ENGLISH EDUCATION AND VOLUNTARY SCHOOLS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.']
SIR,—Schemes for placing voluntary schools, in which majority of English children are educated, on an equality, or nearly on an equality, with Board-schools in respect of the amount of public money paid for their maintenance, and also for giving a large measure of control over them, to local educational authorities, have recently been prepared by bodies of members of the Church of England in Man- chester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, and other towns. All these schemes the Archbishop of Canterbury has told us are "premature." Had Lord Lansdowne told us that proposals for reorganising and strengthening the Army are premature I do not think that he would have caused greater consterna• tion among students of military affairs than the Archbishop's statement has caused amongst those members of the Church of England who are students of educational matters. To those of us who know what schools and life are, both in the manufacturing and the agricultural districts, efforts to attain the objects sought by the framers of the schemes which the Archbishop has condemned mast seem to be, not "pre- mature," but most urgently needed. With your permission I will try to show that there is much to justify this view.
As I am acting as honorary secretary of the Diocesan Com- mittee which has charge of the Manchester scheme, I must mention that I express only my own opinions in this letter, and that the Committee is not responsible for anything that I say in it. The chief evil in English life with which we have to deal may be described either as the separation of classes, or as the growth of large unhealthy towns and the impoverishment and stationariness or partial depopulation of the rural districts. The growth of our towns in their existing condition threatens the destruction of all that is best in English life. Slum and semi-slum dwellings, foul air, the absence of open spaces and vegetation, the massing together of vast numbers of people of the poorest classes,—these things have for result the growth of a population poor in physique and equally un- satisfactory in mental and moral qualities ; ignorant of the life of Nature and of all the noble and more interesting kinds of human life; and therefore cut off from the higher stages of civilisation, and incapable of feeling attracted by any of the forms of recreation needed for the maintenance of physical, mental, and moral health ; a population, therefore, amongst which drunkenness, gambling, and licentiousness are necessarily common. For any one who knows that the physical decadence of a class must always be accompanied by its mental and moral deterioration, the condition of large areas in all our big towns will be sufficiently indicated by the statement of what has lately happened in Manchester. Last year about eleven thousand men offered to enlist, but eight thousand had to be rejected on account of physical defects, and of the three thousand who were accepted, only one thousand and seventy-two were sent into the Army, two thousand one hundred and seven going into the Militia. In the rural districts ignorance and the non-development of intelligence are great evils. A large proportion of the families who could afford to send their children to secondary schools fail to do so. I have known of a case in which a family earning at least 2250 a year took a child from the village school as soon as it could get a labour certificate and sent it to work in a mill ; and similar conduct is so common that the public opinion of the district did not blame the parents. And parents have too often the good excuse for not continuing the education of their children that the foundation given in the village school is too poor and scanty to prepare a child for a secondary school. Owing to the imperfect education of the majority of the members of the small farmer and country shopkeeper classes, they do not know of the ways in which their foreign competitors combine and do jointly what no one person can successfully do alone; and, as they are unable to understand accounts fully, and have the dread of being overreached by their neighbours which ignorant people generally feel, they would not adopt methods of combining if they knew of them. There can be no doubt that if the village school could be made— and there is abundant proof that it could be made— much more efficient in teaching the three " R's " and in developing intelligence and powers of observation and thought, and if inexpensive secondary schools, with a curri- culum in right relation with that of the elementary school, were provided for the children of the classes in question, a large proportion of our small farmers and shopkeepers would be able to reach a higher degree of success, and that their greater prosperity would greatly improve the position of agricultural labourers and other workpeople. The failure of comparatively well-to-do families to give their children the kind of education needed to equip them well for the intelli- gent carrying on of bread-winning work is a marked evil in towns also. Another of the prominent evils in the country is the quite unnecessary dulness of the life of the great majority of the inhabitants. It has been proved in the most convincing way that by the effective teaching of singing and of drawing, and by the effective giving of various kinds of " Nature- knowledge," country children can have powers and tastes developed which would enable the inhabitants of villages to brighten up the common life very greatly, and which would cause many of them to prefer life in the country to life in a large town. The giving of thoroughly good and varied physical training, the teaching of health-giving games, of military drill, of rifle shooting, which would lead most oountry boys to prefer the roominess of the country, is in most places a quite unused resource. It is quite inconceivable that these evils of town and country life can be removed, or much lessened, unless we obtain a very much more efficient educational system than we now have, and there is only one conceivable way in which our voluntary schools can be made a part of. a really efficient educational system. That one way is the one which has been taken by Switzerland and Germany : it is the placing of all elementary schools on an equality in respect of the amount of money paid to them from public sources for annual main- tenance, and the giving of a large measure of control over them all to a local public educational authority, which has also a large measure of control over the secondary and technical schools of its district,—an authority containing a considerable proportion of representatives of the teachers in elementary, secondary, and technical schools, and which has to consult bodies consisting exclusively of representatives of teachers before it decides on making any important change in the system of any grade of school. No one, I think, will doubt that this is the only way in which our Church schools, or any other kind of elementary school, voluntary or Board, can be made an efficient part of an efficient system, who remembers that the task we have to do, if we are to get a larger good result than we are now getting from our vast expenditure on elementary schools, includes the choice of the most useful sub- jects for the curriculum of the elementary school (this has never been seriously attempted in most schools, and the doing of it involves giving far more attention to physical training and far less to grammar); the bringing of the selected subjects into the most mutually helpful relations, and the bringing of the curricula of elementary, secondary, and technical schools into right relations with each other ; includes, that is, a large amount of very difficult work which cannot possibly be done except by the aid of well-trained educational experts. It is one of the chief objects of "the Manchester scheme " to give a large measure of control of voluntary schools to the local educational authorities, who will have to be called into exist- ence all over the country to control the new system of secondary schools, and thus to make it possible that these schools, as well as Board-schools, shall be placed in the best possible relations with secondary and with technical schools. The scheme proposes to leave the control of the religious instruction of the children of the school denomination in each voluntary school to managers representing the denomination, but to let all the rest of the work of the school, including, of course, the religious instruction of children not belonging to the school denomination, be controlled by the local educational authority. Unless the Archbishop of Canterbury believes that the community is not suffering from preventible ignor- ance, sin, and misery ; or while believing in the existence of those banes, does not believe that better education would be an antidote, I cannot understand how his Grace could apply the word "premature" to our Manchester scheme. If any one wishes to learn whether the scheme is well adapted to its purpose, I shall be glad to send a description of it on receiving an addressed newspaper-wrapper.—I am, Sir, &c., Swanscoe Park, near Macclesfield. T. C. HORSFALL.
Previous page
