EDUCATION AND THE UNEDUCATED. T HE attitude of the uneducated towards
education is not easy to gauge. As a mass they seem wonderfully indifferent to the disputes upon the subject which distract their political instructors. Yet the more respectable among them take a great interest in their children's schooling, and in speaking particularly of each child's progress they now and then say something which reveals their feeling towards the general question. Those whose work brings them in contact with the parents of children in primary schools hear much
the saute comments made again and again, and are able to generalise from them to a limited extent. •
So far as the experience of the present writer serves him, there are very few people belonging to the lower classes who are any longer in favour of ignorance. Regrets for fictitious old days when boys and girls were trained by their fathers and mothers in all the practical and homely duties of life, moral remarks about children who learn nothing at school but to despise their parents, are for the most part confined to an educated few who desire to live over an ignorant, and there- fore, as they believe, tractable, mass. On the other hand, there is among the poor a widespread feeling in favour of strict modera- tion so far as education is concerned. So-and-so "has done very well at school," one, hears, and it is to be hoped that his good record will help him to a good place. "The master is proud of him," and so, one sees, are the parents. "He is wonderfully fond of his books," but he is "getting big," and his mother thinks he has "had quite enough." There is a prevalent notion that "too much" education disinclines boys "to work." It is difficult to discover how much truth there is in this notion. Judging by Scotland, one would say there was none, for north of the Tweed no antagonism between hand-work and brain- work seems ever to have been felt. The public-sehool boys, too, who emigrate find their Latin and Greek no drawback on the prairie or in the backwoods, and they make as good farmers and tea-planters as though they had learned nothing beyond reading and writing. On the other hand, it is said by. those engaged in the emigration of the poor that the most "superior " people—the men with most education and the highest standard of life—are by no means the most successful . They feel a rougher life to be a "come down," and lament the performance of "a very different class of work" from that which they had looked forward to, especially for their boys. It is a pang to renounce a possible gentility, and the educated who smile at such folly would do well to reflect upon analogous follies in their own class. The fear of too much education may be founded, after all, upon the experience of life.
But .if poor people are anxious lest their children should learn to set too much store by book-learning and refuse to make their livings by the sweat of their brows, they do not take the grudging view, so often expressed by their social betters, that they must be strictly kept from every form of knowledge which is not immediately useful. "What do the poor want with knowledge which will bring them in nothing ? " rich men say; yet they let their own sons learn many unremunerative things. The poor encourage accomplishments—they regard them as tending to raise the social standing of their children— and undoubtedly there is a good deal of latent artistic talent among them. The present writer is acquainted with a primary school in a Surrey village. The scholars are all the children either of agricultural labourers, or of gardeners and coach- men,—what are called "gentlemen's servants." The drawing and brushwork produced in it by children under twelve are remarkable, and a few children are fired by their school teaching to draw from Nature at home, with results better than those who have never seen them would believe possible. The children and the parents are alike delighted, and what harm is done ? All innocent hobbies tend to good discipline out of school hours. The habit of observation is worth cultivating, and is civilising in its effects. In the same manner, singing gives great pleasure, and, teachers tell one, makes for discipline. Knowledge of musical notation leads many children later on to learn a little music on their own account, and even if it has no positive effect for good, it at least tends to keep them out of mischief, and provides them with rational amusement. After all, it is not possible to teach children nothing but the three "R's" if one is to goon teaching them till they are fourteen. Any average child will read and write by the time it is ten RS well as any amount of practice can enable it to do, and if reading means something more than deciphering print, then it must be directed towards a variety of subjects. "But think of the ratepayer !" we hear some one say. We do not see how in this matter the ratepayer comes in. The children do not have a separate teacher for each subject. In the country school of which we have been speaking the master and mistress teach all that is learned, from Roman history down- wards. Inferior .water-colour paints cost little, and paper is cheap enough, though, of course, it costs more than the
old-fashioned slate the blank surface of which was hourly reproduced by licking.
Two new and admirable features of the education question appear as the outcome of the efforts made during the past fifteen years to render primary instruction interesting. Young parents tell one with almost as much pleasure as is shown by men and women in the professional class that their children are to attend the same school as they themselves attended, and express a lively interest in the improvements which have taken place since their own time. Discipline in school hours, again, has been brought to a maximum of perfection with a minimum of punishment, and the present writer knows of a small school in which, in the unavoidable absence of the master, two young women teachers kept complete order for several days. They would be bold young women who could attempt such a task in a richer class of life.
Of course it is easy to exaggerate the effects of training and • education in any class of life. Education develops, but does not originate. We have yet to find a method of teaching energy, and that strong bent of the mind towards righteous- ness which we often hear described as " character " has very little to do with books. "Education gives a boy a. chance to show what he's got in him," said a village philosopher lately to the present writer, "but if there was nothing there when he began school, there will be nothing there when, he leaves off." We believe that the greater number of the parents of primary-school scholars who think about the matter at all are of a like opinion. Education gives "a chance." It is a means to success and advancement, but one that should never be regarded as an end in itself. Now and then, of course, one comes across a person belonging to the working class whose attitude to education is entirely hostile, but, as we have said above, such cases are rare indeed. We lately heard of a small farmer who objected to education on the ground that it "learned them craft," and a few days ago two women were heard talking on the subject of education in a South-Western third-class compartment. Some gipsies' vans were to be seen out of the window, and one of them remarked that she had heard that the education of gipsy children was "talked of in Parliament." She rejoiced in the prospect, because she thought it would prove both edifying and irksome to the gipsy community. Her companion did not share her enthusiasm. They "lived rough," no doubt, as it was, she said, but in her opinion education was "apt to brutalise." Was this some far-away echo of a Shavian philosophy, or was it founded on some exceptional experience ? After all, if education can only "bring out," it must in rare cases accentuate a bad character.
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