SIDE-LIGHTS ON THE EDUCATION QUESTION.
ALTHOUGH Lord Salisbury's speech at the annual meeting of the National Society is more than a week old, it is worth returning to both for the importance of its subject, and for the interest of the speaker's handling of it. Lord Salisbury is t )o near the responsi- bilities of office to make it likely that he would give an unqualified blessing to the Archbishops' or any other Education Bill. But the criticisms he contributed were valuable because they are sure to be made sooner or later, and so had better be made at once. The supporters of voluntary schools are only at the beginning of what will probably be a prolonged struggle. We believe that success depends on themselves, but however well they fight they will not win in a single battle or in one campaign. They will be exposed to far less discourage- ment if they have surveyed the ground and counted the cost beforehand, if they have weighed and measured what is demanded of them and given each part of their work its proper share of their attention. It is just this that Lord Salisbury's speech will help them to do, and in the interest of the same cause it may be worth while to go over two of his points once more.
The first is especially necessary to insist on at this moment. Great as the liberality of the friends of volun- tary schools has been in the past, it must be equally great in the future. For the time the thoughts of Churchmen and of Roman Catholics are rightly turned to the best means of getting further help from the State for the maintenance of their schools. It is indis- pensable indeed that they should get it, since without it there is no obvious prospect before them save that of partial extinction. But when people are trying their hardest to get money from others, they may be tempted to forget the necessity of providing it themselves. In the present case that necessity is specially great because the principal motive that the State will have for in- creasing its contributions to voluntary schools will be that, by so doing, it will get more for its money than by spending the same sum on building schools of its own. Let us suppose that a hundred new schools have to be provided. Is it cheaper to build them all at the public expense, or to build twenty-five at the public expense, and to pay two-thirds of the cost of the remaining seventy-five ? The answer is too obvious to need stating ; but the whole philosophy of State aid to voluntary schools is contained in it. There is a large sum of money on which the State can draw if it is willing to spend liberally of its own money in the process. Clearly, the willingness of the State to spend liberally of its own money will be determined in the long-run by the amount of money which this liberality will unlock. Supposing, to take an extreme case, that whenever a new school is wanted, somebody was willing to build the schoel out of his own pocket on condition of the State undertaking to maintain it, would it be cheaper for the State to accept his offer or to insist on paying the whole cost itself ? Here again the answer is obvious ; but obvious as it is, it is not always understood. When voluntary schools ask for State aid, the request is constantly treated, even by those who ought to know better, as a piece of sheer impudence. You want, it is said, to teach your own religion at our expense ; whereas what the request really means, is that the supporters of voluntary schools are willing to bear part of the cost of secular education in order to be in a position to teach their own religion in the same build- ing, and by the same teachers. But the continuance of this arrangement depends on the continuance of this readiness to provide money to meet the State contribution ; and there is some danger lest Churchmen, in their just eager- ness to increase the State contribution, should forget the c3rresponding need of maintaining the contributions from private sources. The £38,000,000 that they have spent in this way in the last eighty years, must be an earnest of what they are prepared to spend in the next eighty. There is a real community of interest between the State and the supporters of voluntary schools, and it only needs common- sense and absence of prejudice to make this community of interest equally appreciated by both parties. The State wishes to see all children properly educated. The volun- taryists wish this education to be religious ; and in order to secure this end, they are willing to bear, say, a third of the total cost. On the one hand, therefore, the State has simply to determine whether it will find the whole of every guinea wanted, or allow the voluntaryists certain advantages in return for their contributing 7s. out of every guinea.
On the other hand, the voluntarists have to determine whether their zeal for religious education is active enough to provide this 7s. Both sides of the conditional contract are equally important, because if the State will not give more to voluntary schools than it gives now, they cannot go on ; while if the subscriptions to voluntary schools fall off, the State will certainly not increase its contribution towards their support.
