27 MAY 1876, Page 1

Lord Sandon's Education Bill has been printed and circulated, and

we have written elsewhere on the very serious deficiency which we find in it. There is, however, another great defect besides its inefficient equivalent for a directly compulsory clause, a defect to which Dr. Lyon Playfair drew attention on the night on which the Bill was introduced ; and it is this,—that so far as there may be any direct compulsion under the Bill, it will be chiefly through the agency of Boards of Guardians and "In- dustrial Schools," which are very bad instruments for such a measure. Boards of Guardians bate expense, and certainly do not love education ; and as to industrial schools, they are expressly for children subject to criminal influences, and it is not right to send children who are merely ill-managed or neglected, to associate with children taken out of the society of thieves and scamps. Moreover, the Board of Guardians will have to pay five shillings a week a head for these children, obviously an expense quite too great to admit of any adequate application of this method of compulsion, even if Boards of Guardians loved expense as much as they hate it. Lord Sandon's Bill betrays indeed, by the clumsy and expensive machinery which it provides, no less than by it elaborate anticipation of excuses for not applying compulsion, that it is not intended to bring any direct compulsion to bear on the majority of boys; and even the indirect compulsion will certainly miss altogether the majority of girls.