Chapter XVII: Front Matter (17)

The diverse religious and social conditions of the three constituent parts of the United Kingdom must necessarily cause the education problem to assume a different shape and to receive different solutions in England, Scotland and Ireland respectively; latterly also the special conditions obtaining in Wales have received partial recognition at the hands both of the legislature and the executive. In Scotland the conditions have been less complex than in England. The practical unanimity of the people in religious faith, which has remained undisturbed by the institutional divisions of recent times, the wider diffusion of a sense of the value of education, the greater simplicity of life which has rendered all classes largely content to avail themselves of the preparatory education afforded by the common school and favoured the development in the secondary sphere of day rather than boarding schools, are among the causes which have contributed to the early building up of a national system which in some respects resembles the continental rather than the English type.

Historical development.

The national appreciation of education is found marked already before the Reformation in a statute of James IV. (1494) requiring all freeholders of substance to send their heirs to school and to keep them there until they had perfect Latin. The Reformation, asserting itself by common consent under one ecclesiastical form, and free from the divisions of religious organization which tended to neutralize it as an educational force in England, put fresh life into the educational aspirations of the people. As early as 1560 the Church Assembly, largely under the influence of John Knox, put forth the _Book of Discipline_, providing that "every several kirk" in a town "of any reputation" was to have its Latin school, that the "upaland" or country parts were to have a teacher of the "first rudiments" in every parish, and that each "notable" town was to have "a college for logic, rhetoric and the tongues." Practical effect was later given to this scheme by an act of the Scottish parliament in 1696, under which parish schools were set up in connexion with the Established Church of Scotland. This system was extended by an act of 1803, which made better provision for teachers' salaries and also confirmed the position of the parish school as an adjunct of the parish church. The system of inspection and state aid introduced in England in 1839 was made applicable to Scotland, thus grafting upon Scotland the English system of voluntary state-aided schools. At the same period another new factor was imported into Scottish education by the ecclesiastical disruption of 1843. As a result of these changes in 1861 a new act was passed which relaxed, though it did not sever, the ties which bound the parish school to the church.

Scottish school boards and school attendance law.

The Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 set up elective school boards for parishes and boroughs, and vested in them the existing parish and burgh schools. Long prior to the act it had been the practice of the Church of Scotland to allow exemption in the schools from religious instruction; consequently in imposing a compulsory conscience clause the act did little more than confirm existing usage. The school boards were left full liberty as to the religious instruction to be given in their schools, and in practice school boards universally adopt the Shorter Catechism, which is acceptable to all denominations of Presbyterians. The act made the school boards responsible for the supply of school accommodation, and introduced compulsory attendance, for which opinion in England was not at that time ripe. By the act of 1901, the age of compulsory attendance was raised to fourteen, with provision for exemption after twelve.

Administrative progress.

The experience of the Scottish Education Department, like that of the English, has led to the gradual abandonment of individual examination as the basis for the payment of grants. The institution of the merit certificate is one of the features in which the Scottish system differs from the English. Prior to the code of 1903 the merit certificate, awarded on examination after the age of twelve, was properly described as the leaving certificate of the elementary school. Under the more recent codes merit certificates are awarded under a system designed to encourage the transference of promising pupils at an early age to supplementary courses or higher-grade departments. Under this system the fitness of the pupil to enter upon a course of higher studies is determined not solely by the results of a single examination, but by the whole character of his work during the preceding school course.

Higher-grade schools.

A notable factor historically in Scottish education was the extent to which the parish schools supplied their best pupils with higher or further education. The administrative changes last mentioned have led to a remarkable development of organized higher-grade schools and departments. These departments have now been organized upon the lines of the higher primary schools of France, "to continue a stage further" (says the report of the Scottish Education Department) "the general education of that considerable body of pupils who, under new conditions, may be expected to remain at school till fifteen or sixteen." The function "of giving something of the nature of a specialized education to pupils who will leave school at a comparatively early age" is now discharged by the supplementary courses.

Free education.

Elementary education has generally been rendered free by the fee grants under the parliamentary vote, and by the sums accruing under the Local Taxation (Customs and Excise) Act 1890 and the Education and Local Taxation (Scotland) Act 1892.

Voluntary schools are not numerous, being chiefly those of the Roman Catholic Church. The average cost of maintenance per child in average attendance in public schools (according to the official report 1907-1908) was L3, 11s. 1-1/4d., of which L2, 4s. 4-1/2d. was met by government grants for elementary education. In voluntary schools the average cost of maintenance was L2, 15s. 1-3/4d., of which L2, 2s. 7d. was met by elementary grants, including a special aid grant of 3s. per head under the Education (Scotland) Act 1897.

The total number of children (1907-1908) in average attendance in grant-earning schools was 712,076, and the percentage of attendances to numbers on the register was 87.66%. As regards teaching power, 81.52% of the male teachers and 56.71% of the female teachers in the elementary teachers had been trained in training colleges.

Education (Scotland) Act 1908.

