The Press. — London, England, 1858-05-08 00:00:00

fittraturt. i•ansacti ma of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. 1857. Inaugural Addresses and Select Papers. London : J. W. Parker and Son. IT has been remarked that there is nothing in which authors so often trip as in the titles of their books. Apparently it is easier to talk "about a subject and about it" through three hundred pages than to denominate it correctly in three words. The contemplative man, to whom the title of this book opens a prospect of contri butions to the Social Science, strictly speaking— that is, to the discovery of the principles upon which society is based—will be disappointed by its contents ; and the practical man, to whom the name of science is distasteful, will be reassured when he finds that it contains scarcely any scientific discussion, and is mainly occupied with the exposure of actual social abuses and the sug gestion of actual remedial measures. To reassure the practical reader still further, we may observe that not only have the contributors to this volume no scientific end in view, but that the style of most of them suggests a comparison with the most unscientific thing in the world, which we take to be a debate in Parliament. here and there a Mr. George Combe and a Mr. Robert Carter indulge in a few theoretical speculations, but these are exceptional cases, and are in fact irrelevant digressions, for the very reason that they endeavour to be contributions to the Social Science. We ourselves have not been more displeased than the practical reader will be at discovering this misnomer. A real treatise on the Social Science might or might not be a good thing, ac cording to the philosophical ability displayed in it ; but a company of Englishmen and men of business dealing with hard facts and planning practical reforms are pretty sure to deserve atten tion. Our countrymen thus occupied are in their glory. Then their inborn respect for the fact shows itself; then no idle novelties seduce them ; they deliver no imposing but questionable oracles; then they are modest without affectation ; they waste no words, but say just what they mean with a bluntness and slovenliness delightful to contemplate. Caput artis decere. Neatness is better than slovenliness, and so is a new coat better than a rusty one, yet we choose the rusty one to work in. The matters which it most becomes a man to understand are not the easiest to get information about. Social abuses in the time of the Stuarts may be studied in a hundred books accessible to every one : social abuses in the reign of Queen Victoria men commonly remark only so far as they suffer from them ; and even those who seek for information cannot readily procure it. The highest commendation is therefore due to those who undertake year by year to explain to us in a series of short, readable papers what is rotten in our State, what wants mending, what has been, is being, is going to be, and ought to be, done to mend it. The papers in the present volume are reduced under five heads,—(l) Jurisprudence and Amend ment of the Law, (2) Education, (3) Punish ment and Reformation, (4) Public Health, (5) Social Economy. We shall confine our remarks on the present occasion to the papers on the sub ject of Education. There have been three great educational movements in this country. The first commenced shortly before the Reformation, and began to decline at the end of Queen Eliza beth's reign. To this we owe the free grammar schools. The second, commencing near the end of the seventeenth century, produced the charity schools. The third, belonging mainly to this century, has produced a variety of new educa tional institutions, and is perhaps destined to produce something far more important,—a national system. The Rev. John Day Collis discusses the free grammar-schools in a par which seems to us superficial and unsatisfac tory. " Taking these schools as a whole," he says, " the average amount of educational " training which they have imparted to the " youth of England has been incalculably great " and invaluable." It may be worth while to oppose to this panegyric the sentence of the pre sent Head Master of Rugby:—" More than 700 THE PRESS, MAY 8, 1858. "of these schools are now in existence. What is " the use of them ? It would not be too much to " say, that at least three-fourths of the number " are useless. It is not easy to draw the line " above which efficiency may be said to begin ; " but it is assuredly under the mark to assume " that if 500 were abolished to-morrow, not the " slightest ill-effect would be produced on the " education of the country." The fact is, Mr. Day was not really " taking these schools as a whole," but taking a few illustrious exceptions, such as Eton and Winchester, as specimens of the whole class. Ile is equally unfortunate when he undertakes to e;:ploin why grammar-schools gradually ceased to be founded after the Restora tion. The reasons he gives are—(l) that " the " enormous number of previously existing schools " rendered fresh foundations less absolutely ne " cessary ;" (2) that " the absorption of men's " minds in ever-changing politics, and the apathy " and religious indifference of the eighteenth " century, kept the necessity of fresh educa " tional institutions in the background." These two reasons merely disguise the true explanation, which is, that the grammar-schools were felt to be a failure. It is quite true that they ceased to be founded, because there were already enough and too many ; but it is not true that they had in any considerable degree attained their object. Milton, at the very time when this slackening of zeal began to be perceived, declared that " the " nation was perishing for want of education." Bacon still earlier pronounced a censure upon the grammar-schools, of which that of Mr. Temple is but an echo. He went so far as to declare that as they had been sown in ostenta tion, they had fitly borne fruit in corruption and degeneracy ; and in the same paper, addressed to King James, he adds : Concerning the advancement of learning, I do subscribe to the opinion of one of the wisest and greatest men of your kingdom, that for grammar-schools there are already too many, and therefi re no providence to add where there is excess. For the great number of schools which are in your highness' realm doth cause a want, and cloth cause likewise an overflow—both of them inconvenient, and one of them dangerous. For by means thereof they find want in the country and towns both of servants for husbandry and apprentices for trade, and, on the other side, there being more scholars bred than the State can prefer and employ, and the active part of that life not bearing a proportion to the preparative, it must needs fall out that many persons will be bred unfit for other