299. The First Parliamentary Grant for Elementary Education (Montmorency, J. E. G. de, State Intervention in English Education, pp. 239–40. Cambridge, 1902)

From 1807 to 1833 was a period of investigation and discussion as to the need for state aid for elementary education, and the year 1833, when the first grant of parliamentary funds to help build schoolhouses was made, is a dividing point between the old condition of affairs and the new. This grant of aid, small as it was, formed a precedent from which the House of Commons has never turned back. The following description of the passage of the Act making the grant reveals something of the attitude of many Englishmen toward the question of public education.

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On Saturday, August 17th, 1833, in a very empty House of Commons, a vote of £20,000 for the purposes of education was passed after a hot debate by 50 votes to 26 votes. Mr. T. B. Macaulay voted with the majority in favour of the grant. Lord Althorp explained that the object of the grant was to build schools where there already existed the means of carrying on such schools. In the debate Lord John Russell pointed out, in answer to a complaint that no ground for the experiment had been shown, that in the Report of the Education Committee in 1818 there were cases referred to of parishes which, if they could have been assisted in the first outlay, would afterwards have supported their own schools. This was still the case in 1833, and justified a vote for building grants. Mr. William Cobbett, the Member for Oldham, opposed the grant on the ground that education was not improving the condition of the country. In the country districts, he said, the father was a better man and a better labourer than his son. ports on the table of the House proved, he declared, that men became more and more immoral every year. Then what had become of the benefits of education? Education had been more and more spread; but to what did it all tend? "Nothing but to increase the number of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses that new race of idlers. Crime, too, went on increasing. If so, what reason was there to tax the people for the increase of education? It was nothing but an attempt to force education - it was a French - it was a Doctrinaire — plan, and he should always be opposed to it." It is difficult to realize that Mr. Cobbett - a praiser of times past, a hater of State intervention, a despiser of French philosophy was the advanced reformer of his day. One does not usually couple such opinions with the conceptions of reform. Mr. Joseph Hume opposed the grant on the somewhat reasonable ground that it was too small to constitute a national system, and without such a system there was no justification for the grant. In the division on the grant he acted as one of the tellers for the Noes. The form

of vote was as follows: "That a Sum, not exceeding Twenty thousand pounds, be granted to His Majesty, to be issued in aid of Private Subscriptions for the Erection of School Houses, for the Education of the Children of the Poorer Classes in Great Britain, to the 31st day of March 1834; and that the said sum be issued and paid without any fee or other deduction whatsoever." The vote of £20,000 appears in the Revenue Act, 1833, as a grant for the erection of school houses in Great Britain.

300. Lord Macaulay on the Duty of the State to provide Education (Extract from an Address in the House of Commons, in 1847. Reported in Barnard's National Education in Europe, p. 747. Hartford, 1854)

Among the early champions of a general state system of education for the masses was Thomas Babington Macaulay. In defending the minutes of the Committee of Council on Education relative to nationalizing education, he said, in part:

I hold that it is the right and duty of the State to provide for the education of the common people. I conceive the arguments by which this position may be proved are perfectly simple, perfectly obvious, and the most cogent possible. . . . All are agreed that it is the sacred duty of

every government to take effectual measures for securing the persons and property of the community; and that the government which neglects that duty is unfit for its situation. This being once admitted, I ask, can it be denied that the education of the common people is the most effectual means of protecting persons and property? On that subject I can not refer to higher authority, or use more strong terms, than have been employed by Adam Smith; and I take his authority the more readily, because he is not very friendly to State interference; and almost on the same page as that I refer to, he declares that the State ought not to meddle with the education of the higher orders; but he distinctly says that there is a difference, particularly in a highly civilized and commercial community, between the education of the higher classes and the education of the poor. The education of the poor he pronounces to be a matter in which government is most deeply concerned; and he compares ignorance, spread through the lower classes, neglected by the State, to a leprosy, or some other fearful disease, and says that where this duty is neglected, the State is in danger of falling into the terrible disorder. He had scarcely written this than the axiom

was fearfully illustrated in the riots of 1780. I do not know if from all history I could select a stronger instance of my position, when I say that ignorance makes the persons and property of the community unsafe, and that the government is bound to take measures to prevent that ignorance. On that occasion, what was the state of things? Without any shadow of a grievance, at the summons of a madman, 100,000 men rising in insurrection a week of anarchy - Parliament besieged your predecessor, sir, trembling in the Chair- the Lords pulled out of their coaches the Bishops flying over the tiles - not a sight, I trust, that would be pleasurable to those who are now so unfavorable to the Church of England thirty-six fires blazing at once in London the house of the Chief Justice sacked the children of the Prime Minister taken out of their beds in their night clothes, and laid on the table of the horse guards and all this the effect of nothing but the gross, brutish ignorance of the population, who had been left brutes in the midst of Christianity, savages in the midst of civilization.... Could it have been supposed that all this could have taken place in a community were even the common laborer to have his mind opened by education, and be taught to find his pleasure in the exercise of his intellect, taught to revere his maker, taught to regard his fellowcreatures with kindness, and taught likewise to feel respect for legitimate authority, taught how to pursue redress of real wrongs by constitutional methods?