Certain miscellaneous additional powers are conferred upon school boards by the Education (Scotland) Act 1908, including powers to provide school meals; in outlying parts, to provide means of conveyance, or pay travelling expenses of teachers or pupils, or defray the cost of lodging pupils in convenient proximity to a school; to provide for medical inspection; and as to children neglected by reason of the ill-health or poverty of the parent, to supply food, clothing and personal attention.

Compulsory continuation classes.

Perhaps the most noteworthy provision in the act of 1908 is that which enables (not obliges) school boards to make bye-laws requiring attendance at continuation classes up to the age of seventeen years. Apart from compulsory attendance, the act lays upon school boards the duty of making suitable provision of continuation classes with reference to the crafts and industries practised in the district.

Secondary education.

The Scottish Education Act of 1872 distinguished certain burgh and parish schools as "higher class public" or secondary schools. The act of 1908 deals in some detail with secondary education, modifying and strengthening the framework in various ways, but without introducing organic changes. "Secondary" schools are distinguished from "intermediate," the former being defined as providing at least a five years' course; the latter as providing at least a three years' course in languages, mathematics, science and such other subjects as may from time to time be deemed suitable for the instruction of pupils who have reached a certain standard of attainment in elementary subjects under the code. Intermediate and secondary schools may be provided and maintained either by school boards or otherwise, and provision is contained in the act for the transfer of endowed schools to the school board. Thus secondary (as well as elementary and continuative) education is organized upon the basis of the parish or burgh; it receives, however, grants in aid through the agency of county (or large urban) authorities (called district committees) constituted under schemes of the Scottish Education Department. For the purpose of such grants in aid the funds available under the various local taxation acts, together with parliamentary grants, other than a fee grant at the rate of 12s. per child in average attendance, form a fund called the Education (Scotland) Fund. After provision has been made for (_inter alia_) grants for universities, higher technical education and training colleges, the fund is allocated to the district committees according to a scheme laid before parliament and approved by the king in council. Out of the "district education fund" the school board receives (ordinarily) a sum equal to one-half of the amount by which the net cost to the school board (after deducting income from grants made by the department and from fees) exceeds the amount which would be produced by such rate per pound upon the district of the school board as the committee may determine, not being more than a rate of twopence in the pound. Important powers are also conferred upon the district committee for organizing and aiding within their district the provision by the school boards of medical examination and supervision of school children, the supply of bursaries for purposes of all forms of higher education, and the provision of instruction in special subjects, such as agriculture, &c.

_Ireland._

Special difficulties of Irish education.

The full development of a system of public education in Ireland has been hampered and retarded by the general difficulties inherent in the problem of Irish government. In consequence of the fundamentally different social, religious and political conditions in the two countries, the English and Irish systems have developed down to the present time upon divergent lines. In England, popular education was founded in the first instance upon individual initiative combining in organized voluntary effort, and, though the voluntary agencies have been first supplemented and latterly to a large extent supplanted by public action, the tendency has been in the direction of municipalization rather than in that of central state control. In Ireland, on the other hand, education has suffered in the past from the general absence of individual initiative and local interest almost as seriously as from the mistakes of the English government. These causes, more directly perhaps than the prevailing poverty of the country, made it necessary to throw the burden of supporting the schools to an increasing extent upon the state, while the want of local self-government precluded any devolution of powers and duties upon municipal authorities.

Historic retrospect.

State intervention is actually of earlier date in Ireland than in England. From the reign of Elizabeth onwards, English Protestant schools were founded by the government in a sporadic and intermittent fashion in pursuance of its Anglicizing policy. To mention briefly one or two historical features, the great religious educational enterprise of Edmond Rice in founding the well-known Irish Catholic order of the Christian Brothers in 1802 forms an exception to the general lack of initiative among the people themselves. About the same period the Kildare Place Society (founded in 1811 while the first commission of inquiry into Irish education was sitting) attempted to grapple with the peculiar difficulties of the religious situation upon lines somewhat similar to those just laid down by Lancaster and his followers in England. This organization comprised both Roman Catholic and Protestant schools upon a common religious basis of Bible reading without note or comment, and received government grants which rose to L30,000 a year before they were discontinued in 1833. The religious compromise which the system embodied broke down in consequence of Catholic dissatisfaction, and that it was at first fairly successful may seem extraordinary in view of the later attitude of the Catholic Church towards the question of common schools and combined religious instruction.

The national system.

In 1833, as the result of a second commission of inquiry (1824) and a select committee of the House of Commons (1828), Mr Stanley inaugurated the national system of elementary schools under a board of commissioners nominated from the different religious denominations. The government appears from the outset to have aimed at combined secular and separate religious instruction for Roman Catholics and Protestants. At the same time, an attempt was inconsistently made to provide an ethical basis for the secular instruction by means of Bible extracts. The story of the preparation of these extracts by an ingenious compound of the Protestant Authorized and Douai versions of Scripture is in its way one of the curiosities of religious history. The extracts were designed to meet the recognized Catholic objection to the indiscriminate reading of the Bible without note or comment. In practice they were chiefly used in the Protestant schools (in which their use is now practically extinct), and the growing Catholic objection to the policy of the National Board in this respect found authoritative, though somewhat cautiously worded, expression in a decree of the Roman Congregation De Propaganda Fide of January 11, 1846, declaring that non-sectarian religious instruction was dangerous to youth. "Tutius multo esse ut literarum tantummodo humanarum magisterium fiat in scholis promiscuis, quam ut fundamentales, ut aiunt, et communes religionis Christianae articuli restricte tradantur, reservata singulis sestis peculiari seorsum eruditione. Ita enim cum pueris agere periculosum valde videtur." The religious difficulty in Irish elementary education may be said to have been solved in process of time by the conversion of the national system in practice, though not in theory, into a system strongly denominational and therefore widely different from the design of its founders, combined Biblical instruction being discarded, and separate schools for the most part taking the place of common schools for the two creeds. In the latter respect the like tendency has been noted in the case of Germany.

