Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country

Within the last few years an illustrious proof has been given that a great school is not necessarily so sensitive a plant as to depend for its life-blood and vigour on the essential qualities of the soil wherein its founders first fixed its roots. ‘The Grey Friars’ of Thackeray’s novels, the Charter House school, which, in R. C. Jebb, now Professor of Greek in, as well as M.P. for, Cambridge University, has produced probably the first scholar of the latter half of this century, has been removed recently to the great advantage of the physical health and literary industry of its scholars from its ancient home in London city to the rural neighbourhood of Godalming town. A precedent for the same policy in less famous instances, exists. At Hewsworth, in the West Riding, Archbishop Holgate’s grammar school has been closed from lack of pupils. Its endowment was merged in that of the grammar school at Barnsley, a town of some 36,000 inhabitants, midway between Sheffield and Wakefield. Within half a dozen years, the Barnsley school, thus reinforced, had achieved prosperity, and had adopted the chief recommendations for effective teaching made by the Commissioners. One thing is at least clear. If liberal education, the process, that is, of the development of the whole intellectual nature, without immediate reference to the supply of material needs, is not to become a mere tradition; if, in other words, literary culture be worth preserving as an instrument for training the mind, the cry for merging the grammar schools in agencies of specialist and technical teaching must not be adopted without consideration. The highest experts in this matter agree that the scientific and technical instruction, which is visibly a paying investment, runs in these days no risk of neglect, but that there does exist a danger of the first aims and the true methods of intellectual training being ignored. Even thus, fairly equipped as England is with the machinery for secondary teaching of the scientific sort; still better furnished as she might be with a more economical administration of existing resources, fresh provision must be made on a liberal scale before the national appliances are complete. The Commissioners have estimated in those counties to which they have paid special attention the number of boys or girls educated at secondary schools at 21,878 or 2·5 per 1,000 of the population. As might be expected, the local inequalities revealed by this analysis are very great. Thus, in Bedford, because of the great Harpur endowments of that small county, the proportion per 1,000 is 13·5. In Lancashire the population has altogether out-grown the secondary endowments available: the proportion per 1,000 is only 11. In Yorkshire it is only 2·1. In Warwickshire, notwithstanding the splendid foundations of Edward VI. at Birmingham, and the wealthy and famous schools of Warwick and Coventry the proportion remains as low as 5·2.

While these aspects of latter day education are being considered, the honourable connection of the new Local Government bodies with schools must not be ignored. Liverpool, like South Lancashire generally, is not ill supplied with agencies for secondary or technical instruction. The means of the capital and of the county would both be inadequate but for the very liberal contributions made by the County and City Councils to the schools owned by religious and secular proprietors for boys and girls. The companies thus spoken of are enabled by the Councils to carry on more than one particular school at a loss, even though the deficiency be not made good by the profit on other schools of the group. In view of the fact stated above that a great educational pioneer of this century, Joseph Lancaster, was a Quaker, it is interesting to know that the most recent Education Commission selects for special compliment the Ackworth Friends School, open to members of the Society from all parts of the world, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The more searchingly the enquiry is made, the more distinctly there emerges the fact that private venture schools created by voluntary effort, conducted by individual enterprise, render the most effective service to secondary education. These institutions open their doors for public examination. They cannot, therefore, be unworthy of State help. Their headmasters and their chief assistants generally are University graduates, and were often trained at one of the older public schools. A fresh rung in the ladder of educational ascent will have been made when these schools, 30 per cent. of whose teachers are University graduates, receive official registration as well as whatever material assistance State recognition can confer. State organization of national teaching primary or secondary by means of official examination and by grants of money proportioned to the proficiency established by these ordeals, is, as we have seen, and as it must always be remembered, not more than half a century old, and in a national sense, scarcely therefore passed beyond its infancy. The progress indicated in the preceding remarks justifies the expectation that before very long the edifice will be crowned with a completeness worthy of the strength with which the foundations have been laid, and more than one storey of the fabric has been already reared.

Other agencies now fairly at work in this enterprise remain to be mentioned. Before the Universities had sent their resident representatives to the East End of London, and to the slums of other great cities, they had actively identified themselves with the encouragement and the testing of secondary teaching throughout the land. The Oxford and Cambridge middle class examinations began to be held during the early sixties in the chief towns of provincial England. Very soon afterwards, there were organized successively the Higher Schools Examination Board, conducted by the two Universities, and the University Extension Lectures which presently will be examined here with some detail.

