THE NEW EDUCATION BILL IN BELGIUM.
THE Belgian Ministers would probably have preferred to leave the Education Law of their predecessors untouched. They represent the moderate section of the Catholic Party, and they are, no doubt, quite alive to the danger of provoking reprisals whenever the Liberals are again in office. In this case, however, they had really no choice. The educational policy of the late Government was one of the main reasons why they had become unpopular, and to allow it to remain in force would have been to ask the Catholic electors to forego that fruit of their victory on which they set most value. The Education Law of 1879 was above all things a law of central- isation. It took education out of the hands of the Communes, partly by imposing on them the obligation of maintaining a Secular school, even though there might not be a single parent willing to send his child to it, and partly by investing the State with the appointment and dismissal of the teachers. State schools were compulsorily set up in every parish, and ample security was taken that the teaching given in all of them should in all respects conform to the views favoured by the Govern- ment. Thus Catholic ratepayers found themselves under a double disability. If they declined to send their children to the State school, they were equally obliged to pay for it ; and if, in default of any other, they did send their children there, they had no voice in the education given in it. It may be thought that in these respects they were no worse off than many English ratepayers. Here, just as much as in Belgium, the complaint is made that the subscribers to Voluntary schools have to pay twice over—once for the Voluntary school, which they like, and once for the Board school, which they do not like. There is a material difference, however, between the two cases. In England, School Boards are not forced upon a parish which has otherwise provided for the education of its children. There may be technical differences as to what con- stitutes such provision or as to the time by which it must be forthcoming, but as a ;tile a Board school is not set down next door to a Voluntary school which contains ample accommodation for all the children of school age in the parish. The choice of the teachers, again, and—within certain limits—the deter- mination of the teaching, is absolutely left to the School Board, which is tantamount to saying that it is absolutely left to the ratepayers. The Belgian Law of 1879, on the other hand, embodied the ideal system of the Secularists. It placed elementary education under the feet of a party which was pledged to discourage religious teaching by every means in its power. The Bill which has just passed the Belgian Chamber of Deputies does not simply repeal the Law of 1879 and re- enact the Law of 1842. Under the latter, the Catholic religion was necessarily taught in every Communal school, except where the school was attached to some other Confession. The new law allows each Commune to use its discretion on this point. It may teach any religion it chooses, or it may teach none. If it teaches a religion, it must do so under the protection of a conscience clause, provided that the parents who wish to withdraw their children from the religious lesson are less than twenty. Where they amount to twenty, they may then demand that one or more special classes be organised for their children. Thus the Secularist conscience is doubly protected—by the con- science clause when the Secularists are few, by the obligation laid on the Commune to give them separate classes when they are many. These two provisions will equally apply to the more rare cases in which a Commune contains a minority of Pro- testants. The Catholic conscience has the same protection accorded to it in a somewhat different way. Where the Catholic parents are twenty in number, they can; if a Com- mune refuses to allow the Catholic religion to be taught in its school, set up a Voluntary school for themselves, and call upon the Government to subsidise it. No Commune will be bound to establish a school of its own, unless twenty fathers insist on its creation. If they do not insist on it, the Commune may provide for the children by subsidising a Voluntary school. In this way, all that the Secularist Party can reasonably claim is amply secured to them. Wherever there is even a small minority of them in a Commune, they can insist on a Com- munal school being set up for their exclusive use ; and if in this Communal school religious instruction is given, they can insist on special classes being organised for their children. The only change is that when all the inhabitants of a Com- mune are Catholics, as is constantly the case in rural Belgium, and all wish to send their children to the Catholic school, the Commune will no longer be forced to maintain a Secular school which no one desires to use. No Volun- tary school can be subsidised, unless it consents to admit State inspection, to take the children of indigent parents without payment, and to give the minimum of instruction prescribed by the law. This minimum includes, besides the three R's, the elements of French, Flemish, or German, accord- ing to the language spoken in the district, geography, and Belgian history, together with, for boys, gymnastics, and, for girls, needlework.
The teachers will be appointed by the Communal Council, but a teacher cannot be dismissed, except with the consent of the authorities of the Province, both the Council and the teacher having a right of appeal from these authorities to the King. The teachers must have the diploma of a training college, or be certificated by an Examining Board nominated by the Government. It would have been wiser, we think, if there bad been no exception to this rule. Permission is given, however, to any Commune to appoint, with the consent of the Government, an uncertificated teacher. No doubt cases occasionally arise in which this exemption is convenient alike for the Commune and for the children. A teacher may be able to point to a long career of practical success, and yet be too old to be willing to offer himself for examination, especially if, as will be almost certainly the case, he is a member of a religious congregation. And if the permission is sparingly given, and only after careful inquiry into his ante- cedents, it may in practice work well. But it is plainly capable of abuse, because the Government might conceivably give the necessary provision without any inquiry at all, and so flood the country schools with cheap teachers of an inferior quality. There is not much probability that this will happen, inasmuch as the Minister of Education will be far too much alive to the criticism which appointments of this kind would inevitably provoke. But the mere existence of such a permission has furnished the enemies of the Bill with a colourable ground on which to rest their opposition to it. A second flaw in the Bill is the omission of any provisions for enforcing school attendance. It is argued that if there is an ample provision of schools, and if no fees are demanded from indigent parents, compulsion will not be necessary. But unless the Belgian laws against the employment of children are much stricter than we imagine them to be, the temptation to send a child to work instead of to school, will often be irresistible. It cannot be prudent in the Belgian Catholics to be, even in appearance, less anxious than their Liberal opponents that every child should receive the rudiments of education. The more unpopular compulsion is with parents, the more im- portant it is in the interest of the children that it should be steadily applied. With these two exceptions, the Bill is a thoroughly fair and Liberal measure. We should be glad if there were any chance that the necessary omissions and additions will be supplied by the Senate.
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