The following are the chief specific points upon which the Irish system of elementary education differs from the English.

Irish elementary education.

_Finance._--The state still makes building grants to the extent of two-thirds of the cost. Such grants are only made to what are called vested schools, that is to say, schools of which the premises are vested in trustees or in the commissioners themselves. The state further pays in the case of all national schools the entire cost of maintenance except only the upkeep of the building, and the provision of books after the exhaustion of a first free grant.

_Appointment and Payment of Teachers._--For the purpose of promotion the state through its inspectors undertakes the duty of classifying the individual teachers in four grades, passage from one grade to another being secured by examination. Appointments of teachers to schools are made by the school managers subject to the approval of the commissioners. Rights of dismissal are reserved to the local managers and also to the commissioners independently. Lastly, the teachers' salaries are now paid directly by the state. The old system of payment by results was abandoned in 1900, and the teacher is paid (a) a fixed salary according to grade, (b) a continued good service salary which may be increased triennially, (c) a capitation payment.

_Convent Schools._--In addition to the national schools supported as above, there are a considerable number of convent or monastery schools which receive capitation grants after the English plan, but not direct salaries. There were 308 such schools in 1908, with an average attendance of 70,003. There were also 83 other convent or monastery schools paid by personal salaries, with an average attendance of 11,075.

_School Attendance and Free Education._--The Irish Education Act 1892 provided for compulsory attendance in towns and for the adoption of compulsion in other districts. In virtue of the financial sections of this act, which provided an increased grant for salaries, most national schools have become free.

_General Elementary-School Statistics._--In 1908 the average number of scholars on the rolls of all the schools was 708,992, and the average daily attendance was 494,662, or 69.8% as compared with the number on the rolls. As regards religious denomination, 74.42% of the scholars on the rolls were Roman Catholics; 28.6% were in schools attended by both Roman Catholic and Protestant children and 71.4% in schools attended solely by Roman Catholics or solely by Protestants. The total expenditure on the schools and teaching staffs was L1,591,214, of which L1,451,139, equivalent to L2, 19s. 3d. per scholar, was contributed from state grants, and L140,074, equivalent to 5s. 9d. per scholar, from local (i.e. voluntary) sources, the rate per scholar from all sources being L3, 5s.

_Training of Teachers._--Salaried monitors are employed in the Irish schools, but, unlike the English pupil teachers, are not explicitly recognized as forming part of the school staff. There are now seven training colleges, viz. one undenominational college maintained by the commissioners, five Roman Catholic colleges, and one college in connexion with the Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland. Of the scholars in the undenominational college, 73 out of 312 were Roman Catholics. The total number of students in training was 1189, viz. 514 men and 675 women. The percentage of trained teachers to the total number of teachers was 64.7. A special training college for the instruction of teachers in Irish has been recognized.

Secondary education.

One of the chief desiderata in Irish education is a single central authority for all branches of education, elementary, secondary (or "intermediate") and technical. There are two central authorities dealing with secondary education, viz. the Intermediate Education Board and the Department for Agriculture and Technical Instruction. The Intermediate Board administers sums available under the Intermediate Education Act of 1878 from the Irish Church Surplus, and also the sum allocated under the Local Taxation Act 1890. The vice of the system in the opinion of educational experts lies in the statutory obligation to award grants on the result of an individual examination of the scholars. As a result of the vice-regal commission of 1898, power was taken to introduce a system of school inspection, though not to dispense with the individual examination as the basis for the award of the grants; this measure of reform was ultimately carried out in 1909. The sum distributed in result grants is about L50,000 per annum.

Prior to the Agriculture and Technical Instruction (Ireland) Act 1899, science and art grants were administered by the Science and Art Department in England; by this act they were transferred to the new Irish Department for Agriculture and Technical Instruction. This department makes block grants to secondary schools in respect of science and art teaching, and manual instruction or domestic economy. Measures have been taken for the co-ordination of the duties of the Technical Department and the Intermediate Board, and the impetus given to the teaching of experimental science by grants for the erection of laboratories represents a reform of undoubted value for higher education in Ireland, especially when considered in connexion with the enlistment of the local interest of the technical education committees in the intermediate schools. Nevertheless, in the absence of a reform of the results system of intermediate grants, the special subsidizing of science teaching has tended to put an undue premium upon this subject to the detriment of the rest of the curriculum.

