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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 to 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 equipment 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

in which work is done, of the methods adopted, and indeed of the Oos of a school and the moral influence it exerted. It tempted even the best teachers to the adoption of crude methods designed to secure the maximum number of 'passes' rather than to secure the highest results of school education. Nevertheless, it undoubtedly forced upon teachers the necessity of attending more closely to the 'rank and file' of the scholars, and it produced at least one result especially satisfactory to a Chancellor of the Exchequer; for the Government grant shrank in 1865 to £636,806 as compared with £836,920 in 1859.

All later experience has led by degrees to the modification of the 'payment by results' theory as originally embodied in Mr Lowe's Code. His successors have one by one sought to encourage the teaching of other subjects than Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, and have made part of the grant contingent on attendance as well as on examination. Mr Forster in 1869 obtained facts which showed how lamentably insufficient was the provision which up to that date had been made by voluntary effort to meet the educational needs of the people. My own report in that year showed that in Leeds with a population of 253,110, there were in average attendance in schools under inspection 12,422, in schools not under inspection 7,070, in other schools, reformatory, poor law, &c., 3,040, total 22,932; or less than ten per cent. of the population.

In the whole of the inspected schools of Leeds, only 274 scholars were presented in Standard VI, that being the class appropriate to scholars of 12 years of age. Contrast with these figures the returns just issued by the Leeds School Board for the year 1899. The population was 409,472, average attendance in inspected schools 67,375; and there is a good supply of Higher Grade and Technical Schools.

What Mr Forster's great measure did for the whole country cannot be measured merely by statistics. But it may be worth while to contrast the figures for the Metropolis alone in the year 1870 with those of the present day. With a population

of 3,258,000, requiring, according to the ordinary calculation 543,000 select places, there were in the former year in the various National, British, and other voluntary schools, places for 275,136. At the present moment, with a population of nearly 5,000,000, there are in London 226,381 on the rolls of voluntary schools aided and inspected, or rather fewer than in 1871; while in the course of thirty years about 450 new schools, each consisting of three departments,-boys, girls, and infants— have been erected by the London School Board, and the number of scholars on the rolls of these schools is 752,259, or threequarters of a million. Thus more than three-fourths of the children now attending Elementary Schools in London are provided for by the School Board, and the proportion increases yearly.

I said that the tendency of the Codes and Regulations of the Education Department had been steadily to mitigate what might be deemed the hard and mechanical operation of the system of paying by results.' Mr Forster sought then in introducing the Education Act to make the Code more elastic and to encourage the teaching of other than the three elementary subjects. Grants for discipline and organization were afterwards added; and in 1881 Mr Mundella recognised for the first time the system of training and of manual exercise which had been devised by Fröbel, and which has since done so much to brighten the school lives of the infant scholars and to increase their intelligence. He also sought by a graduated payment under the name of the "Merit Grant” to place it in the power of the Inspector to recommend a special award in respect of general intelligence, order, skilful method, beauty and perfectness of equipment, or any form of excellence which could not be adequately measured by the results of individual examination as tabulated in a schedule of "passes." Another Royal Commission, presided over by Lord Cross in 1887, discussed with much fulness and ability the conditions under which the grants ought to be assessed, and the bearing of the

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