The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924074825815 U A EEPORTS ON ELEMENTAEY SCHOOLS 1852—1882 s^ EEPORTS ON ELEMENTAEY SCHOOLS 1852—1882 MATTHEW AJINOLD, D.C.L., LL.D., ONE OF HER MAJESTY'S INSPECTORS OF SCHOOLS EDITED B^THa EIGHT HON. SIR FRANCIS SANDFOED, K.C.B. To^Tovs ^povs TpeZy •ttoititeSv els Triv iraiZeiav, t6 re fi4ffov Kal Th Swarhv (cal rh vpiitov. — Amstot. Pol. viii. 7. iLontion MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YOEK 1889 J'Zf^^r'Y' CORN UNIVERSITY yLiBRARV^ RiCHATiD Ci,AT AND Sons, Limited, LONDON AND BUNOAT INTRODUCTION. Matthew Arnold was appointed one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools by an Order in Council dated the 14th of April, 1851. He re- signed on the 30th of April, 1886, after a service of thirty-five years, in thp course of which he paid three visits to the Continent, at the request of successive Eoyal Commissions of Enquiry into our Educational System. These foreign missions resulted in the production of several oflScial reports, and other valuable works which have been published separately. The present volume contains his nineteen General Reports to the Education Department on Elementary Schools in this country, omitting matters of only local, personal, or temporary interest. His yearly statis- tical summaries of the 'work of his district,, the boundaries of which were frequently changed, as vi INTEODUCTIOK the number of schools under his inspection in- creased, are also left out. No conclusions of any importance could be drawn, at this date, from a recital of results produced from year to year, under varying conditions, in a limited number of schools ; or from a comparison of his first district, embracing one-third of England and Wales, with that under his charge when he resigned, confined as it then was to the School Board division of Westminster. It should be remembered, too, in reading these reports consecutively, that they refer to three distinct periods of administration; the original system introduced by the Minutes of 1846-7, under which Arnold entered on his duties, having been greatly modified by the Revised Code of 1862, and entirely transformed by the Act of 1870. In addition to his reports on Elementary Schools, he wrote twelve reports on the Wesleyan and unde- nominational Training Colleges for teachers. This latter series came to an end in 1870, when denomina- tional inspection was abolished, and the institutions he had hitherto visited were placed under the imme- diate supervision of the special Inspectors of Training Colleges; though he continued to take part in the annual inspection of the colleges situated in his INTRODUCTION. vii district. His reports of this class, as a rule, dealt merely with the life and history of individual col- leges for a single year, and would have no general interest. They are therefore not repuhlished. But some extracts from them are retained, which relate to matters of principle, or appear for other reasons to be worthy of preservation. The publication of this volume has been called for by many of Arnold's old friends, as a contribution to the record of the life of one who was very dear to them ; and as a means of rescuing some interesting and characteristic work from the oblivion which so rapidly, overtakes Blue Book literature, however valuable. It will, it is hoped, be welcomed by all those who had the good fortune to come under his influence in the discharge of their public duties whether as Ministers of State, oSicial colleagues, school managers, or teachers. One secret of that influence is to be found in his loyalty to the great principles contained in the motto ''■ on the title-page ; ^ Thus translated by Professor Jowett : " Education should be based upon three principles — the mean, the possible, the becoming, these three." The term mean, used here in the ordinary Aristo- telian sense, seems, as applied to elementary education, to be equivalent to what Mr. Forster called " a reasonable amount of in- struction " ; not confined to the three E's, on the one hand, nor trenching on the domain of secondary education, on the other. viii INTRODUCTION. its results are written in much of our past educa- tional history, and in the present working of our Schools. As to the future, many of his opinions and suggestions are specially commended to the careful study of those who, in Downing Street and Parliament, may have to deal with the great ques- tion on which he will continue to speak to them through these pages — in his simple and telling style — with so much knowledge of our own and foreign Systems, with so sweet a reasonableness, and with so high authority as an expert. F. K. S. N.B. — Permission to reprint these Reports was, when asked for, very courteously granted by Mr. Digby Pigott, the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office ; in whom the copyright of all Government publications has recently been vested by Letters Patent. COK^TENTS. REPOETS ON ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. Formation of District — High rate of Fees in Wesleyan Schools ; its effects on ' Discipline, Instruction, and Class of Scholars — Welsh Schools ; English should he insisted on — Organization ; Scholars should be retained in same Division for all suhjects — "Want of Infant Schools — Pupil Teachers : their health ; want of Intelligence ; neglect of standard English authors ; other Languages of little importance . . Pages 1 — 20 GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1853. Efficiency of Schools — Education of the masses — Usual effect of a high Fee — Fees may vary with circumstances of a locality — Compulsion — Want of recognized Text-Books ; e.g. in case of Grammar — Mixed Schools — Needlework — Drawing. Pages 21—31 GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1854. Inconvenience of change in limits of a District — How far should knowledge of local circumstances affect the Report on a School — Uniformity desirable ; difficult from variety of details — Moral Tone — Existing plan would be modified under a National System — Teachers gain by an exact method of reporting . .... . Pages 32 — 40 X CONTEXTS. GENERAL EEPORT FOE THE YEAR 1855. London Schools ; Manchester Schools — Peculiar circnmstances of former — Want of supervision by Ministers of Religion ; and of good accommodation — Organization improved — Xcw British Plan — General Rules to be observed — Is too much taught or attempted ? — Over-teaching — -Attainments to be demanded of Teachers ... . Pages 41 — 56 GENERAL EEPORT FOR THE TEAE 1S56. General rules as to growth and decay of Schools, open to continual exceptions — Half-Time Schools — Force of local circumstances ■ — Organization — TVant of correspondence between School Divisions and Groups of Desks . . . Pages 57 — 65 GENERAL EEPOET FOR THE YEAR 1S57. Country Schools — Their difficulties ; how caused ? at present inevitable — Not to be relieved by a body of low paid Principal Teachers — For Schools of another class. Certificated Secondai'y Teachers needed ; will probably be forthcoming — Improvement in Pupil Teachers — Infant Schools Pages 66 — 74 GENERAJ. REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1S5S. Progress, Management, and Superintendence — School Boolcs, purchase of, by Scholars recommended — Revision of Teachers' Certificates — Attendance, and social rank, of Scholars — Infants admitted too young ... . Pages 75 — SI GENERAL REPORT FOE THE YEAR 1S60. Visit to Continent — Value of Pupil-Teacher system — Reduction of Staff to be regretted — Dirty and unhealthy state of our School- rooms — Great imperfection of School Books . . Pages 82 — 89 CONTENTS. GEN'EKAL REPORT FOR THE TEAR 1S61. Cleanliness of London premises somewhat improved — Pupil Teachers; their instruction in Grammar ; its proper limits ; their want of taste, as shown in paraphrasing ; remedy suggested. Payes 90—95 GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1S63. Revised Code, introduction of— Inspection and Examination, under the Old and Now systems, contrasted — Reading Books improved — Culture of Pupil Teachers ; of English and Scotch Students in Training ; and of Teachers . . Pages 96 — 108 GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1S6T. Second Foreign Mission — Impressions on return — ^^Vant of life in English Schools, caused by Revised Code. Decline in supply and quality of Pupil Teachers — Changed spirit of Teachers — Prospect of fresh calls upon Them — How to be met ? — Effects of Code on Schools, Inspection, Elementary and Higher Instruction — More free play wanted — Payment by Results not sound — Compulsory Education — School Fees — School Books, need of control — Public and Private Schools, a con- trast Pages 109—133 GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1869. Results of examination — Teaching by rote— Reading, "Writing, and Arithmetic as taught under Revised Code — Minute of 20th February, 1867 — Newcastle Commission — Inspectors and mechanical teaching — Test examinations — Suggested change of Grants — Compulsory and gratuitous schooling — Religious Instruction ... Pages 134—152 CONTENTS, GENERAL EEPOET FOR THE YEAR 1871. Useful change in Standards — A Grant-earning examination desirable — Numbers in Standards — Rate of failure — Extra subjects ; their importance — Use of Literature — Returning favour to Profession of Teacher ... . Pages 153—161 GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1872. Undenominational Inspection — Improred Results in 1872 — Special Subjects — Recitation, its utility— Latin desirable ; should be taught from the Vulgate — Different Classes of Schools com- pared, as to Class of Scholars, Management, Organization, and Methods— Drill — Pupil Teachers — Registers . Pages 162—170 GENERAL REPORT FOE THE YEAR 1874. Progress since 1872 — Defective attendance — Bishop of Manchester and Revised Code — Effect of Literature on intelligence — The Grammar Paper, as a literary Test ; unsatisfactory results — Paraphrasing — Parsing — Remedy suggested — Matriculation of Teachers . . .... . Pages 171 — 1S5 GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1S76. Code of 1876 — Recitation — Needlework — Class Subjects — Katur- Jcunde — Extra Subjects — The Three upper Standards objec- tionable — Board Schools — Spelling ; a Reviewing authority required — Improvement in Schools ; and where it lags. Pages 186—200 CONTEjSTTS. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1878. Working of the schools — Need of simplicity — Natur-kundc ; what it ought to be for Elementary Schools— Fourth Schedule — Latin to be retained, and French — Learning by heart, its formative use — Cultivation of Intelligence — Reading — Grammar — Exorbitant Cost of Education, especially in London, as compared with France — Scale and proportion not kept in view — Municipal control desirable . . . Pages 201 — 224 GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1880. English poetry ; its importance and popularity — Choice of pas- sages—The School course as a whole ; Fourth Schedule — Number of subjects — Obligatory and class subjects — What a teacher should aim at — Grammar as a part of training — How to parse — Scientific Subjects — The short-time system — School expenditure in London . . . Pages 225 — 244 GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1882. Voluntary Schools in Westminster ; hold their own ; the useful ends served by them-rAdvantages of payment for Schooling — Useful connexion between Voluntary Schools and their Managers — Evening Schools — The New Code — Overpressure ; how to guard against it — The sense of creative activity — " Knowledges " requisite ; and something more. Pages 245—259 CONTENTS. EXTRACTS FROM REPORTS ON TRAINING COLLEGES. Eepoet on the Weslhyan Tkaining College, ■\YESTMiNSTr,r. ; FOE THE Year 1S53. Training of the Students — Special objects pursued in this College' . Pages 261— 265 Report on the Wesletan Training College, Westminster ; EOE the Year 1856. Efforts to reduce the disproportion between extent of "Wesleyan operations in-day and Sunday Schools — Spirit of co-operation with Committee of Council . . . Pages 266 — 269 Eepoet on the Training College ov the British axd Foreign School Society in the Borough Road ; for THE Year 1858. Prominence given to Study of Method— Instruction in Domestic Economy ... . . Pages 270— 276 Eeport on THE Training Colleges of the British and Foreign School Society ; in the Borough Road, for Schoolmasters, and at Stockwell, for Schoolmis- tresses ; for the Year 1861. Teaching of Domestic Economy— Lectures — Music and Physical Science as Educating Agents Pages 277 — 279 Repoet on the Training Colleges of the British and Foreign School Society ; foe the Year 1864. Teaching Lessons as given before the Inspectors. Pages 2S0— 282 CONTENTS. XV Report on the Training Colleges op the British and Foreign School Society ; for the Year 1867. Callisthenics and Gymnastics Pages 283 — 284 Special Report on the Training College of the Congke- gational Board of Education at Homerton ; foe the Year 1868. Scope of Visit — Present , ciroumstanoes of College — History and Rules of Congregational Board — Their Schools JSvangelical — meaning of this Denomination ; its identity with the general denomination of Protestant Schools in Germany. Pages 285—291 Report on the "Wesletan Training College, Westminster ; foe the Year 1868. Need of instruction in Universal history and history of Religion — Narrow conception of Religious Instruction — Contrast offered in German Schools ' .Pages 292 — 298 APPENDIX. Minutes of 4th May, 1859 ; and 20th February, 1867. . Page 299 EEPOETS ON SCHOOLS. GENERAL EEPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. Formation of District — Higli rate of Fees in AYesleyan Schools ; its effects on Discipline, Instruction, and Class of Scholars — Welsh Schools ; English should be insisted on — Organization ; Scholars should be retained in same Division for all subjects — Want of Infant Schools — Pupil Teachers ; their health ; want of Intelligence ; neglect of standard English authors ; other Languages of little importance. I HAVE the honour of presenting to your Lordships my general report upon the British, Wesleyan and other denominational schools ^ which have come under my inspection during the past year. The midland district, in which these schools are situated, is a new district, formed in 1851. Before that time, all the schools of this class in England and Wales were comprehended originally in one, afterwards in two districts. As the number of schools ^ Before the Act of 1870 was passed, eveiy school, to which public grants were made, was required to be (a) in connection with some religious denomination, or (6) if undenominational, one in which the Scriptures were daily read. Mr. Arnold visited all schools not being Church, or Boman Catholic, Schools. ^ B 2 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. receiving aid from your Lordships increased, this division into two districts was also found insufficient, and a third district was formed out of counties with- drawn from the two districts previously existing; this third district, which has been committed to my charge, comprehends the English counties of Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Stafford, Salop, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick, Leicester, Kutland, Northamp- ton, Gloucester, and Monmouth, with all those of North Wales except Flintshire and Denbighshire, and the whole of South Wales. Beyond the limits of this district I have visited, during the last fifteen months, nine schools in the East and West Ridings of Yorkshire. It will be obvious that an account of 104 schools scattered over this wide extent of country can have no pretensions to be considered an adequate account of the state of education within its limits; besides omitting altogether all schools coimected with the Church of England, such an account fails also to embrace many Wesleyan and still more British schools situated within the limits of the district to which it relates, but not receiving aid under the Minutes of 1846. In Northamptonshire there is but one British or Wesleyan school receiving aid under those Minutes; in Shropshire but one; in Worcestershire, Herefordshire, and Monmouth- GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. 3 shire also but one; in the county of Rutland none. In other localities, such as the neighbourhoods of Derby and of Birmingham, in the mining district of South Wales, in North Wales, and in the county of Lincoln, they are sown more thickly ; but even there they cannot be called numerous. With the general state of education in my district, therefore, I cannot profess myself from personal observation familiar; and even with respect to the 104 institu- tions which I have seen, and my observations on which supply the materials for this report, I feel that I am far from possessing that intimate acquaintance with them which I could desire ; the great majority of them I have as yet visited but once : and I therefore wish to be understood in this report as calling the attention of managers and teachers to those facts connected with their schools which have principally struck me, and which I shall chiefly notice on my future visits, rather than as confidently criticizing what I have seen in their schools. By a circular letter dated 14 October 1851, the attention of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools was particularly called to several subjects, among which that of school fees occupied the first place. With this subject I will begin, for the treatment of it wiU involve the mention of other matters on which I am anxious to make some remarks. B 2 4 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. Of the institutions wliich I have visited during the past year 47 come under the general designa- tion of British schools, though not all of them immediately connected with the British and Foreign School Society ; 35 are Wesleyan schools ; 22 are quite independent. The total income of 112 schools, representing little more than the total income of the institutions in- spected, is stated by the managers at 12,774Z. Is. Of this sum 6,1921. I7s. is stated to have proceeded from the school pence, that is, in round numbers, one half of the total cost of these schools has been collected from, the scholars themselves. This is a large propor- tion ; and it would be stiU larger if the number of Wesleyan schools, among the 112 whose aggre- gate income is stated, were greater. The Wesleyan schools have established, generally speaking, a rate of payment on the part of their scholars higher than that which is made in the other elementary schools that I have seen. This rate of payment varies from 2d. to 8^. per week for each scholar; in some schools a majority of the scholars pay 3d., in others 'id. ; but in none less than 2d. It is obvious that these rates of payment must generally exclude the children of the very poor ; and although these are not altogether excluded (for arrangements are sometimes made in Wesleyan schools by which GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. -5 poor children are admitted at a reduced rate of payment, either' by suhscribers' tickets, or on the recommendation of members of the school committee) yet on the whole, the Wesleyan schools which I have/ seen must be considered as existing for the sake of the children of tradesmen, of farmers, and of mechanics of the higher class, rather than for the sake of the children of the poor. In fact, these schools are sometimes nothing else ,than private schools, in which the salaries of the teachers, the school furniture, and the books are provided out of the school pence, the managers supplying little more than the building in which the school is held. It is evident that schools of this kind have not the first claim to assistance from public funds, whidh are designed to promote the education of the poor. And I think it may well be a question for the managers of Wesleyan schools to consider whether it is not desirable for them to extend the basis of their educational opera- tions, and to confer on a wider circle the benefits of their excellent schools. A lower rate of payments would in my opinion greatly extend . their sphere of usefulness, while their present high character for respectability need in no degree be impaired. But apart from this question of the exclusion of the poorest class of scholars, and taking the Wesleyan schools as they now stand, I wish to notice the con- 6 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. veniences and the inconveniences which I conceive to result from the present system of high payments. The conveniences are — the better and more instructed class of children frequenting these schools as compared with that frequenting cheaper ones; the greater intelligence of their parents, and greater sense of the advantage of having their children educated, with consequently greater disposition, as well as greater means, to keep them longer at school. The inconveniences are the inconveniences of private schools in general — the disposition of parents to interfere, and the diminished independence of the teacher. Parents who pay 6d. a week for the in- struction of their children are apt to criticize nicely, though not always judiciously, the institution where that instruction is given. They desire this and that for their child, and they object to this and that, and, being often not very reasonable persons, they greatly embarrass a teacher. They are exceedingly apt, for instance, to object to the employment of their children as monitors, on the ground that teaching takes them away from learning ; yet, so long as the allowance of pupil-teachers to a school is not greater than at present,'- the employment of a certain number of monitors is almost indispensable ; and, in my ' At this date, one pupil-teacher was allowed for every forty or fifty scholars in average attendance. GENERAL EEPOET FOR THE YEAR 1852. 7 opinion, to be employed as a monitor during a part of his time is most useful to the advanced scholar himself as well as to the school To the less advanced scholar it is no doubt injurious; but it is in the case of the advanced scholar, where the payment is high, that the complaint arises. The teacher's independence is diminished, be- cause, when his salary is principally or entirely derived from the school pence, the favour of the parents becomes of the greatest importance to him; hence it arises that the children of these schools, though disciplinable, are often not well disciplined, owing to the master's fear of offend- ing parents by a strictness which may appear to them excessive. This is a most important matter. I am convinced there is no class of children so in- dulged, so generally brought up (at home at least) without discipUne, that is, without habits of respect, exact obedience, and self-control, as the children of the lower middle class in this country. The children of very poor parents receive a kind of rude discip- line from circumstances, if not from their parents ; the children of the upper classes are generally brought up in habits of regular obedience, because these classes are sufficiently enlightened to know of what benefit such a training is to the children themselves ; but children of the class I am alluding to receive no 8 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. discipline from circumstances, for they are brought up amidst comparative abundance ; they receive none from their parents, who are only half educated themselves, and can understand no kind- ness except complete indulgence ; and, in conse- quence, nowhere have I seen such insubordination, such wilfulness, and such a total want of respect for their parents and teachers as among these children. The teacher's hands cannot be too much strengthened in the schools which this class frequents ; for, if they are not discipHned at school, they will, while young, be disciplined nowhere ; and a scale of fees is peculiarly undesirable, which makes the teacher dependent on the favour of their parents, and un- willing to risk that favour by introducing strict habits of discipline. There is another inconvenience arising out of the system of payments in these schools; that is — the instruction is disordered by it. This happens in the following way. Some children are admitted at a lower rate of payment than others ; those who pay least are to be taught least ; consequently, scholars perfectly capable of taking their place with the highest class, but unable to make the highest pay- ment, are thrown back into the lower classes, and comparatively neglected. Again, those who pay most are to learn most ; accordingly, those children GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. 9 who make the highest payments are put into the highest class, whether fit for it or no. They are often new-comers, very ill-taught, and wholly in- capable of profiting by lessons such as those given in the highest class ought to be. A plan more calculated to derange and dislocate the instruction of a school it would be difficult to imagine ; and the teacher who is responsible for that instruction ought, in my opinion, always to decline to adopt it. I shall not mention by name the particular Wesleyan schools in which I have found the highest rates of payment existing. I do not think it necessary to do so, for I hope at my next visit to find the rates lowered ; nor do I mean to deny that the Wesleyan schools in general are, even at present, very usefuL I am most glad to see them in the receipt of government aid. There are many cases, indeed, in which the burden thrown on the local promoters of these schools is as heavy as that thrown on the local promoters of British or National schools ; but, at any rate, the advantages obtained from the employment, through government aid, of apprentices and certificated teachers, are such as the Wesleyan schools could hardly hope 'to obtain through any private pecuniary outlay ; and it is no doubt desir- able that the funds at your Lordships' disposal should, if possible, after assisting to provide the 10 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. means of education for the really poor, be used to improve the quality of education for a class in some- what better circumstances. What I have said above applies equally, of course, to those British schools in which the fees are on the same high scale as they are in most Wesleyan schools. Generally, however, they are on a lower scale in British schools, and these schools do certainly bear a large part in the elementary education of the poor strictly so called. Still it may be doubted whether even these thoroughly reach the lowest strata of society. In country places it is no doubt true that the resources of Dissenting as compared with those of Church schools are so inferior as almost to compel a higher rate of pay- ment in the former ; but in large towns this is by no means invariably the case ; here the British schools often have a large and wealthy body of contributors, and here it is that the unsectarian and neutral character of these schools peculiarly fits them to be common centres, in which the children of a popula- tion divided into innumerable sects may be harmoni- ously educated together. Since, however, this un- sectarian character of the British schools often practically operates to their disadvantage in point of support, one is the more anxious that schools based on an admirable principle should at least do GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. 