Ireland possesses no such system of scholarships for assisting the passage of scholars from the elementary to the secondary school as England enjoys as a result of the municipalization of the educational system. Nevertheless, Irish children as a fact pass much more freely from the elementary to the secondary school than is the case in England where social prejudices are stronger. The schools of the Christian Brothers are usually organized in two departments, primary and intermediate, and thus supply for the Roman Catholic population the demand for the cheap type of secondary day school represented by the municipal schools in England. It must be added that the Irish intermediate schools are purely denominational. The widespread demand for secondary education among the people, to which the report of Messrs Dale and Stephens bears witness, is a gratifying feature of Irish life, while the recent establishment (1908) of the long-deferred national university, and the perceptible quickening of intellectual interests throughout the country in connexion with the Celtic revival, point to better conditions for higher education and to the development of a wider, deeper and truer, because more national, culture.

_England._

It was justly observed by Sir Joshua Fitch (_Ency. Brit._, 10th ed., xxvii. p. 655) that "the public provision for the education of the people in England is not the product of any theory or plan formulated beforehand by statesmen or philosophers; it has come into existence through a long course of experiments, compromises, traditions, successes, failures and religious controversies. What has been done in this department of public policy is the resultant of many diverse forces and of slow evolution and growth rather than of pure purpose and well-defined national aims. It has been effected in different degrees by philanthropy, by private enterprise, by religious zeal, by ancient universities and endowed foundations, by municipal and local effort, and only to a small extent by legislation. The genius--or rather characteristic habit--of the English people is averse from the philosophical system, and is disposed to regard education, not as a science, but as a body of expedients to be discovered empirically and amended from time to time as occasion may require." Clearly, then, the English system of public education, as it results from successive acts of the administration and the legislature, is one which can only adequately be appreciated in the light of an historical survey of the various stages which have led up to it and the social conditions by which they were determined. The history of state education in England begins tardily in 1832, when after a generation of hesitation and controversy a beginning was made upon an exceedingly modest scale with the system of treasury grants in aid of elementary schools. The diverse forces which were at that date at work in the education of the nation as a whole, retarding state interference and marking out the limits within which it was long to be confined, derive their origin from a much remoter period.

Influence of the English Reformation.

The apprenticeship laws of Henry VIII. contain the earliest germ of state interference. These laws obliged children between five and thirteen years of age who were found begging or idle to be bound apprentices to some handicraft. If the immediate object was the prevention of crime rather than education as such, this early legislation is at least significant of the primary and intimate connexion that exists between popular education and industrial and economic needs. Yet in the shaping of the educational system the original influences were religious rather than economic; hence the importance of the canons of 1604, which secured the control of education to the Established Church. This of course was no novel doctrine, but merely the reaffirmation by the Reformed Church of the Catholic tradition of religious exclusiveness, presenting itself to the mind of contemporaries rather as the recognition of a national, that was also a religious, duty than as the assumption of an ecclesiastical privilege. Whatever mischief the Tudor statesmen wrought by indiscriminate destruction of chantries and other foundations which combined educational work with observances that the new religion branded as superstitions, however far the English Reformation fell short of the organized enthusiasm for popular education and culture that marked the first most vigorous and constructive period of Lutheranism in Germany, the Protestant, and especially the Puritan, spirit unquestionably inspired a considerable volume of individual educational effort during the latter half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries. Here, as in Germany, the influence of the Reformation was wholly on the side of classicism, the dead languages being the key to the theological learning which was of primary concern to the men of that theological age. The conception of elementary education as a system complete in itself and adapted to the needs of the masses of the people was unfamiliar at this date. The earliest elementary schools were _petits_ schools, which (as the name implies) were really preparatory departments of the grammar-schools. Education in fact was still regarded as the privilege of an elite, but, as in the middle ages, the elite for whom it was sought to provide a ladder to the university by means of the endowed schools so numerously founded about this time was an elite of intellect and not of mere wealth; the class feeling which became so marked a feature of English higher education was of much later growth.

Rise of elementary education.

Towards the end of the 17th century elementary education began to differentiate itself, partly by way of reaction against the unnatural classicism of the preceding age, but more especially as the result of the growth of towns and the creation of a considerable industrial population. At the close of the century the moral evils attendant upon industrialism alarmed the religious conscience and prompted one of the great educational movements that stand to the credit of the national church. In 1699 Dr Bray founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and the movement thereby initiated may be traced in the numerous "charity" or "Blue Coat" schools scattered plentifully throughout the country and especially in the great centres of population. The foundation of these schools, which was pushed forward with vigour during the early years of the 18th century, represents an energetic and well-planned attempt to cope with the social evil of poverty by educational means. The instruction was elementary, the scholars were clothed as well as taught free, and the schools in the first instance were supported not so much by permanent endowment as by voluntary effort, so that with this movement the voluntary system may be said to make its appearance. Lastly, all these philanthropic efforts were inspired by a solid but sober piety nurtured by a church which came nearer than at any other period of its history to enjoying the undivided allegiance of the people. Another notable movement in connexion with the church was one confined to Wales, that of the Welsh "circulating schools" established by Griffith Jones about 1730, consisting of an organized staff of schoolmasters who went round teaching adults to read the Bible in Welsh. In the English rural parishes the comparative religious unanimity favoured the quiet development of elementary education in a small way upon less specifically religious lines. Numerous small endowments for the elementary education of poor children were provided by well-to-do parishioners; indeed to such an extent did the practice of making charitable (and largely educational) bequests increase that the legislature intervened in the interest of private inheritance by reviving the law of mortmain in an act of 1736. The village schoolmaster became a feature of rural life, frequently enjoying a schoolhouse provided sometimes by endowment and sometimes even directly by the parishioners at the cost of the rate levied by the vestry, but more often aided only by a little stipend from an endowment for teaching poor children, and eking out an always scanty subsistence by the fees of such paying scholars as he could succeed in getting together.