But by this time the fresh appliances for elementary and secondary education, both directly or indirectly growing out of the legislation of 1870, had changed the physical, not less than the intellectual, aspect of the whole country. In the city as in the suburbs, in the provinces not less than in the metropolis, the whole landscape was thickly dotted with new piles of buildings, in all cases constructed with marked regard to convenience and health, substantial always, in some cases really handsome. These were the new Board Schools, some for the most elementary instruction of the rising generation, some for higher grade teaching, or for imparting to older children the rudiments of scientific and technical knowledge. In the former case the buildings were surrounded with gravel playgrounds, furnished with swings, parallel bars, and other gymnastic appliances, all used under the direction of an expert teacher, who alternately with the drill sergeant came on duty during play hours. The structures annexed to the actual class-rooms of more advanced pupils were furnished within as laboratories and work rooms. Here the pupils were apprenticed to the initial duties of the chemist, the gasfitter, the electrician, or of any other vocation they were destined in after life to follow. One result of this new start in the State schools was the stimulus of a competition that produced a perceptible increase of efficiency in the private schools not necessarily identified with any religious denominations. These private schools still exist; and by the greater elasticity of their system, and special opportunity of encouraging individual originality in the learners they are the salutary and indispensable adjuncts of the State institutions. The generally superannuated and often inefficient dominie, alternating between slumber over the text book from which he was supposed to teach, and unprovoked aggressions with his cane upon the knuckles or any other available part of the persons of his nearest pupils, is now replaced by a master in the prime of life and energy, who, if not a graduate in a University, has the certificate from one of the many examining bodies which attest his fitness for the place. Almost imperceptibly to-day, the elementary school matures into the secondary school. Nor is the development always indicated by a change of name, for higher grade elementary schools, to employ their official title, in which, after all his Standards have been passed, the Board School boy, between 15 and 17 years old is placed, are in effect not less of secondary schools in their way than Cheltenham or Westminster. Controlled indeed by the School Boards, they prepare their pupils for matriculation at the London or other Universities, or for entrance upon professional life. Thus, in 1894, exclusive of the capital, the English School Boards controlled no fewer than sixty establishments of this higher type. Of that number thirty-nine were organized science schools. The fabric of the buildings had been provided out of the rates. The cost of the superior teaching was defrayed by private munificence, or by the State grants conferred by the Science and Art Department which, in South Kensington began as, and still is, a portion of the Department in Whitehall. The number of boys and girls, according to the latest statistics, educated in these superior Board Schools is 4,606 boys, 2,023 girls. Outside London, the great majority of the institutions now spoken of are in the Northern, the Midland and the Eastern counties. Advantage to all concerned might be expected to accrue could these higher Board Schools be managed, if not in active concert, yet with the practical approval, and pecuniary encouragement, of the County Councils. When, therefore, by the withdrawn Bill of 1896, it was proposed to invest County Councils with educational powers, but not, save in rural districts, to displace School Boards, the new duties contemplated for those Councils were not those for which they entirely lacked preparation. In addition to all this, the great City Guilds, notably the Drapers, Grocers, and Goldsmiths provide for secondary teaching not only in London, but wherever their property lies, a machinery of proved effectiveness. The more recent Intermediate Education Act fills in Wales the interval between the schoolroom and the workroom; its precedent is sure to be followed elsewhere. The means, therefore, of technical training accessible to the very humblest classes of the community, cannot be described as inadequate. While the tendency thus is for places of secondary teaching to become training grounds for special, technical, or professional instruction, it is satisfactory that Oxford and Cambridge should hold before the eyes of the country the standard of the more general culture which is identical with real education, and should bring to the very doors of the humblest homes throughout the country the effective and inexpensive agencies for securing this teaching.

CHAPTER XII
THE LADDER OF EDUCATION

Mr Lowe’s advice thirty years ago now fairly fulfilled. Individual influence co-operating with the State reforms the true secret of recent educational advance. Animating effect felt throughout the country of Benjamin Jowett’s educational example at Oxford. The practical and concrete test of the helpfulness of the educational ladder to the entire community applied in detail. Instances of Board School boys, and of sons of day labourers who have risen to distinction with the help of the new educational agencies. Experiences of the Clerk of the London School Board and others. Missing rungs still to be supplied to the ladder by reorganization or slight enlargement of existing resources. Need of reorganizing the teaching profession by new local and central councils. Dangers besetting the present movement illustrated.

