Democracy and Our Older Public Schools
[We do not agree with all the views expressed in this article. but we think that its publication will direct attention along useful lines. Sooner or later there must be a widening of the basis of pchication in this country. We may add that the writer of this erticle in the author of Great English Schools and English Educa- tional Endowments.—En. Spectator.] POSSIBLY the steady sapping of the national morale and the drying up of the springs of initiative following on the four years of the horrors Of war and the hard times of peace, have no more significant illustration to-day than the almost complete lack of interest in the problems of English education shown by the Parliamentary leaders of the Labour Party and the Trade Union movement.
In the last few weeks a very large area of South- East London has been moved to protest very articulately against the threatened alienation from the children of poor parents of the wealthy endowments of Dulwich College. This old Jacobean foundation was the creation of the famous actor, Edward Alleyn, friend of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and keeper of the bear garden of James I. His intention was that three classes should receive the benefits of his foundation_ of the "College of God's Gift" at Dulwich. They comprised twelve poor scholars ; children of Dulwich inhabitants, who were to be taught freely ; and " towne or foreign schollers " who were to "pay for such allowance as the master and wardens shall appoint."
. The President of the Board of Education now states that he has sanctioned a reactionary scheme whereby in future, only about ninety out of 1,000 pupils may enter by the avenue of scholarships from the elementary schools of the London County Council.
The amazing thing. about these proposals is not that they should have been made in a land where ideals of caste and exclusiveness have ruled strongly for more than eight centuries ; but that no protest should have been publicly uttered by the leading members of the party which took office in the last Government ! Sharp criticism has conic from a Conservative ex-mayor of Camberwell, from the, ranks of the local Labour parties, and. from co-operators, but from the Parliamentary leaders of the Movement which, in 1918, at Nottingham, demanded that English educational endowments be put at the disposal of the children of poor folk, in the spirit of founders' intentions, there is a silence of the dead. Why is this so ?
If the price of liberty is perpetual vigilance, no less is it true that the price of democracy is higher and still higher education, liberal and still more liberal culture. The threat to educational efficiency is a national one, for educational endowment alienation is no more a peculiarity of London than are electric tramways or motor omnibuses.
Nearly five centuries ago, an Englishman, whose father was a villein or serf, and mother a lady of aristo- cratic descent, founded a school for the education of seventy poor scholars, "suffering from want of money and poverty." He left future generations in no doubt as to what he meant by "poverty." No one, said he, should be deemed to be in heed of such eleemosynary aid if he had an income of more than five marks a year, or half the wage of a working carpenter, in the late fourteenth century. A few others of wealth and rank, to the number of ten, were to be admitted, but not if that meant burdening the resources of the school. In other words, William of Wykeham established at Winv chester the first public school, as distinct from a caste or exclusive class school.
Sixty years passed by, and then an English king, looking down one day from his castle at Windsor, saw that the water-meadows of the Thames-side were fair, and an ideal situation for a college for twenty-five poor and needy scholars, to take precedence over all others who might thereafter be educated at the grammar school of Eton. No such poor scholar, he said, should haye an income exceeding five marks a year.
In less than a century after, not a poor scholar in this sense was to be found in either Winchester or Eton, and that remained the position until 1861, when the criticisms of a certain "Jacob Omnium," in the -old Cornhill Magazine, compelled the Government of the day to set up a Royal Commission to inquire into the admin- istration and endowments of the older English public schools. This Royal Commission merely left things in a worse state than before ; for since their time and at this present day, a multi-millionaire's son may compete for and enjoy the emoluments of the scholarship intended, in the spirit of the founders, for a poor and needy scholar. It is notorious that highly placed and highly salaried servants of the State, and even archbishops, have had no shame or compunction in accepting for their sons these aids to charitable education. Corroboration of these statements will be found in the reports of the Bryce Commission on Secondary Education, 1892-5, and in Matthew Arnold's charming and nowadays too little read Friendship's Garland.
It is ironical to call these schools "public," nor would they be so called in any other country in the Old or New World. Beautiful and comely as they May be, with their "dreaming spires" and the whispers of their towers "spreading their gardens to the moonlight," let none advance these enchantments of Gothic archi- tecture and these charms of unprogressive felicity as an excuse for maintaining an intolerable and ancient in- justice. Such an attitude is very common among writers and defenders of the older public schools—as frequent to-day in 1928 as in the far-away age when " Napoleon " Keate threatened to swish his Etonian pupils if they were not pure in heart.
To-day you may still hear the old apologist mumbling in his teeth about the battle of Waterloo being won on the playing-fields of Eton. Yes, but think of the hundreds and thousands of precious lives wasted on the battlefials of the Great War because. of the refusal of the High Array Command to adopt new inventions ! The "Tank," as all know, had to be forced on these military chiefs-- all of them old English public school men—by public opinion and by the First Lord of the Admiralty., Three years before the outbreak of the War, we had a public school master telling us that these schools Were turning out " well-mannered, well-naeaning. boys', keen at games, ignorant of _life,. contemptuous of all outside the pale of their own caste, uninterested in work, neither desiring nor revering knowledge.", .
In this time Of national adversity, how much longer can the country afford to leave these schools, With their rich endowments and their:great traditions,_ mere pre- serves of caste, no more advancing knowledge than the education of the • poor? A country far richer than England ' in intellectual power' could not indefinitely go on wasting the gifts of her poor " Judes the Obscure" merely in order that she might produce a few original and creative types who become so not because, but in despite, of the public school system. For four, hundred years, Esau has been deprived of his educational birthright ; how long shall it be before the balance is redressed ?
HAROLD T. WILKINS.
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