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of the ecclesiastical and other personages who maintained these schools. The children were clothed in a conspicuous charity dress, they were picturesquely arranged in the gallery of the church, and many persons now living can remember the annual festival of the Charity School children of London in St Paul's Cathedral, and the gratification evinced by the trustees and supporters of these schools, as they saw the objects of their bounty arrayed in bright colours and listening to a sermon from some dignitary of the Church, who reminded them of their low estate, and accentuated that fact of the 'duty to my neighbour,' which teaches to 'order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters.' The conception of popular education which dominated these schools does not appear to you or to me a very high one; in fact they were rather designed to restrict than to encourage intellectual progress and activity. Their moral ideal is to be seen in the well-known couplet:

God bless the Squire and his relations,

And make us keep our proper stations.

But after all their aim was not an ungenerous aim. Relatively to the state of opinion in the nation, it was an honest aim, it represented a real desire to be of service to the poor in the only way then known. The Schools Inquiry Commissioners of 1865 found nearly 2000 such schools; some of these have become ordinary public elementary schools receiving a grant from Government, in nearly all of them the distinctive charity dress has been given up, and all of them have lost under the influences of modern legislation the sectarian narrowness which once distinguished them. Apprentice funds and other like privileges have been converted into scholarships. At any rate, endowments for primary schools have ceased to be made, as the need for them has practically disappeared, since gratuitous elementary education is now provided by the State. Such gifts as are accessible for the children of the poor are now very properly applied rather to the purpose of enabling them to

proceed to places of advanced education than to the provision or equipment of the elementary schools themselves.

The only provision other than that furnished by the Charity Schools which existed at the beginning of the present century was that furnished by private enterprise. A few so-called schools were held in private houses, and chiefly by incompetent and often disreputable people, who earned a scanty living from the weekly pence of the parents.

Dame schools, such as that of Shenstone's Village Schoolmistress, and boys' schools, such as were described in Crabbe's Borough and in Joseph Lancaster's early tracts, furnished almost the only means of instruction accessible to the children of the poor, and although in 1805 Lancaster made the first experiments which resulted in the formation of the British and Foreign School Society in 1809, and Andrew Bell's monitorial system was adopted by the Church of England and became the basis of the National Society in 1811, private enterprise of a somewhat ignoble character continued to flourish till a much later date. In 1869, with a view to obtain the data for the Education Bill of the following year, I was, at the instance of Mr Forster, appointed one of two Special Commissioners, Mr D. R. Fearon being the other, to report to Parliament on the educational provision then existing in four great towns, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds. Our report showed that besides 'National' and 'British' schools, which by that time were receiving Government aid and inspection, there were still in the poorer parts of those great towns some hundreds of children whose only instruction was gained in private houses, or in the rooms attached to chapels, but rented by the masters and mistresses themselves. Here, for example, is my own description, extracted from the Parliamentary paper, of some personal experiences in Leeds and Birmingham:

I. In a small low room (12 ft. 6 in. by 12 ft.) in a back court I found ++ boys of ages varying from 4 to 14. In the middle sat the master, a kindly man, but a helpless cripple, whose lower limbs appeared to be

paralysed, and who was unable to stand up. At first it was difficult to recognise him in the crowd. The boys formed a dense mass round him, swaying irregularly backwards and forwards, while he was protesting feebly against the noise, his head rising in the midst like a ship in a storm. In a corner the wife was sitting, engaged in "minding" the six or eight youngest children. The room is insufferably close and dark: there are not forms enough for all to sit on, and only three old desks. It is difficult to move in the room, and still more difficult to arrange the older boys for a short examination.

Since the few who are provided with reading books have books of all sorts, most of them with half the leaves out, it is a work of time to organise a reading lesson. With the help of two or three copies of the New Testament I made a beginning and heard the reading of the twelve older scholars. It was very bad, inarticulate and unmeaning. No boy could explain the simplest words, and the master said he was not accustomed to ask questions. The writing lessons consist mainly of copying a whole slateful at a time from a book, then rubbing it out and beginning again. Although spelling in columns from a book is a conspicuous lesson, on which much labour is spent, the spelling of a simple sentence which I dictated was full of gross mistakes.

There are only two boys who can do an addition sum, although the average age was nearly 11. All the sums, I was informed, were copied out of books, or from examples "set" in writing by the master; the boys had never been used to hear a sum given out in words. The ignorance, dirt, and confusion which characterise the school are deplorable. It has, however, one specialité: the boys spend much of their time in ornamental printing of texts, mottoes, and announcements suited to a shop window. Each boy has a little box of cheap paints, and colours his performances liberally. A great number of these works of art were exhibited to me with considerable pride by master and pupils, and I was requested to accept some specimens. The parents are much pleased with this feature of the school work, the boys enjoy it, and, as the master explained to me, it has the great advantage of keeping them quiet. "For when the 'spellings' are said, and the sums are done, there is," he observed, “a good deal of leisure time in a school, and he knows no nicer way of occupying it than this." He has kept school here for 20 years, and has always had it full. Parents in the neighbourhood probably feel sympathy for his affliction, and are content to pay him fees a little higher than those charged in a national school. "Besides," as he remarks, "they like a private school better than one of those large two-penny schools, where boys are only taught and knocked about by other boys."