The theory, and, in outline, the practice, of the educational reforms reserved for the most recent years of the present reign have now been explained with as much fulness as the scheme of this work permits. It remains concretely, if of necessity briefly, to answer the question: What actually has been done? No Blue Books, or other educational statistics are necessary to convince one of the reality and magnitude of the enterprise already accomplished. ‘Let us educate our masters,’ was the advice of Mr Lowe when, in the House of Commons, he bewailed so brilliantly and bitterly the era of the new democracy begun by the legislation of 1867-8. The advice has been followed. A new generation has sprung up, which is demonstrably better educated and more humanized than any of its predecessors. The diminution of pauperism and crime; the gradual disappearance from London and from other great towns of the uncontrollably rough element among the street observers of public holidays; the growing competition among the industrial classes of museums or picture galleries with drinking bars on Sundays and on popular feasts; these are the more superficial signs of the progress already made and still going forward. Intelligent foreigners,³⁸ the very men who are said to anticipate the judgments of posterity, declare that within the last twenty years the physiognomical type of the London street loungers and loafers has visibly improved; that the look of the vulture which was habitual on faces pinched by hunger, and puffy or pallid with debauchery, is no longer the dominating expression of feature; that the rapacious arabs of the pavement who were formerly ready to devour the new comer outside Charing Cross or Victoria railway stations, where they have not disappeared, have become orderly, intelligent, and not altogether the reverse of polite. It requires perhaps an Englishman to appreciate at their true worth, the more delicate gradations of this improvement as it is illustrated elsewhere. Go into the pit or gallery of a London theatre, on the Surrey side or in Hoxton. In look, in manner, and in the kind of conversation between the acts, the play-goers have changed. If there were ever any danger of an orange or ginger-beer bottle descending from the gallery to the pit, the peril is now obsolete. Should the situation be Shoreditch or the City Road, the strains of the orchestra intermittently may be accompanied by voices joining in the chorus with original variations. But the melodies, however irregular, only express an honest holiday enthusiasm. Schools elementary, whether of the first or second grade, secondary, technical or scientific, explain much of this new improvement in the facial characteristics and at all public places in the general deportment of the humblest of Her Majesty’s subjects. But they do not account for the entire change. Something like twenty years ago, when a work named England was in preparation its author by personal inspection of the localities mentioned, ascertained that the latest reports on the truck system as in some parts of Staffordshire it continued to exist, and of the agricultural gangs in more northern counties, faithfully depicted the social condition of great masses of the mining and rural population. The same local examination to-day presents a cheering contrast to the writer’s earlier and depressing experiences. In every town and village of the United Kingdom it is now easier than was ever known before for the very poorest to live in a cleanly, a godly, sometimes even in a comfortable fashion. All the necessaries, most of the superfluities, of existence are to-day unprecedentedly cheap. Wages have risen all round, till a pound a week has become the normal pay of unskilled adult labour in the town, and about twelve shillings in the country. Some conspicuous evils in our industrial system have indeed yet to be removed. The fines and deductions³⁹ to which, often without just cause, the earnings of factory hands are subjected, have been denounced with just severity, though in moderate language, on platforms and in print, by Sir Charles Dilke. On this side of the Millennium finality in social legislation will prove, it is to be feared, not less difficult than in political matters Lord John Russell found, to his disappointment, was the case. The advance of civilization itself creates new social conditions which call in their turn for periodical legislation. Till the resources of all classes are equalized, there must be some who cannot protect themselves, on whose behalf the legislature must interpose.

That is only to say that England is not Paradise. Meanwhile, socially as well as educationally, the progress made is so great that two decades since the most sanguine prophets would have pronounced it to be impossible. The Staffordshire miner, the roughest perhaps of his class, would no longer be represented, even by Punch, as proposing to ‘heave half a brick’ at a new comer for the offence of having a strange face. As for setting the bull-pup at the parson’s little boy, the suggestion is less likely to come, if at all, from the collier than from the mischievous undergraduate, the son of the collier’s employer who is home for his College vacation, and indulges a pretty canine fancy. The eighth Duke of Devonshire is not a social leveller. But on a public occasion he had the frankness to define the difference between the Sunday crowds in Hyde Park round the Reformers’ Tree, and the week day crowds in the Ladies’ Mile as being that the former were not nearly as well dressed as the latter. That implied compliment to the manners of a metropolitan mob at once showed the discernment of him from whose lips it fell, and emphasizes the truth of the views expressed in the present context. Even the carnival of Lord Mayor’s Day has felt the touch of those humanities that are said in the Latin grammar example to soften manners and not permit them to be brutal. The London crowd which, as Mr Disraeli knew, was the most emotional in the world, is to-day the best conducted, and incomparably the least drunken. As for its occasional rowdiness: what are these little outbursts in comparison with the horseplay of the prosperous gentlemen in glossy, silk hats, with high white collars, and deep wristbands, who, having placed a new rose in their button hole, drive high-stepping cobs to their suburban railway station every morning and who, if a stranger strays into their Stock Exchange deal with that unfortunate person as an Epsom mob treats a welsher. Continuation schools, lectures, universally accessible for adults who wish to carry on their education beyond the limit of their school days, the discipline of collective sight-seeing in museums and galleries; the habits formed at free libraries; these are the agencies that share with the teaching which the State provides the distinction of rearing a new generation, not merely veneered by a superficial decorum, but wholesomely controlled by a public opinion of its own quite as real as that which dominates Belgravia or Pall Mall.

