High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Philanthropists steadily became more interested in schools as well as in libraries. Shaftesbury led the Ragged School movement for thirty-nine years from 1844, assisted by supporters such as Dickens: 300,000 children in London alone went through these schools between 1844 and 1881. The Education Act of 1870 set up board schools, but these were neither free nor compulsory. Disraeli’s ministry of 1874–80 sought to widen provision, with Sandon’s Act of 1876 allowing local committees to pay for children whose families had no money. It was not until the next Gladstone ministry that Mundella’s Act of 1881 compelled attendance for children aged between five and ten and forced payment of 3d a week. The Fee Grant Act of 1891, passed by a Conservative government under Lord Salisbury, finally made education for children free of charge.

  However, in the middle of the century religion still restricted educational opportunity. By 1851 there were nearly as many Nonconformists in England as Anglicans: but it was not until the University Test Act of 1871 that the bar against non-Anglicans holding fellowships or senior university positions at Oxbridge was removed. The supposedly best schools were also restricted other than by money, until the Clarendon Commission led to the Public Schools Act 1868, which took the nine leading schools in England out of the hands of either the government or the Church and made them independent. Breaking the Church’s control allowed a broadening of the curriculum away from the Classics, which helped create a new generation of broader thinkers and innovators more in tune with a world that was changing technologically and socially. The slow, gradual and incomplete separation of religious institutions from educational ones was both driven by the march of secularisation, and drove that march. In parallel with the movement to extend education was a movement to question the hold religion had had on society, and to force religion to confront rationalism. By the 1880s this broadening of minds would initiate a profound change in society, though it did not happen without a fight.

  II

  The work of Churches to provide education to the lower classes was supplemented by steadily increasing government grants: but it was not enough to provide a decent basic education to all who needed it, and not enough to supply the needs of a fast-growing country whose industrial expansion demanded a larger pool of skilled labourers and literate, numerate clerical workers. Advocates of the extension of education made much of the fact that Prussia had introduced State education, and it was now a right for Prussians to have their children sent to school and be paid for by the State.

  In 1848 petitioners from Manchester – where there was plenty of wealth unevenly distributed – had sought parliamentary permission to levy a local tax to pay for schools. Parliament refused. By 1855 both Lord John Russell and Sir John Pakington, a former Colonial Secretary, proposed bills to allow local public subsidy of education. The problem with establishing a system of publicly funded schools, or schools partly funded by the public, was not merely financial: it was also religious, in that dissenters did not wish to pay taxes to support Church of England schools. In fact, in the first full year after the Liberals returned to office in 1859 education accounted for one-fifth of the State’s entire expenditure: something that could be ill-afforded after the Crimean War.10 A grant system had grown since 1839, when Russell invented it, under the aegis of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, to cost over £750,000. This was because of the growth in population, the multiplying of schools and the expense of training teachers. Even Russell and Matthew Arnold, respectively the instigator and most fervent supporter of Kay-Shuttleworth’s system, felt it required better control.

  William Fox, the MP for Oldham, told the Commons on 11 June 1855 that although one child in eight was at school according to the most recent figures – compared with one in seventeen in 1818 – because of population rises ‘there were now in Great Britain more children who should be at school, and who were not at school – more by many, many scores of thousands – than there ever were before.’11 He estimated the number at 2 million. He said that only two in a hundred Prussians aged twenty-one could not read; whereas only one in five ‘of our common soldiers, who had enjoyed the advantage of regimental schools’ could; and in every two marriages, one party on average signed his or her name with a mark.12 Pakington also showed that crime rates were far higher in Britain than in Holland and Denmark, where there was universal education.