11 nothing to render themselves difficult of access by the establishment of rates of payment higher than those in competing schools in the same locality. Before quitting the subject of school fees, I wish to mention a plan pursued in one of the schools under my inspection, and -which, though not avail- able for elementary schools in general, I should be glad to see adopted in more schools of its own class. It is a school established for the children of the workpeople employed by an iron company ^ in a very remote part of the country. This school is not maintained by the company, nor by the payments of the children who frequent it ; but a weekly deduction is made from the wages of every person employed in the works, whether married or single, to form a fund to defray the expenses of the school, of a library, and of medical attendance. Those who have families pay no more than those who have none, and any number of his children may be sent to the school by the head of a family without his having to pay any additional subscription. The school is regarded as existing for the common benefit of all, directly or indirectly, now or at a future time. The deduction, I was assured, is submitted to with- out reluctance. In other places, masters and agents have informed me that they should be afraid to ^ LlyiiTi Iron Company, Maesteg, South Wales. 12 EEPORTS ON SCHOOLS. attempt such a plan, dreading the discontent it would produce ; but as it was an experience of its advantages, and not any superior enlightenment on the part of the workpeople, which made it succeed in the case I have mentioned, I am inclined to think it might be made to succeed elsewhere also, with a little management and patience at first introducing it. By such a plan, in localities where masters and companies cannot support schools at their sole expense, and where a rude population have little sense of the advantages of education to their children, and little disposition to make sacrifices for it, ample funds are raised for the support of a school, and it becomes the direct interest of the population to avail themselves of an institution to which they are in any case forced to contribute. The Welsh schools that I have seen are generally on the British system. Those connected with mining and manufacturing establishments stand on a peculiar footing of their own ; those not so connected generally charge low fees, are well attended, and may be con- sidered as really receiving the children of the poor. Indeed, the poor population of Wales is so entirely a dissenting population, that the British schools acquire a peculiar importance there, and they are filled with the same class of children that one sees in the National schools in England. The children GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. 13 in them are generally docile and quick in appre- hension, to a greater degree than English children ; their drawback, of course, is that they have to acquire the medium of information, as well as the information itself, while the English children possess the medium at the outset. There can, I think, be no question but that the acquirement of the English language should be more and more insisted upon by your Lordships in your relations with these schools as the one main object for which your aid is granted. Whatever encouragement individuals may think it desirable to give to the preservation of the Welsh language on grounds of philological or antiquarian interest, it must always be the desire of a Govern- ment to render its dominions, as far as possible, homogeneous, and to break down barriers to the freest intercourse between the different parts of them. Sooner or later, the difference of language between Wales and England will probably be effaced, as has happened with the difference of language between Cornwall and the rest of England ; as is now happening with the difference of language between Brittany and the rest of France ; and they are not the true friends of the Welsh people, who, from a romantic interest in their manners and traditions, would impede an event which is socially and politically so desirable for them. U REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. With a view to enable pupil-teacliers in Welsh schools the better to acquire a knowledge of English, the late Mr. Fletcher ^ proposed that they should be sent for six months in the middle or latter part of their apprenticeship to perform their duties in English schools. The great objection to such an arrangement is that English schools might not be very willing to accept teachers imperfectly acquainted with the language in which they would have to teach. Difficulty, I think, would also often arise on the part of the parents of the pupil-teachers and the managers of the schools employing them, when arrangements came to be made for meeting the expense of their six months' residence in England. I myself cannot but think that it is from the masters of Welsh schools that the promotion of the use of English in their schools must come, and that at present the masters themselves of these schools, not knowing English thoroughly well, do not employ it in their intercourse with their apprentices and scholars by any means so much as they should. If it were possible for Welsh students to be sent invariably to English training schools, apd on leaving the training schools to be em- ployed for two or three years in English schools, before returning into Wales, that I think would be the plan ■ H.M. Inspector of Schools, Mr. Arnold's predecessor in his district. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. 15 most likely to bring about an increased use of English in the Welsh schools. Such students, possessing, it may be presumed, at least a fair acquaintance with English at the end of their apprenticeship, would increase it to a complete familiarity while residing at an English training school, and associating with English students ; they would thus be perfectly serviceable in English schools ; and a year or two's habit of teaching in English in these schools would give them that thorough mastery of the language which alone will induce them to speak it without reluctance and of their own accord. With respect to the organization both of British and of Wesleyan schools, I regard it as being at present in a state of transition. It tends, I think, to become eventually very much alike in both, as the original masses in Wesleyan schools are broken up, and the original fractions in British schools are massed together. The vice of the strict Glasgow system is that numbers of children do not really come under teaching at all; of the strict British system, that numbers of children come under teaching so inadequate as to be hardly better than none. The problem is to discover an organization which shall maintain a just proportion between the teaching power in a school and the numbers taught in it. When this problem has been solved — when the 16 EEPORTS OX SCHOOLS. children are finally arranged in divisions, neither too large nor too small — I hope that the plan of retaining them in the same divisions for all parts of their work wiU be more extensively tried than it has been hitherto. At present there are few schools in which a child is not put into one division for reading, into another for writing, into another for arithmetic; and masters seem to have no notion of the increased regularity and steadiness of attention that a child gains by going throT3rgh his whole day's work with the same associates, and under the same teacher. I am convinced that the benefit to the children themselves and to the discipline of the school, which would result from retaining them in the same divisions, would more than compensate any additional trouble which the necessity of varying the instruction in particular subjects, such as arithmetic, to children equal in most subjects, and therefore classed together, might impose upon the teacher. In the institutions which I have visited during the past year, I have continually felt the want of infant schools. It seems to me that more good schools are clogged and impeded in their operations by a mass of children under eight years of age, at the bottom of them, than from any other cause. Yet the parents will not send the older children without sending these also. The only remedy for the incon- GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. 17 venience, where the expense of two but not of three schools in the same institution can be supported, is to adopt the plan of having mixed schools. The older children of both sexes are then in one school, the infants of both sexes in another. The Wesleyan schools which follow this plan appear to me to gain thereby a great advantage, and one which the British schools often lose by their anxiety to separate the boys from the girls. I must say that I have never yet seen any inconvenience arise from bringing to- gether boys and girls in the same school, if their playgrounds are kept distinct. Indeed, the education of girls, when they learn with boys and from a master, appears to me to gain that very correctness and stringency which female education generally wants ; while a female teacher is no doubt the person best qualified to instruct infants of both sexes. The circular of 1851, before alluded to, called attention to the subject of industrial schools, besides that of school fees, and also to the state and prospects of female pupil-teachers. A subsequent circular directed attention to the subject of elemen- tary drawing. Industrial schools and drawing I hope to speak of in my next report. With respect to female pupil-teachers, I think it right to remark on the serious amoimt of ill- health, especially in the later years of their appren- c 18 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. ticeship, which I have found amongst them. Managers of schools cannot be too strongly re- minded that the physical qualifications of girls presented as candidates for apprenticeship require to be most carefully observed, and that the duties of pupil-teachers are such that delicacy of constitu- tion alone, without any positive infirmity, unfits a girl for discharging them without great risk. I am sure your Lordships cannot be too strict in guarding against the admission to apprenticeship of sickly children, boys as well as girls ; intelligent as they often are they always want many qualities which a teacher should never be without. It may be a question, perhaps, whether an affliction like lameness or the loss of a limb, where the general health is good, need always be considered as a disqualification for the office of pupil-teachers ; but where the general health is decidedly feeble (and the managers ought always to ascertain this) a child should never be presented as a candidate. On one other topic, in connection with the subject of pupilrteachers, I am anxious to touch in conclusion. In the general opinion of the ad- vantages which have resulted from the employ- ment of them, I most fully concur; and of the acquirements and general behaviour of the greater GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1852. 19 number of those of them whom I have examined I wish to speak favourahly. But I have been much struck in examining them towards the close of their apprenticeship, when they are generally at least eighteen years old, with the utter disproportion between the great amount of positive information and the low degree of mental culture and intelligence which they exhibit. Young men, whose knowledge of grammar, of the minutest details of geographical and historical facts, and above all of mathematics, is surprising, often cannot paraphrase a plain passage of prose or poetry without totally misapprehending it, or write half a page of composition on any .subject without falling into gross blunders of taste and expression. I cannot but think that, with a body of young men so highly instructed, too little attention has hitherto been paid to this side of education ; the side through which it chiefly forms the character ; the side which has perhaps been too exclusively attended to in schools for the higher classes, and to the development of which it is the boast of what is called classical education to be mainly directed. I attach little importance to the study of languages, ancient or modem, by pupil-teachers, for they can seldom have the time to study them to much purpose without neglecting other branches of instruction which it is necessary that they should follow ; but I c 2 20 EEPORTS OX SCHOOLS. am sure that the study of portions of the best English authors, and composition, might with advan- tage be made apart of their regular course of instruc- tion to a much greater degree than it is at present. Such a training would tend to elevate and humanize a number of young men, who at present, notwithstand- ing the vast amount of raw information which they have amassed, are wholly uncultivated ; and it would have the great social advantage of tending to bring them into intellectual sympathy with the educated of the upper classes. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1853. EBSciency of Schools — Education of tlie masses — Usual effect of a high Fee — Fees may vary with circumstances of a locality — Compulsion — Want of recognized Text-Books ; e.g. in case of Grammar — Mixed Schools — Needlework — Drawing. My estimate of the efficiency of the British and Wesleyan schools generally has certainly risen. While the abundance of work and the demand for labour have had during the past year an un- favourable effect upon the regularity of the attend- ance in them, I have still been more and more con- vinced of the thorough way in which, in the majority of cases, the elements of instruction are taught to the children frequenting them, and more and more struck with the acquaintance shown by the upper classes of these schools with grammar geography, and English history. With regard also to the desire of the authorities of the central institutions to make the sphere of usefulness of the schools connected with them as 22 KEPOETS ON SCHOOLS. wide as possible, and fairly to devote their main efforts to advancing the education of the actual poor, I believe that it is most sincere. As to Wesleyan schools particularly, of the failure of which to reach the lowest classes of society I spoke last year, I have received from the authorities of the Wesleyan Institution at Westminster the strongest assurances in this respect. Nevertheless, -while more and more convinced that the present elementary schools sufficiently educate the children who frequent them, and while more and more convinced that the central institutions sincerely desire to promote the education of the poor, I remain in the opinion which I last year expressed, that in the schools which I visit, and above all, in the Wesleyan schools which I visit, the children of the actually lowest, poorest classes in this country, of what are called the masses, are not, to speak gene- rally, educated ; that the childTen who are educated in them belong to a different class from these ; and that, consequently, of the education of the masses, I, in the course of my official duty, see. strictly speak- ing, little or nothing. I mention this, not for the purpose of casting blame upon any one, but simph" as a fact which arises under the present state of things. The present schools supply, and on the whole efficiently GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1853. 23 supply, a demand which, no doubt, exists ; they are not to be blamed if they do no more than supply that demand. Small farmers, small tradesmen, skilled mechanics, desire to have their children educated ; they are willing to pay a considerable school fee ; they often object as much as the classes above them to the contact, with their children, of children of the lowest class, of the class found in ragged schools ; their wants create a peculiar kind of demand, and that demand is answered by the present schools, and on the whole efficiently answered. Under the present system it is not to be expected that a committee which can fill its school with children paying 4^. or 6d. a week, will refuse to do so in order that it may admit children paying half, or less than half, that sum. It is not to be expected that a committee or a teacher should object to see their school grow more and more " respectable "; should object, as their suc- cess increases, to seeing that portion of it which is poorest, least profitable, most irregular in attendance, gradually eliminated to make room for a more desir- able body of scholars. A school is established, under the present system, at the pecuniary risk of its pro- moters ; this risk is, in many cases, very considerable ; it is natural that they should be glad to see, at the same time that their school is efficient, the risk disappear. 24 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. I have no intention, therefore, as I have said, of blaming any one for the result mentioned ; still, as it is often said that this result has little or no con- nection with the rate of school fees established in a school, I am anxious to say a few words on this point. It is urged, and by persons for whose authority on matters of education I entertain a sincere respect, that it is not the high rate of payments whicb deters parents from sending their children to a school, but their suspicion that the education they get there is not much worth having ; that they would le willing, did they think more highly of that education, to make great sacrifices to secure it for their children ; and that these sacrifices need not generally be greater in pro- portion than those which are made by many a family of small means in the middle classes, in order to send a son to school and college. And they add, that so far from poor parents objecting to a high school fee, the very suspicion they feel arises generally from the school fee being too low a one ; they cannot believe that anything can be worth much for which they are required to pay little or nothing. What is cheap, it is said, is always supposed by these poor people to be bad. And instances are brought forward, such as that of the King's Somborne school, in which the reputation of the school induced the labourers of the whole neighbourhood gladly to pay a high fee for GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1853. 25 the sake of sending their children to so excellent a school. I answer, that there is no doubt that all people will make great sacrifices to secure what is eminently desirable, or what is generally thought so ; and that if there existed in every parish in England a school possessing the high reputation of that at King's Somborne, a school much known and talked of, and at which it was a distinction to have been educated, then in every parish in England the poor would- willingly make sacrifices to send their children to such a school. But to bring this about, we must also suppose in every parish in England a man like the present Dean of Hereford, with an energy in pro- moting education, and a genius for organizing schools, quite rare and exceptional. We must suppose that what is now the exception, and has of course attracted the greater interest on that account, will become the rule. But this will never happen. The real practical question to consider is, whether in ordinary cases, such as form the vast majority — whether in cases when the managers are of fair average energy, the teachers of fair average merit, and the school of fair average reputation, a high school fee operates on the poor as an attraction. I feel quite convinced from all which I have seen and heard, that it does not operate as an attraction ; 26 KEPOBTS ON SCHOOLS. that, on the contrary, there are numberless cases in which the poor are deterred by a high school fee from sending their children to school. It is not the high school fee which is the attraction, but it is the high reputation of the school which makes the poor willing to pay a high school fee ; in ordinary cases, where this high reputation cannot be expected, it is vain to imagine that a high school fee will have any effect but a deterring one ; the parents will feel clearly the inconvenience of having to make a high payment, while they will not perceive any corresponding advantage to compensate it. At the same time, of course, it is to be remem- bered, that what is a high school payment in one part of the country is a low one in another ; that 4(^. a week is a moderate school fee in South Stafford- shire, for instance, while in Dorsetshire it is a high one ; the school fee may fairly differ in different parts of the country, precisely in the same proportion in which the rate of wages differs. This is very neces- sary to bear in mind ; and I am far from imagining that a lower school fee, or even a free admission, would induce the poor universally to send their children to school. It is not the high payments alone which deter them ; all I say is, as to the general question of the education of the masses, that they deter them in many cases. But it is my firm GENERAL BEPORT JOE THE YEAR 1853. 27 conviction, that education will never, any more than vaccination, become universal in this country, until it is made compulsory. I should be glad to see the subject of school books receiving increased attention. The diversities of these are at present truly embarrassing. Almost every educational society has its own school books ; these are by no means universally adopted by the schools in connection with it, and a recognized text- book on any subject is nowhere to be found. To this state of things your Lordships alone can supply a remedy. The inconvenience now arising from it is extreme, and in subjects where classification and arrangement are of peculiar importance, as in grammar, the multitude of text-books, all following a different system, is of serious prejudice to the learner. I really think that it matters little, com- paratively, what the text-book is, so that it be uniformly adopted. Some of the books now in use are, no doubt, more perfect than others, bat almost any one of those with which I am acquainted is adequate for its purpose. In grammar, for instance, the system of almost all of them has its rationale, capable of being comprehended by the mind, if the mind is steadily kept to it, and of serving as a clue to the facts ; but, under the present system, the same person often uses one grammar as a scholar, another 28 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. as a pupil- teacher, another as a student at a training school, another as a schoolmaster. Every one of these grammars following a different system, he masters the rationale of none of them ; and, in conse- quence, after all his labour, he often ends by possess- ing of the science of grammar nothing but a heap of terms jumbled together in inextricable confusion. I spoke last year of the want of infant^hools. More and more I become convinced of the necessity of them, both for the sake of the infants themselves, so much neglected and mismanaged in their homes, and still more for the sake of the eflSciency of the older schools. I retain my strong opinion, that when two schools only are possible, they should be not a boys' school and a girls' school, but an infants' school and an older mixed school. I think it is generally allowed by those who dislike mixed schools, that no actual harm arises to girls from attending them ; but it is said that those feminine qualities which are seldom developed in these girls in their homes, are not developed in a mixed school : I answer that this is true, but neither are they developed in a girls' school. When the infant school is sacrificed to the desire to keep the boys and girls in separate schools, it seems to me that the in- struction of all suffers, without any compensating advantage. It is important however that in the older mixed GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1853. 29 school, the needlework of the girls should be care- fully attended to. I hear indeed great complaints of the inefficient teaching of needlework, not in mixed schools only, but in girls' schools also, and even in the female training schools. But, be this as it may with regard to the training schools, there is no doubt that the needlework of the girls in elementary schools is not at present in a satisfactory state. At the in- spection of a school the main stress is necessarily laid on other branches of the school- work; thus, the teacher is perpetually tempted to direct her chief efforts towards bringing forward her pupils in these. The parents also, in general, seldom have much value for plain needlework, nor do the mothers teach it at home to their daughters ; the only kind of needlework which the parents admire, and which the children are anxious to practice, is crochet- work and ornamental needlework ; this is comparatively useless, and managers and teachers should, in my opinion, utterly prohibit it in school. The importance to a poor family that the daughters should be skilful in plain needlework is obvious to all ; yet their ignorance of it is something incredible. I heard the other day in a Lincolnshire village of a pauper family, in which were several daughters living at home ; the family were actually in receipt of parochial relief; their debts were collected, and among them was 30 RErOETS ON SCHOOLS. found a considerable one to a dressmaker, who, it appeared, made all the clothes of the female part of the family. And Miss Martineau, in an admirable paper in Household Words, has well shown what dis- comfort of all kinds is produced by the ignorance, in the female part of a family, of needlework and other matters of domestic economy, even in homes of a comparatively comfortable class in towns. Of industrial schools and of drawing, subjects which I barely noticed in my last year's report, I have this year also little to say. No industrial school has come under my inspection during the past year, and in the study of drawing no consider- able progress has yet been made in the greater part of the schools which I visit. The establishment of drawing schools is, however, likely rapidly to promote it ; and of the advantages which they offer many schools in my district, those in the potteries especially, are anxious to avail themselves.. This study is one which at present finds great favour among the most influential promoters of education. It is one which it is most important that those children in elementary schools who show any aptitude for it should have the means of pursuing ; but I will venture to remark that it is possible, by insisting upon it too much, to cause time to be wasted in it, by those who have no such aptitude. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1853. 31 I have already found instances in which the time so spent had clearly been wasted : and, when it is remembered how short is the time which the child- ren in elementary schools have to pass there ; how ignorant they generally are at their first coming to school; how irregular is their attendance afterwards; and how many subjects they have to gain some knowledge of; — that any of their school time should be unprofitably employed must be a matter of deep regret. It is the opinion of many persons at the present day, that every child should be taught to draw, as every child should be taught to read and write. It may be so : but I will venture to express my hope that they may, at any rate, be taught to read and write first. Your Lordships have done much to better the quality of education in this country, by improving the instruction in the existing elementary schools ; what is now perhaps most urgent, is to make this improved instruction universally available ; to widen the sphere of the elementary schools, and to extend the benefits of them to the masses. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1854. Inconvenience of change in limits of a District — How far should knowledge of local circumstances affect the Report on a School — Uniformity desirable ; difficult from variety of details — Moral Tone — Existing plan would be modified under a National System — Teachers gain by an exact method of reporting. I HOPE that the present arrangement of districts may contiaue unchanged for some time. The changes which have taken place have been, no douht, of the greatest convenience to me personally, by transforming into a manageable district what was at first a most laborious and embarrassing one, and I am under great obligation to your Lordships for sanctioning them. Change was, indeed, necessi- tated by the work of inspection of British and Denominational Schools out-growing in quantity the physical powers of those who were set to do it ; so that what at first could be done by one Inspector now demands the labour of four. Still, everj^ change, though necessary, has not been without its GENERAL EEPORT FOR THE YEAR 1854. 33 transient inconvenience ; eacL. has entailed, at first, a certain amount of irregularity on the Inspector's part, pending the complete arrangement of his time to meet all the claims of his new district, in visiting some of the schools under his inspection : hence delays in the transmission of annual grants, and inconvenience to teachers and apprentices. There is an advantage also in the same Inspector, where it is possible, continuing to see the same school year after year ; he acquires in this way a knowledge of it which he can never gain from a single visit, and he becomes acquainted not with the instruction and discipline only of the school, but also with its local circumstances and difficulties. These local circumstances and difficulties, it is of advantage, no doubt, that the Inspector should know them : it is a most important question, and one the necessity of a clear resolution of which becomes daily more and more apparent to me, in what manner and to what extent this knowledge should aifect his report on a school to your Lordships. I constantly hear it urged that consideration for local difficulties and peculiar circumstances should induce him to withhold the notice in his report of short- comings and failures, because these may have been caused by circumstances for which neither managers nor teacher were to blame, and because the state- D 34 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. ment of them may unfavourably affect a straggling school. There is some plausibility in this plea for silence ; but it is based, I feel sure, on a misconcep- tion of what the peculiar province and duty of an Inspector is. His first duty is that of a simple and faithful reporter to your Lordships; the knowledge that imperfections in a school have been occasioned, wholly or in part by peculiar local difficulties, may very properly restrain him from recormnending the refusal of grants to that school ; but it ought not to restrain him from recording the imperfections. It is for your Lordships to decide how far such imperfec- tions shall subsequently be made public ; but that they should be plainly stated to you by the Inspector whom you employ there can be, I think, no doubt at all. It is said that the Inspector is sent into his dis- trict to encourage and promote education in it ; that often, if he blames a school, he discourages what may be, from local difficulties, a struggling effort, and an effort whose inferiority is owing to no fault of its pro- moters. I answer, that it is true that the Inspector is sent into his district to encourage education in it : but in what manner to encourage education ? By pro- moting the efficiency, through the offer of advice and of pecuniary and other helps, to the individual schools which he visits in it ; not by seeking to maintain by undeserved praise, or to shelter by the suppression of GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1854, 35 blame, the system, the state of things uuder which it is in the power of this or that local hindrance to render a school inefficient, and under which many- schools are found inefficient according!}-. A certain system may exist, and your Lordships may offer assistance to schools established under it ; but you have not, surely, on that account committed yourselves to a faith in its perfect excellence ; you have not pledged yourselves to its ultimate success. The business of your Inspector is not to make out a case for that system, but to report on the condition of public education as it evolves itself under it, and to supply your Lordships and the nation at large with data for determining how far the system is successful. If, for fear of discouraging voluntary efforts, Inspectors are silent respecting the deficien- cies of schools — respecting the feeble support given to this school, the imperfect accommodations in another, the faulty discipline or instruction in a third, and the failure of all alike to embrace the poorest class of children — if everything is repre- sented as hopeful and prosperous, lest a manager should be disappointed or a subscriber estranged — then a delusion is prolonged in the public mind as to the real character of the present state of things, a delusion which it is the very object of a system of public inspection, exercised by agents of the Govern- D 2 36 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. ment on behalf of the country at large, to dispel and remove. Inspection exists for the sake of finding out and reporting the truth, and for this above all. But it is most important that all Inspectors should proceed on the same principle in this respect — that one should not conceal defects as an advocate for the schools, while another exposes them as an agent for the Government. If this happens, besides that the general picture of the state of education will be unfaithful, there is also a positive hardship inflicted on the schools which are frankly reported on ; they will appear at a disadvantage compared with other schools, not because these are reaUy in a better state, but because the statement of their defects is softened down or altogether suppressed. It is an ungrateful task to seem to deprecate, under any circumstances, consideration and indul- gence. But consideration and indulgence, the virtues of the private man, may easily become the vices of the public servant ; and I have ventured to submit the foregoing remarks to your Lordships because I think that in the inspection of schools there is a peculiar temptation to exercise these qualities unduly. A factory or a workhouse is, to most people, a less interesting and attaching object than a school ; it has less power of making a friend GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1854. 37 of its visitor, and of leading him, often half in- sensibly, to become its advocate rather than its reporting Inspector. The character of school in- spection, too, is, it appears to me, at present such as to render difficult the adoption of a uniform principle in reporting by all the Inspectors. The inspection of a school is now, upon a plan founded when a far smaller number of schools were under your Lordships' supervision than at present, carried out into such detail as to afford every facility to an Inspector, desirous to give a favourable report upon a school, for doing so, by enabling him to call atten- tion to special points of detail in which the school may be strong, rather than to others where it may be weak, or to its general efficiency, which may be small. At present, for instance, an Inspector finding an advanced upper class in a school, a class working sums in fractions, decimals, and higher rules, and answering well in grammar and history, constructs, half insensibly whether so inclined or not, but with the greatest ease if so inclined, a most favourable report on a school, whatever may be the character of the other classes which help to compose it. But it is evident that the attention of your Lordships is especially concentrated on those other classes, and that an elementary school excites your interest prin- cipally as it deals with these ; as it deals with the 38 EEPORTS ON SCHOOLS. mass of children who, remaining but a short time at school, and having few or no advantages at home, can acquire little but rudimentary instruction ; not as it deals with the much smaller number, whose parents can enable them to remain long at school, to pursue their studies at home, to caiTy on their education, in short, under favourable circumstances, and who therefore less need the care and assistance of your Lordships. The difficulty of obtaining an exact report on a school is still further complicated, if the Inspector is to think himself bound to ascertain (in a single morning) what is called the moral tone of a school, and to make the condition in which he imagines himself to have found this tell considerably upon the character of his report. Should a state of things ever arise which placed a very greatly increased number of schools under your Lordships' supervision; should your Inspectors ever have to work under a really national system of education ; the range of details to which their atten- tion in inspecting each particular school is now addressed would no doubt bo necessarily naiTOwed. Variety of judgment would then be less probable, when that which had to be judged of was less various. They would then, perhaps, have to look only to certain broad and ascertainable things : on the one hand, the GENERAL EEPORT FOR THE YEAR 1854. 39 commodiousness of the school buildings, the con- venience of the school fittings, the fulfilment of the necessary sanitary conditions; on the other, the competence of the teacher, the efficiency of the dis- cipline, the soundness of the elementary secular, and (in certain cases) of the elementary religious instruc- tion. But they would not occupy themselves in inquiring with what success the three or four head boys (sons, probably, of tradesmen in good circum- stances) out of a school of 100 or 150 children, could work an equation, or refer words to their Greek or Latin constituents. Until this time arrives (if it ever should arrive) the true duty of an Inspector towards your Lordships, the truest kindness towards the managers and teachers of schools, seems to me to be this — that the Inspector, keeping his eye above all upon the most tangible and cognizable among those details into which he is directed to inquire, and omitting, as much as possible, the consideration of what is not positive and palpable, should construct a plain matter-of-fact report upon each school which he visits, and should place it, without suppression, before your Lordships. But, although I thus press for the most unvarnished and literal report on their schools, I can assure the teachers of them, that it is from no harshness or want of sympathy towards them that I do so. No one 40 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. feels more than I do how laborious is their work, how trying at times to the health and spirits, how full of difficulty even for the best: how much fuller for those, whom I too often see attempting the work of a schoolmaster — men of weak health and purely stud- ious habits, who betake themselves to this profes- sion, as affording the means to continue their favourite pursuits: not knowing, alas, that for all but men of the most singular and exceptional vigour and energy, there are no pursuits more irreconcilable than those of the student and of the schoolmaster. Still, the quantity of work actually done at present by teachers is immense : the sincerity and devotedness of much of it is even affecting. They themselves wUl be the greatest gainers by a system of reporting which clearly states what they do and what they fail to do ; not one which drowns alike success and failure, the able and the inefficient, in a common flood of vague approbation. GENEEAL REPOKT FOR THE YEAR 1855. London Schools ; Manchester Schools — Pecviliar circumstances of former — Want of supervision by Ministers of Religion ; and of good accommodation — Organization improved — New British Plan — General Rules to be observed — Is too much taught or attempted ? — Over-teaching — Attainments to be demanded of Teachers. The schools in the most important part of my district, in London, I have now inspected three times ; and the present appears to me a good op- portunity for making one or two remarks upon their condition. I am more and more impressed with the idea that they are not in so satisfactory a state as they should be ; that not only do they not as a whole surpass country schools, but that they do not even, as a whole, rise to their level. Ex- cellent schools there are, no doubt, among those under my inspection in London, as elsewhere; but excellent schools everywhere are few in number, and pretty much on a level in excellence one with 42 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. another : it is of schools neither excellent nor very bad, of schools of average character, neither the highest nor the lowest, of the great majority, there- fore, that I speak. In London these schools seem to me not to reach so high a standard as schools of the same class in many parts of the country. Yet this is at first surprising. It appears, at first sight, as if the schools of a metropolis had advantages over schools in the country, which ought to ensure to the former the superiority. They exist in a great centre of wealth and intelligence, where their promoters have remarkable facilities for com- bination of effort; the teacher, often cheerlessly isolated in the country, has in London the best opportunity for self-improvement, and for help and stimiilus from others of his profession; the school children — always quick-witted in large towns, where the daily spectacle of a varied and powerful life passing before their eyes sharpens their intelligence — particularly alert and quick-witted in London, have besides in London this special advantage, that their reading, in spite of some faults of pronunciation, has a purity and delicacy of tone and accent which is quite remarkable. And of the work produced in elementary schools, how great a part consists in the reading; and what an advantage for making a favourable impression on the spectator have those GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1855. 43 elementary schools in which the tone and accent of the reading are agreeable. Yet, notwithstanding this advantage, an ordinary London school does not, I repeat, make a favourable impression upon the spectator when he contrasts its instruction and dis- cipline with those of an ordinary school in the country. Manchester is but the metropolis of a province ; and in Manchester schools, certainly, the school- children do not start with any advantage in point of their reading accent : yet the recent examination for Queen's scholarships seems to show, that the life and intelligence of even this provincial metropolis com- municate themselves to the schools within it in a manner which ensures to them a superiority over others excluded from like benefits. The schools of London do not show the same relative superiority. Is it that the excitement and intensity of London life are too powerful ; that they operate on those connected with elementary schools not as stimulants, but as distractions ; that, in London, managers are so overwhelmed with the pressure of business, with the calls of other pursuits, that they find it peculiarly difficult to bestow on their schools more than a hurried and intermittent attention ; that teachers have so many sources of interest offered to them outside their schools, so little encouragement and 44 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. supervision from their managers within them, that they too find it harder here than elsewhere to bend themselves to the hearty performance of a uniform, unpretending, and laborious duty ; that school- children, in their turn, are here particularly in- accessible to prolonged influence and regular discipline ? Is it, in short, that the activity of all kinds, which in other large towns exerts a favourable effect on the development of elementary schools, exists in London in an overpowering degree, and becomes prejudicial to them ? This question I will not now discuss. I pass on to name two special points in which, apart from all consideration of the general influence of London and London life, the schools under my inspection in this metropolis, as compared with those elsewhere, appear to me to stand at a real disadvantage. The first point is, the want of supervision by ministers of religion. It is well known what an advantage the National schools enjoy in the constant visits of the parish clergyman, of whose pastoral duties the care of his schools is now almost universally considered to form a main part. He is the member of the school committee generally the best qualified in all respects, always the best qualified in point of leisure, to attend at the school ; for that attendance, which with lay members of the com- GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1855. 45 mittee is an interruption of their ordinary day's business, is with him a jpart of his ordinary day's business. And the advantage of this supervision to the teacher, not merely in keeping him at work and vigilant, but in the cheerfulness and encouragement conferred by the presence of one who presents him- self (as, to the honour of the clergy be it said, is generally, I believe, the case,) as a fellow-labourer, rather than as an overlooker, is so evident that I need not enlarge upon it. But this supervision, far top often wanting in the British and Wesleyan schools which I inspect in the country, is, I regret to say, almost wholly wanting in those which I inspect in London. I believe, indeed, that with Dissenters the personal care of schools is not so universally considered one of the first and indispensable functions of the minister, as it now is with members of the Church of England. And I am aware too, that with regard to many of the British schools which I inspect, there exists a special reason for that absence of the ministers of religipn of which I complain, namely, -that in these schools the minister has adhered to the voluntary principle when the lay members of his committee have abandoned it; that they have connected their school with the Committee of Council against his will, and that he therefore has relinquished all participation in the 46 KEPOETS OX SCHOOLS. management of it. This may, in many cases, account for the ab.sence of the minister of religion in Briti.-h schools ; but that absence is not, because it may thus be accounted for, less unfavourable to the welfare of the schools. With Wesleyan schools the case is different. The Wesleyan body, as represented by tlieir educational committee, have accepted the prin- ciple of connection with the Committee of Council : there is not among them, I believe, any important body of malcontents on this point ; indeed, it would be hard to discover in the tenets of the Wesleyana, who are very different in this respect from the Independents and others, any ground for opposition to this principle. Consequently, in the committees of Wesleyan schools under inspection tlie lay and clerical members of the Wesleyan body are united ; and there is no reason why I should not meet in the schools which I inspect Wesleyan ministers as well as Wesleyan laymen. Indeed, the attendance of ministers in Wesleyan schools is, I know, strongly encouraged and inculcated by their general education committee, and by the authorities of their central iiLstitution at Westminster. And in Wesleyan schools in the country, acconlingly, it is becoming, I am glad to say, a more and raore frequent occurrence for me to meet the minister in the school ; and more than this, to find that he habitually visits it, and GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1855. 47 attends to it. In the Wesleyan schools in South Staffordshire, particularly, I find that the Wesleyan minister attends as regularly as the parish clergyman in the National school. But at Wesleyan schools in London it seldom happens that I meet a Wesleyan minister ; it seldom happens that I hear of his visits and personal attention being bestowed upon the schools throughout the year. The second point in which I find the majority of London schools at a disadvantage is the want of good school accommodation. In no school premises any- where, so far as my observation goes, is want of space, want of cleanliness, want of ventilation, want of playgrounds, so much felt as in school-premises in London. One would have hoped that the difficulty of obtaining extensive school-premises in London, arising out of the great value of space, would have been counterbalanced by the facility of obtaining in London a more numerous and a more wealthy body of subscribers : one would have hoped at any rate that cleanliness and ventilation might be provided for, even though the school-premises were incon- venient and insufficient. But this does not prove to be the case. Yet nowhere are good school-buildings, and, above all, a good playground, such a potent means of attraction to scholars as in London ; for nowhere are the benefits of air, hght, space, and free 48 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. • means of exercise, so scantily possessed by them in their homes. The spacious playgrounds attached to the Wesleyan practising schools in Westminster, in the midst of a densely crowded and poverty-stricken locality, form, in my opinion, one of the most delight- ful features of that institution ; and form also one of its best agents in the work of humanizing and civilizing the neighbourhood in which it is placed. If in respect of school-buildings the country parts of my district are more fortunate than London, yet in London no less than in the country I begin to find, I am glad to say, a more satisfactory state of things than formerly with regard to school-fittings and school organization. Increasing experience leads me more and more to prefer the Battersea plan of school organization — the plan now usually adopted in National schools — with some modifications, to any other. The new model of organization proposed by the Wesleyan education committee for their schools, follows this plan in its main features; so far as it departs from it by introducing a large gallery, and diminishing in consequence in school-rooms of ordinary size the number of the rows of desks, it is, in my opinion, inferior to it. But this large gallery is a point by which the Wesleyan body hold fast : they declare it an indispensable agent in their system of conveying religious and moral instruction ; and as GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1855. 