FRASER'S

MAGAZINE.

I'

is a serious drawback to the benefits of a free press and a free platform that they expose us to the risk of incomplete induction and precipitate inference. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is not the one condition of a satisfactory discussion of large and complicated questions. The journalist, the platform speaker, deals with some fact which has for the moment arrested general attention, responds to some cry which the baby public is for the moment raising. Or, to change the figure, he has his eye on but one part of the field, and is apt to think, like Frederick at Môlwitz, that the battle is lost when the squadron in which he rides is driven from the fray, or, like Rupert at Naseby, that the victory is won when his own wing his own pet scheme or vehement crotchet-carries all before it. The subject of primary education is large in its extent and complicated in its relations. We have had articles and speeches upon it without number; articles of force, speeches of brilliancy. But it may be of use to those who care less about vivid momentary impressions and thecharm of sensational rhetoric than about comprehensive views and guarded conclusions, to have the matter discussed, however imperfectly, yet as a whole.

Let us at the outset dismiss the idea that little or no progress has

VOL. LXXX.-NO. CCCCLXXVI.

Our fathers and

been made in the matter of national education. Were this idea well grounded, the case might be pronounced desperate. Since the close of the French war or earlier, we have been wrangling, proposing, devising in connection with the education of the people, and if nothing of importance has been accomplished, we may be excused for sitting down, folding our hands, and giving up the enterprise. The truth is that a beginning, and more than a beginning, has been made; and in this instance the difficulty proverbially attendant upon beginnings was unusually great. grandfathers were the victims of illusions on this subject which have become to us almost incomprehensible; illusions of fantastic hope; illusions of shadowy panic and reasonless alarm. What a singular hallucination, for example, was that which took possession of grown men with reference to infant schools! It captivated even the rugged Brougham. If infant schools,' said Brougham, 'were planted for the training of all children between three and seven years of age, so as to impress them with innocent and virtuous habits, their second natures, thus superinduced, would make it as impossible to pervert them, as it is to make men and women of the upper classes rush into the highways each time they feel the want of money.' Did

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ever fabulist or flutist, entrancing Arcadian shepherdesses with sylvan pipe, discourse purer nonsense than this? And what was the kind of education warranted to make man perfect at the age of seven? In a little treatise entitled 'Infant Cultivation, with illustrative facts and anecdotes, by J. R. Brown, master of Spitalfields Infant School,' published in London in 1826, we meet with an illustrative fact which enables us to return an answer to the question. The amount and quality of the knowledge acquired by the infants respecting the creation of the world astonished and delighted Mr. Brown. The following sensible and comprehensive answers,' he writes, have been elicited from the children in reference to this point. Q. Why did not Almighty God make man before He made the earth?-A. Because there would have been no place for him to walk on. Q. Why did He not make man before He made the vegetables?A. Because there would have been nothing for him to eat. Q. But why did He make the air before He made man?-A. Oh, sir, he could not breathe or live without air.' Such was the instruction which, in the opinion of Henry Brougham, was to 'superinduce' a second nature upon children, converting them not only into angels, but into angels incapable of falling from their high estate. It is a real advantage to have cleared the atmosphere of bewildering, semi-translucent fog, through which every outline of the coast, along which we have to conduct a perilous voyage, must have shown falsely. The penalty of extravagant hope is the pang of disappointment and the collapse of energy, and on the sterile rock or the shelving iceberg, the voyager suffers more bitterly from having fancied that, through the wavering haze, he beheld the blush of flowers or the expanse of a land-locked harbour.

....

We have done something also,we have in fact done a good deal,to lay the phantoms of superstitious terror which, for so long, were lions in the way of educational progress. The extent of our gains may be measured indifferently well by listening to some words of Brougham's on the religious difficulty, as it presented itself to educational reformers some forty years ago. 'As things now stand,' he said, 'the two great parties . . . are resolved that we should have no system of education at all, . . . . and this interdict, under which both parties join in laying their country, is by each pronounced to be necessary for the sacred interests of religion. Of religion! Oh, gracious God! was ever the name of thy holy ordinances so impiously profaned before? thy best gift to man, his reason, so bewildered by blind bigotry, or savage intolerance, or wild fanaticism -bewildered so as to curse the very light that Thou hast caused to shine before his steps-bewildered so as not to perceive that any and every religion must flourish best in the tutored mind, and that, by whomsoever instructed in secular things, thy word can better be sown in a soil prepared than in one abandoned through neglect to the execrable influence of the evil spirit?' There may still lurk in dark corners a bigotry which wants piercing by these keen shafts; but it is no longer true that the religious difficulty brings the educational movement to a dead halt.