  He tried in 1858 to have a Royal Commission appointed, but ‘he was told the information he sought was not required; that all the facts the friends of education could desire could be obtained from the annual reports of the inspectors employed by the Privy Council. He was told that all was going on well; that there was no need of a change; that the progress of education in England was greater during the present century than it had ever been in any other country during the same period of time.’13 Pakington, and Russell, knew this was complacent rubbish: ‘Large masses of the people of this country were in a state of the most deplorable ignorance,’ Pakington said. He knew the centrally administered attempt at regulating education was failing, and that some local administration was essential; in large areas of Britain there were either only bad schools, or no schools at all.

  At the change of government in 1858 he secured his Royal Commission on the education of the poorer classes. Derby appointed it. He delegated the matter to the second Marquess of Salisbury, who chose the Duke of Newcastle to lead it. Newcastle was a Peelite. He had been Secretary of State for War in Aberdeen’s administration and would be Colonial Secretary in Palmerston’s from 1859 until his premature death, just before his fifty-third birthday, in 1864. The Commission began in the inauspicious circumstances of the reduction by Gladstone, Palmerston’s Chancellor, of the grant for education by over £30,000, for the first time since 1834; this was despite the number of children increasing rapidly.

  Newcastle was told ‘to consider and report what measures, if any, are required for the extension of sound and cheap elementary instruction to all classes of people.’14 He drew on the twenty-seven volumes of school inspection reports published since 1839: but ‘the Inspectors are Inspectors of Schools, not of education’, Newcastle said. Their expertise on the better sort of elementary schools was unrivalled: but there were many more schools, many uninspected. The work was massive: assistant commissioners had to be appointed to visit schools all over the country. They concentrated on two main agricultural districts, in the West Country and in East Anglia and Lincolnshire; on the main manufacturing areas in Lancashire, Yorkshire and around Birmingham and the Potteries; on mining areas in the north-east and in South Wales; in ports such as Bristol, Hull, Yarmouth and Liverpool; and metropolitan London.

  Newcastle looked at Catholic schools, dissenting schools, schools run by the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the principles of the Established Church, and other charitable schools such as those of the London Ragged School Union. No government had sought to promote education before 1832, when it was agreed to vote £20,000 a year to the National Society and the British and Foreign Schools Society to erect buildings. The Committee of the Privy Council for Education was formed in 1839, and the annual grant was increased to £30,000. The grant had risen steadily, and had begun to be paid to Roman Catholic schools after 1847. By 1860 it was £798,167 per annum. In 1846 the pupil-teacher system had been set up, under which the State paid the salaries of apprentice teachers for five years while they learned their profession.

  Although some assistant commissioners found parents insisting on sending their children only to schools of their own denomination, in other districts nobody seemed to care at all, reflecting the advance of secularisation. Mr Hare, assistant commissioner in the East Coast ports, said that ‘everywhere I have found Jews in Christian, and Roman Catholics in Protestant schools, and Church children in British or positively dissenting schools.’15 Even in Hull, where Protestant feeling was strong, he found Protestants ‘in schools managed by Roman Catholic priests and sisters of mercy’. Mr Foster, who covered Cumberland and County Durham, said that ‘paren
ts will send their children to whichever they deem the best school, quite irrespective of religious peculiarities.’16

  It had been hoped that evening schools would allow children who worked in factories or on the land to get an education; but the failure of this system was apparent to Newcastle, and this finding would lead to the eventual compulsory attendance, until the age of twelve, of children at day-schools. A clergyman from Lynn who was the secretary of the local board of education said that children in that agricultural district might attend on winter evenings; but once the days were longer they would more likely be at work. A schoolmaster from Yeovil said of the evening schools he had seen that ‘they are, for the most part, failures; indeed, nearly all the elements requisite to ensure success are wanting, viz, apparatus, good teachers, especially a competent superintendent, funds, interest, and support. They are often undertaken by inexperienced, untrained, and badly educated men. The order is that of Bedlam; little or no progress is made; and shortly the number, large at first, becomes reduced to a few, and the scheme is abandoned.’17 Sunday schools had a better report, largely because of the zeal of those who taught in them, but what they did was almost exclusively confined to religious instruction.