vocations, and unprofitable for that in which they are brought up, which fills the realm full of indigent, idle, and wanton people, which are but materia return nrwarum. It is because he has overlooked this plain account of the matter that Mr. Day is driven to the strange shift of representing that, from the Re storation onward, men's minds became gradually absorbed with politics to the exclusion of social questions. The Restoration, on the contrary, was the beginning of a long era of domestic repose, which was only for a short time disturbed by the troubles of the reign of James 11. It gave an admirable opportunity for continuing works of peaceful improvement, such as Mr. Day supposes the foundation of grammar-schools to have been ; and nothing can account for the cessation of such undertakings, except the fact that they were not so favourably regarded by the men of that time. That an unfavourable opinion of them did really exist is proved by a tract pub lished in 1678 by Christopher Wase, in which he struggles to evade Bacon's objections to the free schools in a manner which shows that those objections were at that time very generally acknowledged to be just. Ii how ever, the disturbances of 1688 furnish Mr. Day with an excuse for considering the whole period between the Restoration and the end of the seventeenth century as one of absorbing political disquiet, there can be no excuse for regarding the first half of the eighteenth century as such a period. Accordingly, Mr. Day takes refuge in the apathy and religious indifference of that age, which he supposes to have thrown the necessity "for fresh educational institutions into the back "ground." Now it so happens that the men of that apathetic age, though they did not found free schools, initiated an entirely new and very extensive educational movement, and founded a vast number of fresh educational establishments. In the year 1701 the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge was founded, and in the first few years of the same century the whole country was covered with charity-schools. It is not a mark of apathy and indifference in the subjects of William and Anne that, deserting precedent and considering only the wants of the country, they could produce a new institution which, whatever its faults, was at any rate a sin. cere endeavour to grapple with a rampant and growing evil. The reports of the fbundation of new charity-schools put forth in the reign of Queen Anne breathe a spirit of earnest, it rot very energetic piety. At the principal churches in London sermons were preached once a month or once in three weeks in behalf of the schools, and hymns were written in a soft, pleasing strain to be sung by the children. It was an age when religion and manners were slowly recovering from a disease which had threatened both with dissolution, under the assiduous nursing of a Church which had been reconciled to the nation, under the influential patronage of a decorous Court, under the guardianship of Addison. A retrogression did indeed follow this period of modest and steady improvement. The Queen died; the Court grew vicious and vulgar; litera ture, if it gained something in power, lost much in decorum, and bright names became rarities in the Church. The impulse which had called the charity-schools into existence grew weaker, and at last expired; but when a more vigo rous generation Succeeded to the task of edu cating the people, the good effects of that bold and honest experiment were visible generally in the deeper practical comprehension which men had attained of the national want, and particu larly in the entire abandonment of the system of free grammar-schools. We have delayed longer upon this period in the history of education in England because the contributors to the volume before us, being much more concerned with the present than the past, have passed it over in almost total silence. Charity-schools, like free grammar-schools, have in their time done good; if we would know what they are now, the critic quoted above will tell us. " A vast number of these schools," says he, " are now useless, and worse than useless, because " they offer clothing to the scholars, and thus " attract within their walls many who might " learn something elsewhere and will learn no " thing there." We have been speaking of things of the past, of first essays, of crude uncertain experiments, of which the relics may still be seen, like cast-off skins of the serpent. Education in England be longs properly to this century. Before the patient and,sustained energy with which for fifty years, not a few individuals, but the whole mass of the powerful classes, the whole multitude of religious sects, united in nothing but the eager desire to give education to the people, have ad dressed themselves to this problem, all the fitful and ineffectual exertions of previous ages are insignificant. Probably, there is no example in history of a national effort so mighty, so perse vering, so calm. The issue of it is yet doubtful; but if the sects will have a little more patience and be a little less sectarian—if the Committee of Privy Council will continue a little longer its wise and firm abstinence from spiritual tyranny on the one hand and resistance to spiritual tyranny on the other—if statesmen, finally, can manage to postpone their party engagements to an interest so momentous, a measure may before very long be carried which will deserve to be called the greatest achievement of the century, and which may, perhaps, bring in its train the reconciliation of the religious sects. At any rate the disgrace of England will be wiped away, her people will be educated, and, to recur to our former metaphor, the course of the serpent of wisdom will be no longer Prone on the ground as once, but on his rear Circular base of rising folds, that towered Fold above fold, a surging maze, his head Crested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes. The glaring defect of these papers on Education is, that they omit to consider, except in passing, the religious difficulty. As, compared with this, all other difficulties are insignificant, we cannot but be reminded of " the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet left out." The omission is particularly glaring in Professor I'illan's p a per on " the present aspects of the educational question, which, in fact, will convey no information what ever to any one to whom the subject is not entirely new, and which is, besides, carelessly written. It is strange that a man who has long taken an interest in this subject should be capa ble of such a blunder as the assertion that the Committee Of Council, instituted in 1839, was instituted about, thirty years ago. His contemptuous manner of • Q If 1 R a R 1 •, 1' • 1 Il 0 ic e Ir If II 5, IL h is 438