49 with this part of the instruction in their schools your Lordships have bound yourselves not to inter- fere, before this declaration I have only to incline myself and be silent. The plan of organization followed in the model schools of the British and Foreign School Society in the Borough Road, and adopted by many British schools, is altogether different from that followed in National and Wesleyan schools. It was recom- mended by the late Mr. Fletcher, and a full account of it by him was published in your Lordships' Minutes ^ ; but he died before he had had much ex- perience of the mode in which it worked. I will frankly avow, that I find several inconveniences in it. It appears to me to provide too little desk accom- modation, to occasion too much moving about, too many changes of place ; and to cause a distribution of the school in which the main divisions are too large, and the subdivisions too small. To illustrate my objections, I will take the case of a school of 150 children organized on this plan. Of these, 50 will be on the gallery, 50 in the desks, and 50 on the floor. The better a school is, the more of the work done in it is work which is best done at the desk — by the scholar in a permanent station, with the means of writing conveniently : in a good school of 150 1 See Minutes for 1851-2, page 301. E 50 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. children, there will be more than 50 scholars whose work is advanced enough to make it desirable that they should have this advantage. Then, in order that each body of 50 may have the benefit of the desks in its turn, it is obvious that several changes of place wUl be necessary during the day ; these re- peated changes of place must occasion noise, wear and tear of floors, temporary interruption of studies ; all avoided when the organization is such as to permit the scholar to have his fixed place at a desk. Again, the school is divided into three bodies of 50 ; each of these is too large to be adequately handled by one teacher ; accordingly, they are in fact broken up into small divisions, not always sufficiently differ- ing either in respect of their numbers, or of the inadequate teaching power necessarily assigned to them, from the drafts under monitors on the old monitorial system. The general rule on which I insist is this ; — the scholar, to get on, should liave a fixed place, arid that place at a desk. This rule I have gathered from all the experience which I have had ; and I find, indeed, that the teachers of schools organized on the new British plan practically acknowledge its force, by giving to the highest and most advanced division of their school the greatest number of hours at the desks. But what I say is, that in a good school there is a GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1855. 51 greater number of the children than one third who are capable of profiting by this advantage ; and the result of the present plan often is, that while one- third of the school, the highest division, having this advantage, is very well brought on, the other two- thirds, the middle and the lowest division, are handled too much like divisions of infants, and exhibit, in proportion to the rest, too low a rate of attainments accordingly. I have no hesitation in enlarging upon this matter of school organization, because experience impresses me more and more with a sense of its importance. Next after the character of the master (long after it, certainly, but next after it), that which acts most powerfully to determine the condition of a school is, I think, its organization. It is hardly possible ade- quately to describe to those who have not experienced it the sense of relief and satisfaction felt on entering a school, which one has formerly known ill-arranged and ill-organized, for the first time after it has been re-arranged on a good plan. What was formerly intricate, confused, difficult to discipline, difiicult to inspect, now lies before you simple, clearly divided, comprehensible : to every one his labour is lightened ; the teacher himself can hardly comprehend how what seemed a mere mechanical alteration can have led to so great a moral effect. I appeal to the teachers of E 2 52 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. those schools in my district where a new plan of organization has been introduced with eminent success, whether they themselves were prepared for the extent to which they have reaped benefits from the organization of their schools. Experience alone has convinced them of it, as it has convinced me also. This is a matter, too, in which it is hard to conceive that party spirit should operate. No one can have any desire but that the best plan of organization should prevail : all the old plans have been found inadequate : of these old plans, the original British plan was, in my opinion, eminently the best, and the old National plan eminently the most ineffieieHfc-: but all have failed to answer the present requirements of elementary schools, and a new plan has gradually evolved itself, which has been "the slow fruit of experience, which is even yet not fully matured, which is the especial property of no sect or society, although by National schools it has now, I believe, very generally been adopted. The standard of attainment in the schools under my inspection continues generally at much the same level as in the year 1S54, and is satisfac- tory. The needlework in girls' schools has, I am glad to think, been more attended to, and has improved. GENERAL REPORT FOE THE YEAR 1855. 53 I hear many complaints that too high a standard of attainment is now required in elementary schools ; that the exact point up to which it is desirable to instruct the children attending them has been con- siderably outpassed ; that the children are more and more instructed in subjects injudiciously chosen, and in a manner to unfit them for their future station and business in life. These complaints have in them, I think, some- thing true and something false. It is not true, I think, that the course of instruc- tion in elementary schools generally embraces too many subjects, or is carried on in any of these subjects too far. Certainly it is not true with regard to those elementary schools which I inspect. These are not attended, as I have repeatedly said, by the lowest and poorest class of children : they are attended often by children who might well lay claim to an instruction of a more comprehensive and advanced kind than that which they obtain in them : they are attended universally by children who may well lay claim, on the score of social position and future prospects in life, to be instructed not only in reading, writing, and the elements of arithmetic, but also in the higher rules of arithmetic — in geography, in English gram- mar, and in English history. I do not mean to affirm it as my opinion, that there are degrees of instruction 54 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. exactly proportioned to the degrees iii society ; but I place myself in the point of view of the complainants themselves, and I say, that the children in those schools which I inspect belong to a class for which the complainants themselves would allow that such an instruction as they receive was neither improper nor over-ambitious. But it is true, that where schools profess to teach industrial work, or to train children for a certain occupation, and do not teach that work, or teach it inadequately, do not train the children for that occu- pation, or train them inadequately, then there is ground for complaint. In industrial and reformatory schools, for instance, instruction in a certain industrial work is the main object of the institution : there is cause for complaint if that main object is missed, whether it is missed because the special instruction has been in itseK bad, or because it has been thrust out by the teaching of other subjects. In girls' schools, again, there is, there must always be, a branch of industrial instruction indispensably professed — instruction in needlework : if this is given ill, if the girls cannot do plain work well, there is cause for complaint : it is no excuse that time has been occu - pied in teaching other branches of instruction well, if one indispensable branch has been neglected. In all these cases it is necessary to define clearly what the GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1855. 55 aim of the school is, or should be, and to judge the school accordingly as it attains or misses that aim. Much of the exaggeration respecting the over- teaching in elementary schools arises, I think, in the following way. People read the examination papers, which are printed from year to year in your Lordships' Minutes, and exclaim at the rate of attainment demanded ; as if the rate of attainment demanded by those examination papers was the rate of attain- ment demanded in elementary schools. They forget that these examination papers are for teachers, not for scholars. Yes ; but, they say, why demand so much learning from those who will have to impart so little ? — why impose on those who will have to teach the rudiments only of knowledge to the children of the poor, an examination so wide in its range, so searching in its details ? The answer to this involves the whole question as to the training of the teachers of elementary schools. It is sufficient to say, that the plan which these objectors recommend, the plan of employing teachers whose attainments do not rise far above the level of the attainments of their scholars, has already been tried. It has been tried, and it has failed. Its fruits were to be seen in the condition of elementary education throughout England, until a very recent period. It 56 EEPORTS ON SCHOOLS. is now sufficiently clear, that the teacher to whom you give only a drudge's training, will do only a drudge's work, and will do it in a drudge's spirit : that in order to ensure good instruction even within narrow limits in a school, you must provide it with a master far superior to his scholars, with a master whose own attainments reach beyond the limits within which those of his scholars may be bounded. To form a good teacher for the simplest elementary school, a period of regular training is requisite : this period must he filled with vjork : can the objectors themselves suggest a course of work for this period, which shall materially differ from that now pursued ; or can they affirm that the attainments demanded by the certificate-examination exceed the limits of what may without over-work be acquired within the period of his training, by a man of twenty or twenty- one years of age, of fair intelligence, and of fair industry ? GENEEAL EEPORT FOR THE YEAR 1856. General rules as to growth and decay of Schools, open to continual exceptions — Half-Time Schools— Force of local circumstances — Organization — Want of correspondence between School Divisions and Groups of Desks. The chief result of my experience as to the growth of schools, and the fluctuations in their condition, has been to establish the conviction that the general rules which one so often hears others lay down, and which one is so often tempted oneself to lay down, respect- ing the elements of growth and decay, of efficiency and inefficiency in this or that class of schools, are unsound, or at least that they admit of so many exceptions as to be practically of little value. The hasty generalizations to which the observer is led by the first contemplation of the present system of elementary schools in England are perpetually being corrected ; life appears at isolated points where one least expected to find it; decay takes place where one entertained least apprehension of it. I have sometimes thought, for instance, that schools 58 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. not especially connected -witli any religious body whose fortunes it might partake and in whose permanence it might share, had a natural tendency, when the. first impulse which led to their establishment had died away, to be neglected and to decline. With a constant enemy to contend with in the sectarian tendencies of the English people, with the constant danger, while they had no perpetual official promoter like the clergyman, of losing their original promoters by death, removal, decay of zeal in what was from the first a -purely volun- tary labour, or from other causes, these schools seemed likely to run a certain course, and when they had exhausted the special impulse which set them in motion, gradually to slacken speed and at last to stop. But I have seen schools of this kind, which appeared to be approaching the last stage of their course, recover themselves suddenly and start afresh. I have sometimes thought, again, that in schools where the bulk of the children were half-timers, the school-work was necessarily inferior in neatness, finish, and accuracy, to that of the children in schools where the half-time system is not in operation, and where the scholars had the benefit of a longer daily practice in their work. But in the British school at Milford, in Derbyshire, I found GENEEAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1856. 59 a school of half-timers where the school-work is eminent for these very qualities of neatness and finish, and may vie in these respects with that of the best schools, of whatever class, under my inspection. The fact is that at the present moment aU is so undetermined in England with respect to public edTication — one system, one body of persons is so little in possession of the entire field — that every- thing depends, in each locality, on special local circumstances, which are continually changing, and on individual agencies, which cannot be calculated beforehand. Public education is perhaps too vast a matter to be advantageously left to these individual agencies, but, where it is left to them, it is absolutely necessary to take into account their inherently fortuitous and independent character. It is necessary to leave each of them to produce freely its natural fruits, without attempting to prejudge its character and chance of success. Amongst the local efforts for the promotion of pubhc education which I have witnessed in my district during the last five years, none, perhaps, is so remarkable as that which the Wesleyan Methodists have been making during that period in South Staffordshire. In no part of my district, except in London, are the schools under my inspection 60 REPOKTS ON SCHOOLS. SO thickly scattered ; in none are they so well attended ; in none have they multiplied so fast and improved so rapidly in efficiency. Mr. Tremenheere's reports on the state of the mining population have sufficiently made known the moral and social condition of the working-classes in South Staffi)rd- shire; and, while that condition is such as it is there described, the elementary schools in that part of the country will not, as a body, be equal to the best elementary schools in other parts of the countiy. The home education of the children must make itself felt. But that these South Staffi3rdshire schools have attained, as a whole, the thoroughly respectable and satisfactory condition in which I now find them, a condition of efficiency quite out of all proportion with the barbarism of the district in which they are found, does infinite credit to the zeal of their promoters and to the labour of their teachers, and cannot fail in the end to tell powerfully upon the civilization of the neighbourhood. When first these schools came under my inspection in 1851, the rate of attainment which I found in them was far lower (with one or two striking exceptions) than that which I found in any other part of my district ; it was so low that, in order to obtain pupil-teachers here at all, I was in many cases forced to recommend the admission of candidates whose deficiencies would else- GENEEAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1856. 61 where have ensured their instant rejection. The rate of attainment in these schools generally is now, as I have said, equal to that of respectable schools in the best parts of my district ; I am enabled to demand the same proficiency of candidates for apprenticeship here as elsewhere; the actual apprentices perform, with credit, the same examination as others. And the new aspect of the school buildings (often, with the neighbouring Wesleyan chapel, the only considerable edifices, except the furnaces, in their locality) sufSciently indicates how recent is the effort which has produced these results. In nearly all these schools the fittings adopted are more or less in conformity with the Battersea plan, which, as I have stated in former reports, appears to me, of those at present in use, by far the most convenient. In some cases they are entirely in accordance with this plan ; in others they approach more nearly to the plan followed in the model school of the Wesleyan institution at Westminster, a plan which is a modification of the Battersea system, designed to meet the requirements of Wesleyan schools in respect of large galleries and collective instruction. But I constantly observe that, although a sound plan of fittings may have been adopted, the teacher has not organized his scholars in accord- ance with that plan, and that the organization^ 62 REPORTS OK SCHOOLS. therefore, of the school remains imperfect, although its fittings may have been made all that can. be wished. In these cases the managers have done their part, but the teacher has not yet adequately performed his. It is, indeed, a matter of some difficulty at once to organize a body of children in accordance with a plan which was not in use at the institution where the teacher was trained, and it is a very venial shortcoming to have failed in at once doing this perfectly ; but the excellence of this plan of fittings is that it is so simple and so precise that, in a school where it has been adopted, the mode of arranging the scholars in conformity with it suggests itself at once to the eye, and it seems as if a school so fitted would almost organize itself, if the teacher would allow it. The failure is generally in the following particular ; the divisions du not correspond vnth the groups of desks; one division considerably overlaps its own group of desks and invades the next group, another division does not half fill its own group. In fact, the scholars have not been re-organ- ized to meet the requirements of the new plan, but the same division of them is continued which was in use before the improved plan of fittings was introduced. Teachers must not forget that the excellence of the Battersea plan consists in this — that it facilitates the establishment of a system GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1856. 63 oi uniform clearly defined classes ; and, if the facilities which it offers for doing this are not taken advantage of, the mere introduction of a number of new desks and benches into a school is of no great benefit. The reasons generally alleged by teachers for not making their divisions correspond with the groups of desks may be reduced to two main points ; one, that the scholars are of such different degrees of attainment that they cannot be classed in bodies of uniform number ; the other, that the want of a sufficient supply of pupil-teachers compels them to enlarge, beyond measure, certain divisions, that they may have the benefit of the superior instruction of the pupil-teachers, and to contract beyond measure other divisions, that as small a body of scholars as possible may be subjected to the inferior handling of monitors. With regard to this second point, it is true that a group of desks will not properly accommodate more than from twenty-five to thirty scholars, and that, in schools where the allowance of pupil-teachers does not exceed one to every forty scholars, the allowance is inadequate to meet the requirements of the Battersea plan of fittings. But in schools not enjoying this allowance, it is far better, in my opinion, to divide regularly all but the youngest and least advanced children into classes corresponding with the groups of desks. U REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. and to throw together the youngest children into one large body, capable of being chiefly taught on the gallery, by collective methods and under one teacher, rather than to divide the whole school from top to bottom in an unsystematic manner, which generally leaves the largest bodies of scholars at the top of the school, and the smallest at the bottom. With regard to the first-mentioned point, namely, the different degrees of attainment of the scholars alleged as a bar against combining them in equal bodies, the answer to this is the same as the answer to the objection urged against the plan of retaining the scholar in the same class for all parts of his work. In both cases the answer is, that, uniform bodies can be formed of scholars having a sufficient degree of correspondence in their attainments to render their working together perfectly practicable, and that far greater advantages result to the disciplim and training of the scholar from placing him in a system of uniform, clearly defined classes, than result to his instruction from placing him in a system where the different shades of proficiency are made the basis of the organization of the scholars, and where the classification is as various and as little uniform as are the attainments of individuals. I cannot conclude this report without recording GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1856. 65 my satisfaction at what has been accomplished in the repair, refitment, and re-organization of the schools under my inspection in London, during the past year. In my last report I spoke unfavourably of the London schools in these respects. Some of them continue to deserve that unfavourable men- tion ; but I am bound to say that the great number of them merit it no longer. As I visited one of them after another in the course of last summer, I had perpetually the pleasure of finding a school which I had known dirty, ill furnished with fit- tings, and in bad repair, now wearing a totally new face. Some, too, even of those which were best provided before, had actually transformed them- selves by additions and improvements : and amongst these last it is but just to mention the great Jews' free school in Bell Lane, in the improvement of which no cost and no pains have been spared, and which has been now reconstituted on a scale worthy of its great resources and of its wide sphere of usefulness. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1857. Country Schools — Their difiSculties ; how caused ? at present inevitable — Not to be relieved by a body of low paid Principal Teachers — For Schools of another class, Certificated Secondary Teachers needed ; will probably be forthcoming — Improvement in Pupil Teachers — Infant Schools. Mt experience has hitherto lain chiefly among schools in towns ; on this account, I look forward with pleasure to the opportunity of becoming better acquainted with another class of schools, in the country and in somewhat remote situations, the state of which must always form a most important element in our calculations, when we attempt to estimate the general condition of elementary education. From what I have thus far seen of them, it strikes me that in the circumstances of this class of schools lies the main obstacle to the success, either of a purely volun- tary system of education, or of a system like the present, combining state-aid with voluntary local contribution. The promoters of these country schools are often both few in number and far from wealthy ; GENERAL REPORT FOE THE YEAR 1857. 67 the funds which they can raise, therefore, even though they may tax themselves severely, are far from con- siderable ; and the more inconsiderable are their own means, the more inconsiderable becomes the assist- ance which they receive from the state. For their poverty renders them unable to perform the all-im- portant first step, to engage a well-trained teacher ; the indispensable requisite to enable them to obtain an efiicient school ; the indispensable requisite, also, to enable them to obtain Government aid. Here, then, may be seen the real pressure, the real financial difficulty, which is comparatively absent in the schools under my inspection in towns ; for the town schools have not only in general a wealthier body of supporters to appeal to, but this body can at any time be considerably enlarged by a resolute and per- severing exertion. But in country districts the body of contributors is in aU cases necessarily limited ; it is generally — in the case of schools not connected with the Church of England, and deprived, therefore, of the aid of the clergyman and the squire — a body far from wealthy. Such a body of school-managers often invite inspection in the hope of obtaining a prelimin- ary aid towards the payment of an efficient teacher's salary, which no form of aid at present sanctioned by the Minutes of the Committee of Council can supply ; and in their extreme difficulty, and in their vexation F 2 68 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. at finding no provision whereby assistance from Government can reach them, their language is often that of bitter disappointment. " We have overcome," they say, " for the sake of the wants of our ill-pro- vided neighbourhood, the prejudices against state- connection in which we were reared, and after we have made this sacrifice of feeling, and have admitted Government interference, we find the Government refusing to help us, and reserving all its help for those who, far more than we, can help themselves." They forget, nor would it much console them to remember, that it is in great measure to their own jealousy, to their own past and now confessed prejudices, that their difficulty is attributable. Such an assistance as they demand amounts, in fact, very nearly to the maintenance and support of their school at the expense of the state. The state would contribute the bulk of the funds, and they would contribute the management. The principle of a school system reposing on voluntary local effort is thus abandoned. But what has hitherto made it im- possible for the Government in this country to found a national system of education ? The loudly-avowed preference for a system of voluntary local effort. And had the Government been inclined to offer an entire support to those schools which should demand it, what would have rendered such a course difficult GENEEAL REPORT TOR THE YEAR 1857. 