PEDAGOGY.
[To THE EDITOR Or TER SPECTATOR." I
Slit, —Will you allow me, while thanking you for the friendly tone of your article on the meeting at the Drapers' Hall to advocate the claims of the Training College for Teachers in higher-class schools which bears my name, to point out to you that, far from being a new College, as you suppose, coming before the public only with an untried programme, and promises unbacked as yet by performance, it has existed for ten years, and can point to the record of those ten years' work which was brought up at the annual meeting last spring, as the beet guarantee the public can have that the larger means its promoters are now asking for will be worthily employed, and will accomplish the objects they have set forth ? The College was founded in 1877 by the Society for the Training and Registration of Teachers, the Council of which is its govern- ing body, and was conducted for eight years in premises in Skinner Street, Bishopsgate, generously given to it, rent-free, by the Rev. Wm. Rogers, who also obtained the use of the large middle-class girls' school in the same locality, as a practising school for the students. Two years ago, the numbers of the latter, which had steadily increased from six to nearly fifty, having quite outgrown the Skinner Street premises, the College was removed to its present habitation, No. 5 Fitzroy Street, in order to be near the Maria Grey School, No. 1 Fitzroy Square, which had been founded soon after the College, with a view to becoming its practising school. It was then that the Council did me the honour to give the College my name, which had been borne all along by the school. This change of premises involved the heavy additional expense of rent, which the fees of the students are quite inadequate to cover. The generosity of various members of the Council and their friends has hitherto enabled it to meet this and other deficiencies caused by the very expensive nature of the teaching required ; but this, of course, is, and must be, a precarious resource, and the Council felt that with the record of ten years' good work behind them, the time had come when they could appeal to the general public to place an institution which had proved its public utility, on a permanent basis, and in possession of assured means of carrying on and extending its work. Mrs. Salis-Schwabe's munificent offer of £2,000 as the nucleus of a fund sufficient to enlarge it into a great national institution, comprising the training of teachers and the organisation of schools of every grade, from the infant-school upwards, such as Mrs. Schwabe has founded at Naples, determined the Council to make their appeal to the public at once ; and this was the object for which the brilliant assembly at the Drapers' Hall was called together, and to which the Crown Princess of Germany and Princess Louise gave the sanction of their presence. How it happened that the speakers connected with the College failed apparently to make these facts clear, and instead, gave the impression expressed in your article, that it was a new and experimental work which the public was asked to assist, remains a mystery to me ; but I venture to hope, from the approval you give to the objects of the promoters, that you will allow space in your next issue for this rectification and statement of the real facts of the case. One of those facts I would specially dwell upon,—i.e., that ever since the University of Cambridge instituted its Syndicate for the Examination of Teachers, our students have formed a very large proportion of the candidates going up for that examination, and have, with exceedingly few exceptions, obtained the certificate both in the theory and practice of education. I must also rectify your writer on another point, and disclaim the position he assigns to the Maria Grey College as the only training institution for teachers of higher- grade schools which it justly held at one time,—Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the Cheltenham College for Ladies having now started similar ones, whose students, together with ours, probably made up the fifty-nine female candidates who went up to the Cambridge examination this year. A similar College was started for men a few years ago in Finsbury Square, but collapsed from want of students.
Let me add that, should the answer to our appeal be such as to enable the institution to be placed on the large national footing aimed at by Mrs. Salis-Schwabe, it will be my earnest desire that its name should be also changed to one more fitted, as known to the whole nation, to be at the head of a national
Previous page
