THE EDUCATION BILL IN THE COUNTRY.
HE shriek against the Education Bill which the Opposition journals raised on its first introduction has not found itself echoed in the country. The Con- ference of the National Union of Teachers prefer, it seems, direct to indirect election of the Education Authority, but even on that point there is a large minority in favour of the Government scheme, and the Bill itself, though many of its details are disapproved, is treated on the whole by the teachers with respect, except where, on the question of salaries, they find it financially inade- quate. Mr. T. E. Ellis's fierce attack upon it on Tuesday at Bala was so angry and so obviously political, that it will not count for anything except with the devotees of his party, who look at everything through purely political spectacles. Almost all his points were the points of a mere partisan. For example, he began by pointing out that the Board-school education gains upon the people faster than the voluntary school education. Of course it does, because it has the unlimited resources of the rates from which to draw, and therefore attracts all the best teachers to it by giving them the best salaries. The cost of education per scholar is, as Sir John Gorst showed, vastly greater at the Board-schools than it is at the voluntary schools. That is the very root of the advantage of which the voluntary schools complain. They have no un- limited resources from which to draw. And, consequently, they cannot pay their teachers nearly as well as the Board- schools pay theirs. The consequence is not only that the best teachers eagerly desire to get work at the Board- schools, but that those children who hope in their turn to become teachers, strain every nerve to attend the schools at which they have the best chance of gaining scholar- ships qualifying them for a training college or a secondary school. Mr. Ellis makes the very grievance of which the voluntary schools complain, and for which this Bill is in- tended to be a partial remedy, a plea for condemning the Bill that purposes to remedy it. Then, again, what can be more unfair than to attack the Bill as "tricky, showy, and delusive," because it aims at decentralising the education system, and yet is " permissive " instead of compulsory ? Is it "tricky, showy, and delusive" to say plainly, as the Bill does, that "it shall be the duty of the Education Authority to supplement and not to supplant such exist- ing organisations for education purposes as for the time being supply efficient instruction." That seems to us as plain-spoken as it possibly could be. If that is "tricky," we do not know what is straightforward. What would Mr. Ellis have said, and what would he not have been justified in saying, if Sir John Gorst had proposed to extinguish the best School Boards and the best School Board schools of the existing system because they are regulated exclusively from the Education Department, and not by any more local and less centralised authority. Mr. Ellis knows perfectly well that if the object of the Bill had been to undermine all the best Board-schools by a sudden change of the regulating and inspecting authority, he would have had such a case against the Bill as even his partisan heart would have exulted in. Of course, the system of local control and inspection must be, and ought to be, gradually and tentatively, and not abruptly, introduced. Then, again, Mr. Ellis declares that the Bill "bribes School Boards to extin- guish themselves," but as he does not, in any report of his speech that we have seen, say what the bribe is, or in what clause it is provided, and as we have searched the Bill in vain for any evidence of this asserted bribe, we may, for the present at least, class that attack as the random discharge of that kind of dis- agreeable rather than dangerous artillery with which angry mobs belabour their enemies in the hope that some of it may stick.
Mr. Ellis declares that the two main instruments of educational progress are the strong impulse of a strong and directly elected local authority, on the one hand, and the strong hand of a highly organised, well-staffed, and wisely directed Central Department on the other hand, and that the new Bill will maim, distort, avid blunt these two instruments. We believe that Sir John Gorst showed very serious evils in the action of both these often useful but often also misapplied instruments, and that the new Education Bill is an honest and, for the most part, a well-considered attempt to remove them. In the first place, nothing could be more convincing than Sir John Gorst's evidence that in the rural districts the directly elected School Boards have for the most part been parsimonious and ineffectual instruments of education, inspired rather by a dread of expense than by a zeal for instruction. In the second place, while it is perfectly true that the Education Department is an admirably organised and invaluable instrument, it cannot be denied for a moment that it is very inelastic, and that its cut-and- dried demands on the various schools which it inspects for the filling - up of millions of blank spaces by the teachers of the schools, often exhaust a great deal more of the energy of the teachers than even the duty of teaching itself. What is certainly wanted, and what the new Bill will, we believe, supply, is some intermediate agency between the Central Department and the schools themselves, that will show much more sympathy with the educational needs and tastes of the locality than the Central Department, and yet will have all the trained ability and knowledge of the Education Department at its disposal for the control of local prejudices and the checking of parsimonious fears. There has been, we believe, a kind of panic among the official in- spectors of schools lest the new Bill should super- sede them and permit the new Education Authority to appoint inspectors of their own who may not be properly trained for their work. No mistake could have been greater, if it had been made, for such a staff of inspectors as the Education Department have organised could not be easily supplied. again. But there is, we believe, no sort of ground for any such fear. The Bill requires the new county Education Authorities to inspect the elementary schools of the county "by the officers of the Education Department," and indeed con- firms the controlling authority of the Education Depart- ment over all these county bodies in the most explicit way. While the new local intermediaries will very much modify, we hope, the too cut-and-dried system of the Education Department, and will give a great deal more verge to local taste and feeling, they will not have it in their power to lower the standard of good teaching,—a danger against which the Bill most carefully provides.
On the great question on which the Opposition hoped to excite the most angry resistance to the Bill, the pro- visions for religious education in the tenets of any Church to which the parents of the children, if in sufficient numbers to make it worth while to give them separate teaching, may belong, we do not see any evidence that the country will echo the scream of the Radical journals at all. It is indeed superfluously obvious that the pro- visions of this kind are all an extension, not a restriction, of parental liberty, and that the objections which have been made to the Bill are really blows struck at parental liberty, not blows struck at bigotry of any kind. The protest made at the Education Conference against any meddling with the subject of the Cowper-Temple compro- mise, is practically a protest against giving to Catholic. parents the power to insist on their children being put under Catholic teaching. It is chiefly the Roman Catholic clergy, though not the Roman Catholics exclusively, who now have to choose between Catholic children learning what they think dangerous, and receiving no religious teaching in school at all. And the country will certainly not support the policy of these bigots for undenomi- nationalism, who seem to hold that if all the Churches and sects cannot consent to accept a common religious teaching, they are unworthy of any respect or even tolerance in an undenominational age.
One amendment, however, it seems quite certain that the Bill will need. The number of poor Board-schools which will be entitled to the new grant-in-aid under the clause as it stands at present is far too limited. If these poorest Board-schools are to continue to exist at all, they must receive as much help as the voluntary schools.
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