of our public schools or colleges exceeds, we believe, two or three lessons in the week, and in some it is limited to an hour's reading of the Greek Testament on Sunday mornings. Indeed, the entire middle classes of the country may be said to be educated in secular schools, while the lower classes get what instruction they receive entirely in schools where little else is attempted to be taught besides religion. And, as the result of these opposite plans of teaching, we have the fact that religion has taken a firm hold on our middle classes, and that our churches are deserted by the lower. Foreigners are struck by it. 'Place yourself,' says M. Leon Faucher, late a Minister of State in France, on Sunday, in the midst of Briggate Street, in Leeds; of Mosley Street, in Manchester; or of Lord Street or Dale Street, in Liverpool; what are the families whom you see walking to the churches gravely and silently? It is impossible to deceive oneself— they belong almost exclusively to the middle classes. The operatives remain on their door-steps, where they collect in groups until, the services in the churches being concluded, the taverns will open.' The children of the National School will generally be found prodigiously in advance of any other children in the parish, not excepting the clergyman's children, in religious knowledge, but profoundly ignorant of the simplest elements of secular instruction. These remarks must not be misunderstood. They are directed against the grievous abuse of, so called, religious instruction in our National Schools, and not against a religious education. The latter we recognise as the first and most solemn and responsible duty of the teacher, the former as a sacrilege. It is no slight matter to have presented to a child's mind all that belongs to its highest interests in such a way as to give to these the lowest place in its affections, to make religion the subject which, by irreverent use and constant iteration, has become the most wearisome to it, and the least regarded. 6 clergymen, who, for their own profit and emolument, keep schools, or hold tutorships and offices in Trinity College-not excepting the professorships of Divinity, acting on this principle, as respects the rich, who can pay for their education, and yet refusing to do so in ' reference to the poor, whose parents are unable to pay for their in'struction. But that is not all. I could refer you to cases, in which 'the same clergyman in whose parish there are two national schools, is to be found regularly visiting one, and communicating therein religious instruction on the system referred to (the school in the union 'workhouse, of which he is the salaried chaplain) while he would con'sider it a sin to visit the other in an adjoining street.' — The English Settler's Guide to Ireland. 6 'Etudes sur Angleterre.' We copy the passage from the work of Mr. Kay, p. 594. 1850. Importance of Applications. 129 Elementary education appears to us, whether on its religious or its secular side, to deal too much in abstractions. It is necessary to teach children principles, but we should not stop there; they should be taught also how to apply them. Whilst principles might thus be more firmly fixed in the mind and a relation established between them and a corresponding course of action, the habit would be cultivated of acting upon principle. The Prussians are conscious of this defect in their elementary instruction. On a recent occasion the Minister of Public Instruction admitted, on the part of the Government, that the teaching in the schools was much too abstract, and that the infusion of 'something practical into it would be a decided improvement.'* In elementary education what is wanted, above all things, is applications. To apply a general principle is, however, not less difficult in morals than in science. The most obvious resource of education for this end is to habituate a child to consider all that is learned by it in the light of that which is also to be applied: and, this will be best done by continually making the application of its learning to such questions as come within the range of its personal experience, or observation. The whole power of a school-resting on a scriptural basis, and appealing to a Divine Authority- might thus be brought to bear on one or two great questions of Morals under the form of an application of them. Take, for instance, truthfulness.' If in every thing which was said and done in the school, down to the minutest things, there were a scrupulous regard for it,-if openness and candour and fidelity were so encouraged in the intercourse of the teacher and children as to cause it to be honoured in the mutual intercourse of the children with one another, in some degree winning the public opinion of the school to that side,—it is difficult to estimate the amount of good that might be done.f Round the column of truth thus reared in the middle of the school every other Christian grace would entwine itself, and * Times, May 29. 1850. † 'I have seen,' says one of the inspectors (Minutes, 1846, vol. i. p. 176.), it would be in vain for me to attempt to describe with what indignation, the very teachers lend themselves to the deceits which, in their examinations, the children have a tendency to practise; and the visitors prompt them. If there be anything which it is expedient early to teach to a child, and to implant deeply, it is surely the abhorrence of "whatsoever maketh a lie"- the acting or the telling of it. A thousand other good qualities will attach themselves 'securely and permanently to this one, and the perils of life are com'paratively few to him in whose bosom it is deeply rooted.' VOL. XCII. NO. CLXXXV. K cling to it as by an instinct. For as every thing which occurs in the material world is but a particular manifestation of some universal principle and the subject of some general law, and there thus arises a connexion of the sciences, so it is in the moral world. Our virtues are united by principles common to all, and have a mutual dependence; and it is the same with our vices. Thus, if one vice be successfully attacked, the whole position will be weakened; and if one virtue be strengthened, that strength-or, if it be enfeebled and beaten down, that weakness-will be common to all. There is a temporal welfare of the labouring man, as well as of his master, and an education adapted to promote the one as well as the other. What is the distinctive character of that education has not been considered with the attention which it claims. Our idea of it almost always identifies itself with the education we have ourselves received. We can conceive differences in the degree, but not in the subjects of it. To our poorer brethren we would give greater or less fragments of the knowledge we ourselves possess according to their standing; thus reproducing ourselves under different but inferior forms in all below us. It is in this way that a very little learning comes