The Elementary Education Act. 429 ART. VIII.—The Elementary Education Act. 1870. THINGS have shaped themselves thus far right in the Educational Movement. Destruction has been averted, but improvement has not been arrested. Oppression and proscription have not been allowed to prevail, but an epoch of reformation and expansion has been inaugurated. An excellent beginning has been made towards a truly united system of National School Education. As yet, the educational forces are not perfectly marshalled; the organisation of the whole in one harmonious plan, with perfect subordination of part to part, is by no means complete; some principles have been but slightly brought into play which must before long become of chief importance; some provinces of activity have only been surveyed, which ought, without delay, to be annexed; the great metropolitan centre of direction and reference is still exorbitantly surcharged with responsibility in details, whilst the functions of the mutually co-ordinate sub-centres are, as yet, too meagre and too mean; a few positive mistakes, and not a few practical defects, in the new Act have been brought to light by the experience of the past two years. But still, on the whole, the Act has worked wonderfully well; the errors in it have been remarkably few; and of the defects, a considerable proportion were unavoidable in a piece of legislation which could not but in part be tentative, and which affected so vast a field of action; some, indeed, were defects the admission of which into the measure was necessary in order to secure its passing in Parliament, and the manner and need of correcting which could only be learnt, and the lesson generally accepted, by means of actual experience in the working of the Act. In all that we have written in this Journal upon the subject of National Education, we have indicated the need of deeper, more searching, more extensive, reforms, than the new Act embodies. We have to acknowledge, indeed-and we do so with some pride as well as with pleasure-that not a little which we were among the foremost, if we were not the first, in requiring, has been accomplished by Mr. Forster's Act; but yet not a little remains to be done, and the time has now arrived, sooner, on the whole, than we anticipated, when what farther is needful may, with good hope of its acceptance, be pressed upon the attention of the Parliament and the country. Three years ago Mr. Forster found a system of partially nationalised schools, which had almost reached its limit of development, but was far from having satisfied the necessities of the country, and which was arrested helpless in confessed failure precisely in situations where educational necessity was most extreme and lamentable; a system in which, so far as the denominational element prevailed-and the denominational schools were in numbers to the undenominational as six to one-that element was allowed so far to dominate and obscure the national character of the schools, that the national officers who visited them were required first to make good their proper denominational allegiance, and the national field was divided and complexly parti-coloured according to a distribution of provinces, in the definition and apportionment of which geography and topographical economy were sacrificed to paramount considerations of denominational colouring and prejudice. Mr. Forster had to provide for the modification of this system in such a manner that the denominational element should be made altogether subservient to the national principles and requirements, that new springs and elements of activity, rising naturally out of the civil constitution and popular life of the nation, should be incorporated with those previously existing into one harmoniously administered whole, and that effectual provision should be made for satisfying the needs of the whole population. He was not at liberty to destroy the past, in order to create a new educational world. The wonderful growth of schools and teachers, which, in two generations, had sprung up throughout the land, which had indicated and prepared the way for all that remained to be done, which had itself, on the whole, made fairly effective, if not always unimpeachable or thoroughly adequate, provision, *Here it is only just to note that the Wesleyan Methodists never sought to have inspectors of their own denomination. From the beginning they deliberately and by preference waived their right in this respect. If, however, the inspectors of British and Wesleyan schools had not been laymen, the Methodists could not have afforded to do this. Inspectors of Church of England schools were all required to be clergymen. This was a decidedly objectionable feature in the old system. The sooner there is an end of clerical inspection, as a rule, the better. Some clergymen, indeed, from Dean Cowie downwards, are admirable inspectors. But not a few have the gift of making themselves peculiarly disagreeable in Nonconformist schools, which are not to be judged by the standard of small National Schools in rural districts. Possibly these gentlemen are as disageeable in Church of England schools ; but the exercise of their special powers in a Nonconformist school is dangerous. It all helps to increase the feeling of bitter dislike with which so many Nonconformists already regard the Church of England. Reform and Expansion. 431 not indeed for the sorest, but for much the largest, part of the nation's educational wants, could not be swept away to make room for a new and uniform system. The Churches had stepped in to do the work when Parliament refused to heed the disclosures and arguments of statesmen and philanthropists; they had persisted in their humble, but vast and assiduous, labour, even though the nation itself, for whom they laboured, was yet more deeply buried in apathy respecting its own condition and needs than the Parliament which represented it. To confiscate, by legal proscription or disinheritance, such rights and such fruits as the voluntary schools of the country represented, would have been at once a cruel outrage on all that was just and sacred, and a most reckless and scandalous act of waste. It would have been outrage alike upon religion and upon national economy. In neither light would the English people have endured it. Mr. Forster never for a moment entertained the thought. Under these circumstances, the precise form in which, three years ago, the national problem could not but present itself to a responsible Minister of State, was capable of being defined with sufficient closeness by any man of adequate information and of a reasonable mind. We ourselves indicated, just three years ago, and some time before his measure was brought into the House of Commons, the obvious course to be pursued.