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the first set apart certain lands to furnish a revenue for the common schools; and in Switzerland, the home of Fellenberg and Pestalozzi, education has, as we all know, been a matter of national concern ever since the foundation of the Republic. But in England it was not till 1816 that the energy of Brougham induced the House of Commons to appoint a Select Committee to enquire into the educational condition of the metropolis; nor was it till nearly 20 years after that any practical step was taken to carry the recommendations of that Committee into practical effect. In 1832 the first grant of £20,000 was made by Parliament for the building of schoolrooms, and this sum was distributed through the agency of the British and Foreign School Society and the National Society. In 1835, Brougham brought before the House of Lords his resolution affirming that it was the duty of Parliament to encourage the establishment of schools, and also of proper seminaries for the training of teachers. In 1838--the first of the Queen's reign-another Parliamentary Committee disclosed a lamentable lack of educational provision, and urged the necessity for legislative action. In 1839 a Committee of Privy Council was formed, at the instance of Lord Lansdowne and Lord John Russell, and charged with the task of administering any sums which Parliament might from time to time assign to educational purposes. The first Secretary of this Committee was Dr J. Philips-Kay, afterwards better known as Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth. He had visited Switzerland, Holland and Prussia, had familiarized himself with the working of the State system in those countries, and he returned home profoundly impressed with the seriousness of our own educational deficiencies, and full of zeal for the success and usefulness which the new Department seemed to him to promise his own countrymen. He was a man of large and statesmanlike views, and fine and generous enthusiasm; and he had before him a vision of a great system by which the State, with the cooperation of good men of all parties, might place popular education on a basis not inferior

to that attained by any continental country, and might express and give effect to the highest national ideals. But he underrated the forces of the opposition which had to be encountered. In particular, his continental experience had profoundly impressed him with the indispensable importance of training for the teacher's profession; and he desired to make such training a great State function. So he urged on the Government the duty of establishing Normal Colleges. Pending the decision of Parliament on this point, he and his friend Mr Carleton Tufnell, at their own private cost, set on foot such an establishment at Battersea. But the religious bodies took the alarm. Bishops and Nonconformists alike were unwilling that the training of the public teacher should pass out of the hands of voluntary societies into those of the State. Battersea College was acquired by the National Society; diocesan institutions, 11 for men and 14 for women, were hastily brought into existence; the British and Foreign School Society increased its own training accommodation at the Borough Road, and afterwards added at Darlington and Stockwell new colleges on its own distinctive principles; the Roman Catholics and the Wesleyans soon followed, and hence it has happened that the whole business of preparing teachers for their professional work is to this hour in the hands of voluntary bodies, and that no single training college in England is under either State or municipal government. Shuttleworth was much disappointed, but he could not part with the hope that the new education bureau could by its own action do much to control and ennoble popular education, and to help teachers to improve their professional qualifications. Accordingly, the Committee of Council hired Exeter Hall and other public buildings, and instituted courses of pedagogic lectures: Mr Hullah gave a series of demonstrations of his method of teaching singing, Mr Butler Williams held classes for the teaching of drawing on a new and improved system, and courses of lectures were freely opened to teachers on the Pestalozzian method of instruction in Arithmetic

and other school subjects. Teachers flocked to these lectures in considerable numbers. Text-books on various school subjects were published with the authority of the Committee of Council. But this and the like experiments were viewed with great disfavour by many, and especially by the founders of the new sectarian Colleges, who regarded it as an encroachment by a Government bureau on the domain of the Churches. What remained to the new department of education was the examination of candidates for the teachers' office and the award of certificates. The first of these examinations was held in 1848, two years after the famous Minutes of Council, and it is very significant of the view which the energetic Secretary took of the functions of his Department, and the spirit in which he undertook those functions, that in his official circular to the Inspectors who were entrusted with the supervision of the first examination there occurred these words:

"For the first time from 800 to 1000 Schoolmasters will be assembled, by the invitation of the Government of this country as Candidates for the formal recognition of their capacity to instruct the humbler classes of Her Majesty's subjects, and as a consequence of such recognition to receive immediately from the State an annual stipend proportioned to their merits and exertions. Such a fact is in itself very significant of the continually increasing interest which the Civil power takes in the condition of the working classes, whose moral and religious state and whose intelligence are acknowledged to be objects of vital importance to the common weal.