II. In a school in Leeds containing 40 children, of whom the majority

were under 7, but several had reached 10 years of age, I found an elderly woman sitting in the midst of a group of girls who were engaged in knitting while one of the elder girls was minding the little ones and trying to make them sit still. It is very hard to keep the boys quiet the governess explains to me. There is nothing for them to do but write, and when they have done slateful after slateful they get tired; the only other lessons they do consist of reading and a little spelling; no one learns to cipher. The mistress complains much of the capricious way in which children are removed. It is almost better, she thinks, not to teach them much, for the more you teach them the more quickly they are removed; as soon as they learn a little parents think they can read, and take them off to work. Of the neighbouring National schools she speaks with considerable irritation, not unmixed with contempt. She has known some children to be nine months in such a school and never to have learned a single task. She knows of no form of instruction except saying lessons; her room is very dirty and ill-ventilated, and her own qualifications are of the humblest kind.

III. In the front room of a small dwelling-house, half filled with dirty household furniture, there were 35 boys, all of whom were entirely unemployed, except eight who were writing in copy-books. The master had retired (11 a.m.) to a neighbouring house for luncheon. He was

a cloth-dresser by trade, and "took to schooling because work was slack." He finds the employment very hard, as he does not know what to do to keep the boys occupied so many hours. He regrets that he is not "a bit of a singer," for if he were, he would “learn them a few ditties, and the time would pass away quicker." There are five "sixpenny boys" at the top of the school, who are writing fairly, but not well, and who enter sums in a ciphering-book-but without understanding them. The "fourpennies" are very backward, no one of them has yet mastered simple notation. Their only employments are occasional reading, the learning by heart of “spellings" from a book, and a little scribble on broken slates. During the larger part of every day they are expected simply to sit still. Notwithstanding the prominence given to spelling lessons, all the elder boys failed to write an easy sentence without gross mistakes. The master does not profess to be qualified for his work, or to care about it, and would willingly find other employment if he could.

IV. A more important school, known in the neighbourhood of Birming ham as an academy, is held in a large upper room, which at one time formed part of a factory, and at another was used as a dancing saloon. It is now rented by a schoolmaster of 30 years' standing, who has 50 boys in it, but whose numbers have sometimes reached 90 or 100. He says that the school has been subject to many vicissitudes; that since he has been in the

profession more than 1000 scholars have passed through his hands, and that accident and the state of trade cause the numbers to be exceptionally low just now. He has no assistance; the room though low and somewhat gloomy is well provided with long desks, and not ill supplied with school requisites. The boys are seated and are nearly all engaged in the preparation of coloured texts and shop bills, not, as I am specially informed, with any view to exhibition at the approaching Christmas, but as part of the regular work of the school. I examined the twelve elder scholars; their reading was rather indistinct and slovenly; they were not accustomed, as I found, to be checked so long as the words were pronounced; and no heed was given to expression, or to any investigation as to the purport of the reading lessons. My questions on the meanings of some simple words were met by blank silence and astonishment on the part of the boys: and by the master's explanation to the effect that he was not accustomed to put questions of that kind. The writing was the best feature of the school work, many of the copy-books being neat and otherwise creditable. Before giving a sum in arithmetic I asked, as usual, how far the lads professed to go? The answers varied: discount, square and cube root, decimals, fellowship, etc. were mentioned, and all professed to have gone beyond proportion and fractions. Yet the question, "How many articles costing 35. 44d. each can I buy for £50?" which I desired them to write down and think over before they worked it, baffled them completely. Not one boy could work it out, and the master urged, in explanation of their failure, that he did not think there was such a sum in the book.

There were in the four towns on which Mr Fearon and I reported in 1869 many thousand children of persons of the artizan class taught or 'minded' in schools of this type.

It is very characteristic of England that the awakening of the national conscience to any sense of responsibility in relation to the education of the people did not begin until a later period than in most other civilised countries, and that when it did begin it was a slow process. Scotland had made its first provision at the instance of John Knox. In several of the German states, in Würtemburg, Saxony, and Prussia, public provision was made for schools in the middle of the 18th century. In France, Turgot and Talleyrand had formulated plans for a national system of education, and, under the régime of the first Napoleon, legislative effect was given to a comprehensive plan with the same object. The founders of the New England States had from

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