ITO THR EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—Excellent as is the plan (described in your last number by Mr. Cardwell) of offering entrance exhibitions to the highest-class schools of a town, it does not meet the complaint that a practical monopoly is being secured by the well-to-do classes of the educa- tional endowments intended for the poor,—or if not for the poor alone, from which the poor were certainly not to be excluded. To admit into a high school a few lads of extraordinary ability, is not to bring within general reach of all classes of the community those opportunities of securing a noble culture for which ancient endow- ments make such ample provision. By this process the brains of the working-classes are picked, but the working-classes, as a whole, are left out in the cold.
The idea which appears to be guiding the educational policy of England is, that the poor are to be collected into "elementary schools," while the" endowed grammar-schools" are to furnish a high education at a price which will be cheap to the middle-class, but prohibitory to working-men, the passage between th e two classes of schools being freely opened to a small per-centage of specially gifted boys alone. Practically, the middle classes are securing cheap classical schools for themselves, by limiting the number of free scholars in the old grammar-schools, and relegating their poorer fellow-citizens to another set of institutions, in which the "Standards" are the be-all and the end-all of educational life. This process is being carried on under the plea of extending the advan- tages of the grammar-schools, when it should rather be described as establishing a class monopoly of institutions intended to bring the advantages of the higher education within reach of the people at large.
For a grammar-school to be of service, it must be entered at a comparatively early age, and admission cannot be deferred until a pupil has finished his course at an elementary school, in which his education is limited by a system of "extras." No reader of the Spectator who thinks of sending his child to Rugby would keep him ignorant of Latin and Greek, and confine him to the "Standards" until he was fourteen years of age. My contention is, that the free grammer-school system should be sustained, and not abolished, entrance being secured by competitive examina- tion at the proper age for beginning a complete curriculum. Abolition or limitation of this system means a confiscation of the educational privileges of the less wealthy classes of society.
It ought not to be assumed that every boy from the poorer classes who enters a grammer-school ought to be of "extraordi- nary ability." The object of the higher education is not simply to prepare for professional life, but to make life worth having.— I am, Sir, &c.,
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