It is important that the assembled candidates should be impressed with a conviction of the anxiety of Government by means of a higher description of moral and religious education te improve the condition of the poor, and of their determination, as an indispensable means to this end, to elevate the position of the elementary teacher, by qualifying him to occupy a higher station and by rewarding his more efficient services by superior emoluments.

They should be reminded that the present low standard of salaries of schoolmasters and their equivocal if not mean position in society are the consequences of the humble estimate of attainments and skill which has been adopted in respect to them, and that it is impossible to raise them to a position of dignity or comfort unless the disposition of the Government towards them be seconded by their own efforts to qualify themselves to obtain these rewards.

They ought to receive from you the impression that they are called upon to cooperate with yourself and with the Committee of Council on Education, for the attainment of great national objects by means strictly consistent with the interests of every industrious, intelligent, and wellintentioned teacher."

The policy here foreshadowed in the early days of the Education Department was thus to stimulate the best ambition of teachers and to invite their cooperation with the State in achieving a great national object. Grants were made direct to the schoolmasters and mistresses, and graduated in proportion to their standing in the examination, and some direct payments were made to managers under the name of 'capitation grants' calculated on the number of scholars who had attended school a certain number of times. The grants rose rapidly: in 1839 the sum voted was £30,000, in 1846 to £100,000, in 1853 it had risen to £260,000, and in 1856 to £451,213. In 1858 to £663,435, and in 1859 to £836,920. Statesmen and churchmen alike became alarmed at the rapid growth of the national expenditure, and a Commission of which the Duke of Newcastle was chairman was instructed in 1858 to report on the working of the system. Their report was somewhat disheartening; they declared that far too small a proportion of the children of school age were to be found in the schools, that the attendance of the scholars was irregular, that as to the instruction, although the more promising scholars received a good deal of attention, the rank and file of undistinguished scholars were often neglected. And they recommended a very drastic remedy, that instead of paying the teachers directly, in proportion to their own attainments, and the general equip ment of the school, the children should be individually examined; and that the grant paid to the managers-no longer to the teachers should be assessed strictly in accordance with the number of scholars who could pass a simple examination in Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. This was the method of payment by results to which Mr Lowe, who was Vice-President

of the Council, gave effect in the crudest and most pitiless form in his celebrated Revised Code of 1861.

It need hardly be said that this step was a bitter disappointment to Sir James Shuttleworth, who had now retired with a well-earned baronetcy and in rather broken health. He saw the abandonment of some of his own cherished ideals. His successors were no longer to take the initiative in educational reform. They were simply to be the dispensers of a large sum of public money in aid of local efforts, and to see that the nation gained a good shillingsworth for every shilling that it expended. The attitude of the Department towards school managers was to be summed up in the formula, "We do not prescribe what you should do, nor ask you to do it, but if you are willing to fulfil certain conditions we will pay you for your work." And the attitude of the Department towards Parliament and the taxpayer was summed up in Mr Lowe's famous formula, "We do not assert that the system will be economical, or that it will be efficient. But if it is not economical it will be very efficient, and if it is not efficient it will be very economical." Thus it came to pass that during several years the Education Department having renounced its earlier ambitions came to be regarded by the public merely as a grantdistributing office, and the school as a grant-earning machine. This result was defended on the plausible ground that as the State neither appointed the teachers nor paid them and could. not dismiss them, the only means at its disposal for influencing popular education was the making of money grants, the payment for certain subjects and measurable results, and the imposition of a money fine if those results were not obtained. To the scientific economist this appeared to be a very businesslike arrangement, but from the point of view of educational science it proved unsatisfactory. For it sets up a very inadequate standard of what the "results" of school training ought to be. It measures those results in a hard and mechanical way. It takes no account of general intelligence, of the order and spirit

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