* We intimated that the then existing system "would have to be disdenominationalised to the utmost extent compatible with the maintenance of denominational interest and energy in the working of the schools, and provision made for the development of all varieties of effective education in the future, on the common platform of a Nationalism combining variety of form and mode with unity of purpose and effect, so far as the essentials of an education proper to British citizenship are concerned." We specifically indicated in the same article almost every change of chief importance which has since been carried into effect by the Act, and some which have not yet been carried out, as, for instance, that "the denominational schools in any district might be correlated to a general District Board." We gave our suffrage beforehand in favour, not only of Districts and Boards, but of Board Schools, and of local rating and management. We gave our adhesion to the principle of compulsion, but we gave our reasons for concluding that, in England, no universal law of direct compulsion could, at that time, be practically carried * London Quarterly Review, January, 1870: "Denominational and National Education.' out. The experience of the last two years has furnished a luminous commentary on the views as to this point we published three years ago. The partial and permissive introduction of compulsion has, indeed, done much good. It has shown, practically, what compulsion must imply in the way of school provision, of quasi-police visitation and inspection, of popular approval, and of magistrates' co-operation; it has prepared the nation for what, two years ago, it would have shrunk from, in accepting the principle of compulsion at all, to accept it frankly for all classes; it has shown the most thoughtful and practical workers under the different Boards that, when they have carried compulsion to its utmost possible extent, there will still remain a residuum of children of the most vagrant and degraded classes, who cannot be brought under education by any merely legal mechanism whatever, or without the co-operation of voluntary philanthropy; it has demonstrated, as we ventured to affirm three years ago, that direct compulsion can never really succeed until it is supplemented and sustained by laws of indirect compulsion defining the relations between education and juvenile labour: all this has been effected by the experience of the last two years, and so the way may, perhaps, have been prepared for calling into action compulsory powers, to be more or less strictly applied, and to be variously adapted to varied circumstances, throughout the whole of England, and in rural districts as well as in towns. Our main purpose in this article is to set forth some particulars in which it has been suggested, on high practical authority, that the Act should, without delay, be now amended. Some of these we indicated in a criticism of the Bill itself, when it was before the House, published three months after that from which we have quoted.* Most of them will be found to be but the development of principles indicated in both the articles. The general effect of them all will be to make the popular element of school provision all pervasive, and everywhere to bring public or quasi-public schools and voluntary schools, both such as receive Government grants and such as receive no Government grant, into relations of responsibility to the District Board. Before, however, we proceed to consider in detail the amendments which may now with advantage be made in the Act, let us be allowed to trace the genealogy of legislative attempts and ideas by which we are brought to the existence *Mr. Forster's Education Bill, published April 1870. Earlier Attempts at Similar Legislation. 433 as statute of the present law. Several ineffectual, and yet not altogether abortive, because by no means useless, attempts in the direction of the Act had prepared the way among wellinstructed friends and leaders of education for the acceptance of Mr. Forster's Bill. The main ideas of his measure were local boards and local rating, the preservation and utilisation of existing schools, the incorporation in one system of the voluntary and the newly created Board Schools, the power of converting or transforming voluntary schools into Board Schools, the universal requisition and enforcement of a strict Conscience Clause, the separation of the voluntary provision for religious instruction from the public provision and responsibility for secular instruction, and the permissive provisions for compulsory education. As originally drawn, the Bill made provision for extending aid from local rates to voluntary inspected schools, where such aid might be a mutual economy and advantage both to the managers and the ratepaying public. This provision would have brought such schools into direct relation with the Boards, as themselves Board Schools in a modified sense, and would have given the Boards certain responsibilities and rights in regard to such schools. Now there can be no doubt that the immediate progenitor of Mr. Forster's Cabinet Measure of 1870 is to be found in the "Education of Poor Bill," which was brought into the House of Commons in 1867 by Mr. Bruce, Mr. W. E. Forster, and Mr. Algernon Egerton. There can be as little doubt that the real, though not so modern or so well remembered, original of this Bill was the "Manchester and Salford Boroughs Education Bill," which was brought into the House of Commons in the Session of 1851-2. Mr. Egerton, whose name stood on the back of the later Bill, was confessedly the personal representative of the same earnest and influential union of the friends of education in Manchester which brought forward the earlier Bill. Fourteen or fifteen years, indeed, had not passed without taking away some who had taken an active part in preparing the Bill of 1851. Mr. Entwisle, M.P., was no longer living; the Rev. Dr. Osborn had long left Manchester; others were in like manner wanting. But Canon Richson and several more still remained at their post ready to lend their best help to any honest endeavour to solve the Educational problem of the nation. These, joined by some earnest and candid men, who had originally been. supporters of Mr. Fox's Secular Bill, but who had learned practical wisdom by the experience of the intervening years, put the machinery into motion which in 1867 brought forth |