Before considering the provisions necessary to complete the educational ladder, it will be well from specific instances to see what the facilities already established have done towards promoting the ascent from the Board School to the University. The following instances now published for the first time, are supplied by the courtesy of the Clerk of the London School Board. In 1879 a boy whose first learning was gained at a primary London Board School, obtained on entering a secondary school the Carpenters’ Foundation Scholarship, together with the Conquest gold medal. Shortly afterwards he became captain of the City of London School. Proceeding thence to Cambridge, he won a Foundation Scholarship at Trinity; eventually was placed in the first class of the Classical Tripos, became next a Fellow of Trinity; and subsequently held a high position in the Board of Trade. Another lad of equally humble birth in 1880 got a mathematical scholarship at Queen’s College, Cambridge, was among the Senior Optimes in the Tripos and in 1886 was appointed a mathematical master at one of the great public schools. In 1881, another Board School boy, having received the Greek and Latin certificate from the Universities Examining Board won a classical scholarship at St John’s, Oxford, and afterwards a First Class in Classical Moderations. A little later he was placed fourth in the First Class of Civil Service candidates. He has since developed into a useful official of the Local Government Board. Another boy of like antecedents won a scholarship at St John’s College, Cambridge; subsequently came out first class in one division, second class in another division, of the Theological Tripos; carried off the Jeremie Septuagint prize, open to the whole University, and afterwards became a successful parish clergyman. Other distinctions won by candidates of the same category are a scholarship at the City of London School; in 1883 a first place in the competition for vacancies in the India Office; in another case, and with the other sex, in 1885, the fifth place in the London Matriculation test, the Gilchrist and Reid scholarships, and later First Class Academic Honours for English. This instance is the more memorable because it is the earliest distinction of the sort won by a Board School girl. Since then the same young woman has become an assistant teacher at the Ladies’ College in Jersey. This example has often been repeated since. Three or four of the prize winners at Girton College during the later eighties were London Board School girls. The well-known senior curate of St Saviour’s, Everton, Liverpool, a High Honours Cambridge graduate, had been a Board School boy. His colleague had been enabled by a Fishmongers’ scholarship to enter at Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge. In the summer of 1880, F. J. Wild was the first London Board School boy who went to Balliol. Nine years afterwards, this lad entered the Indian Civil Service, and became Assistant Magistrate and Deputy Collector in the North-West Provinces. ‘Bachelor of Science, Bedford College, first division, 1891;’ ‘Recommended by Wesleyan Conference for training in their theological institutes and for the Home ministry;’ ‘Teacher at Diocesan Training College;’ these are comparatively common entries in the catalogue of Board School honours for this decade. In or since 1893, there have been some half dozen cases of Board School boys taking College and University Honours at Oxford as well as good places in the Indian Civil Service competition. The experience of the London Board Schools is not unlike that of similar institutions in the provinces. A decennial calendar after the Oxford precedent of distinctions academic or professional won by Board School pupils is a volume which it would really be worth while to prepare, and materials for which are accumulating on all sides. Pending the completion of the ladder for ascent in the normal way from the Board School to the University, private encouragement supplies many of the missing rungs. Thus, the vicar of a Herefordshire village noticed the quickness of his gardener’s son; helped him to enter the Hereford County School. From this the lad got a scholarship to Malvern College. Afterwards, one of the first Board School boys who won that honour, he carried off the entrance blue ribbon of a Balliol scholarship. In due course the gardener’s boy took a first class in Classical Moderations, and a first class also in Classical Greats.