  Fees, the Commission found, provided between a quarter and three-fifths of schools’ income. Charitable societies levied fees according to the means of the parents. Where fees were 1d a week only 16 per cent of children in Yorkshire were felt able to pay them, and only 23 per cent of those in Lancashire. In an agricultural district such as Cambridgeshire the figure rose to 61 per cent and in the West Country to over 66 per cent.18 It cost £1 10s a year to educate a child, but even if a family was paying 3d a week (as many were asked to do) this would bring in under 12s a year; 8d a week was needed to cover costs. One of Newcastle’s recommendations was that all those who could afford 8d a week should pay it.

  Much of the rest of the money came in subscriptions from landowners, clergymen and householders. In the manufacturing districts many businesses had founded and then funded schools, as part of their obligations to their workforce. Horner, a factory inspector who had visited factory schools found the ‘great majority’ had failed to educate children even to a basic standard.19 He described the law that demanded education for factory children as ‘delusive’. ‘It provides nothing more than that the children shall on certain days of the week, and for a certain number of hours in each day, be enclosed within the four walls of a place called a school, and that the employer of the child shall receive weekly a certificate to that effect signed by a person designated by the subscriber as a schoolmaster or schoolmistress. Not a word is said as to what the instruction shall be, and the lowest possible qualifications that could be applied for teaching the rudiments of infantine training are declared to be sufficient for the granter of the certificate.’20 However, from 1 July 1861 no boy under twelve could be employed in any mine or colliery unless it was certified by a ‘competent schoolmaster’ that he could read or write, and he had to attend school for a certain number of hours each month. This law, like the Act that banned boys under ten from working in collieries, was widely flouted; the Commission estimated that in the Durham coalfield 9 per cent of the boys were under ten.21

  The 1851 census, the most recent to which Newcastle had access, showed 1,549,312 scholars in 22,647 schools, which included Sunday and evening schools. In 1860 it was found that 917,255 children were in schools to which the Privy Council Committee made a grant; 860,304 were in private schools. Some of these private schools were described as ‘very bad indeed’.22 The better schools, though, were good, and the assistant commissioners found many cases of children coming 2, 3 or even 5½ miles to them. The teachers too were variable. Mr Hare, from the East Coast, said that ‘most private schoolmasters are men who have failed in other pursuits, and . . . many of them eke out a subsistence by doing whatever odd jobs chance may throw in their way. One witness specifies quondam barbers, sailors, soldiers and millers as turning to school-keeping, and present schoolmasters as being also interested in ship-owning or engaged in rate-collecting.’23 In Plymouth Mr Cumin, an assistant commissioner, found one schoolmaster had been a blacksmith, another a journeyman tanner, another a dockyard labourer.

  The dregs were found in London: Dr Hodgson, Newcastle’s man there, found that ‘none are too old, too poor, too ignorant, too feeble, too sickly, too unqualified in every way, to regard themselves, and to be regarded by others, as unfit for school-keeping.’24 He continued: ‘The profession, as such, hardly exists . . . it is a mere refuge for the destitute, and enumerates grocers, tobacconists, linendrapers, tailors, attorneys, painters, German, Polish and Italian refugees, bakers, widows or daughters of clergymen, barristers and surgeons, housekeepers, ladies’ maids, and dressmakers, as being found among the teachers of private schools.’ Inevitably, many could not spell, and one or two could not even write.