Take away education, and what are your means? Military force, prisons, solitary cells, penal colonies, gibbets all the other apparatus of penal laws. If, then, there be an end to which government is bound to attain if there are two ways only of attaining it if one of those ways is by elevating the moral and intellectual character of the people, and if the other way is by inflicting pain, who can doubt which way every government ought to take? It seems to me that no proposition can be more strange than this - that the State ought to have power to punish and is bound to punish its subjects for not knowing their duty, but at the same time is to take no step to let them know what their duty is.

301. Evils of apprenticing the Children of Paupers

(Report of the Reverend H. Mosely, Inspector, to the Committee of Council on Education for England. In a Report on Kneeler Hall Training School, 1851) Kneeler Hall Training School, twelve miles from London, was established in 1846 to train teachers for service in workhouse and penal schools, and was under the direct control of the Committee of Council on Education. The Report of the Poor-Law Board for 1850 showed that there were, on January 1, 1851, 43,138 children in the workhouses of England and Wales, and 838 teachers em

ployed in their instruction. This was about one child in eight for whom poor-relief was being extended, and for whom the State stood more or less in loco parentis. For these children, the Report held, "every dictate of humanity and wise economy demands that the State should make immediate and thorough provision in schools and teachers of the right kind."

Of the system of apprenticing the children of paupers, Mr. Mosely wrote:

The system of education under the old poor law was that of parish apprenticeship. Pauper children were bound apprentices to such persons as were supposed capable of instructing them in some useful calling. In some cases this was by compulsion, the apprentices being assigned to different rate-payers, who render themselves liable to fines if they refuse to receive them, which fines sometimes went to the rates, and in other cases were paid as premiums to persons who afterward took these apprentices. Another method of apprenticeship was by premiums paid from the rates to masters who, in consideration of such premiums, were contented to take pauper children as apprentices. The evils of this system were manifold:

Ist. As it regarded the independent laborer, whom, by its competition, it prevented "from getting his children out, except by making them parish paupers, he having no means of offering the advantages given by the parish," and in whom it discouraged that which in a parent is the strongest motive to self-denial, forethought, and industry — a desire to provide for his children.

2dly. As it regards those to whom the children were apprenticed; who, when they took them on compulsion, took them at an inconvenience and a disadvantage — to whom these parish apprentices "were much worse servants and less under control than others," who often found them "hostile both in conduct and disposition, ready listeners, retailers of falsehood and scandal of the family affairs, ready agents of mischief of the parents and other persons ill disposed to their employers," who "not infrequently excited the children to disobedience, in order to get their indentures cancelled," — they were the unwilling servants of unwilling masters; they could not be trusted, and yet could not be dismissed. The demoralization of the apprentices made them undesirable inmates. They disseminate in the parish the morals of the workhouse.

3dly. As it regards the children themselves:

1. They were often apprenticed to "needy persons, to whom the premium offered was an irresistible temptation to apply for them," and "after a certain interval had been allowed to elapse, means were not unfrequently taken to disgust them with their occupation, and to render their situations so irksome as to make them abscond."

2. They were looked upon by such persons as "defenseless, and deserted by their natural protectors," and were often cruelly treated. So that to be treated "worse than a parish apprentice" has passed into a proverb.

3. Not only was their moral culture neglected, but their moral wellbeing was often totally disregarded. The facts under this head are fearful. There was a mutual contamination. The system appears, says Mr. Austin, to have led directly to cruelty, immorality, and suffering, although, in some cases, apprenticeship was not unproductive of certain beneficial results to both master and apprentice.

4. Their instruction in any useful calling was for the most part neglected, because their masters were often unfit to teach them, and because they were obstinately unwilling to learn. The position which the parish apprentice occupied in the house was therefore commonly that of the household drudge.

It is scarcely to be wondered at, that among a race thus born in pauperism, and educated to it, pauperism became hereditary.

When the Poor Law Board abolished the system of education by apprenticeship, they took upon themselves the responsibility of providing some better form of education. Every workhouse was accordingly required to provide a schoolmaster who should educate the children. For which purpose they were to be completely separated from the adults, and instructed for at least three hours every day.

Lest the guardians should be tempted to employ inefficient schoolmasters, that they might not have to pay them high salaries, it was afterward provided that the salaries of workhouse schoolmasters should be paid out of a grant voted specially for that purpose by Parliament; and, later still, these salaries were ordered to be determined by your Lordships, upon examination by Her Majesty's Inspectors.

302. Typical Reasoning in Opposition to Free Schools (Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James, Public Education as affected by the Minutes of the Committee of Privy Council, 1846-52. London, 1853)

The following brief extract from the above volume is typical of much of the reasoning of the time in favor of supporting schools by public grants, coupled with tuition fees, in preference to the creation of a system of national education based on taxation.

A weekly payment from the parents of scholars is that form of taxation, the justice of which is most apparent, to the humbler classes. Every one who has even an elementary knowledge of finance is aware that no tax can be largely productive from which the great mass of the people are exempt.

The moral advantage of a tax on the poor in the form of school pence