The Sunday-school movement.

Towards the end of the 18th century the emergency of the industrial revolution evoked a fresh religious effort upon a more highly organized scale in the shape of the Sunday-school movement, which may be said to represent the educational contribution of the Evangelical revival Robert Raikes, the founder of the Sunday School Union, established his first Sunday school in 1782. The idea of the Sunday school did not originate with Raikes; among earlier pioneers in this field were John Wesley, who held Sunday classes at Savannah in 1737; Theophilus Lindsey at Catterick in the North Riding of Yorkshire, about 1769; Hannah Ball at High Wycombe in 1769; and Jenkin Morgan near Llanidloes in 1770. Sunday schools, too, had been founded in England by Joseph Alleine, the Puritan Father, in the 17th century, and in Catholic Italy and France by St Charles Borromeo and Jean Baptiste de la Salle in the 16th and 17th centuries respectively. Nevertheless, in virtue of his achievement in organization, Raikes is rightly regarded as the founder of the English Sunday school. The peculiar value of the Sunday-school system in its early days lay in the combination of secular with religious instruction; in many cases the school was held on Saturday as well as Sunday, and its restriction to the one day or two days was due to the prevalence of child labour under stress of the great industrial expansion. With better economic conditions and with the development of day schools the Sunday schools gradually became restricted in function to purely religious instruction. Even with this limitation there is no doubt that the great Sunday-school organizations of the various churches still deserve to be reckoned among the educational assets of the nation, and as agencies both of religious instruction and of general culture they may tend, under modern educational and religious developments, to play an increasingly important part.

Movements of Lancaster and Bell, and rise of the religious controversy.

At the end of the 18th century the development of industry and the social unrest which followed the French Revolution combined to bring home to the public mind the need of a national system of day schools. Unfortunately, just at this moment the revival of Nonconformity as the result of the religious vitality of the Evangelical movement shattered the religious peace of the early Hanoverian period and divided the nation once more into hostile camps, to which class distinctions lent additional bitterness. The famous controversy between Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster and their respective followers in the opening years of the 19th century served to define the religious difficulty substantially in the form in which it exists after the lapse of a century for the present generation. Both these remarkable men conceived independently the idea of a national system of popular education upon a voluntary basis; both concurred in extolling the merits of the monitorial system, which each claimed to have originated. The controversy between them, begun upon personal grounds, resolved itself into a national contest of rival principles of religious teaching. Lancaster as a young Quaker schoolmaster, confronted with pupils drawn from various religious bodies, planned his religious instruction upon the lines of doctrine common to all the orthodox Christian denominations. Thus he is the father of the undenominational religious teaching which later formed the basis of the Cowper-Temple compromise. But whereas the Cowper-Temple clause is purely negative in form and so seems to point to an undogmatic religion, the Lancasterian teaching was essentially positive and dogmatic within its limits. In 1805 Mrs Trimmer opened the attack upon Lancaster's system with a work bearing the expressive title of _A Comparative View of the New Plan of Education promulgated by Mr Joseph Lancaster and of the System of Christian Instruction founded by our Forefathers for the initiation of the young members of the Established Church in the Principles of the Reformed Religion_. The church as a whole refused to co-operate in religious teaching upon the basis of a common Christianity, and joined issue with Lancaster and his Whig and Nonconformist following not merely upon the question of the exclusion of dogmatic formularies, but also upon the question of the control of whatever religious teaching should be given. In fact the vital question at this period was whether the clergy of the Established Church were to control the national education. The religious issue was prominent in connexion with the remarkable attempt at legislation made by the Whig statesman Mr Whitbread in his Parochial Schools Bill of 1807. As originally introduced, the bill proposed to make it compulsory on parochial vestries to levy rates for the support of schools for teaching reading, writing and arithmetic. The compulsory provisions were dropped in the House of Commons, but the bill was rejected by the Lords, mainly on the ground that it did not place education on a religious basis or sufficiently secure control to the minister of the parish.

Foundation of voluntary schools.