to be associated with our notion of the instruction which people in the very lowest grades of society should receive. The inveterate prejudice, that education is a privilege annexed to a definite social position, and to be graduated according to it, associates itself with all our educational efforts. It would be one of the advantages of an education, devised with a special reference to the pursuits of labouring people, that it would enable us to get rid of this character of a little learning. In respect to the objects which it contemplates, it might be a thorough and complete education; and yet the upper classes of society might continue to be separated from the lower, as they are now, by other forms of knowledge;-education being still graduated according to men's social condition, but having an adaptation to each condition, and being good and complete with reference to that adaptation. Industrial Schools, as they have been called, should help us here. The son of a labourer might, for instance, according to this view of the question, be well educated, although he was a bad penman, spelt incorrectly, and knew very little of etymology. He might still have the contents of a whole book on agriculture in his head, and might be thoroughly grounded in the principles of those experimental sciences* which go far to explain the * Whoever knows the avidity with which boys receive this kind of instruction, and compares the difficulties of it with those to be overcome by a boy who, at the age of thirteen, has learned to construe Virgil 1850. Mr. Dawes's Village School. 131 processes out of which the vegetable world is elaborated, and have a direct and profitable application to the business of agriculture. The course of study he would thus have pursued would serve just as completely for the education of his mind, the drawing out of his faculties of reason and the understanding, as though it had been contrived specially for that object, and had no other use; and it would have this advantage over any thing else which could have been taught him, that he will be less likely to forget it. The labouring man may have been taught many things at school; but, practically, what is associated with the earning of his daily bread is that which will remain with him; and whatever process of instruction we commence in his mind when a little boy, this will infallibly take the place of it, when he comes to be a man. To tell a man that he is to shut out from his labour the exercise of thought, or that the proper functions of his intelligence lie in some other path than that of his daily avocations, is, indeed, to a certain extent, to contravene the order of God's providence in respect to him; for assuredly men's understandings were not given them to be held -as to the great majority-in abeyance; nor is it without reason that the Almighty has associated the means of exercising the highest intelligence with the humblest craft; and placed thinking and doing, in a pleasurable relation, so that what we do in the exercise of our judgment, and for some object, we do with pleasure, but not that which is done with no exercise of our judgment, for no object, and with an adaptation to no end. In education thus adapted to the daily pursuits of labouring people and the ordinary affairs of life, nobody has done so much as the Rev. R. Dawes; whose services have been acknowledged in his recent elevation to the Deanery of Hereford. The principles on which his village school is conducted, and the subjects and methods of the instruction which he adopts, are fully detailed in his various works, and in the report of the Government inspector. † One of the important characteristics by which Mr. Dawes's village school is distinguished from all others, is the fact, that and Horace and, perhaps, Homer, or even with what is required to be known by a boy admitted on the foundation at Eton, before he is ten years old, will not dispute this. Suggestive Hints towards improved Secular Instruction.'Groombridge. An improved Self-paying System of Education.'-Groombridge. † Minutes, 1848, vol. i. p. 7. This report has been republished under a separate form by Groombridge. - it includes, with the children of labourers, those of tradesmen and farmers; the children of labourers being charged a weekly fee of two pence; and other children, if they live in the parish, six shillings per quarter, if out of it, ten shillings. The number of labourers' children attending the school in 1847 was 170; of other children, 49. The quarterly payments of these forty-nine children, added to the weekly pence of the rest, yield an annual income of from 120l. to 1307., and cover the whole expenses of the school. pre Who are to be considered farmers and to pay the highest fee, and who, tradesmen and labourers, Mr. Dawes claims the right himself to decide; but all are placed within the walls of the school on terms of perfect equality: they are intermingled in their seats and in the classes in which they are taught, and cisely the same advantages of instruction are offered to all. The success of the school has been remarkable. Mr. Dawes has shown his knowledge of the springs of opinion among the poor by consulting their independence; while, by a careful study of their condition, he has adapted the education he offers to them, to their wants. His most singular achievement, perhaps, is the union of the education of the labourers' and farmers' children, of which we have just spoken. It is impossible too highly to appreciate the value of this obvious means of cultivating those feelings of neighbourly consideration and mutual good-will between the employers and the employed, on which the links of society depend for their permanence and the commonwealth for its safety. The expediency of some form of instruction which should have for its object to impress upon the minds of children in elementary schools the principles of integrity, as regards the common affairs of life, the necessity of providence and forethought, -the rules of discretion in the dealings of man with man, and the laws which govern our social relations, has often been insisted upon. We have never seen any attempt made to carry out this form of instruction except in the Birkbeck schools, by Mr. Ellis, their founder, a gentleman well known by his writings on Political Economy. We have hitherto limited ourselves to a statement of what is doing to elevate the moral and religious condition, and provide for the material and social well-being of the labouring classes, by means of education. It is the character of eleemosynary efforts for the public welfare to be boastful. The stream of gold would flow but scantily into the coffers of public charity if there were no one to blow the trumpet. It is not easy otherwise to understand the impression which appears to have gone abroad that the people of this country are receiving the benefits of a good education. There is another defect in all the good we seek |