SG Mb, G. Andebson on the Education of the Working Classes, 



improvement of school fabrics, the supply of suitable and skilfully devised 

 apparatus, and the gradual creation of an adequate staff of competent 

 and devoted teachers. Towards all these objects your Lordships' 

 measures have furnished tlie most important aid. But when the 

 schools have been built, often at great cost, and mth excellent judg- 

 ment, and the teachers have been installed in their office, full both of 

 zeal and capacity, what has been done to secure inmates for the one and 

 pupils for the other ? Evidently nothing." 



In looking over these Keports, which contain much valuable and 

 interesting information, we cannot help being struck with the fact, that 

 most of these inspectors have felt so deeply the extreme difficulty of 

 inducing parents to send their children to school, or, if they did send 

 them, to keep them there for any useful period, that nearly all of these 

 Reports recommend a compulsory enactment. 



In the face of aU the evidence on this point, it becomes very difficult 

 to avoid the conviction, that all om- maguilicent educational schemes, if 

 they go no farther than the building of schools and the providing of 

 teachers, will never educate the people. Towards that grand object 

 there appear to be two courses. We must either treat ignorance as a 

 police delinquency, and pass a compulsory educational law, or we must 

 wait the slow process of years, the tardy leavening of the mass below 

 with the ideas of those above, till the masses of our population get to 

 appreciate the education we seek to give them, and become willing to 

 avail themselves of our teachers and our schools. If there be a third 

 course, it must be by founding on one or other of these, and either by 

 establishing a modified compulsion, or by endeavouring by some means, 

 legislative or otherwise, to stimulate that tardy leavening to a more 

 rapid fermentation, and to imbue the masses, by some speedy means, 

 with a strong desire for education. 



The causes at present in operation to produce the slow result are, the 

 weight of moral obligation, the sense of parental duty, slowly growing 

 with the growing intelUgence of the people. To pi'oduce more rapid 

 results, we must appeal to some more lively feeling, even if it be a less 

 elevated one. We must appeal in the plainesit and most direct way to 

 self-interest, and I need hardly add that the plainest and most direct is 

 through the medium of the magic letters, X s. d. 



In short, I wish to bribe the people into educating their children, by 

 proposing to them some unmistakeable and quickly realizable pecuniary 

 benefit from their doing so. I propose that uneducated children should 

 be placed for some years under certain disabilities in the matter of 

 earning wages, and that a premium be put upon education, by allowing 

 all wlio shall come up to a prescribed educational standard to earn wages 

 at an earlier age. 