The failure of the liberal proposals of Whitbread, and the strength of the Dissenting opposition to any settlement on purely church lines (such as that advocated by Bell in 1808 for establishing schools under the control of the parochial clergy), rendered recourse to voluntary effort inevitable. In 1808 the Royal Lancasterian Society was formed to carry on the work of Lancaster, the name being afterwards changed, owing to personal difficulties due to the wayward character of Lancaster, to the British and Foreign School Society. In the following year the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales was formed, with Bell as its superintendent. In voluntary effort on a grand scale the church easily outdistanced her opponents, and in 1831 the National Society was able to show that there were in all over 13,000 schools in connexion with the church, of which 6470 were both day and Sunday schools, having a total attendance of 409,000.

Monitorial system.

The rapid development of the voluntary school system was no doubt greatly facilitated by the monitorial plan of teaching, upon which Bell and Lancaster equally relied. Probably the first idea of utilizing the older pupils to teach the younger presented itself independently to Lancaster in the Borough Road and to Bell in Madras. The monitorial plan never rested upon any educational theory; it was simply a makeshift, a rough-and-ready expedient for overcoming the practical difficulty caused by the dearth of competent teachers. Historically it is important as the precursor of the pupil-teacher system which so long formed the exclusive basis of the English elementary system.

Activities of Brougham.

Meantime a further political move was attempted by Brougham, who included educational reform among his multifarious activities. In 1816 he procured the appointment of a general commission of inquiry into endowed charities. The labours of this great inquisition lasted for twenty years and led to the reformation of many cases of abuse or waste of wealthy endowments, and eventually to the establishment of the Charity Commission in 1853. In 1820 Brougham introduced a remarkable bill which proposed to make the magistrates in quarter sessions the rating authority, to require teachers to be members of the Church of England and to be appointed upon a certificate from the parochial clergyman, and on the other hand to prohibit religious formularies and to confine religious instruction to Bible reading without comment. The bill naturally failed through the opposition cf the Dissenters, and served only to accentuate the religious impasse.

Treasury grants.

In 1832 the Whig government which passed the Reform Bill placed on the Estimates a sum of L20,000 for public education, thus initiating the system of the annual grant voted by parliament and dispensed under regulations framed by administrative act. The grant of 1832 was administered by the treasury and not by a special department, under certain conditions laid down by treasury minute of August 30, 1833. The chief of these were that grants were confined to the erection of school buildings, and were to be administered only through the National and the British and Foreign School societies; there was a provision for audit, but no condition of inspection.

Establishment of State-aided system.

In 1839 Lord Melbourne's government by means of an order in council established a separate education office under the style of the Committee of Council on Education, and the sum voted by parliament was increased to L39,000. The original intention of the government was to establish a state normal school or training college as the foundation of a national system of education. Unfortunately this design had to be abandoned in view of the religious difficulty, with the result (so fruitful in controversy at the present time) that the training of elementary teachers was left in private hands and became a stronghold of the voluntary and denominational interests. In view of the limited resources placed at their disposal by parliament, the Committee of Council were at first compelled to confine their assistance to capital grants in aid of the provision of school buildings, but in the distribution of the money three important conditions were at once imposed. In the first place, the continuing right of inspection was required in all cases; secondly, promoters were obliged to conform to a fixed standard of structural efficiency; thirdly, the building must be settled upon trusts permanently securing it to the education of poor children.

Concordat with the church.

By the minute of August 10, 1840, the Committee of Council concluded what came to be known as the concordat with the church. Under this minute no appointment was to be made of any person to inspect schools in connexion with the Church of England without the concurrence of the archbishop of the province, and, what seems still more extraordinary to modern ideas, any such appointment was to be revoked should the archbishop at any time withdraw his concurrence. The inspectors were charged with the duty of inspecting religious teaching, but under instructions to be framed by the archbishop, and their reports were to be transmitted in duplicate to the archbishop and the bishop for the information of these authorities. Further, the general instructions of the Committee of Council themselves were to be communicated to the archbishop before being finally sanctioned. The march of events, and in particular the altered financial relations between the state and the voluntary managers brought about by the institution of maintenance grants, soon rendered this concordat obsolete, but it remains historically important as showing how at the outset the denominational principle was recognized and fostered by the state.

Trust deeds.

Among the first acts of the Committee of Council was the promulgation of a set of model trusts deeds, one or other of which applicants for building grants were required to adopt for the settlement of their school premises. The necessary conditions were the permanent appropriation of the site to purposes of education, and the permanent right of government inspection; it must, however, be noted that this latter right was generally limited in terms to the inspection provided for by the minute of August 10, 1840. A conscience clause was not obligatory, and indeed was only offered in the limited form of exemption from instruction in formularies and attendance at Sunday school or public worship. A more systematic attempt to promote public control by means of trust deeds in 1846 led the Committee of Council into a controversy with the National Society which extended over a period of three years, turning chiefly upon the management clauses and the question of appeals, and resulting in compromises which constituted a fresh concordat with the church. In point of fact, the management clauses proved to be of little practical consequence, save in a few controversial cases, until the act of 1902, which had the effect of bringing them once more into prominence in connexion with the constitution of statutory bodies of foundation managers. The act of 1902 also dealt specifically with two other points arising upon the old trust deeds, viz. the control of religious instruction and the appeal to the bishop in religious questions. Special facilities for the conveyance of land for school purposes were afforded to limited owners by the School Sites Acts of 1841 and subsequent years. The landed gentry responded with great public spirit to the call thus made upon their generosity by the state, with the result that the vast majority of rural, and many urban, parishes were freely endowed with sites for elementary schools.