Was ever before

In the way of machinery erected for the primary education of the people, there is much to which we can point. Instruction has been brought nearer the doors of all than it was in the early part of the century. The 'common dayschool,' familiar to the last generation, has as good as vanished. 'We know,' said Macaulay, in the House of Commons, 'what such a school

too often is; a room crusted with filth, without light, without air, with a heap of fuel in one corner and a brood of chickens in another; the only machinery of instruction a dog-eared spelling-book and a broken slate; the masters, the refuse of all other callings; discarded footmen, ruined pedlars, men who cannot work a sum in the rule of three; men who cannot write a common letter without blunders; men who do not know whether the earth is a sphere or a cube; men who do not know whether Jerusalem is in Asia or America. And to such men-men to whom none of us would entrust the key of his cellar we have entrusted the mind of the rising generation, and, with the mind of the rising generation, the freedom, the happiness, the glory of our country.' This state of things is behind us. The National School fronts us in most parishes-a comely and commodious edifice, well appointed in all respects. The teachers of the higher certificated grades have an honourable place in their profession, and the worst are men whom it would be unjust to compare with the kind of pedagogue described by Macaulay. An immense machinery for the education of the people has been provided; few if any Englishmen, not sunk in pauperism, who honestly desire that their children should go to school, will find the object of their ambition beyond their reach. The children of the present generation are growing up with more of education than was obtainable by the children of the generation now in grey hairs. In all this there is cause for congratulation. The struggle to attain the present point has been severe, but it has not been futile; and, making allowance for the slowness with which important social changes are commonly effected, we may derive encouragement from a glance at the past of educational reform.

And yet it is surely no more than

the truth to declare that a widespread misgiving exists as to the solidity and permanent value of the result achieved in the way of actually benefiting and bettering the people by our great outlay in primary education. A robust and unconquerable instinct of practicality in the breasts of plain Englishmen insists that it is not merely to delight the souls of examiners by turning out a certain number of children capable of reading fluently, writing neatly, and ciphering correctly, that the nation ought to lay out its money in educating the people. These children are, no doubt, very pretty pieces of pedagogic workmanship

-as ingenious in their way as talking bull-finches; but it is not to produce entertaining children-it is to produce superior men and women, that the nation wants; and thoughtful and practical observers shake their heads gravely when you ask them whether the new system, in so far as it has been tested in the youths and maidens who have shared its blessings, is producing a better class of peasants and mechanics than England previously possessed. It is undeniable, for one thing, that children taught to read and write in childhood are frequently found, at the close of the first or second decade in their life of toil, to have had the thin gilding of instruction rubbed off, and to be indistinguishable from their brother boors. It is distressingly dubious also, whether ability to read, however well preserved, is always of value to society. When the Newgate Ordinary tells you that not in one case or in two, but in all cases without exception, in which juvenile criminals are convicted for daring and violent offences, their reading, by giving them access to the sensational garbage of the book-stall, has been an instrument of their ruin, you are forced to admit that, if the problem of national education means, exclusively, the reduc

tion to a minimum of the number of persons in the country who can neither read nor write, its solution may not be worth much of the nation's money. Nor is it only when their skill in reading introduces the aspiring boys of England to Jack Sheppard and the Female Pirate, that it is thought, by shrewd observers, to have a questionable effect. A clever boy acquires in school a liking for study, a distaste for labour; work is thrown for him into the background, and books, books, books, appear of supreme importance. But no opening to an intellectual career presents itself; a labourer or a mechanic he must be; and he is apt to be a bad one. There are things which, unless they are well done, had better not be meddled with. A hen of too volatile disposition, which sits upon her eggs for ten days and then deserts them, does not leave the eggs as she found them. They are addle -good neither for the production of chickens nor for anything else. The cackle of this hen is not unfairly emblematic of the loquacious wisdom of those educational reformers, who, having spoiled a boy's working faculties-his capacity to toil, to suffer, to obey-rejoice over him because they have given him capacities of which he knows not how to make use. Once more, the scepticism and unrest on the subject of national education, which vex the public mind, take shape in the inquiry, whether any perceptible improvement is being wrought in the social habits, whether any perceptible increase is discernible in the domestic and civic virtues, of the population. The slightest glimpse of performance or of promise in this department deserves to be thankfully welcomed, and we are glad to see that the Commission on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture have obtained the testimony of one John Townsend, evidently a sensible and