69 or impossible ? The outcry that voluntary effort on the part of self-supporting and independent schools was to be swamped by the competition of schools maintained by the state. Only one way, therefore, was left open by which the state might, in part, remedy the shortcomings of voluntary effort, and that was by affording its aid only in correspondence with voluntary contribution. Thus schools were to depend for their existeruie upon themselves, and only for a higher development of their ejiciency were they to de- pend upon the Government. Even this arrangement has been accused of injustice to independent schools, by unfairly placing them in competition with schools improved and highly developed through Government aid. What would have been said of an arrange- ment which not only improved and developed such competing schools, but actually founded them and maintained them in existence ? It is, however, certain, that the present arrange- ment, imposed as it has been on the Government by the necessity of circumstances, and rendering as it has rendered all the benefit possible under those cir- cumstances, fails to assist certain schools which stand greatly in need of assistance. Professing as it does to improve the quality rather than to increase the quantity of elementary schools, it is most sufficient and successful in large towns and populous neigh- bourhoods. In these principally I had, until lately, 70 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. witnessed its operation, and by its success in these I had been profoundly impressed ; for here it is, above all, the quality of elementary education which needs improvement. On becoming more acquainted with its operation in poorer and more thinly peopled dis- tricts, I cannot but be impressed with the conviction, that its adequacy is here no longer the same ; for here it is the increase in the gybantity of education, it is the very establishment and maintenance of schools which is in many cases the thing required. The high rate of payment which the services of a trained teacher now command forms the obstacle in the case of schools of the poor class just mentioned, to their acquisition of such a teacher, and, therefore, to their participation in your Lordships' grants. To improve the position of the teacher in respect of his salary as well as in other respects, has been a con- stant endeavour of your Lordships, and that this endeavour has been crowned with success is a pubhc benefit. The formation of a class of 'principal teachers paid at a low rate is by no means to be desired ; and, therefore, while I lament the difficulty in which their inability to pay a high salary to a teacher places the managers of certain poor schools, I should be sorry to see that difficulty removed by any change which lowered the present standard of principal teachers' salaries. For the wants of these schools, therefore, it is not easy, under the present system, to suggest a provi- GENERAL REPOET FOR THE YEAR 1857. 71 sion ; there is, however, in the higher class of schools under my inspection, a want which is at this moment strongly felt, and to which it lies, I think, in your Lordships' power in some degree to afford relief. In this higher class of schools there is a great and grow- ing demand for regularly trained semndary or assistant foacAers, which is at present most inadequately supplied. Such teachers would be employed under the super- vision of the principal teacher whose salary would re- main at the present rate ; but the richest body of school- managers is generally unable, even were it desirous, to pay the assistant at the same rate as the prin- cipal. But the increase in the number of schools aided by your Lordships, and requiring trained teachers, is at present so rapid, that it still fully keeps pace with, or even outstrips, the supply of such teachers; a student in a training school, therefore, after he has finished the shortest period of training ' which is permitted, finds no difficulty in at once^i obtaining his appointment to an elementary school at a principal teacher's salary. There is not at present left, after the existing elementary schools have been provided with principal teachers, any class of students unprovided for, and willing, therefore, to accept a less remunerative, although, for them more instructive and more improving employment. For not merely is the teacher of a large and 72 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. important school greatly benefited by the service of a highly trained student, infinitely superior in training, information, and authority, not alone to the class of pupil-teachers, but also to the class of assistants established by your Lordships' Minute of July 1852, but the student too, on his side, may be greatly benefited by such service. Under the successful and experienced teacher of a large and thriving school he may learn what the training school cannot teach him, what his own ex- perience can only teach him slowly and after many mistakes — the practical methods by which great schools are made and kept thriviug. It is well worth his while for the sake of such knowledge, for the sake of learning, in a good practical school, how to manage children, how to deal with parents and managers — it is well worth his while, in consider- ation of such advantages, to content himself for a year or two with a somewhat lower salary. The time will no doubt arrive when the present extension of the pupil-teacher system will bear its natural fruits, and when, after all the principal- teacherships of elementary schools are occupied, there will yet remain year by year a considerable class of students not posted as principals, and will- ing, therefore, as in Holland and Prussia, to begin their career as assistants j but this period has not yet GENERAL EEPOin? FOR THE YEAR 1857. 73 arrived. Its arrival will greatly benefit elemeatary scliools, and will benefit in a scarcely less important degree the trained students also. Even under the present circumstances, I have been greatly struck with the keen and just sense which I have found existing among the students themselves of the advan- tage to be derived from serving for a certain period under an experienced master in a formed and success- ful school ; more than one student has expressed to me his readiness to forego the higher rate of salary which he might obtain as a principal teacher, for the sake of obtaining this invaluable experience as an assistant. At present, however, it is only in a school of the very first order, and offering, therefore, , to the student the most extraordinary advantages as a place of practical training, that I feel warranted in urging him to accept an engagement as assistant, to the temporary detriment of his condition as respects salary. Indeed the authorities of the training schools would at present be opposed to any extensive employment of their trained students as assistants ; for not only are they naturally unwilling to allow them to forfeit the tangible benefit of the best-paid situations offered, but they cannot leave the schools in connection with them without principal teachers, which they would do if they now diverted to other employment any considerable portion of their yearly supply of students. 71 KEPOBTS ON SCHOOLS. It is desirable, however, and I am sure your Lord- ships will feel it to be desirable, to encourage as much as possible among the managers of schools their growing wish for this highly trained and efficient class of assistants ; this only aid which can con- siderably lighten the labours of a chief teacher, or enable him to feel really at ease with respect to the management of those parts of his school which are not for the moment under his own personal tuition and superintendence. I find, I am glad to say, the committees of British schools becoming more and more alive to the importance of the establishment of infant schools; more and more disposed to admit the imdoubted truth, that the admission to their institutions of the older children of a family makes it incumbent upon them to make some provision for the education of the younger ; to admit, further, that this educa- tion needs a sepai'ate methodized system of its own, and that the presence of a large body of infants in an ill-taught and ill-trained mass, at the bottom of their older schools, inflicts injury on the whole school, and not merely on the infants themselves. The Wesleyans continue and extend their activity in the establish- ment of infant schools ; that department of element- ary education in which they have already done so much, and with such happy results. GENERAL REPOET FOR THE YEAR 1858. Progress, Management, and Superintendence — School Books, purchase of by Scholars recommended — Ee^ision of Teachers' Certificates — Attendance, and social rank, of Scholars — Infants admitted too young. With the progress of the body of schools under my inspection I have abundant cause to be satisfied. If the superintendence afforded to British and Wesleyan schools by their managers is in some respects not so active as that which National schools enjoy, the con- dition of comparative independence in which the teachers are thus left is not without its advantages, when the teachers are of such a class as those gene- rally found in the best British and Wesleyan schools. They form and pursue their own plans with entire security and consecutiveness ; and occupy in the eyes of their scholars, and of the parents of their scholars, a position of undivided dignity and authority. There are some teachers who cannot safely be trusted with entire independence ; some institutions which cannot thrive without the constant intervention and fostering 76 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. care of their managers. I have in a former report observed that the usual course of management followed in British and Wesleyan schools is not per- fectly adapted to teachers and institutions of this kind. But there are also some teachers who can be safely trusted to walk alone ; there are some institutions so securely fixed, so efficient, and so popular, that the best thing which their managers can do for them is- to leave them to themselves. Of this latter kind are now many of the teachers and many of the institutions under my inspection in London; and for such the operation of the ordinary British and Wesleyan system of manage- ment is decidedly beneficial. It has now become a common practice, through- out my district, for the scholars to buy their own school-books. The advantages of the practice are obvious ; the children are found to take more care of books which are their own ; above all, books which are the property of the scholar can be taken home by him in the evening, and the study of them continued out of school. But I have remarked in some schools where this practice was followed that several children, even in the higher classes, were without books altogether. They and their parents could not or would not buy them, and there was no public stock of which they could have the GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1858. 77 use in school; but such a state of things as this should in no case be suffered. If the children are of a class rich enough to be fairly expected to buy their own books, either they should buy them, if such is the rule of the school, or their attendance at the school should not be permitted. But I know scarcely one British or Wesleyan school in which there are not some children on whom it might be a hardship to make the purchase of books imperative. I think that in all schools there should be a public stock of books, from which those who cannot beyond a doubt afford to buy for themselves should be sup- plied. It might safely be left to the teachers and managers to discriminate what children had a fair claim to be supplied from this source. Of all other scholars, the purchase of the necessary books might then be strictly required. Almost every teacher ulider my inspection is now certificated. Great interest is created among this able and active body of persons by the arrival of the period fixed by your Lordships for the first revision of certi- ficates. A promotion of even one division is of great importance to a teacher. How powerfully, therefore, is his position affected by regulations which render possible, in some cases, a promotion of no less than three divisions ! I believe that this periodical revision of certificates may prove a most powerful means to 78 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. promote tlie efficiency of teachers. I propose to re- serve, in revising certificates, the highest promotion for the very best teachers in my district; to award the promotion of three divisions, only when the teacher has given proof of distinguished excellence of some sort; whether of distinguished fidelity in adhering to the same school, or of distinguished success in con- ducting it. There are many cases in which a teacher's merit in adhering for five years to the same school cannot be considered sufficient, although joined to a fair degree of merit in the conduct of his school, to entitle him to the highest reward at your Lord- ships' disposaL In endowed schools, for instance, the certainty of his stipend, the fixed number of his scholars, often render it so directly the teacher's in- terest to keep his situation, that continuance in it for five years can hardly be accepted as a proof of merit. In such cases, distinguished merit in the conduct of his school may fairly be demanded, in addition to his five years' service in it, of a teacher who seeks the highest promotion. On the other hand, where a teacher has continued in his school for his school's sake, when inclination or profit might have suggested a wish for change, such continuance is clearly in itself meritorious, and deserving of the highest encourage- ment and reward. The attendance of the scholars in the schools under GENERAL EEPORT FOE THE YEAR 1858. 79 my inspection is, on the whole, surprisingly good. This regularity of attendance is, no doubt, in part, owing to the fact that many of my best schools are mainly recruited from a class of society in which pa- rents exercise much the same supervision over their children's proceedings as that which is generally ex- ercised in the richer classes. The children have thus a much better home-training than the children of the classes below them, and their general conduct is com- paratively regular. I am more and more convinced that benefit arises from the admission of schools con- taining children of this middle class to a participation in grants, and from their consequent liability to inspec- tion. I must notice at the same time that teachers do not always show perfect judiciousness in dealing with children of this description. I have heard such children addressed by their teachers with the title of " miss " and " master," an absurdity which would not for a moment be tolerated in English schools for the highest classes : but, on the other hand, I have ob- served that truly able teachers in dealing with chil- dren of this class, find it possible to inspire them with a genuine interest in their work, a good taste and a self-respect, which it is the highest office of education to inspire, and which I had never before witnessed, except as the result of the more prolonged and sys- tematic training of the richer classes. 80 EEPOKTS ON SCHOOLS. I am glad to remark a steady improvement in the needlework of girls' schools. The importance which recent regulations have given to the careful in- struction in needlework of female pupil-teachers has much contributed to its general improvement in the schools where they are employed. I was informed, on remarking the excellence of the needlework in the girls' Lancasterian school at Loughborough, which I inspected the other day, that the girls in that school now often bring to school with them work done by their mothers, in order to pick it out and to do it better, and that this takes place with the full appro- bation of their mothers, who are delighted with their daughters' progress, and no longer remain satisfied with the clumsy needlework which would a few years ago have perfectly contented them. For, until lately, in the homes of these girls little care was felt for ex- cellence in plain useful needlework ; their daughters' proficiency in ornamental needlework alone excited the pride and interest of the mothers. There is a prospect, I am glad to say, that the desk accommodation in ordinary Wesleyan schools, which I have more than once noticed as deficient, will be somewhat increased. The infant school system of the Wesleyans continues to bear the most excellent fruits; and the attention of the managers of British schools is increasingly directed GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1858. 81 to the establishment of separate departments for children of this age. In all the infant schools which I visit, there is, however, a tendency to allow the admission of children too young even for an infant school. The mothers put, no doubt, a great pressure upon infant school managers in this respect, but the pressure should be resisted. Children under three years of age should certainly not be admitted to an infant school, unless it is provided with a baby-room or creche, such as is attached to infant schools in France. Two attempts at the establishment of this appendage I have wit- nessed in infant schools in England ; neither attempt was fully successful ; but in neither case was there, I think, an adequate provision of attendants and fittings. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1860. Visit to Continent — Value of Pupil-Teacher system — Reduction of Staff to be regretted — Dirty and unhealthy state of our Schoolrooms — Great imperfection of School Books. Having with your Lordships' permission, been em- ployed on the Continent during a great part of the year 1859 as an Assistant Commissioner under the Royal Commission for inquiring into the State of Popular Education, I last year presented no general report on the schools under my inspection in this country. My experience of foreign schools impressed me with nothing more strongly than with a sense of the advantage which our primary schools enjoy from the institution of pupil-teachers. The contrast between our classes of 30 and the French classes of 100, and often far more than 100, struck me more than any other single feature of difference in comparing the primary schools of Paris with those of London. It is not, I am bound to say, that this inferiority in the GENERAL EEPOET FOR THE YEAR 1860. 83 number of teachers is in Paris accompanied by a corresponding inferiority in the quality of instruction; but in order that this may not be the case, a strain is put upon the principal teachers greater than they can properly bear. On my return to England I found the teachers of my district greatly disturbed by your Lordships' Minute of the 4th of May 1859/ restricting the allowance of pupil-teachers hitherto under certain conditions enjoyed. It was particularly represented to me by the teachers of practising schools in connection with normal colleges, that this restriction told upon them with especial severity, as they have to devote so much time and attention tp the supervision of students employed in their schools, that the assistance of a strong staff of pupil-teachers to conduct the regular business of the school is peculiarly necessary. I regard the service of pupil-teachers as so useful, both to the school and to the apprentice himself, that it is with regret that I see any reductions made in it. Still the teaching power in our primary schools is, even at present, numerically much superior to that in the best ana most favoured schools which I have seen on the continent ; superior even to that in the schools of Holland, where the institution of pupil- teachers took its beginning. In Holland, however, ^ See Appendix. G 2 84 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. the employmeat of certificated adult assistants is much more general than with us ; but it may, perhaps, be doubted whether the English schoolmaster shows the same aptitude for the management and use of these adult assistants, which he shows for that of pupil-teachers. Still, even were the employment of adult assistants (certainly susceptible of a development in our schools beyond that which it has yet received) carried with us as far as it is carried in Holland, our schools would find themselves, supposing their allow- ance of pupil-teachers to be at the same time reduced to the Dutch standard, with a force of assistance considerably less than that which they enjoy at present. In former reports I have spoken of the improve- ment which has gradually taken place in the school- buildings of my district ; and, so far as their buddings are concerned, the elementary schools under my inspection in London have, perhaps, no reasijn to envy those of Paris. I wish I could say the same as to the state of cleanliness and good repair in which they are kept. The Enghsh, who pride themselves on their personal cleanliness, appear not to take the same pride in the cleanliness of their public institutions ; in France the solicitude for the cleanhness and neatness of these is exemplary. Poverty and remote- ness may in France as in England occasion in rural GEJTERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1860. 85 schools neglect and untidiness : I have seen very ill- kept school-rooms in distant French villages; and never shall I forget the state of dirt and disorder in which I once found the master, scholars, and school- room of a village school in Anglesey, which I entered on a day when I was not expected. But in Paris the public primary schools are in general excellently kept ; while there are few, indeed, of the schools under my inspection in London which I could show to a Parisian inspector without apologizing for their want of clean- liness. Paint and whitewash are doled out with a very sparing hand, and walls and wood-work show this ; yet it is especially in the poorer and crowded districts of London, with their want of good light and good air, that paint and whitewash, the latter especially, are real blessings. In the poorer quarters of Paris the establishment of manufactures and the use of coal more and more crowds the population and thickens the air as in London ; yet I remember no fresher, cleaner, and wholesome school interiors than those which I saw in the Faubourg St. Antoine. The truth is, voluntary managers are apt to be satis- fied with a standard of cleanliness for school premises which would by no means satisfy a Government or an efficient municipal body ; a municipal body like that of Paris, for instance, which spends on its primary schools nearly 100,000/. a year. Voluntary managers 86 KEPORTS ON SCHOOLS. in London will repeat with complacency that they paint the inside of their school premises once in seven years, and that leases engage the tenants of private houses to do no more ; forgetting that the interior of a house occupied by a single private family, and the interior of a school occupied by some hundreds of poor children, many of them by no means clean, are not precisely in the same condition, and have not precisely the same requirements. Then they plead that they lay out as much money on these public schools as private persons, helped by a certain limited rate of public aid, can be expected to spend on them.. This may be true, and may excuse individual managers for the dirty ■ and unhealthy state of their school-rooms ; yet, perhaps, if Fleet Street were ill- lighted, the citizens of London would hardly rest satisfied with such a defect, because they were told that private benevolence, assisted by a small public subsidy, could not afford to light it any better. The candour with which school inspectors in France avowed to me their dissatisfaction with the school-books in use there, led me to reflect on the great imperfection exhibited by our school-books also. I found in the French schools good manuals for teaching special subjects — a good manual for teaching arithmetic, a good manual for teaching grammar, a good manual for teaching geography; GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1860. 87 what was wanting there, as it is wanting with us, was a good reading-booh, or course of reading-books. It is not enough remembered in how many cases his reading-book forms the whole literature, except his Bible, of the child attending a primary school. If then, instead of literature, his reading-book, as is too often the case, presents him with a jejune encyclopaedia of positive information, the result is that he has, except his Bible, no literature, no humanizing instruction at all. If, again, his reading- book, as is also too often the case, presents him with bad literature instead of good — with the writing of second or third-rate authors, feeble, incorrect, and colourless — he has not, as the rich have, the cor- rective of an abundance of good literature to counter- act the bad effect of trivial and ill-written school- books; the second or third-rate literature of his school-book remains for him his sole, or, at least, his principal literary standard. Dry scientific dis- quisitions, and literary compositions of an inferior order, are indeed the worst possible instruments for teaching children to read well. But besides the fault of not fulfilling this, their essential fanction, the ill- compiled reading-books I speak of have, I say, for the poor scholar, the graver fault of actually doing what they can to spoil his taste, when they are nearly his only means for forming it. I have seen 88 EEPOETS ON SCHOOLS. school-books belonging to the cheapest, and therefore most popular series in use in our primary schools, in which far more than half of the poetical extracts were the composition either of the anonymous com- pilers themselves, or of American writers of the second and third order ; and these books were to be some poor chUd's Anthology of a literature so varied and so powerful as the English ! To this defectiveness of our reading-books I attribute much of that grave and discouraging deficiency in anything like literary taste and feeling, which even well-instruct-ed pupil-teachers of four or five years' training, which even the ablest students in our training schools, still continue almost invariably to exhibit ; a deficiency, to remedy which, the progressive development of our school system, and the very considerable increase of informa- tion among the people, appear to avail little or nothing. I believe that nothing would so much contribute to remedy it as the diffusion in our elementary schools of reading-books of which the contents were really weU j selected and interesting. Such lessons would be far better adapted than a treatise on the atmosphere, the steam-engine, or the pump, to attain the proper end of a reading-book, that of teaching scholars to read well ; they would also afford the best chance of inspiring quick scholars with a real love for reading and literature in the only way in which such a love is GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1860. 