic as Londoners and good-natured people are accustomed to suppose. Anybody who imagines that the ideas of Mr. Leamon, who advocated child labour in the fields ; of Mr. Barton, who held that the boys preferred keeping crows, and therefore ought not to be sent to school ; of Mr. Salter, who declared that education was "humbug," and " had been carried quite far enough in rural districts," were peculiar to themselves or to Norfolk, is utterly mistaken. The Chamber contained, it is true, more reasonable men, but it carried a vote against further legislation by a large majority, and the decision will be endorsed openly or secretly by a very large section, possibly by a clear majority, of English farmers. They do not indeed, as they once did, oppose instruc- tion altogether. Nobody quite ventures to say that the poor ought not to be taught lest they should forget their "position in life." The Clergy, whose conduct upon the Education ques- tion, despite some small ecclesiastical prejudices, has been really admirable, who have not only established schools, but fined themselves to maintain them, have convinced the farmers that it is not morally right to refuse to labourers permission to read their Bibles, but beyond this point all cordiality of assist- ance ends. The Berkshire farmer who held that arithmetic positively injured a labourer only exaggerated the opinion of thousands more intelligent than himself. The inferior among them cannot bear to see their labourers' sons better educated than their own, for whom the State provides no schools ; and the superior secretly dread one of two coming evils, which they imagine they foresee. Deeply conscious of the mono- tony of ill-paid toil in which agricultural labourers pass their lives, they argue, first, that no educated man will perform the more disagreeable labours of cultivation, —as if Prussian peasants and Connecticut yeomen, both educated men, did not cart and spread muck, — and secondly, that if they perform them, they will demand wages which English land, held as it is, can never pay. This question of wages is, naturally, never long absent from the farmer's thoughts, for he knows, what writers in cities are so slow to recognize, that this is the grand peculiarity of his business. In most trades wages, though an important item, is only one among many ; in the cultivation of the soil it is the one on which profit and loss depend. Every rise, there- fore, appears dreadful, and a feeling, probably just, but certainly irresistible, that education and ten shillings a week are incompatible, is one strong cause of the prejudice honestly confessed by the majority of the Norfolk Chamber. At all events, whatever its origin, the feeling is a real and strong one, which, as it exists! ought to be proclaimed aloud, and with which, whether proclaimed or not, we shall all have to reckon.
It will, we fear, render all permissive bills for an Educa- tional rate very nearly useless. In the boroughs, where the ratepayers who elect the Council are all thirsty for education, and perceive in some dim way that ignorance is dangerous, it may be possible to obtain a large or decent organization out of a permissive measure. Even there the dislike to such expen- diture on the part of those who do not benefit by it will be very keen, and may impede educational schemes, as it has impeded the action of the Boards of Health ; but in the counties the resistance will, we fear, for some time to come, be almost insuperable. It is true the rates are voted by the landowners, but they feel the opinion of the occupiers, and are most reluctant to press severely on men whom they do not repre- sent, and cannot altogether control. The magistrates of Norfolk will hardly insist on educating the people against the will of the tenantry, more especially when every man with an occupancy of any size at all has been placed on the Electoral Register. The centralized system, with all its defects, has at least the advantage that the money is voted by politicians who look beyond the rate of wages, and though really contributed by every taxpayer, is still contributed in a fashion imperceptible to the individual who contributes. It will be wise to abandon that system very slowly, at least until some change of opinion has passed over employers, or the House of Commons has at last decided that the education of children, like their maintenance, shall be one of the duties enforced by law. It is quite possible that the householders who are so soon to be our masters may lay down that principle, for the boroughs return a majority of members, and in the boroughs the common-school system may yet become an idea. The artizans are jealous for their children's chance of a rise in life, and are sensitive as to grade, which education greatly affects. If it is laid down, education by rates will not only be possible, but easy, for as the schools will exist whether or no, the Common Councils and county magnates will be anxious to retain the management of them in their own hands. They will probably manage them very much better, very much cheaper, and with much closer reference to local conditions than the State possibly could, and local management will not necessarily exclude Parliamentary inspection. But until the constituencies and the House have advanced thus far, until they have insisted on education as the essential datum, it would be weakness to leave to local authorities the task of providing the means. They will in a large minority of cases pronounce the task a work of supererogation, object to discuss ing the sauce because they beforehand object to be cooked. Why should Mr. Salter pay rates for that which he declares, while he is not paying them, to be a mere delusion ? He will not do it, and to trust to the counties for the willing develop- ment of a national system of instruction, is simply to postpone it until the " counties " themselves have been educated up to the point when cultivation becomes impatient of ignorance,—a long date ahead.
Should the Reformed Parliament ever establish compulsory education,—one of the hundred points upon which those who have voted for the Reform Bill are completely in the dark —the cry we have so often predicted, for State aid to middle-class education, will unquestionably be raised. Men with less than 3001. a year will not go on for ever paying taxes to secure to those below them a benefit which they can- not secure for themselves. County Lyceums,—great schools where a good education shall be obtainable for 201. a year, —will become a necessity, and will do almost as much for progress as the National Schools have done. The two- horse farmers and village tradesmen are among the most ignorant classes in the country, and they will for the future hold in the counties the balance of electoral power. They must be taught, and they ought in common fairness to be taught, and they cannot be taught except through a combina- tion which only the State can secure. They cannot pay the money for good schools,—nobody has so little cash as the farmer of 150 acres, — and the schools their means will reach are perhaps the most ineffective schools in the world, managed mainly by ignorant men intent on scraping out of the pittances they receive a bare subsistence, with no prospects, no recognition from the State or from society, and a weary monotony of daily toil as hard as that of the labourer, and not, like his, passed in the open air. Such lyceums, once established, can be made self-supporting ; but they cannot be established without State aid or rate aid for sites, buildings, and the first dreary interval of non-success.
Previous page