observant man, to the effect that 'not half the young men get drunk now that used to do when he was young.' Mr. Townsend belongs to Ingoldisthorpe, Norfolk, and speaks of his own district. We have no warrant to apply his statement to the agricultural districts generally, and evidence glares upon us that, if the tastes and habits of the people are to be modified by education, the process has as yet hardly begun. The public-house is still our chief national institution, outnumbering churches, chapels and schools all put together, keeping the poor eternally poor, gathering those little hoards of industry, which might build dwellings and brighten them into homes, into ulcerous wens of vulgar opulence, proclaiming at every street corner and in every country road that animalism still crushes down the spiritual principle and the intellectual life in the English multitude. Enough; the general feeling that national education has not accomplished all that was expected of it has been sufficiently accounted for. The vague dissatisfaction which prevails manifests itself in an impatient cry for compulsory education.

A word of caution, however, may be interposed against expecting too much from the school. There is a disposition abroad to lay everything on the shoulder of the national schoolmaster. One philanthropist exclaims-or rather a chorus of philanthropists exclaim-that, if our national system of education is to be perfected, we must above all things teach the children trades. Others take for their text the indisputable fact that education, in the full sense of the term, embraces the heart as well as the head, and, sweeping the machinery of hornbooks and revised codes aside, demand that the children of England shall be taught justice, mercy, and compassion. What trust, in the third

place, ask many clergymen and not a few laymen, can be placed in a population which is cultivated but not religious? What is the use of knowledge if it is not spiritual knowledge? What benefit can be derived from national schools if they do not awaken the children to a sense of their duties, and an appreciation of their interests, as immortal beings? And so these theorists proceed, sweeping higher and higher in their gyrations, until the scarred face of the old Earth is lost sight of altogether. We must fly nearer the ground if we are to see clearly and work effectually in this matter. The Spanish proverb says that a thing may be so good as to be good for nothing, and if we continue to require everything from the national school, the perfection at which we arrive will be of this flimsy kind. Not because those other things upon which the philanthropists insist are unimportant, but because they are superlatively important, do we lay emphasis upon the assertion that they must be otherwise provided for. We are to take a lesson from nature and modestly apply in the educational province her principles of specialisation of function and division of labour. Through all her cycles of creative progress she advances not merely by combination of effects but by discrimination of organs. Confusion of functions means invariably imperfection of operation, the ostrich can neither fly like an eagle nor run like a greyhound.

The school is not the place in which a child is to learn the vocation by which he must live. We are anxious to speak distinctly on this point because it is one of capital importance and because much error prevails regarding it. The trade or handicraft can be acquired only in the workshop; and the education of the workshop is of more vital and pressing concern than the education of the school.

Our fathers knew this well. The parish authorities in the olden time saw to it that no child was growing up without learning to do something for doing which society would give it bread; and if that rule were once more made universal and stringent in England, we should have done more to check pauperism, to facilitate emigration, and, on the whole, to brace the national framework, than there is the slightest chance of our achieving by any other method. The education of apprenticeship is, for the body of the population, beyond comparison the most important education of all. It is a matter which must on no account be trifled with. Apprenticeship is for the man who intends to live by hand labour the time of crucial probation. The question of social life or social death, not figuratively but literally, is then before him. Of this he ought to be vividly conscious. And no schoolmaster-only a master craftsmancan teach him his craft. Every trade, every mechanical vocation, has its secrets of method, its subtle specialities of skill; no schoolmaster in the world can teach these: no school, even although a purely industrial school, if it supersedes apprenticeship,-if it stands in any other than a merely ancillary relation to apprenticeship,-will turn out accomplished workmen. We dismiss, therefore, peremptorily and absolutely, the notion that children are to be taught in the national school the trade, craft or profession by which they are to gain a maintenance.

Nor, in the second place, is the school primarily or distinctively the sphere of the affections. Heart culture-that delicate and mysterious operation,-belongs to a finer species of husbandry than the village pedagogue's. Nature has not forgotten it; though, as is the way with nature, 'of many seeds, she often brings but one to bear.' The home is the school of the heart. Within that sacred circle,