89 ever really inspired, by animating and naoving them ; and if they succeeded in doing this, they ■would have this further advantage, that the literature for which they inspired a taste would be a good, a sound, and a truly refining literature ; not a literature such as that of most of the few attractive pieces in our current reading-books, a literature over which no cultivated person would dream of wasting his time. GENEKAL KEPOET FOR THE YEAR 1861. Cleanliness of London premises somewhat improved — Pupil Teachers ; their instruction in Grammar ; its proper limits ; their want of taste, as shown in paraphrasing ; remedy suggested. In my last report I complained of the dirty condition in which school premises in London were too often permitted to remain, and I contrasted them unfavour- ably in this respect with the school premises which I had seen in Paris. In the course of the year just ended, the managers of several London schools under my inspection have exerted themselves to remove the stigma thus cast upon them, and I can now report a somewhat improved state of things. There is still, however, a great disposition on the part of managers to consider sufficient for pubUc school' premises a degree of cleanliness which is really not sufficient ; to think that all which is necessary is something far less, at any rate, than what is froper. And I venture to pre- dict that the greater the " liberty of action " given to GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1861. 91_ managers in fixing the standard of needful school cleanliness, the dirtier will our public schools become. In my examinations of pupil teachers during the last year, I have been struck with the commonness of the failure in grammar. This failure has been yet more evident to me in the papers (which I have just been revising) of the candidates for Queen's scholar- ships at the recent Christmas examination. In general the pupil-teachers seem to me to do worse in this branch of their instruction than they used to do. Many objections have been raised against the teach- ing ofL,grammar in bur elementary schools, and I believe that there are even inspectors who somewhat discourage it. But I confess that I should be very sorry if this study should be discontinued, or should be suffered to decline. With the tendency to verbi- age and to general and inexact answering to which all persons of imperfect knowledge are, when exam- ined, so prone, it is a great thing to find for their examinations a subject-matter which is exact ; every answer on which must be right or wrong, and no answer on which can have any value if it keeps to vague generalities. Arithmetic as well as grammar has the merit of being an examination subject of this kind. But grammar has an advantage even over arithmetic, in that it is not only exact — it not only compels the pupil examined in it to show 92 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. himself clearly right or wrong, as knowing the rule or as ignorant of it — ^but it also compels him, even more than arithmetic, to give the measure of his common sense by his mode of selecting and apply- ing, in particular instances, the rule when he knows it. And the common sense of pupil-teachers cannot be too much exercised. • I am inclined to think that for the ordinary pupil- teacher the text books of grammar which he uses are much too elaborate. These aim at showing the rationale of grammar and of the terms and laws of grammar ; but this is a stage of doctrine for which the pupil is, in this case, seldom ripe ; he has memory to master the rules of grammar, but seldom understanding to master its metaphysics. What he has understanding for is the application of the rule when he has learnt it; and it is within these Uraits that we should address ourselves to exercise his un- derstanding. Therefore it is to be lamented that there is not one uniform text book for pupU- teachers studying grammar, even if that text book treated grammar less philosophically than some of the existing text books, not more philosophically than the old Eton grammar ; for what the pupil- teacher wants is the rule as a positive fact before him, and no rules acquire this force so well as those of a universally employed text book. It matters less GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1861. 93 that the rule should be intelligently stated to him, than that it should be intelligibly and briefly stated; for he wants it as a law, not as a theorem. The metaphysics of grammar may come later for him, at the training school. Perhaps our examinations, too, extend themselves over too wide a field, ask questions too numerous, and regard the rationale of grammar in a way for which the pupil-teacher is hardly ripe. Perhaps they should limit him more, make him concentrate himself more on that for which he is ripe. He will hardly write a good essay on the nature of the preposition or the adverb. He will hardly analyse an intricate passage correctly according to the metaphysical principles of Dr. Morell's Analysis. But he may be brought if his teaching takes in somewhat less and keeps him to this more steadily, to parse a sentence a great deal better than he does now. And the true aim of a boy's mental education — to give him the power of doing a thing right — will in this way best be followed. The best intelligence of the rationale of grammar is that which gradually comes of itself, after such a discipline, in minds with a special aptitude for this science. Such minds are few ; but the minds with some aptitude or other for which the discipline of learning to do a thing right will be most beneficial, are numerous. And to the 94 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. young, grammar gives this discipline best when it limits itself most. Rhetoric and grammar are allied, and what may be called the rhetorical exercise of paraphrasing a passage of prose or poetry often finds a place in our grammar examinations. In general a pupil- teacher paraphrases a passage even worse than he analyses it, and in the examination for Queen's scholarships this year no exercise in paraphrasing was given. We all complain of the want of taste and general culture which the pupil-teachers, after so much care spent upon them, continue to exhibit; and in their almost universal failure to paraphrase ten lines of prose or poetry, without doing some grievous violence to good sense or good taste, they exhibit this want most conspicuously. Here too, perhaps, the remedy will be found to lie, not in attempting to teach the rules of taste directly — a lesson which we shall never get learnt — but in introducing a lesson which we can get learnt, which has a value in itself whether it leads to something more or not, and which, in happy natures, will probably lead to this something more. The learning by heart extracts from good authors is such a lesson. I have often thought of it as a lesson offering an excellent discipline for our pupil-teachers, and I rejoiced to see it instituted by one of the regulations of the much attacked GENEEAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1861. 95 Eevised Code. This regulation at any rate; I think, no one will be found to attack. Nay, it is strange that a lesson of such old standing and such high credit in our schools for the rich, should not sooner have been introduced in our schools for the poor. In this lesson you have, first of all, the excellent dis- cipline of a lesson which must be learnt right, or it has no value ; a lesson of which the subject matter is not talked abend, as in too many of the lessons of our elementary schools, but learnt. Here, as in the case of the grammar lesson, this positive character of the result is a first great advantage. Then, in all but the rudest natures, out of the mass of treasures thus gained (and the mere process of gaining which will have afforded a useful discipline for all natures), a second and a more precious fruit will in time grow ; they will be insensibly nourished by that which is stored in them, and their taste will be formed by it, as the learning of thousands of lines of Homer and Virgil has insensibly created a good literary taste in so many persons, who would never have got this by studying the rules of taste. Pupil-teachers will then be found to paraphrase well, whom no rules supplied by their teachers will ever teach to para- phrase well at present. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1863. Revised Code, introduction of — Inspection and Examination, under the Old and New systems, contrasted — Eeading Books improved — Cultui'e of Pupil Teachers ; of English and Scotch Students in Training ; and of Teachers. The great school event of the year has of coui-se been the introduction, in the latter half of it, of the new system of examinations prescribed by the Revised Code. I have not hitherto applied to your Lordships for any help in conducting these exami- nations in my district, but have, so far, accomplished them all myself, because I was anxious fuUy to observe their working. I have not to make any remarks upon their financial working, its effect upon schools, and its acceptability to managers. I confine myself entirely to their practical working as a system of school examinations, and to points in which they make the inspection of a school now a different matter from what it used to be formerly. It might have been wished and intended, per- GENERAL EEPOET FOR THE YEAR 1863. 97 haps, that the old inspection should take place just as before, and that the examination should be merely a new thing superadded to it. Prac- tically this is not so, and I think, without a very large increase in the body of inspectors, and a strict discrimination of their separate kinds of function, it cannot be so; practically the old in- spection tends, and I think will tend more and more, to disappear. I am speaking of the old inspection considered as an agency for testing and promoting the intellectual force of schools, not as an agency for testing and promoting their disci- pline and their good building, fitting, and so on. For their discipline and for their material suit- ability, the- new system furnishes the same or nearly the same means of care as the old one. For their ^ intellectual force it furnishes no longer the same means of care, but a different one; I do not say a means of care less valuable or not more valuable than that furnished by the old inspection, but a different one. It is important to point out this difference, in order that one undoubtedly useful sort of care which inspection used to provide for the intellectual progress of schools, but which it provides no longer, or in a much lesser degree than formerly, the managers may take measures to provide in some other way. H 98 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. Inspection under the old system meant some- thing like the following. The inspector took a school class by class. He seldom heard each child in a class read, but he called out a certain number to read, picked at random as specimens of the rest; and when this was done he ques- tioned the class with freedom, and in his own way, on the subjects of their instruction. As you got near the top of a good school these subjects became more numerous; they embraced English grammar, geography, and history, for each of which the inspector's report contained a special entry, and the examination then often acquired much variety and interest. The whole life and power of a class, the fitness of its composition, its handling by the teacher, were well tested; the inspector became well acquainted with them, and was enabled to make his remarks on them to the head teacher; and a powerful means of correcting, improving, and stimulating them was thus given. In the hands of an able inspector — an inspector like Dr. Temple, for instance (one may particularize Dr. Temple without invidiousness, for he has ceased to be an inspector ^) — this means was an instrument of great force and value. ' The present Bishop of London had recently been appointed Head Master of Rugby. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1863. 99 The new examination groups the children by its standards, not by their classes; and however much we may strive to make the standards correspond with the classes, we cannot make them correspond at all exactly. The examiner, therefore, does not take the children in their own classes. The life and power of each class as a whole, the fitness of its composition, its handling by the teacher, he therefore does not test. He hears every child in the group before him read, and so far his examination is more complete than the old inspection. But he does not ques- tion them; he does- not, as an examiner under the rule of the six standards, go beyond the three matters, reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the amount of these three matters which the standards themselves prescribe; and, indeed, the entries for grammar, geography, and history have now altogether disappeared from the forms of report furnished to the inspector. The nearer, therefore, he gets to the top of the school the more does his examin- '[ ation, in itself, become an inadequate means of test- '; ing the real attainments and intellectual life of the scholars before him. Boys who have mastered vulgar fractions and decimals, who know some- thing of physical science and geometry, a good deal of English grammar, of geography, and his- H 2 lOO REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. tory, he hears read a paragraph, he sees write a paragraph, and work a couple of easy sums in the compound rules or practice. As a stimulus to the intellectual life of the school — and the intellectual life of a school is the intellectual life of its higher classes — this is as inefficient as if Dr. Temple (to recur to him again for illustration), when he goes to inspect his fifth form, were just to hear each boy construe a sentence of delectus, conjugate one Latin verb, and decline two Greek substantives. I know that the aim and object of the new sys- tem of examination is not to develop the higher intellectual life of an elementary school, but to spread and fortify, in its middle and lower por- tions, the instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, supposed to be suffering. I am not contesting the importance of this subject, or the adequacy of the means offered by the new exam- ination for attaining it. I am only pointing out the real value of a certain mode of operation on schools which the old inspection undoubtedly supplied, and which the new examination does not and by its nature cannot supply. It wiU be said that we must conjoin the old inspection .with the new examination; undoubt- edly we must so far as we can. But I think no one who is much acquainted with schools and GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1863. 101 examinations will imagine that we can do this at all completely. The whole school feltj under the old system, that the prime aim and object of the inspector's visit was, after insuring the fulfilment of certain sanitary and disciplinary conditions, to test and quicken the intellectual life of the school. The scholars' thoughts were dii-ected to this object, the teacher's thoughts were directed to it, the inspector's thoughts were directed to it. The scholars and teacher co- operated therefore with the inspector in doing their best to reach it; they were anxious for his judgment on their highest progress, anxious to profit by this judgment after he was gone. At present the centre of interest fot the school when the inspector visits it is changed. Scholars and teacher have their thoughts directed straight upon the new examination, which will bring, they know, such important benefit to the school if it goes well, and bring it such important loss if it goes ill. On the examination day they have not minds for anything else. If it were possi- ble for the inspector to make the old inspection, unaltered so far as he was concerned, precede the new examination, it would no longer be the same inspection, for he would no longer have the children's spirit in it, and without 102 EEPOKTS ON SCHOOLS. this he could no longer make the same test of their intellectual life; he would no longer have the master's whole interest and attention in it, and without these he would no longer criticize and counsel with profit, and so be able to stimulate the school's intellectual life for the future. I think, if the peculiar valuable effect of the old inspection is to be retained, this inspection ought, on these grounds, to be dis- joined from the new examination. But on other, and purely material grounds, it must be disjoined from it. The new examin- ation is in itself a less exhausting business than the old inspection to the person conducting it ; it does not make a call as that did upon his spirit and inventiveness; but it takes up much more time, it throws upon him a mass of minute de- tail, and severely tasks hand and eye to avoid mistakes. Few can know till they have tiied what a business it is to enter in a close-ruled schedule, as an examination goes on, three marks for three different things against the names of 200 children whom one does not know one from the other, without putting the wrong child's mark in the wrong place. Few can know how much delay and fatigue is unavoidably caused before one can get one's 600 communications GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1863. 103 fairly accomplished, by difficulty of access to children's places, difficulty in seeing clearly in the obscurer parts of the school-room, difficulty of getting children to speak out — sometimes of getting them to speak at all — difficulty of resisting, without feeling oneself inhuman, the appealing looks of master or scholars for a more prolonged trial of a doubtful scholar. Then there are inquiries and returns to be made by the inspector about log-book, portfolio, accounts, pupil-teachers' engagement and stipends, which had not to be made formerly. An inquiry has just been added respecting the means and position in life of school children's parents, to discover whether they are proper objecte of state aid. All this makes the new examination a business of so much time and labour, as to deprive the inspector of the needful freshness and spirit (to conduct the old inspection properly needed a good deal of spirit) for joining with it, on the same occasion, the old inspection. If I insist on this, it is that I may exhoi-t managers themselves to supply, in case of need, a mode of stimulus to their schools, which was very useful to them. The clergy, who are the usual managers of National schools, could probably supply what is wanted without difficulty; and I think the managers of British and 104 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. Wesleyan schools, with a little exertion and good-will, might find means to supply it to their schools also. I have been struck by one result of the practical working of the new examinations which I am sure your Lordships never intended. I mean the peculiar severity with which they tell upon the younger classes in a school owing to the timidity natural to this age. When a boy of 11 or 12 years of age is so shy that he cannot open his mouth before a stranger, one may with- out harshness say that he ought to have been taught better and refuse him bis grant; but when a child of seven is in this predicament one can hardly, without harshness, say the same thing, and to refuse him his grant for a timidity which is not, in his case, a school fault, seems to be going beyond the intention of your Lordships, who designed the refusal of your grants to be a punishment for school faults. The attention which has been drawn by the Revised Code to the elementary subjects of read- ing, writing, and arithmetic has already had the happiest effect in improving the quality of school reading books. At last the compilers of these works seem beginning to understand that the right way of teaching a little boy to read is not by GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1863. 105 setting him to read such sentences as these (I quote from school works till lately much in vogue) : " the crocodile is viviparous," " quicksilver, antimony, calamine, zinc, &c., are metals," "the slope of a desk is oblique, the corners of the door are angles ; " or the right way of teaching a big boy to read better, to set him to read : " some time after one meal is digested we feel again the sensation of hunger, which is gratified by again taking food ; " " most towns are supplied with water and lighted by gas, their streets are paved and kept clean, and guarded by policemen ; " " summer ornaments for grates are made of wood shavings and of different coloured papers." Reading books are now published which reject all such trash as the above, and contain nothing but what has really some fitness for reaching the end which reading books were meant to reach. Some of them even go a little too far in the effort to avoid dryness and pedantry and to be natural and inter- esting ; they contain rather too many abbrevia- tions, too many words meant to imitate the noises of animals, and too much of that part of human iitterance which may be called the interjectional. The little children, for whom the books are designed, are apt to be rather puzzled by words of this kind, and, even if they were not, it is a fault in 106 EEPORTS ON SCHOOLS. a short reading lesson to contain too much of them. But this fault, which certainly some of the best of the new reading books do not quite avoid, has at least the merit of being a fault on the right side. No more useful change has in my opinion ever been introduced into the programme of the pupil- teachers' studies than that which has lately added to it the learning by heart oi passages from some standard author. How difficult it seems to do anything for their taste and culture I have often said. I have said how much easier it seems to get entrance to their minds and to awaken them by means of music or of physical science than by means of literature ; still if it can be done by lit- erature at all, it has the best chance of being done by the way now proposed. The culture both of the pupil-teacher and of the elementary school- master with us seems to me to resist the efforts made to improve it and to remain unprogressive, more than that of the corresponding class on the Continent. Ignorance is nothing ; such a blunder as this of an English student, "Pope lived a little prior to the Christian era," a French or Swiss student might also commit ; but the hopeless want of tact and apprehensiveness shown by such a sentence as this, "I should consider Newton as a great author; firstly, on account of the style and value GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1863. , 107 of his works ; secondly, on account of his most " valuable and wonderful discoveries, coupled with the pains he took to diffuse his self-acquired knowledge among the people," no French or Swiss student, who had read the books and heard the lectures which the English student who wrote that sentence had heard and read, would in my opinion ever equal. It is true that if you take the bulk of the scholars, even in schools for the richer classes, the rate of culture is very low; but then it is to be remembered that our pupil-teachers and students are a select body, not the bulk of a class, and have gone through a careful training and schooling. This is not the place to speculate on the causes of this inferiority, but I will make one observa- tion. These shortcomings in taste and culture naturally show themselves more manifestly in the student's gi-ammar and composition papers than in any other. I have just looked over nearly a thousand of these papers, and the Scotch students, especially perhaps those of the training schools of the Scotch Established Church, seem to me to have in general both more of positive culture and more of capacity for culture than their English fellows. It is not that they give one the impression of having worked harder or done more to get infor- mation; their papers are often worked in rather a slovenly style, in all externals they have by no 108 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. means the neatness and smartness which the papers of students from the best English training schools exhibit (I take this opportunity of saying that the handwriting of the Scotch students as a body greatly needs improvement), but they certainly have more culture. I attribute this to the effect in- sensibly produced on all classes in the country by the long establishment of education for all, as a matter of public institution and national impor- tance, in Scotland. In England it is among the teachers that the desire for a better culture, and the attainment of it, most shows itself. It shows itself in those in my district by more and more numerous efforts to pass the examinations which the London University, with a wise liberality, makes accessible to so large and various a class of candidates. I gladly seize every opportunity to express the satisfaction which the sight of these efforts gives me. To the able, the ardent, and the aspiring among the young teachers of schools under my inspection, I say : Your true way of advancing yourselves, of raising your position, of keeping yourselves alive and alert amidst your trying labours, is there. And the more the Government certificate comes to be regarded as a mere indis- pensable guarantee of competency, not as a literary distinction, the better ; literary distinction should be sought for from other and larger soures. GENERAL REPOET FOR THE YEAR 1867. Second Foreign Mission — Impressions on return — "Want of life in English Schools, caused by Revised Code. Decline in supply and quality of Pupil Teachers — Changed spirit of Teachers — Prospect of fresh calls upon Them — How to be met ? — Effects of Code on Schools, Inspection, Elementary and Higher Instruction — More free play wanted — Payment by Results not sound — Compulsory Education — School Fees — School Books, need of control — Public and Private Schools, a contrast. Several years have elapsed since last I made a general report. During those years I have a second time visited officially the schools of the Continent, having heen employed for this purpose by the Schools Inquiry Commission of 1865, as I was previously employed for it by the Commission on Popular Education in 1859. The object of the more recent visit was not, as in 1859, the primary school; it was the school for the middle and upper classes. Still it was natural that I should not pursue my inquiries respecting secondary and superior in- struction abroad without in some degree renewing 110 REPOETS ON SCHOOLS. my acquaintance with primary instraction, its