CONVOCATION AND THE VOLUNTARY SCHOOLS. T HE most important contribution that
has been made for a long time to the perennial controversy about voluntary schools, is the Bishop of London's speech in the Convocation of Canterbury last week. It is a speech which we should like to see circulated through every parish in England. No one who has read it can be in any doubt as to the prospects of voluntary schools, or as to the direction which the effort to maintain them ought at present to take. In this last respect, the debates in both Houses of Convocation offered a striking contrast to some former proceedings upon the same question. The Bishops passed a resolution approving generally of the recom- mendations of the Archbishops' Committee on Voluntary Schools, and commending them to the immediate and careful attention of the whole Church. In the Lower House, the Dean of St. Paul's moved a string of resolu- tions embodying the recommendations of the Committee, with the result that the two essential features of the scheme were unanimously approved. It may be well to state shortly what the recommendations here referred to are. The Committee was appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, at the request of the House of Laymen; and at the cost of much sacrifice of individual opinion, they have presented a report signed by all the members. They had little difficulty in determining that if voluntary schools are not merely to be maintained, but to be extended in proportion to the growth of the popula- tion, and enabled to recover the ground which they have lost through the weakness or wrong-headedness of those who ought to have supported them, some additional help from a public source is indispensable. The Church can do a great deal, and happily, with some notable and unfortunate exceptions, it is becoming more and more impressed with the duty of doing a great deal ; but it cannot do everything. This need of additional help does not, as is commonly supposed, arise from the recent action of the Education Department. More than half a million of money has been raised to effect the necessary improve- ments in school buildings, and the Bishop of London expects that another quarter of a million will have been added to this sum by the time that the improvements are completed. This is a highly satisfactory result, not merely because the demand was so sudden that there was no pos- sibility of meeting it except by individual liberality, but also because of the additional moral lien upon the State which it secures to voluntary schools. But outside the present exceptional demand for improved school buildings, there is the more formidable, because permanent, demand which is involved in the continuous growth in the cost of elementary education. Where voluntary schools and Board-sclrols exist side by side, the voluntary schools have to choose between giving the same advantages as Board-schools and seeing the children gradually drawn away from them. Even where the voluntary schools have sole possession of the field, there is a steady advance in the requirements of the Education Department. Here- after, perhaps these requirements may be lessened by the transfer to secondary schools of some of the subjects now taught in elementary schools. But this change, if it comes, will bring no real relief with it. Secondary education will raise the religious difficulty quite as effectually as elementary education, and those who wish children to be taught religion from thirteen to sixteen, as well as from five to thirteen, will have to put their hands still deeper in their pockets. Nor must it be forgotten that the fee-grant, which was given in lieu of the children's pence, did not make good the loss in the northern and mining districts. There wages are high, and managers have been accustomed to pay a large part of the cost of their schools, over and above what they get from the Parliamentary grant, by means of high fees. The new grant of threepence for each child in average attendance, meant an increase of revenue to a country school which had never perhaps charged the children more than twopence, but it impoverished a school which had been accustomed to get sixpence or ninepence for each scholar. These three things —the inevitable competition of Board-schools where they exist, the growing requirements of the Education Depart- ment, and the operation in certain districts of the abolition of school-fees—make the future of voluntary schools ex- tremely dark unless their present share in the educational expenditure of the community can somehow be increased.