Typical instances have now been cited sufficient in number and variety to show that, as seems to be the general opinion of the last Education Commission, notwithstanding incompletenesses and imperfections here and there, enough has already been done to enable every clever boy in whatever station he is born by his own industry and volition to secure the same opportunities of cultivating his gifts as the nobleman’s son who wins the Newcastle medal at Eton. The personal effort and initiative of the late Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, did more perhaps than has been done by any other individual to promote this work. Under him the College of Wycliffe not only maintained the prestige which it had acquired in the days of Dr Jenkyns, and which was greatly increased by the successor of Jenkyns, Robert Scott, but became at once the patron and the pattern of minor places of education throughout the country. Provided they showed ability and industry, the day labourer’s and the artizan’s son were welcomed from the provincial grammar school as warmly at Balliol as the Sixth Form boy from Harrow or Eton. The connection between secondary schools of all grades in the provinces and the University on the Isis had already been promoted by the agency of local examinations; it was rendered more intimate by the Socratic interest which Jowett took in the intellectual welfare of the rawest lad from the country if only he showed the slightest sign of mental promise. Jowett’s stimulating sense of citizenship was felt during his life in the remotest corners of the country. Its animating influences have survived his death; they still operate as an inspiring force wherever the domains of municipal and educational life converge. This good man and patriotic citizen did not live to witness the active assumption of educational responsibilities by the County and Borough Councils from which, not vainly, he hoped great things. An educational system in thorough touch with Oxford and Cambridge on the one hand and on the other hand with primary village schools; this was the ideal that Jowett, Lake and Stanley advocated to the earlier School Enquiry Commissions. Jowett lived long enough to see in the case of several great provincial grammar schools, notably that of Bradford, his ambition fulfilled.

In many, if not in most districts, the new provincial Councils have now added as many rungs to the educational ladder as could fairly be expected. The wants which still await fulfilment are definite. They ought not to prove very difficult to supply. Local endowments supplemented by a moderate amount of State help, will, if wisely directed, provide the larger facilities still needed for the promotion of higher grade elementary school pupils to grammar schools. In order that there may be no further waste either of the money or of the machinery for national education, a drastic scheme of reorganization seems to be a cardinal necessity. Secondary education is a phrase too mechanically interpreted as a synonym for technical or scientific education. If the Statutes be interpreted literally, the County Councils are empowered only to levy a rate for a higher school grant when the teaching which that grant defrays is to enable a boy or girl to learn the elements of some remunerative handicraft, and is thus expressly sanctioned by the Technical Education Act of 1890. If the Councils have gone beyond this, and pecuniarily ministered to the needs of a more generous culture, they have acted, so to speak, at their own peril, or that action has been rendered possible by the private liberality of their more opulent members. In addition to this need of a new definition of the ambiguous epithet and substantive employed so often in the foregoing text, a new educational authority which can officially survey every department of the entire field of teaching has become indispensable. Centralized at Whitehall this authority will to some extent inevitably be. Its operation, however, must be highly elastic. The conditions of its control must be adaptable to the infinitely varying conditions, social, geographical, material, sentimental, of the United Kingdom. The most recent enquiries show that there is much less dissipation of educational energy by the mutual overlapping of schools than might be expected. The single instance of this sort to which attention has been directed by the last Commission is that of Bolton, where there exists an unprofitable competition between the grammar school and the Church Institute Boys’ School. Elsewhere, however, as at Leeds and other great towns of the North, Mechanics’ Institute Schools, Higher Grade Board Schools, trench respectively on each other’s province, though each of them, by slightly varying its curriculum, does good work and is in great local demand. The explanation of the latter fact is the universality of the appetite for higher teaching created in the large centres of the English population. The most frequent, and with proper care the most easily remediable form of overlapping occurs when the higher divisions of a lower grade school retain pupils already ripe for a higher grade school. What are the exact limits to be placed respectively to the provinces of elementary schools of both grades? and what to the grammar schools on the one hand, or the University schools on the other with which the rudimentary institutions ought closely and cordially to co-operate? these are problems with which, in the fifty-ninth year of Her Majesty’s reign, there does not exist any single authority competent to deal. The confusion between the jurisdiction of the educational bodies now in being is comparable with that which existed in the relations of the various administrative authorities and areas in the case of local government before these functions were comparatively simplified by the legislation of 1874 and of 1888. The Education Department in London has no concern with secondary schools save so far as some of these are inextricably intermingled in their operations with the finance or the teaching of primary schools. The Charity Commission wherein the Endowed Schools Commission is now merged, can only take cognizance of the agencies for higher teaching for a special purpose and from a single point of view. This loose and very partially effective machinery of control has since 1890 received a new element of complexity from the educational power vested with such happy results as it has been in the County Councils. The educational branch of the Privy Council office in London has long attracted to it young men of industry and talents from the Universities as well as of considerable administrative ability developed at a later date by official experience.