IS ENGLAND IN EARNEST ABOUT EDUCATION ?
THE " scene " at the Birmingham School Board, to which we referred very briefly last week,—the cross-examina- tion of candidates on the subject of their intended religious teaching,—is one of those incidents that strike the imagina- tion very painfully, not so much on account of any particular danger to religious teaching which it indicates, as on account of the suspicion it suggests that the country is losing earnest- ness altogether about Education, and allowing itself to be drawn aside into paltry side-issues and party squabbles, which, if they are to be multiplied and prolonged, must be fatal to the cause not merely of religious, but of national education itself. There is a kind of controversial heat which indicates true earnestness, and a kind which indicates self- opinionated levity, and we cannot help thinking, after a care- ful review of the scene in Birmingham, that the heat there displayed was of the latter and lower kind,—the kind which indicates degenerated national purpose and the exaltation of personal jealousies. We apply this, of course, even more to the questions put by the friends of religions teaching at the School Board than to those put by the friends of the Secular system, though the strategy of the latter appears to have been a deliberately planned party trap, and so far more blame- able. Mr. Chamberlain, the representative of the Secularists, has declared in a letter to the Daily News, "that the object of the examination to which the candidates for the position of teacher were subjected at the Birmingham School Board on Wednesday, was not to embarrass the persons catechised, who were all extremely well qualified to act as secular instructors, but to show the inconsistency or insincerity of the professed intention of the Church party to secure undenominational reli- gions teaching at the expense of the ratepayers." We can only say that if Mr. Chamberlain's colleagues assent to his explana- tion of the purpose of this scene, the Secularist party seem to us to have culpably forgotten the main cause of education in their eagerness for a party triumph, just as the questions put by the friends of religion at the School Board prove them to have forgotten it when they weakly fell into the snare. The proper course of the opponents of religious teaching in State schools was clearly, first, to advocate their cause at the School Board, and if outnumbered, to impress the absolute necessity of a reticent and devotional, rather than controversial, treat- ment of all such doctrinal passages in the Bible as the teacher might think it necessary to read to the children at all,—and next, to collect from the schools themselves all the instances of practical grievances which they might be able to discover. But they know perfectly well,—and it was their knowledge of this fact which made them eager for the cross-examination,—that in badgering a teacher as to how he would explain doctrinal passages which it does not necessarily follow that he need ever explain, in their doctrinal sense, at all, they were ' exaggerating a thousandfold the practical difficulties of the situation, raising cavils, of which the candidates themselves had never thought, in their minds, and subjecting both the Board and the masters to a false ridicule, which it would have been every bit as easy to throw over the mode of teaching half-a-dozen other subjects as it is to throw it over the mode of teaching religion. If the thirteen men had cross-examined the candidates on the nature ' of a lie, or the duty of obedience to parents, or the claims of patriotism, or the account to be given of Cromwell, or of the revolt of the American Colonies, or of the merits of the great Elizabethan authors, we venture to assert that they would have made both themselves and their victims equally ridiculous, and yet, just because they would not dare to exclude all these subjects from the Schoolmaster's domain, they would probably have thought it a very unwise, undignified, and mischievous task to show up "the insincerity or inconsistency " of the Church or any other sect in relation to such matters. They ventured to exhibit in an absurdly exaggerated form a mere sample of the difficulties of education solely for this reason,—that on the topic chosen the paradoxes elicited told against the religious party and in their own favour. They forgot that it told against national education altogether, and has contributed not a little to disgust the country with a cause in which men appear to be such bitter antagonists and so incapable of a common purpose. The simple truth is, as every parent knows, that on almost all subjects education is a most difficult and tentative process, in which children's faculties are cultivated far less by any pouring in of specific information, than by that discipline of questioning and self-questioning whereby the judgment, and the conscience, and the reasoning powers are developed. If you are only to touch what is certain, —what is not matter of difficult judgment and nice appreciation, —you won't educate at all, you will only inform. And the true answer of any reasonable schoolmaster to such questions as the Board put, would have been that it was not his duty to give the children doctrinal information, but to make them so feel the power of the divine character as it is revealed in the Bible, that they should take the deepest interest in trying to explore the field of revelation for themselves.