legisla- tion, and its actual condition. It was natural, too, that in returning to the in- spection of primary schools in England, I should have in mind both my former return to them after a similar visit to the Continent, and the experi- ence , which each of my visits to the Continent had afforded me. I cannot say that the impression made upon me by the English schools at this second return to them has been a hopeful one. I find in them, in general, if I compare them with their former selves, a deadness, a slackness, and a discourage- ment which are not the signs and accompaniments of progress. If I compare them with the schools of the Continent I find in them a lack of intelli- gent life much more striking now than it was when I returned from the Continent in 1859. This change is certainly to be attributed to the school legislation of 1862. That legislation has reduced the rate of public expenditure upon schools, has introduced the mode of aid which is commonly called payment hy results, and has with- drawn from teachers all character of salaried public servants. These changes gratify respectively one or other of several great forces of public opinion which are potent in this country, and a legisla- GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1867. Ill tion which gratifies these ought perhaps to be pronounced successful. But in my report to the Royal Commission of 1859 I said, after seeing the foreign school^, that our pupil-teachers were, in my opinion, "the sinews of English public instruc- tion ; " and such in my opinion they, with the ardent and animated body of schoolmasters who taught and trained them, undoubtedly were. These pupil- teachers and that body of schoolmasters were called into existence by the school legislation of 1846 ; the school legislation of 1862 struck the heaviest possible blow at them ; and the present slack and languid condition of our elementary schools is the inevitable consequence. The rate of pupil-teachers to scholars in our elementary schools was, in 1861, one pupil-teacher for every thirty-six scholars ; in 1866 it was only one pupil-teacher for every fifty-four scholars. Throughout all the training colleges only 1,478 candidates presented themselves for admission last Christmas, whereas 2,513 candidates presented them- selves in 1862. Yet the number of schools recruiting their teachers from this source had risen from 6,258 in 1861 to 8,303 in 1866, and the average popula- tion of such schools from 919,935 to 1,082,055. The performance of the reduced number of candidates is weaker and more inaccurate than was 112 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. the performance of the larger numher six years ago, and for the last year or two has been becoming weaker and weaker. No inspector can be surprised at this who compares the present acquirements of the vast majority of the pupil-teachers of his dis- trict in the yearly examinations which they have to pass before him with those which he remembers ten years ago. Nor, again, can this difference in their acquirements surprise him when he com- pares the slackness, indifference, and loose hold upon their profession which is to be remarked in the piipil-teachers now, and contrasts it with what he remembers ten years ago. The service of the pupil-teacher was then given under an indenture which he was accustomed to regard as absolutely binding him for five years ; now it is given under an agreement which expressly declares itself to be always terminable by notice or payment. He then had seven and a half hours of instruction every week from the principal teacher, out of school hours and when all the attention of the principal teacher could be given to him ; now he has only five hours of instruction, and these may be given in the night school, when the principal teacher's atten- tion is divided. The work of teaching in school is less interesting and more purely mechanical than it used to be. But, above all, the pupil-teacher has GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1867. HS continually before him, he continually sees and hears, a master who ten years ago was rewarded for teach- ing him, was proud of his own profession, was hopeful, and tried to communicate this pride and hope to his apprentice. Ten years ago the school- master was under the impulse given by the celebrated letter of instructions of the Secretary to the Com- mittee of Council in 1848, which, in establishing the certificate examination, said : — " For the first time in this country schoolmasters will be assembled by the invitation of the Government, 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. 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 qualify- ing him to occupy a higher station, and by rewarding his more efficient services by superior endowments. They ought to receive from the inspectors the impres- sion that they are called upon to co-operate with I 114 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. them and with the Committee of Council on Educa- tion for the attainment of great national objects." To the trainer thus rewarded, thus animated, thus encouraged to value his profession, thus proclaimed a fellow-worker with the national Government, has succeeded a trainer no longer paid or rewarded, a trainer told that he has greatly overrated his importance and that of his function, that it is most inexpedient to make a public servant of him, and that the Government is determined hence- forth to know no one in connection with his school but the managers. Is it wonderfal that such a trainer should be slack in seeking pupil-teachers whom he has to instruct without reward ; that he should communicate to what pupil-teachers he has his own sense of the change in the schoolmaster's position, his own slackness, his own discouragement ; and that under these influences the pupil- teacher's heart should no longer be in his work, that his mind should be alwaj^s ready to turn to the hope of bettering himself in some more thri-sdng line, and his acquirements meanwhile weak and scant ? At a moment when populai- education is at last becoming a question of immediate public interest, and when the numbers, spirit, and qualifications of our teaching staff will have a great call made upon them, it is important to take precise note of GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1867. 115 their actual condition and prospects. Undoubtedly the present educational movement finds us ill- prepared for it, in so far as our teaching staff is less vigorous in spirit, is more slackly recruited, and with weaker recruits, than it was a few years ago. Complaints and recriminations as to the measures which have led to this falling-off are now vain; let it be conceded that these measures may have had grounds which made them, in spite of this falling-off, politic and sound. But it is still most desirable to see if this falling-off cannot be stopped, and what are the means which afford the best hope of stopping it. My colleague, Mr. Cowie, says in his last report : " In cases where the managers have, with a wise fore- sight, continued to the masters of their schools the allowances formerly made by the Government, and paid them so much for teaching the boys, so much for teaching the pupil-teachers, and so much for the result of the inspector's examination, I think the system works well." If managers were universally or even frequently to be found who could and would take the best means for the creation and preservation of a good teaching staff, there would be no necessity for a Committee of Council on Education. It is just because it is of the first importance for a system l2 116 EEPORTS ON SCHOOLS. of popular education to have and to maintain an abundant and a well-trained supply of teachers, and precisely in ensuring this supply the vohmtary and undirected efforts of private bodies of managers come short, that the plan of appropriated grants — augmentation grants to certificated teachers, stipends to pupil-teachers, and gratuities to the principal teacher for instructing them — was resorted to. The diminution in the amount of Government aid puts it out of the power of many school managers to continue, of their own motion, the plan of appropriated grants, which, I agree with Mr. Cowie, is a plan that acts with the happiest possible stimulus upon the teacher. Even if they have the means of meeting the expenses of such a plan, they have not always the knowledge and school experience, nor can they always give the time, thought, and attention requisite for originating and regulating it. Particularly is this the case with British and Wesleyan school managers, who are in general business men, perfectly to be relied on for carrying into effect the direct requirements of the Education Department and their own under- takings with it, and for the most part liberally enough disposed, but hardly capable of supplementing the action of the Department where it falls short, and of remedying by their own efforts and inven- GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1867. 117 tiveness any weakness against which the Depart- ment does not directly provide. In general, with the minimum of teaching power fixed by the Department they will be satisfied; and if their principal teachers represent to them that it is impossible or very difficult to find pupil-teachers, they will acquiesce. At the same time, the rate of payment for pupil-teachers having formerly been indicated to them by the Department, they are very apt, having no wish at all to screw their teachers closely, to maintain this rate unabated for the pupil-teachers whom they are bound to employ. But their action in respect of the teaching staff cannot, in general, be relied on for much more than this. Some schools in my district have adopted what seems to me the judicious plan of paying a pupil- teacher the same sum, in all, which the Committee of Council formerly paid him, but distributing it differently over the years of apprenticeship; paying a sum considerably below the old rate in the first year or two of apprenticeship, and a sum consider- ably above it in the later years. For a boy of thirteen who would very likely stay on in the first class any way, a stipend of 6/. or 11. is sufficient, and if he abgindons his engagement at the end of a year or two there is not so much money thrown away. On the other hand, at the age when his services are getting valuable, and openings in other Hues begin 118 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. to present themselves to him, there is the higher rate of stipend to tempt him to stay. This arrange- ment, if more generally adopted, might tend somewhat to fix pupil-teachers; and the great interest which is now directed to popular education will also again create in this country, and on a fai' wider scale than formerly, a sense of the importance of the teacher and his function, and will tend to make his function an object of ambition rather than of avoidance. This, with time, will undoubtedly attract a better supply of pupil-teachers to the profession. Still, however, the main obstacle to their steady recruiting and good training remains unaffected — the indifference of the principal teacher to seeking them out, taking pains with them, and inspiring them with a zeal for their calling. To meet this it would be very desirable, in my opinion, to stipulate that whenever the managers have to provide a pupil- teacher they should also have to provide a gratuity to the principal teacher for instructing him. The rate of gratuity to the principal teacher, like the rate of stipend to the pupil-teacher, might be left, as at present, to be settled by the managers. In my district, the Committee of Council having fixed that the teacher should have a gratuity, managers would very generally follow for this the old rate established by the Committee of Council, just as they follow the old rate established for pupil- GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1867. 119 teacher stipends. It would be well worth while, by a small increase in the rate of the Government grant, and not attaching to the increase such elaborate conditions as those which surround the grant ofifered by the Minute of February/ to facilitate the accept- ance by managers of this new rule. In return, the principal teacher should be bound to furnish at least six hours a week of instruction to his pupil-teacher, and this should be, as formerly, instruction g^ven with his attention undivided, and not amid the distractions of a night school. To pass from the teachers to the schools. I can- not, with the recollection of the Continental schools, and of what the schools of my district formerly were, fresh in my mind, say that the operation of the Revised Code has been in my opinion good for the schools if not for the teachers. My colleague, Mr. Bowstead, says in his last report that on his best schools the Revised Code has produced little or no effect ; on the great majority of his schools, which were neither very good nor very bad, it has produced an unfavourable effect; on his worst schools it has produced a good effect. In the best schools in my district the decay and discouragement of the teaching staff has not been without some bad effect on the school. I agree, however, with Mr. Bowstead that the instruction in these schools 1 See Appendix. 120 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. is in. great measure independent of Government action, and is maintained at a high standard by the demands of the parents, in general of a class quite removed from poverty and fairly intelli- gent. I agree with him that in the majority of schools, neither very good nor very bad, the in- struction has sensibly deteriorated. I hesitate to agree with him that even in the worst it has improved. In these schools the children's irregular attendance and premature leaving are and were the great causes of the school's badness, and not the insufficient attention paid to the younger children by the teacher. Children brought back for examination after a two months' absence fail, and children who have attended very irregularly fail, whatever care the teacher may have bestowed on teaching them ; and meanwhile the better instructed top class, composed of children who stayed long enough to profit by careful teaching, who received this teach- ing, and who became, when they left school, a little nucleus of instruction and intelhgence in their locality, has for the most part disappeared. The truth is, what really needed to be dealt with, in 1862 as at present, was the irregular attendance and premature withdrawal of scholars, not the imperfect perform- ance of their duties by the teachers ; but it was far easier to change the course of school instruction and inspection, and to levy forfeitures for imperfect school GENERAL REPORT FOB THE YEAR 1867. 121 results upon managers and teachers, than to make scholars come to school regularly and stay there a sufficient time. The mode of teaching in the primary schools has certainly .fallen off in intelligence, spirit, and inven- tiveness during the four or five years which have elapsed since my last report. It could not well be otherwise. In a country where every one is prone to rely too much on mechanical processes, and too little on intelligence, a change in the Education Department's regulations, which by making two-thirds of the Government grant depend upon a mechanical examination, inevitably gives a mechanical turn to the school teaching, a mechanical turn to the in- spection, is and must be trying to the intellectual life of a school. In the inspection, the mechanical examination of individual scholars in reading a short passage, writing a short passage, and working two or three sums, cannot but take the lion's share of room and importance, inasmuch as two-thirds of the Government grant depend upon it ; yet I find, that of this examination, into which, in schools like British and Wesleyan schools where the religious in- struction of the children is withdrawn from inspection, the whole inspection tends to resolve itself, more than 49 per cent, of the children in average attend- ance in the schools inspected by me this last year 122 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. had no share. More than 14 per cent, of the children in average attendance were under six years of age, and therefore not examined for the grant ; more than 27 per cent, of them did not appear on the capita- tion schedule at all, not having attended school often enough ; there are left, therefore, as subjects of examination, not more than about 58 per cent, of the scholars. The inspection, therefore, is not now that stimulus to the whole school which it was when a proportion of each class, picked at random by the inspector, were freely examined by him. In the school teaching the decline of intellectual life caused by a more mechanical method of instruc- tion shows itself in increasing weakness in even those very matters which our changes were designed to revive and foster. In my district the proportion of children presented in the three higher standards and doing their work, therefore, on paper, and that presented in the three lower standards, and doing their work on slates, were as nearly as possible the same last year as the year before. Just 27 per cent, last year were in paper-work, and 73 per cent in slate-work; the year before, 26'7 per cent, were in paper-work, and in slate-work 73'3 per cent. The proportion, therefore, remained as nearly as possible the same ; but I find that whereas of the children presented in paper-work only 14'9 per cent, failed GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1867. 323 the year before last, 18 per cent, failed last year. Among the children presented in slate-'work the in- crease in the rate of failure is smaller, but an increase there is ; 10 8 per cent, failed the year before last, 11 '2 per cent, last year. The total rate of failure, which the year before last was 11"9 per cent., rose last year to 13 per cent. Meanwhile, the matters of language, geography, and history, by which, in general, instruction first gets hold of a child's mind and becomes stimulating and interesting to him, have in the great majority of schools fallen into disuse and neglect. The Minute of last February, ■'^ which makes them subjects of a grant- bringing examination has, by recalling attention to them, made manifest into what decay they had sunk. That Minute is, in my opinion, chiefly valuable as an indication to school managers and school teachers that the Education Department thinks these matters of importance. The grant is so trifling, and is sad- dled with such conditions, that many of the schools in my district decline, as I have said, to avail them- selves of it. But even if they availed themselves of it, I doubt whether a decline of intellectual life, itself due chiefly to the mechanical mode of examination the Eevised Code has introduced, can be well cured by a palliative, which, while it ^ See Appendix. 124 KEPORTS ON SCHOOLS. extends the examination beyond the elementary matters, yet arranges it, for the higher matter as for the elementary ones, in such a way as to give it the character of an intricate and mechanical routine. More free play for the inspector, and more free play, in consequence, for the teacher, is what is ■wanted ; and the Minute of February with its elabor- ate mechanism of the one-fifth and tlie three-fourths makes the new examination as formal and lifeless as the old one. In the game of mechanical contrivances the teachers will in the end beat us; and as it is now found possible, by ingenious preparation, to get children through the Eevised Code examination in reading, writing, and ciphering, without their really knowing how to read, write, or cipher, so it will with practice no doubt be found possible to get the three- fourths of the one-fifth of the children over six through the examination in grammar, geography, and history, without their really knowing any one of these three matters. I observe one or two of my colleagues say lq their reports that school managers get pleased with the new mode of examination, and with the idea of payment by results, as they become familiarized with it. I think this is very true ; the idea of payment by results was just the idea to be caught up by the ordinary public opinion of this country and to find GENERAL EErORT FOR THE YEAR 1867. 125 favour with it; no doubt the idea has found favour with it, and is likely perhaps, to be pressed by it to further application. But the question is, not ,^ whether this idea, or this or that application of it 1 suits ordinary public opinion and school managers; the question is whether it really suits the interests of schools and of their instruction. In this country we are somewhat unduly liable to regard the latter suitableness too little, and the former too much. I feel sure, from my experience of foreign schools as well as of our own, that our present system of grants does harm to schools and their instruction by resting its grants too exclusively, at any rate, upon an individual examination, prescribed in all its details beforehand by the Central Office, and necessarily mechanical; and that we have to relax this exclusive stress rather than to go on adding to it. The growing interest and concern in education wiU of itself tend to raise and swell the instruction in the primary schools ; if we wish fruitfully to co-operate with this happy natural movement we shall, in my opinion, best do so by some such relaxation as that which I have indicated. Throughout my district I find the idea of com- pulsory education becoming a familiar idea with those who are interested in schools. I imagine that with the newly awakened sense of our shortcomings 126 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. in popular education — a sense which is just, the statistics brought forward to dispel it being, as every one acquainted with the subject knows, entirely fallacious — the difficult thing would not be to pass a law making education compulsory; the difficult thing would be to work such a law after we had got it. In Prussia, which is so often quoted, edu- cation is not flourishing because it is compulsory, it is compulsory because it is flourishing. Because people there really prize instruction and culture, and prefer them to other things, therefore they have no difficulty in imposing on themselves the rule to get instruction and culture. In this country people prefer to them politics, station, business, money- making, pleasure, and many other things ; and tiU we cease to prefer these things, a law which gives instruction the power to interfere with them, though a sudden impulse may make us establish it, cannot be relied on to hold its ground and to work efiect- ively. When instruction is valued in this country as it is in Germany it may be made obligatory here ; meanwhile the best thing the friends of instruction can do is to foment as much as they can the national sense of its value. The persevering extension of pro- visions for the schooling of all children employed in any kind of labour is probably the best and most practicable way of making education obligatory that GENERAL REPORT TOR THE YEAR 1867. 127 we can at present take. But the task of seeing these provisions carried into effect should not be committed to the municipal authorities, less trust- worthy with us than in France, Germany, or Switzer- land, because worse chosen and constituted. I think high school fees in elementary schools a check to popular education, and steadily to be discouraged. In Prussia the average fee for a scholar in these schools is about a penny a week. In France the average fee is higher, I believe, than in any other country — as high as fourpence a week. But a large number of children receive free schooling by virtue of having their names entered on a list of indigent children which the authorities of every commune have to make. It is found that many parents strongly object both to the high rate of school fee and to having their children placed on the indigent list, and they do not send them to school at all. The French Minister favours the plan of making the school- ing free for all, not as paupers, but as taxpayers. The Prussian plan, however, of exacting a small school fee seems to me preferable, but it should be a small one. The foreign plan of making school fees payable in advance, either monthly or quarterly, has unquestionable advantages; it is far too little followed in this country, and the 128 REPOKTS ON SCHOOLS. Education Department would do well, I am sure, to promote it by all the means in its power. The system of weekly payments joined to the touting of rival schools for scholars, and joined also, I must say, to the pernicious notion fostered among parents by our present mode of making our grants, that a child confers a favour on the school managers by earning money for them; all these combine to create an insecurity in our elementary schools, a slightness of hold upon the school children, and an inversion of the proper relations between them and their teachers, which has no parallel anywhere else. It has occurred to me that it would be well if the Education Department were to make a stand against this baneful state of things by refusing to pay grants to an aided school which admits children removed on frivolous pretexts from another aided school in the same place ; the inspectors being directed to receive complaints of such improper admission, and to forward them, with their own comments, to the Council Office. With the increase of schools, the supply of books designed to meet the requirements of .the examina- tion instituted by the Education Department in- creases, and becomes a lucrative and important business. These books are very often compiled by persons quite incompetent for the undertaking. It GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1867. 