There are those who deny the justice of this demand, and maintain that schools supported by public money should be subject exclusively to public control. Public money and public control are terms that are associated with more than one fallacy. The extreme advocates of Board-schools constantly speak as though voluntary schools were paid by the community in the same sense that Board-schools are, and that no public control of voluntary schools is worth having which is not coextensive with the public control of Board-schools. As regards the first point, the advocates of voluntary schools have a perfectly good answer. It will be time enough for the community to claim the entire control when the community bears the entire cost. In other words, voluntary schools should be wholly subject to public control when, and not before, they cease to be voluntary. A Board-school has been paid for out of the rates at every step of its life. A voluntary school has in the past been built in part, and in the present is wholly built, and when built is kept in repair, out of private funds. In order to retain the management of the school in their own hands, the subscribers lend the State the school buildings. They make them, in the first instance, what the State requires, they alter them afterwards as the State requires. The education of children and the building of ships are carried on by the Government on lines closely resembling one another. In each case a part of the work is exe- cuted in the public dockyards, and a part is entrusted to private firms. The Board-schools answer to the dock- yards, the voluntary schools to the private firms. The State gets the same education from each because the voluntary school has to satisfy the same tests as those prescribed for the Board-school. There is, however, a much weightier argument in favour of the payment of voluntary schools by the State than any derived from con- siderations of money and value. This was stated with great force by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the same debate. As the law stands, a School Board can refuse its consent to the erection of a new voluntary school in its district, though there may be parents who wish their children taught their religion, and subscribers who are willing to find the money for building it. We entirely agree with the Archbishop that this is "a positive offence against freedom, a positive check upon the growth. of religious bodies. For centuries past there has been nothing like it in England." But there are many Radicals who not only defend this state of things, but wish to extend it much further, They would make all elementary schools Board-schools, and only allow undenominational religion to be taught in them. All other religions are to be thrust into a corner i , taught, perhaps, by outsiders n a separate room, or made over to the Sunday-school. That would be in all respects as tyrannical a measure as to say that the religion taught in every elementary school shall be the religion of the Church of England, and that every parent shall be given the choice of having his children taught that, or left without religions teaching. The cry about public control is equally misleading. In one sense it is perfectly reasonable. When the State buys education from the managers of a voluntary school it has a perfect right to test the quality of the article supplied. Nobody proposes that the Education Department shall put up with inferior teaching because it is given in a voluntary school. On the contrary, it takes ample precautions to insure that the proper subjects are taught in them, and that they are taught in an adequate way. Control directed to this end is legitimate and necessary ; control that goes beyond this end is useless and tyrannical. This distinction is more clearly seen when the money comes from the taxes and is distributed by the Education Department, than when it comes from the rates, and is distributed by a School Board. We are so accustomed to the action of the De- partment that by a curious inconsistency many people who would think themselves gravely injured if a penny of the money they pay in rates went to a voluntary school, are not in the least disturbed by the knowledge that an appreciable part of the money they pay in taxes is spent in that way.
The Archbishops' Committee have kept this distinction in view when determining the source from which the increased contribution of the State to voluntary schools should be drawn. They were, we believe, as equally divided between aid from the rates and aid from the Parliamentary Grant, as it is possible for a Committee consisting of an uneven number to be. Had the advocates of rate-aid insisted on their solution things would have come to a deadlock, but they wisely remembered that the important thing is to get a further subvention from public funds, and that from which moiety of the public funds the subvention comes is a matter of comparative unimportance. The particular form which the Committee propose that the addition to the Parliamentary Grant shall take, is one that educationalists ought to welcome. They might have asked for a simple addition to the grant, leaving the expenditure of it by the school managers no more prescribed than it is now. Instead of this, they have suggested a plan which insures that the teaching in voluntary schools shall, so far as those who give it are concerned, be absolutely on a level with the teaching in Board-schools. At present the salaries paid in voluntary schools are decidedly lower than those paid in Board- schools, and though voluntary schools have some counter- balancing attractions, the general tendency of the dis- crepancy is to make the quality of the teaching inferior. It comes up to the specified standard, but that is all. The Archbishops' Committee recommend that the Educa- tion Department should take over the payment of the teachers, either in whole or in part, and that in return they should fix the number of teachers in each school, and determine their salaries. To us this seems, in some respects, a better proposal than any that has yet been put forward. With the present indisposition, on the one side to raise the rates, and on the other to devise fresh modes of spending them, they are likely to have quite as many demands on them as they are able to bear. With the Parliamentary grant it is different. Great as its growth has been, it has been hardly felt ; and of no payment can it be more truly said that for every penny laid out, corre- sponding value has been received. We are glad, therefore, that the two Houses of Convocation have declared them- selves favourable to the recommendation, and we sincerely hope that those friends of voluntary schools who have not yet brought themselves to support the plan will speedily come round to it. After all, the essential thing is to have a plan of some kind. In the course of the negotiations and discussions which any plan must undergo before it takes shape as a Bill, and much more as an Act of Parliament, very great changes are sure to be- effected in it. Nothing can be worse policy than for each man to stand out at starting for his own par- ticular idea, when the plan ultimately proposed will probably bear only a partial resemblance to any of those now talked of.
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