Grammar Schools Act 1840.

The Grammar Schools Act of 1840, which was passed to deal with the case of the decayed "grammar" (i.e. classical) schools which abounded throughout the country, belongs to the history of elementary rather than secondary education. It expressly empowered the Court of Chancery, where the endowment was insufficient for a classical school, to substitute subjects of useful learning analogous to those contained in the original trusts. As a result of this act a considerable number of ancient endowments were reorganized so as to afford an improved elementary instead of an inefficient classical education, and the schemes made under the act constituted an early, but not very successful, experiment in the direction of higher elementary schools.

Training-college grants.

In 1843 the Committee of Council decided to make grants in aid of the erection of normal schools or training colleges in connexion with the National Society and the British and Foreign School societies, thus marking the definite abandonment of the provision of training colleges to voluntary effort.

Pupil-teacher system.

In 1846 an important step forwards was taken in the foundation of the pupil-teacher system. The regulations of this year inaugurated annual maintenance grants in the form of stipends for apprenticed pupil teachers receiving a prescribed course of instruction under the head teacher, and a lower grade of stipendiary monitors in schools where such instruction could not be provided. These regulations inaugurated the system of Queen's Scholarships to assist pupil teachers to proceed to a training college; they also established capitation grants for the support of such colleges, and annual grants to elementary schools under government inspection of from L15 to L30 in aid of the salary of every trained teacher employed. Provision was at the same time made for retiring pensions to elementary teachers.

Extension of state aid to Wesleyans, Roman Catholics and Jews.

Down to 1847 state aid was confined to two religious categories of schools: those giving specifically Church of England teaching, and those in connexion with the British and Foreign School Society giving simple Bible teaching. To facilitate the recognition of other denominational schools the Committee of Council in 1847 issued a minute dispensing schools not connected with the Established Church from inquiries concerning their religious condition, and in the same year state aid was extended to Wesleyan and Roman Catholic schools. The settlement of model trust deeds gave occasion for each of these two great religious bodies to negotiate a kind of concordat with respect to school management, and the Roman Catholic deed was only settled after a controversy, similar to that which had arisen with the National Society, as to the rights of ecclesiastical authority. Jewish schools received recognition in 1851 upon condition that the Scriptures of the Old Testament should be daily read in them.

Bills of 1842-57.

During the middle years of the century various unsuccessful legislative attempts were made to establish a national system of elementary schools upon the basis of rate-aid. These attempts began with the education clauses of Sir Robert Peel's Factory Bill of 1842, and were renewed in a series of bills from 1853 to 1857, of which one set was introduced by Lord John Russell on behalf of the Whig government, whilst a second was promoted by an organization called the Manchester and Salford Committee on Education, in the denominational interest, and a third set by an organization called the Lancashire (afterwards the National) Public Schools Association, in the secular interest. The only one of these attempts which calls for notice here is the bill introduced by Lord John Russell (called the Borough Bill, on account of its being restricted to municipal boroughs) in 1853, and forming part of a comprehensive scheme of legislative and administrative reform of which a portion was actually carried into effect. The bill as a measure for elementary education was supplemented by an administrative system of capitation grants for rural areas. The government scheme also comprised a measure dealing with the administration of charitable trusts (which took shape as the Charitable Trusts Act 1853), the constitution of the Department of Science and Art, and university reform upon the lines recommended by the Oxford and Cambridge commissions. The Borough Bill left it optional with municipalities to adopt the act. It provided for the appointment of a school committee, one half of whose members might be non-members of the council. The school committee was merely given power to assist existing voluntary schools out of the rates. No provision was made for public control beyond the requirement of audit; the sole condition as to religious instruction was the acceptance of a conscience clause.

Capitation grants.

The failure of the Borough Bill did not affect the new system of capitation grants which was introduced by minute of the Committee of Council dated April 2, 1853. These grants were fixed at a scale varying from 3s. to 6s. per head, payable upon certain conditions, of which the most important were that the school must be under a certificated teacher, and that three-fourths of the children must pass a prescribed examination. In consequence of the failure of the several fresh bills introduced in 1855 by the government, the church party and the secular party respectively amplifying the proposals previously brought forward, the capitation grant was, by minute of January 26, 1856, extended to urban areas. As in the case of all the early grants, the regulations governing the distribution of the capitation grants were framed upon the principle that subventions of public money must be met by local funds derived from voluntary contributions, endowments and school fees; thus the basis of the denominational system as fostered by the state at this stage was one of financial partnership.

Education minister, 1856.

In 1856 a purely administrative bill was passed, establishing the office of vice-president of the Committee of Council on Education as a minister responsible to parliament. At the same time, the Science and Art Department was transferred from the Board of Trade to the Committee of Council.

Newcastle Commission.

