NATIONAL EDUCATION.
THE impression produced in the House of Commons by Lord ASHLEY'S picture of the mental darkness of the manufacturing- districts, led many to entertain the hope that something would im- mediately be done to dispel it. That hope has all but vanished.
The sectarian spirit of the nation threatens for the present to frustrate the attempt of Government to smuggle through the Legis- lature a minimum measure of popular education. The educational clauses of the Factories Bill are assailed by the sectarianism of the Dissenters on the one hand, while on the other the sectarianism of the Church will prevent any available concessions by the Ministers. The demands of these hostile bodies with regard to religious in- struction are incompatible, and neither will give way or listen to
compromise. The Government measure is not of that broad and commanding nature to rally round it an unsectarian public opinion that might put down both parties. It hardly even deserves Ole name of a measure—it is an attempt to do one thing while pro- fessing to do another. It is not a thing upon which a Ministry could peril its existence, resolved to stand or fall by it. In all pro- bability, therefore, Ministers will bend and give way to the blasts and counter-blasts of sectarian jealousy and intolerance ; and the bill, or at least the educational clauses, will be withdrawn.
What will be the ultimate result of this failure ? It will have been demonstrated that the sects into which men are in this coun- try divided cannot agree upon any common plan of religious in- struction. The necessity of mental education will make itself more and more felt. Finding that men cannot agree upon a com- mon system of religious instruction, statesmen and philanthropists will be obliged to introduce a system of secular instruction by the State, leaving each church or sect to care for the religious educa- tion of its own members. The compromise—and all arrangements in such matters are compromises—will not consist of a mutual pledge to abstain from inculcating controverted dogmas, but of an agreement to leave religion altogether out of the categories of in- struction provided by the State.
To this conclusion, there is every reason to believe, the mat ter must come at last. Secular education is the concern of the Secu- lar State—religious of the Church, the Spiritual State. But the public mind is not ripe for this complete separation of the functions of these two coexisting authorities. The majority still retain that timorous apprehension of knowledge which leads men to refuse intellectual unless accompanied by religious instruction. No party in the Legislature, no Government, could carry a measure of purely secular instruction in this country at present. But if men were truly sincere in their professions of anxiety to have the people educated, some kind of educational measure—some arrangement by which conscientious differences were respected and at the same time the broad leading principles of religion sedulously inculcated —might have been got. But the sectarian spirit of the nation will not listen to this ; and so we must go without any national educa- tion until we be ripe for that which abstract theorists think the best !
The mischief this indefinite postponement of any measure of public education will occasion is incalculable. And it is done by men with their eyes open. The untaught masses in our manu- facturing districts are not like the untaught of rude ages. In the old time, every man had to work his way as he best could—turn his hand to many employments—exert his ingenuity in devising shifts to support himself. The bare struggle for existence was a practical education : his intelligence, his foresight, his habits of self-control, were all cultivated by it. In our manufacturing-dis- tricts, on the contrary, every child is taught to perform some one manipulation. What the child begins with the man continues. In the manufacturing-districts you may see adults and old persons who have gone through life without learning to do more than file a bolt—who have performed that single operation every day and all day long, until their bodies have hardened into the attitude they as- sume in working. In the factory framework, it is such living machines alone that are in request, Thinking, inventive, shifty men, are out of place, or in small request : the effective demand is for filers, and pin-head-makers, and hammerers. There is nothing to supply the place of education with men who are never called upon to think—who go through life performing one mani- pulation, receiving their wages, and spending them. If such men receive no education, their souls are never awakened ; they remain creatures of mere instinct—unmanageable and dangerous as beasts. The Reports of the Children's Employment Commissioners prove that this is the case. They prove that, for want of mental education, religious instruction falls in the factory districts upon minds too dull to apprehend it. There is something horribly ludicrous—appalling in its grotesqueness—in the unmeaning jabber of the poor creatures when attempting to repeat by rote the words of their teachers—confounding names sacred and profane, involun- tarily parodying the holiest mysteries. They are mere filing and eating and sleeping machines. They are " without God in the world"—without moral principle—without enjoyment, for many lack the energy to seek pleasure either virtuous or vicious. The withholding of education from these poor creatures is equivalent to forbidding the minds meant to inhabit their frames to be quickened into life—it is killing souls. And this the proud, wilful, uncom- promising sectarianism of the land is bent upon doing. The Churchman will not tolerate any secular education which does not give him an exclusive right of communicating religious instruction. The Dissenter will not tolerate secular instruction unless he is put upon a footing of perfect equality with the Church- man. So far as they are concerned, neither feels any pain from the prolongation of the struggle : it is prostrate humanity, to which education is denied till they can agree, that suffers on account of their obstinacy. It is a guilty struggle. The Churchman, who refuses men the benefit of secular education unless they first profess themselves his subjects—the Dissenter, who refuses to allow them to receive it until the deference he thinks due to his private opinions is first paid—both alike outrage the spirit of Christianity. They show want of faith as well as of charity, If they really believed what they profess, they would cherish mental instruction even though it were combined with the inculcation of dogmas which they questioned. They would say, Sr. Palm's intellect was cultivated in a Heathen
school—the
e intellects of Knox, Wicurrs, LUTHER, in Romish
i
schools : it is in vain that men seek to combine mental education
with implicit unreasoning belief. They would say, confident in the
truth of our opinions, we only ask to have the intellectual faculties of men developed, and we trust to the force of truth for the rest. Teach them what you please, provided you teach them at the same time to understand and think : the young athlete whom you train will soon burst any bonds of error you may twine around him. But they want this faith, and yet they will proselytize ; and therefore they say, let ignorance and vice and danger continue to fester throughout the land, rather than our sectarian authority be en- dangered.
Previous page