Lord Salisbury's second point is that Churchmen ought not to forget that they have a second string to their bow,—not, indeed, a string which has been of much value in the past, but one which may gain unexpected strength and usefulness in the future. "It is your business," he said, " to capture the Board-schools ; to capture them, in the first instance, under the existing law ; and then to capture them under a better law which shall place you under no religious disability." The history of the existing law, and of the religious disability under which in practice it places Churchmen, and, indeed, persons of any definite religion, was very well given by Lord Salisbury. Everywhere, except in England, one of two ways of meeting the difficulty of divided religions has been adopted. One way is to banish religion from the school. This is the secular system, and it has been adopted in France and in some English colonies. The other is to group and classify the children of each religion in schools in which that religion is taught. This is the system which has been adopted in England in the case of voluntary schools, and there would have been no difficulty in applying it to the Board-schools established under the Act of 1870. All that was required for the purpose was a clause leaving School Boards free to decide whether the schools under their control should be Church, or Nonconformist, or secular schools. Then, as very few School Boards would have cared to set up secular schools, the religious instruction in Board-schools would have taken the religious colour of the locality in which the schools were placed. The majority of the parents would have got the religious teaching they preferred ; the minority would have availed themselves, as they do now, of the protection afforded by the Conscience Clause. The Nonconformists, however, were too reso- lutely opposed to this scheme to admit of its being carried through by a Liberal Government, and the difficulty was in the end got over by the invention of the Cowper- Temple Clause. This famous expedient has been called a compromise, but, as Lord Salisbury says, with equal truth and humour, " a compromise is something where each party gives up something," whereas the Cowper-Temple Clause " was really an ambiguity where each party secretly believed it had got an advantage for itself." The Non- conformists thought that by forbidding the use of dis- tinctive religious formularies they had forbidden the teaching of distinctive religious doctrines. The Church party thought that by limiting the prohibition to the use of distinctive formularies they had averted the prohibition of distinctive doctrines. It was again and again pointed out, while the clause was under discussion, that it would not hinder a School-Board from having transubstantiation taught in its schools, provided that the teaching was not given in the exact words used in the Tridentine Catechism. But though each party thought that in accepting the clause they had got the better of the other, the real victory re- mained with the Nonconformists. Partly through their own skill and activity, and still more through the supine- ness and indifference of Churchmen, a compromise was generally adopted by which the authorised religious teach- ing in the great majority of Board-schools became not, indeed, specifically Nonconformist, but such as nearly every Nonconformist was content to accept as sufficient. If Churchmen had had their wits about them, and had cared enough about their own distinctive religion to insist upon its being taught in the schools of every School Board in which they held a majority of seats, such compromises as that of which we heard. so much last November would have been unknown, except in districts in which Nonconformists outnumbered Churchmen. Wherever the proportions were reversed, Churchmen would have elected the School Boards, have appointed the teachers, and have provided for the teaching of the distinctive doctrines of the Church. The only dis- ability imposed on them would have related. to the parti- cular words in which these doctrines were expressed. The substance of the Church Catechism would have been taught in these Board-schools, but it would not have been taught in the words of the Church Catechism. Lord Salisbury does not advise Churchmen to try this experiment now, and certainly we do not. The time for venturing upon it has passed away. The opposite meaning has been so universally imposed upon the Cowper- Temple Clause, that the attempt to give it the meaning which it was originally made capable of bearing would now be held to savour of hair-splitting. Lord Salisbury's advice is to get the law made better, by which he probably means the repeal of the Cowper-Temple Clause. With this out of the way, two improvements would be possible. The mere repeal of the clause would enable each School Board to give such distinctive teaching as it thought fit in its own schools, and, if it chose, to give Church teaching in some of them, Nonconformist teaching in others, and Roman Catholic teaching in others. Or it might be found better to work Board-schools on the creed-register plan, and to give the children religious instruction in their several creeds by teachers of their own denomination. Neither of these plans would completely remove the need for voluntary schools, nor would it be desirable wholly to remove it. They have special advantages, and within moderate limits the rivalry between them and Board- schools is good for both. But with these plans in operation the need for voluntary schools would be less urgent, and might, consequently, be met in a more thorough and satisfactory way.
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