Importance of National Education. 365 



cautious and systematic selection of persons adapted for the office of 

 teachers (says Mrs. Trollope, alluding to the Prussian systenij) which can 

 alone ensure a profitable national education."* "No system (says Pro- 

 fessor Pillans) would work well without a good master, and it is upon 

 this account that I conceive the institution of schools for masters to be at 

 the foundation of all improvement in national education."! Another im- 

 portant step (as many writers have suggested)]: would be the appointment 

 of a public functionary, invested with sirailiar powers to those of the 

 French Minister of Instruction, or of the Superintendant of common 

 schools in the state of New York, who might give his undivided attention 

 to those duties at present very partially and imperfectly discharged by the 

 Home Department. Such an officer would find ample employment for a 

 time in the collection of the Statistics of education; and besides his at- 

 tention to the establishment of schools, he should have to watch over the 

 working of them, to " improve their system of superintendence and plans 

 of instruction, and to extend their sphere of action to the very limit of 

 their means." An early result of the establishment of such an office, it is 

 said, "would be to make the fact as well-known to ourselves as it already 

 is to our neighbours, that in few countries of Europe are the elements of 

 a sound and useful instruction so scantily diffused as in England and the 

 sister island." § The Select Committee on secondary punishments (of 

 1 83 1 ) in noticing the general conduct of criminals in London, state that "most 

 of them can read and write, but they are excessively ignorant ; their read- 

 ing and writing gives them no sort of knowledge ; it is the same as if they 

 could not read or write as to any useful knowledge." \\ 



to at least as rigid a scrutiny as apothecaries, it is perfect nonsense to tallc of educa- 

 tion having failed to check the progress of crime in England,". ..." a country, by 

 the way, in which the science of education is at a lower ebb than in any other civi- 

 lized nation on the earth." — For. Quar. Rev. Oct. 1835. 



* Belgium ii. Ui'J. 



t " A crazy and ragged orator some time ago applied at the Mansion House for a 

 few shillings and a pair of shoes, to take him back to Ireland, seeing he had found 

 the pretensions of this island to learning exceedingly hollow. In his harangue to the 

 Lord Mayor, he observed with exquisite and most ap])ropriate sarcasm, ' that he 

 had heard much of the schoolmaster being abroad in England, but that he had not 

 had the good fortune to find any body who had met with him ."' — Simpson, p. 185. 



I Quar. Jour. Ed. — Edinb. Rev. No. 117. — Simpson on Education. 214, &.C. 

 § Quar. Jour. Ed. No. 18, p. ;i27. 



II Gucrry, p. 49. 



" It forms an instructive example of the sedative effect of established habits of 

 thinking, that our ancestors and ourselves have so contentedly held this to be 

 education, or the shadow of it, for any rank of society I Reading, writing, and 

 ciphering, are mere instruments : when attained, as they rarely or never are after 

 all, by the working class to a reasonable perfection, they leave the pupil exactly in 

 the situation where he would find himself, were we to jnit tools into his hands, the 



No. .0.— Vol. I. 3 B 