129 seems to me very desirable that the Education Department should here, as in other countries, exercise some control over school books in aided schools ; and all the more so because, with our pre- sent system of grants, these books profess to be in immediate correspondence with our requirements. It is very usual for the scholar to have to purchase his reading book, which is often the only book of secular literature in his possession; it is important to do what we can to ensure its being a good one. Perhaps it may be permitted to an ex-professor of poetry to remark that in general the choice of poetry in these books is, especially bad; I print in a note ^ a specimen of popular poetry from the Fifth 1 MY NATIVE LAND. She is a ricli aud rara land, Oh ! she is a fresh and fair laud, She is a dear and rare land. This native land of mine. No men than hers are braver, The women's hearts ne'er waver ; I'd freely die to save her, And think my lot divine. She's not a dull or cold land. No, she's a warm and bold land ; Oh ! she's a true and old laud, This native land of mine. Oh ! she's a fresh aud fair land, Oh ! she's a true and rare land. Yes, she's a rare and fair land. This native land of mine. 130 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. Standard book of a series much in vogue. In the Fifth Standard the scholars have, as is well known, to read poetry aloud for an examination. When one thinks how noble and admirable a thing genuine popular poetry is, it is provoking to think that such rubbish as this should be palmed off on a poor child for it with any apparent sanction from the Educa- tion Department and its grants. In this country, where little importance is attached to the science of public administration, a pubHc department is apt first to attempt to exercise a criti- cal function with insufficient means, and then, when the result appears unsatisfactory, hastily to retreat altogether from exercising it. The better way, perhaps, would be to exercise it properly. Nothing is more remarkable in the school administration of Germany than the care with which every branch is confided to experts, and experts of recognized expertness. The control of school books and school examinations in literature is there strictly given to persons of proved qualifications in letters ; the control of school books and school examinations in the mathematical and natural sciences to persons of proved qualifications in those sciences ; and so on. It would surely be well if we followed this example, instead of either exercising this control with imper- fect instruments, or abandoning it altogether, and GENERAL REPORT TOR THE YEAR 1867. '.131 suffering private speculation to have unchecked play. The stamp of plainness and the freedom from charlatanism given to the inst ructi on of our primary schools, through the public character which in the last thirty years it has received, and through its having been thus rescued, in great measure, from the influ- ences of private speculation, is perhaps -the best thing about them. '^It is in this respect that our primary schools compare so favourably with the private adven- ture schools of the middle class, that class which, Mr. Bright says, is perfectly competent to manage its own schools and education. The work in the one is appraised by impartial educated persons; in the other, by the common run of middle-class parents. To show the difference in the result, I will conclude by placing in juxtaposition a letter written in school by an ordinary scholar in a public elementary school in my district, a girl of eleven years old, with one written by a boy in a private middle-class school, and furnished to one of the Assistant Com- missioners of the Schools Inquiry Commission. The girl's letter I give first : — Dear Fanny, — T am afraid I shall not pass in my examination ; Miss C says she thinks I shall. I shall be glad when the Serpentine is frozen over, for we shall have such fun ; I wish you did not live K 2 132 IlEPOKTS ON SCHOOLS. SO far away, then you could come and share in the game. Father cannot spare Willie, so I have as much as I can do to teach him to cipher nicely. I am now sitting by the school fire, so I assure you I am very warm. Father and mother are very well. I hope to see you on Christmas Day. Winter is coming; don't it make you shiver to think of? Shall you ever come to smoky old London again ? It is not so bad, after all, with its bustle and business and noise. If you see Ellen T will you kindly get her address for me. I must now conclude, as I am soon going to my reading class ; so good bye. From your affectionate friend, M . And now I give the boy's : — My deau Parents, — The anticipation of our Christmas vacation abounds in peculiar delights. ISot only that its " festivities," its social gatherings, and its lively amusements crown the old year with happiness and mirth, but that I come a gaest com- mended to your hospitable love by the performance of all you bade me remember when I left j'ou in the glad season of sun and flowers. And time has sped fleetly since reluctant my depai:ting step crossed the threshold of that home whose indulgences and endearments their temporary loss has taught me to value more and more. Yet that restraint is salutary, and that self-reliance is as easily learnt as it is laudable, the propriety of my GENERAL EEPORT FOE THE YEAE 1867. 133 conduct and the readiness of my services shall ere long aptly illustrate. It is with confidence I promise that the close of every year shall find me advancing in your regard by constantly observing the precepts of my excellent tutors and the example of my ex- cellent parents. We break up on Thursday the 11th of December instant, and my impatience of the short delay will assure my dear parents of the filial sentiments of Theirs very sincerely, N . P.S. — We shall reassemble on the 19th of January. Mr. and Mrs. P. present their respectful compliments. To those who ask what is the difference between a public and a private school, I answer. It is this. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1869. Results of examimition — Teaching by rote — Eeading, Writing, and Arithmetic as taught under Revised Code — Minute of 20th February, 1867 — Newcastle Commission — Inspectors and mechanical teaching — Test examinations — Suggested change of Grants — Compulsory and gratuitous schooling — Religious Instruction. During the school jear more than 25,000 children passed under my inspection; of these, about 13,000 were presented for examination grants. Nearly one-balf of these children had been less than one year at school, one-fourth had been at school over one year and less than two years, the remaining fourth had been at school more than two years. Nearly one-half of the children, again, were under nine years of age ; of the other half, two-thirds were between the ages of nine and twelve, the remaining third were twelve years old and upwards. The num- ber of children present on the day of inspection con- siderably exceeded, as usual, the number in average GENERAL EEPORT FOR THE YEAR 1869. 135 attendance. The number presented for examination grants was nearly 66 (65'77) per cent, of the average attendance. In the previous year the number pre- sented had been greater by 3 per cent. But in both years the proportion of children examined for grants was to the number actuUy present on the day of inspection 14 per cent, less than to the number in average attendance. The proportion of children in the higher and lower standards was almost exactly the same as at my last report ; close upon 27 per cent. of those examined were in paper work, close upon 73 per cent, were in slate work. The rate of failure is for the scholars in paper work 2 per cent, less now than at my last report ; for the scholars in slate work it is If per cent. less. The exact figures are : rate of failure in 1866—7, in slate work 11"2 per cent., in paper work 18 per cent. ; in 1868-9, in slate work 9'5, in paper work 16 per cent. The intervening year 1867-8 was a bad one ; the rate of failure was in slate work 12'8 per cent., in paper work 19'4 per cent. The total rate of failure which in 1866-7 was 13 per cent., rose in 1867-8 to 14'56 per cent., but declined in 1868-9 to 11"3 per cent. Of last year's failures 20 per cent, were in arithmetic, 7'7 per cent, in writing, and 6 per cent, in reading. This gradation not ill represents the degrees of difficulty in teaching by rote the three matters of 136 KEPOKTS ON SCHOOLS. arithmetic, writing, and reading. I have repeatedly said that it seems to me the great fault of the Revised Code, and of the famous plan of payment by results, that it fosters teaching by rote ; I am of that opinion still. I think ths great task for friends of education is, not to praise payment hy results, -which is just the sort of notion to catch of itself popular favour, but to devise remedies for the evils which are found to follow the application of this popular notion. The school examinations in view o{ payment hy results are, as I have said, a game of mechanical contrivance an which the teachers will and must more and more learn how to beat us. It is found possible, by in- genious preparation, to get children through the Revised Code examination in reading, writing, and ciphering, without their really knowing how to read, write, and cipher. To take the commonest instance : a book is selected at the beginning of the year for the children of a certain standard ; all the year the children read this book over and over again, and no other. When the inspector comes they are presented to read in this book ; they can read their sentence or two fluently enough, but they cannot read any other book fluentlv. Yet the letter of the law is satisfied, and the more we undertake to lay down to the very letter the requirements which shall be satisfied in order to earn GENERAL KEPORT FOR THE YEAR 1869. 137 grants, the more do managers and teachers conceive themselves to have the right to hold us to this letter. Suppose the inspector were to produce another book out of his pocket, and to refuse grants for all the children who could not read fluently from it. The managers and teacher would appeal to the Code, which says that the scholar shall be required to read "a, paragraph from a reading book used in the school," and would the Department sustain an in- spector in enforcing such an additional test as that which has been mentioned ? The circle of the children's reading has thus been narrowed and impoverished all the year for the sake of a result at the end of it, and the resiUt is an illusion. The reading test affords the greatest facilities for baffling those who imposed it, and therefore in read- ing we find fewest failures, but the writing test is managed almost as easily. Let us take the middle, of a school, generally the weakest part, and the part which requires most careful teaching — the scholars in the Third Standard. There are books of the Third Standard which, what with verse, pages of words for spelling, exercises for dictation, and sums, contain for the prose reading-lesson less than fifty pages of good sized print. The writing test for scholars of the Third Standard is to vv^rite from dictation a 138 EEPORTS ON SCHOOLS. sentence from that same lesson of their reading-book in which they have just previously been set to read. Verse is not commonly used for the reading of the Third Standard ; an examiner would hardly choose to set the very dictation exercises given in the lesson book ; there remain the fifty prose pages which the scholar has been reading and re-reading all the j^ear. His eye and memory have become familiar with them ; he has just refreshed his acquaintance with one of them by reading it ; from this page he is now set to write a sentence slowly dictated to him by a few words at a time. Can it be said that because a child can spell this sentence tolerably and thus pro- duce the required result, he may therefore be set down as able to write easy sentences from dictation ? and must we not own that this result also is in great measure an illusion ? We see accordingly, that though the rate of failure in wiiting does exceed that in reading, yet it exceeds it very slightly, and both are quite inconsiderable. In arithmetic, the rate of failure is much more considerable (20 per cent, in arithmetic, to 7"7 per cent, in writing, and 6 per cent, in reading). To teach children to bring right two sums out of three without really knowing arithmetic seems hard. Yet even here, what can be done to effect this (and it is not so very little) is done, and our examination in GENERAL EEPORT FOR THE YEAR 1869. 139 view of payment ly results cannot but encourage its being done. The object being to ensure that on a given day a child shall be able to turn out, worked right, two out of three sums of a certain sort, he is taught the mechanical rule by which sums of this sort are worked, and sedulously practised all the year round in working them ; arithmetical principles he is not taught, or introduced into the science of arithmetic. The rate of failure in this branch also will thus, in aU probability, be gradually reduced, but, meanwhile, the most notable result attained will be that which has been happily described by my colleague, Mr. Alderson, when he says, " Unless a vigorous effort is made to infuse more intelligence into its teaching, Government arithmetic will soon be known as a modification of the science peculiar to inspected schools, and remarkable chiefly for its meagreness and sterility." Those who know the German schools know the extreme care taken there to tea^ch elementary matters in such a way as to develop as much as possible the intelligence of the children, and to give them some real mental power. M. Baudouin's report to the French Government on the primary and secondary schools of Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium, a work which is, I believe, in the library of the Department, exhibits in full detail illustrations of 140 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS, this prominent feature in German teaching. In my opinion, the want of it in English schools is, and long has been, at least as real a shortcoming in them as their imputed neglect of the lower and more back- ward children. Not less than this neglect it needs, and has long needed, on the part of the Education Department, some action to correct it. The Minute of February 20th, 1867,^ was meant to correct that impoverishment of the instruction, which was due to the mechanical routine brought in by the Revised Code examination. But it proceeds just in the same course as that examination proceeds. It attempts to lay down, to the very letter, the requirements which shall be satisfied in order to earn grants. The teacher, in consequence, is led to think, not about teaching his subject, but about managing to hit these require- ments. He limits his subject as much as he can, and within these limits tries to cram his pupils with details enough to enable him to say, when they pro- duce them, that they have fulfilled the Departmental requirements, and fairly earned their grant. The ridiculous results obtained by teaching geography, for instance, under these conditions, may be imagined. A child who has never heard of Paris or Edinburgh, will tell you measurements of England in length and ' See Appendix. GENERAL EEPOET FOR THE YEAR 1869. 141 breadth, and square mileages, till his tongue is tired. I have known a class, presented in English history, to take the period from Caesar's landing to the Norman Conquest, and to be acquainted in much detail with the Roman invasion of Anglesey ; but Carnarvon, on the coast opposite Anglesey, being mentioned, they neither knew what Prince of Wales was born there, nor to whom the title of Prince of Wales belonged. Another class took the period from Caesar's landing to the reign of Egbert, and knew the history of this period, or what passes for its history, minutely, but only one of them had heard of the battle of Waterloo. It is true, for this sort of unsound performance inspectors pluck candidates for the sup- plementary grants much more freely than they pluck candidates for the main grants. But this is only because these supplementary grants are so insigni- ficant that managers and teacher care comparatively little whether they are obtained or not, and mean- while, the object of the Department, to counteract the narrow, unintelligent mode of instruction en- couraged by the Eevised Code, is not attained. Great stress has been laid oh the declaration of the Duke of Newcastle's Commission, that " the object is to find some constant and stringent motive to induce teachers to do that part of their duty which is at once most unpleasant and most important." This 142 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. unpleasant and important part of their duty, accord- ing to the same Commission, ia, " to see that all the children under their charge really learn to read, write, and cipher thoroughly well." And some of my colleagues speak as if this undoubtedly important and desirable object were certainly attained by giving to our examinations their present character, and as if whoever wished to modify that present character, contested the importance and desirability of that object. " If children are not well taught and trained in the lower classes,'' says Mr. Duport, " they will never be taught at all." And again, " First, let a school be thoroughly in working order from top to bottom as regards accuracy of elementary grounding.'' Undoubtedly ; but is a child's elementary g^-ounding in thorough working order, because he can read fluently a sentence in a short book which he has been reading and re-reading all the year? But perhaps it is only meant that the elementary grounding is in thorough working order comparatively with what it was formerly, before the legislation of 1862. This is a hard comparison to make with accuracy, so as to be sure that the improvement in question has actually taken place. To say with confidence yes, one ought to have known well a district of schools, and the same district, for at least five or six years before the legis- lation of 1862 as well as after it ; whereas some of GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1869. 143 those who say yes with most confidence, seem but, before 1862, to have been well acquainted with one school. However, no one questions the advantage of an individual grant-rewarded examination, or that the Newcastle Commissioners did well in suggesting it, or that the Education Department did well in giving efifect to this suggestion ; the real question is, and it is eminently a question for educationists, since the general public has neither care nor skill for it, and is sure to be perfectly satisfied as soon as it hears oi paying hy results — the real question is, whether we have not somewhat overdone this sort of examination by attaching to it so overwhelming a share of our grants, and consequently so overwhelming an import- ance ; and whether some improved mode of combiuing it with the old inspection might not be hit on. It is urged, indeed, that the remedy is in the inspector's hands, because " it can only be by the ex- press recommendation of an inspector that any school obtains its full grant while it produces nothing better than mechanical results, and if, after due warning, any school continues to do so, the reason must lie in the inspector's acting on only half of his instructions." So it is the inspector's neglect of duty which appears to be in fault. But I ask again — Suppose the in- spector were to produce a book out of his pocket, and to pluck all the children who could not read fluently Hi KEPORTS ON SCHOOLS. from it, would the Department sustain him? The managers would appeal to the Code, which says, that the scholar shall he required to read " a paragraph from a reading hook used in the schooL" It is just the weakness of a system which attempts to prescribe exactly the minimum which shall be done, and which makes it highly penal to fiall short of this minimum, that when the minimum is somehow produced, there seems a good deal of hardship in still exacting a penalty. If the inspector inflicted deductions to any such extent as really to grapple with the evil of mechanical teaching, I cannot but think that he would find himself in. collision with that very neces- sary official notification concerning the power of in- flicting deductions, which he received at the outset — My Lords do not wish this power to he exercised in any hut serious coms. Again, it is urged that an inspector is not forbidden by the Eevised Code to retain " a, liberal and intelli- gent inspection" along with the new examination, and that an inspector who has an assistant has ample time for such inspection. But the question is, not whether an inspector can make such an inspection, but whether the school wiU cate much for it when it is the new examination which brings the grant, and whether it will do as much good as it formerly did when it is no longer much cared for. GENERAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 1869. 145 All test examinations, it is said again, may be said to narrow reading upon a certain given point, and to make it mechanical. If a man wants a certificate or diploma of you, you say you will give it him if he learns this and that, which you prescribe ; and you may be said to cramp his studies by thus limiting them. Certainly, if a man wants a certificate, or a diploma, or honours, of you, you must fix just what he shall get them for, which is by no means of the same extent as a liberal education. But this is a reason against making an excessive use of such test examinations, of turning too much of a man's read- ing into reading for certificates, diplomas, or honours. This is why our University system of examinations, competitions, and honours, is so little favoured in Germany. ■*■ But, at any rate, to make a narrowing system of test examinations govern the whole in- spection of our primary schools, when we have before us, not individuals wanting a diploma from us, but organizations wanting to be guided by us into the best ways of learning and teaching, seems like saddling ourselves with a confessed cause of im- perfection unnecessarily. Admitting the stimulus of the test examination to 1 The least studious of German countries, Austria, is the one most abounding in university examinations like our own. " Le pays A exaTnens, VAutriehe, est pricisivnent celui dans lequel on ne travoMe pas," says M. Lahoulaye. (M.A.) 146 REPORTS ON SCHOOLS. be salutary, we may therefore yet say that when it is over-employed it has two faults : it tends to make the instruction mechanical, and to set a bar to duly ex- tending it. School grants earned in the way fixed by the Eevised Code — by the scholar performing a certain minimum expressly laid down beforehand — must inevitably concentrate the teacher's attention on the means for producing this minimum, and not simply on the good instruction of his school. The danger to be guarded against is the mistake of treat- ing these two — the producing this minimum success- fully and the good instruction of a school — as if they wgre identical. The safeguard seems to be in re- ducing the overwhelming preponderance of this examination and its results, at the same time that we retain all its useful stimulus. In my report two years ago I said, " More free play for the inspector, and, in conseqiteTice, more free play for the teacher." As long as the whole grant-earning examination turns on results precisely and Hterally specified by the Department beforehand, so long the inspection will be mechanical and unintelligent, and it will inevitably draw the teaching after it. It will be remembered that the Duke of New- castle's Commission attached great importance to leaving inspection just as it was, the new capitation grant examination being therefore kept subordinate GENERAL REPOKT FOR THE YEAR 1869. 147 to it, and committed to a subordinate functionary ; for when, practically, the substantive result of the inspector's proceedings in a school is the grant for this examination, it will, whatever the Department may say, efface everything else. The Newcastle Commission proposed 15s. per head as the maximum, grant to be earned per scholar. Our actual maximum is 12s. per head, the grant under the Minute of February being so insignificant (about £13,000, I think, last year for the whole of England), that it is not worth taking into account. Of this 12s., 4s. is maintenance grant, paid on average attendance ; 8s. is capitation grant on examination in reading, writing, and ciphering. Some such plan as the following seems to me calcu- lated to temper what is excessive and retain what is useful in the system now in force : — Suppose, the 4s. grant on attendance being left as it is, the examina- tion grant were reduced from 8s. to 6s. ; 2s. on read- ing, 2s. on writing, 2s. on arithmetic, instead of 2s. 8d. on each of these branches as at present. To the 2s. thus saved let there be added a third shilling, making a 3s. grant on average attendance, to be paid if the inspector finds the school taught with intelligence, if he finds proper extent given to the instruction, if he finds the work done in good form and style, and if, L 2 us REPOETS ON SCHOOLS. finally, the staff of pupil-teachers is not less than one for every forty scholars after the first twenty-five. The inspector to have the power to recommend the re- duction of this higher instruction grant hy thirds for failure in any one of the three first points specified. The fourth point to he a condition of the grant being paid at all. The stipulation in point the third (that as to form and style of work) would give the Department an opportunity of checking the inspector's recommenda- tions and verifying their accuracy, because the paper work of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Standards, in which this merit of form and style would chiefly appear, is sent up to the Department. But some confidence must be reposed in the inspector if the inspection is to have any life at all. Thus there would be three grants, an attendance grant of 4elled to present children, at short notice, in standards for which they had not intended them. In every stand- ard the rate of failure was higher than in 1869 ; and the total rate of failure was 1881 per cent, against 11-31 per cent, in 1869. The rate of failure was highest in arithmetic stdl, as it always has been; the failure in this branch of study being five times as great as the failure in reading, and twice as great as the failure in writing and spelling. In the extra subjects fixed by the fourth schedule of the New Code, all the examinees, except those presented in recitation, were examined on paper. The rate of failure in the paper- work was nearly 40 per cent. ; 902 papers were examined, and 358 of them were raaiked failure. This schedule of extra subjects is very valuable ; by it, and by it alone, d{i