262 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE STOEY OF ENGLISH EDUCATION". 



By J. E. G. DE MONTMORENCY, B.A., LL.B. (Cantab.), 



BAEEISTER-AT-LAW. 



n^HE history of education in England is a suljject of profound in- 

 -*- terest and of singular importance; for it is intimately associated 

 with all the great crises of the national life, and exhibits, as no other 

 subject can, the effects of the interplay of religion, learning and poli- 

 tics upon the sociological development of a great people. The subject 

 is, moreover, one that belongs to all the daughter-nations of England, 

 whether, like Canada, they are still, to use a simile from Eoman law, 

 within the English manus, or whether, like the United States, they 

 have become sui juris. For it is necessary to go back far in time 

 if we would trace with honesty the obscure streams of thought, learn- 

 ing and tendency that are responsible for the great systems of educa- 

 tion in force in the various parts of the English-speaking world 

 to-day. We have indeed to go back to times which are the com- 

 mon property of that world, and delve among the records of 

 fifteen hundred years of strife and effort if we would understand 

 the meaning and the direction of modern education as conceived by 

 the Anglo-Saxon race. It is well sometimes to dwell, if only for a 

 moment, on the j)ermanence, the persistence, the soundness of the 

 social forces that through a millennium and a half have emanated and 

 still emanate from Britain. Fifteen hundred years almost exactly 

 measured the period of the great Eoman race from Eomulus the first 

 king to Eomulus the last emperor. The Anglo-Saxon race at the 

 end of a similar period shows little sign of exhaustion. It has, as 

 we are often reminded by reformers of every possible type, faults and 

 vices enough ; but in the main they are the vices and faults of youth — of 

 youth somewhat impatiently and curiously approaching adolescence 

 after an infancy of fifteen centuries. I desire in these pages briefly 

 to consider this infancy and to indicate the main educational lines 

 that have been followed in so vast a period of preparation. To 

 do so will, I believe, be valuable, for, in the storm and stress of 

 modern times, men are perhaps a little apt to neglect the principles 

 of progress that have been wrung, at the cost of infinite tears, from 

 nature in the past — principles that are the motives of history if we 

 will but read it. 



We know from the writings of Tertullian and Origen that it is 

 now at least seventeen hundred years since Christianity took root 

 in Britain; while Zozomen and Euscbius reveal to us, in the fourth 