But as we have said, if the Secularist party acted badly and with a certain cynicism in laying this trap for the reli- gious party, the religions party acted worse in falling into it. Did the Roman Catholics and Churchmen seriously think that they should gain anything for their own creed by posing a few nervous schoolmasters with difficult party texts ? Did they hope to make converts on the spot ? If not, what demon pos- sessed them to make their approval or disapproval of particular teachers seem dependent on those teachers' absolute sectarian agreement with themselves ? If that is to be so, we may say at once good-bye to religious teaching in national schools, just as if the same policy were adopted in relation either to history, or morals, or political economy, we should have to say good-bye to historical, moral, and economical teaching in those schools, and before long good-bye to all common teaching whatever. If the Bible cannot be taught to children without an explosion of the controversial temper, it will never be a part of the national discipline at all ; and if a schoolmaster cannot be chosen without an explosion of the controversial temper, we shall never have respectable national schoolmasters at all. National Education is a great work which can only be achieved by the sacrifice of personal feelings on all sides,—not on religious subjects only, but on all. But on religious subjects that suppression of personal feeling should be the easiest, instead of the most difficult. There at least, if there be real earnestness, there will be something like a deep, overmastering passion that would throw petty personal
prepossessions into the shade. If it be not so, then it is not religion at all we are contending for, it is a mere opinionated proselytizing. • And this is just what the friends of religious teaching in the Birmingham School Board have given the English public good reason for fearing that they were battling for. They have made a great and terrible mistake,—a mistake of the heart as well as of the head, and it will be well if they do not find it an irretrievable mistake.
It seems to us more than a bad sign, a sign of diminish- ing earnestness,—this intensification of the bitterness of sectarian difference between the opposite factions on the Education question. Not so long ago, as we have seen by a correspondence hardly completed in our own columns, the leading members of the Birmingham League were not merely willing,—indeed they still are,—to pay out of their own pockets the denominational school fees of the poorest class of children, but were eager to have the principle of Denison's Act, which permits the application of rates for the payment of such fees, compulsorily enforced,—i.e., to have the very grievance enforced of which they now so bitterly complain,—rather than endanger education. Mr. Chamberlain justified this course last week on the wise and dignified plea that the members of the League are " Englishmen first and Nonconformists after- wards." Very well, then that admits completely that if national education can only be attained by concession, it should be attained by concession rather than not at all. Now it appears that he thinks there is so little further need of concession, that it is desirable and dignified to bring the whole principle of national education into ridicule, and implicate a leading School Board in fierce sectarian controversy, rather than even try fairly the possibility of undenominational religious teaching. Surely there is no less need of concession now than there was then. Of course it is conceivable that the League, by turn- ing out Mr. Forster or the Ministry, may render the present
experiment untenable. But will that bring us any nearer to a national system than we were in 1868, when it was proposed to make the principle of Denison's Act compulsory instead of permissive I Will it make those who think the attempt to place Christ and his Gospel vividly before the mind and imagination of children as belong- ing to the very essence of education more willing to give up that hope, and fall back on Sunday schools and voluntary associations for the carrying-out of that great task ? We cannot see how the cause of national education is ever to suc- ceed in this country without large and willing concessions on both sides. The religious party must concede, and concede earnestly, the necessity of avoiding as far as possible all doc- trinal definition on disputed points,—all attempt to analyse minutely religious influences into their dogmatic elements. The Secularist party must concede generously the trial at least of this latter enterprise, and endeavour to co- operate in their own way, instead of laying traps for the enemy. If the nation ever falls into the squabbling and controversial humour, the hope of a great national move- ment, of a great moral endeavour for a great end, is over. And it is this of which we are now seriously afraid. The Leaguers may fight if they please on behalf of those who think it wrong to pay a halfpenny which may go to the support of any creed not their own. They may, if they please, demand that a minute fraction of the Edu- cation rate should be made voluntary, as the Church-rate has been made voluntary,—and that only this fraction shall go to the support of poor children in denominational schools. But leaders who have themselves freely contributed to the fees of poor children at such schools, and who have recently demanded that Denison's Act shall be made compulsory, cannot, we conceive, in reason or conscience declare that they them- selves object on moral grounds to pay any rate for such pur- poses, and here there is a plain ground of concession for them. On the other hand, the religious sects cannot maintain that all their specific doctrines shall be taught, or they would annihilate each other, and their plain duty, therefore, is to advocate such liberal and large teaching on points approaching dogma, that there will be the minimum of friction and resistance from each other and from the Secularists. But without common concession, and large common concession, no great work can be done. Levity, petty jealousies and animosities such as were shown at Birmingham are ominous of deteriorating zeal and -declining faith in the greatest social cause of our own day.
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