  The commissioners also estimated there were 1,248,691 children who derived no benefit from the annual grant.25 It was estimated that between 5 or 10 per cent of children received no education at all, not even of the useless and disorganised type supplied by evening schools.26 Even the pupil-teacher scheme, which had been supposed to improve the number of trained people entering teaching, was failing, because it paid so badly; some schools in the more affluent parts of the country found that only by their managers offering an extra £5 a year above what the government would pay would anyone be tempted to take up such a post.27 Pupil-teachers began at fourteen on 3s 10d a week, rising to 7s 8d at eighteen; but this was no attraction when a boy could earn 10s a week in a factory in Sheffield, or 11s a week as a telegraph clerk on the railways. The work was exceptionally hard, especially, it was found, on young women; the training was ‘mechanical’ and boring and did nothing ‘to elevate the tone of their minds’.28

  The teacher training colleges were of a higher standard but had their imperfections. A man when fully trained could earn £97 a year; the Commission at least conceded that such men had ‘proved beyond all doubt’ that they were ‘greatly superior to the untrained teachers.’29 However, even without compulsory education, the growth in population required more teachers. The growth in prosperity – and therefore in expectations of parents paying even modest fees – would further boost demand. There was a grave shortage of teachers in infant schools, with only one training college, run by the Home and Colonial Society, producing them.30 Newcastle demanded a ‘powerful’ intervention by the Privy Council Committee if this was to be rectified.31

  The Commission knew that for some school was about more than learning. ‘To very poor children the school is a substitute for a home; they frequently have no other experience of domestic comfort and decency, and the teacher and those who take an active interest in the school are the only persons of tolerably cultivated minds with whom they are brought into anything approaching an intimate relation.’32 The moral effect of a school was important, an achievement of Dr Arnold’s influence in the public schools: ‘A set of good schools civilises a whole neighbourhood.’33

  Matthew Arnold had been appointed an assistant commissioner to report on education in France. One of his suggestions, as an experienced inspector, was that no prior warnings of inspections should be announced, as schools could prepare and dress themselves up. The Commission ignored his advice, saying inspectors should make allowances for such behaviour. Arnold had seen this in France, but the Commission thought it would not be practicable in England. Arnold was concerned about the dismal standards in British schools: notably of illiteracy, or of children who could read but with no understanding of what they were reading. It was noted that the books with which children were taught to read were packed with examples designed not to interest them, but to give them moral lectures instead. In even the best schools inspected, only about a quarter of boys were deemed ‘successfully educated’.34 The Commission decided ‘distinct inducements’ should be offered to masters in all schools to teach better and ‘to bring their individual scholars, jun
ior as well as senior, to a certain mark.’35 These unfavourable comparisons with France were meant to prompt improvements, and to an extent they did. But they also irritated those not of Arnold’s cast of mind, notably James Fitzjames Stephen, who ridiculed his ‘self-imposed mission to give good advice to the English as to their manifold faults’.36

  The Commission reserved its strongest language to condemn the education of pauper children in workhouses. It wanted to end, by law, contact with adult paupers, which caused a child to lose ‘all desire to earn its own living’.37 The Commission wanted them in separate schools, far from the workhouse, and from the ‘injurious’ influence of their feckless and often depraved parents. Children from orphanages so often, the report claimed, turned out better than those with parents in workhouses.38 Otherwise they would turn into ‘thieves, or paupers, or prostitutes’. Boards of guardians were beyond understanding this. Newcastle was unequivocal. ‘Pauperism is hereditary . . . children born and bred as members of that class furnish the great mass of the pauper and criminal population . . . the best prospect of a permanent diminution of pauperism and crime is to be found in the proper education of such children.’39 Schools outside the workhouse would ‘emancipate them from pauperism’, because workhouse schools were dismally funded and would never attract decent teachers.

  A final class of children was that for whom crime was already a way of life, and in reformatories, or industrial schools. The Commission quoted, with approval, an assistant commissioner’s report about these places. It was regarded as far superior to the ‘closeness, dirt and disorderly freedom of the common lodging houses’ where they mostly lived.40 In an industrial school they had ‘airy’ dormitories and separate beds, regular meals, exercise and fresh air. They were kept busy and taught trades and skills, such as brick-making and stock-keeping. Above all, ‘the Scripture regulation [is] in full force – if a man will not work, neither should he eat.’ This prevented the places becoming ‘seductive’ to the inmates. They were given much religious instruction; they had some wider education.