The progress of state-aided education during this period may be measured by the increase of the annual parliamentary grant, which rose from L30,000 in 1839 to L100,000 in 1846, L150,000 in 1851, L396,000 in 1855, and L663,400 in 1858. This expansion was viewed with misgiving by the friends of the denominational system, and by the strong individualist school of that day, who upon wider grounds clung to the old ideal of voluntary initiative. These sections combined with the advocates of further state intervention to press for a commission of inquiry, and at the instance of Sir John Pakington (the eminent Conservative educationist who was responsible for the denominational bills of the 'fifties) a royal commission was appointed in 1858, under the chairmanship of the duke of Newcastle, to inquire into the state of popular education in England, and to consider and report what measures, if any, were required for the extension of sound and cheap elementary instruction to all classes of the people. The _Report_ of the Newcastle Commission, issued in 1861, contains an exhaustive account of the existing condition of elementary education, and, with due allowance for the grave defects revealed, and in particular the glaring inefficiency of the numerous little private-venture schools kept by "dames" and others, the graphic picture drawn by the commissioners constitutes a striking tribute to the sterling qualities of self-help and religious earnestness which were so characteristic of the early Victorian period. It was found that in round numbers about 2,500,000 children were attending day schools, the proportion to population being 1 in 7, as compared with 1 in 9 in France, 1 in 8 in Holland, and 1 in 6 in Prussia, where education was compulsory. On the other hand, of this number only 1,675,000 were in public schools of all kinds, only 1,100,000 in schools liable to inspection, and 917,000 in schools receiving annual grant. The result was that only one child in every twenty was attending a school whose efficiency could be in any way guaranteed by the state. In the constructive portion of their work the comments and recommendations of the commissioners reflected the prevailing perplexity of the public mind. A consistent individualistic minority considered that the annual grant should be withdrawn altogether, and that any further state aid should be confined to building grants, which they would concede not as desirable in themselves but as necessitated out of considerations of fairness to the parishes that had not yet received such aid. The commissioners as a body rejected free and compulsory education in view of the religious difficulty and upon general grounds of individualistic principle. Of the religious difficulty itself the commissioners had some wise words to say which hold good in substance at the present time. In their judgment the considerable evidence they had amassed conclusively proved that the religious difficulty originated with the managers, promoters and organizers of the schools, and not with the parents themselves; yet the indifferent or comparatively passive attitude of the people nowise materially diminished the practical difficulty of introducing a comprehensive system, since it was not with the body of the people but with the founders and supporters of schools that legislators would always have to deal. In view of the solution adopted in 1902 it is of interest to note that the Newcastle Commissioners deliberately rejected the parish as unfit to be taken as the unit of elementary education upon the ground that management by parochial ratepayers must tend to be illiberal and niggardly, bent upon economy of the rates to the detriment of educational interests; accordingly they recommended the constitution of county boards (which in the absence of elective councils must needs originate with quarter sessions) clothed with power to levy a rate for the aid of existing voluntary schools.

Payment by results.

The one definite achievement of the Newcastle Commission was the famous system of payment by results, which may be said to have excited a keener and more prolonged controversy than any other measure of a purely educational character. Impressed by the defects of the existing teaching, the commissioners reported that there was only one way of securing efficiency, and that was to institute a searching examination by competent authority of every child in every school to which grants were to be paid, with the view of ascertaining whether the indispensable elements of knowledge were thoroughly acquired, and to make the prospects and position of the teacher dependent to a considerable extent upon the results of this examination. Thus the commissioners hoped to counteract what appeared to them to be the crying defect of the existing training college system, viz. that it tended mainly to adapt the young schoolmaster to advance his higher, rather than to thoroughly ground his junior, pupils. They recognized that to raise the character of the children, both morally and intellectually, was and must always be the highest aim of education, and they were far from desiring to supersede this by any plan of a mere examination into the more mechanical work of elementary education, the reading, writing and arithmetic of young children; but they thought that the importance of this training, which must be the foundation of all other teaching, had been lost sight of, and that there was justice in the common complaint that while a fourth of the scholars were really taught, three-fourths after leaving school forgot everything they had learnt there.

Revised Code.

Mr Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke) as vice-president of the Committee of Council (1859-1864) adopted the system of payment by results in what became famous in history as the Revised Code, issued in 1862 and so called because it was a revision of the minutes and regulations of the Committee of Council, which were first collected and issued in the form of a code in 1860. The Revised Code provided for the payment of a grant of 4s. upon the old principle and a further grant of not more than 8s. upon the result of examination. Mr Lowe declared of the system in the House of Commons that "if it was costly it should at least be efficient; and if it was inefficient it should at least be cheap." In fact, it proved to be cheap; the giant fell from L813,400 in 1861 to L636,800 in 1865. The upholders of the existing system denounced the Revised Code as an undeserved slight upon the voluntary managers, and even as a breach of faith with the great religious denominations. On purely educational grounds, which need not be here re-capitulated, it was at once viewed with misgiving by many authorities, including Matthew Arnold. To meet objections, some modifications were introduced in the code under the Conservative government in 1867. The system of paying grant upon the result of individual examination of the scholars was not finally abolished till 1904.

Proceedings preliminary to the act of 1870.