564 Education a National Concern. 



still more wretched in quality. The Reports of the Statistical Society of 

 Manchester present a painful and humiliating picture of the general mass of 

 our so named, but misnamed, education ; the mere material organization 

 school-houses, outfit, &c. of the worst possible description ; the intellectual 

 and moral still worse. Bad sites, bad air, garrets and cellars for school- 

 rooms, every thing to produce both physical and mental injury, are a few 

 only of these features : a much more afflicting characteristic is the want of 

 teachers, of books, and instruction ; the very essentials, in fine, of education 

 are wanting. They are mere lock-up houses to ease parents for a certain 

 number of hours of their children. The great majority of the schools in the 

 thriving towns of Manchester, Salford, Bury, Liverpool, are of this class ; and 

 there is no reason for supposing they do not present a pretty fair sample of 

 what is usually to be met with in the great majority of our commercial cities. 

 The country districts are secured indeed by their mere position from many of 

 the physical evils ; but from few, if any, of the mental. The Dame-schools 

 are types of the greater part of these institutions : the simplicity of childhood 

 is taught by ignorance, and often by imbecility. It is true, indeed, that these 

 defects have long since attracted the attention of benevolent individuals and 

 associations ; and, amongst others, the National Society and the British and 

 Foreign have become conspicuous. But neither appears to have remedied the 

 evil, or indeed to have fully understood the true nature of the means by which 

 it was to be remedied. Their whole system refers much more to a certain 

 series of applications, than the being to which they are to be applied. It pre- 

 supposes no knowledge, no study of the infant mind ; it treats all with the 

 same dose of words, and pulls all by the same wires to the same attitude. 

 Scriptural teaching is a mere stringing together of half-understood or alto- 

 gether misunderstood phrases. That it is well meant, I have no doubt ; but 

 that it is wisely done, is quite another question. In most of these elementary 

 schools the instruction is reduced to its very simplest elements. It is often 

 little more than reading ; and though I have not heard that writing has gene- 

 rally been protested against, as in the case of some of the workhouse estab- 

 lishments, as little more than reading and writing as was at all possible has 

 been conceded. That there are not exceptions to this character, it would be 

 unjust to deny ; but it must still be remembered they are exceptions. The 

 British in some particulars maintain a considerable superiority over the Na- 

 tional, and some schools in each over the other. Private schools, in many 

 places, have rivalled the excellence of the best in Scotland or on the Continent. 

 But private schools are often, after all, but proofs of the inefficiency of public 

 ones, and of the necessity that exists of supplying their defects or their place. 

 The more superior, the more clearly they mark the inferiority of their rivals, 

 the more forcibly they attest the immense space yet to pass before the 

 public instruction can attain its just place. In no country is the strife be- 

 tween the new and old educations more vehement, the education which 

 deals with mind as spirit, and that which deals with it as matter. In no 

 country are there greater anomalies, greater differences, not merely on the 

 means, but the ends of education. Nor is this discoverable in elementary 

 only ; it runs up through the entire system. 



" If we find in the country and town schools little preparation for the occu- 

 pations, still less for the duties of the future agriculturist or mechanic, we 

 find in the Grammar schools much greater defects. The middle-class, in all 

 its sections, except the mere learned professions, find no instruction which 

 can suit their special middle-class wants. They are fed with the dry husks 

 of ancient learning, when they should be taking sound and substantial food 

 from the great treasury of modern discovery. The applications of chemical 

 and mechanical science to every-day wants, such a study of history.as will 

 show the progress of civilisation, and such a knowledge of public economy, 

 in the large sense of the term, as will guard them against the delusions of 

 political fanatics and knaves, and lead to a due understanding of their posi- 



