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are overlaid by many faults and failings in a pupil. There is no more 

 humiliating reflection than that teachers have so frequently been blind to 

 the promise of distinction in their pupils. Of the public schools especially 

 it is only too true that they have been, and in some degree still are, the homes 

 of the average and the commonplace. They have applauded mediocrity, if it 

 conformed to the rules made by the masters for boys and the yet stricter rules 

 made by boys for one another; they have been not only oblivious but even 

 contemptuous of such conduct as was felt to be a departure from, if not a 

 reflection upon, the established norm of public school life. 



The second head includes such difficult matters as the carriire oiiverte nux 

 talents, the ladder set up from the lowest educational standard to the highest, 

 the provision of scholarships, the equalisation, as far as possible, of the condi- 

 tions under which boys and girls compete for pecuniary and other rewards, the 

 danger of social exclusiveness in schools and colleges, and the appreciation of 

 qualities, other than mere learning, as adapting students for their parts at home 

 and abroad in after-life. 



Under the third head, if it be granted that citizenship is, or ought to be, 

 everywhere the educational goal, it follows that the teacher may not unfairly 

 claim from the State the opportunity of giving such an education to children, 

 especially in the wage-earning class, where parents are tempted to take their 

 children away from school at an early age in the hope of making them con- 

 tributors to the family purse, that it may not be hopeless to implant in them 

 a certain knowledge, and with it that love of knowledge without which educa- 

 tion, as soon as it ceases to be compulsory, is only too apt to become a negligible 

 factor in tho citizen's life. It follows, too, that, where the interest of the 

 State is not wholly connected with the interest of the parent or the class or 

 the Church, some degree of regard for the State will ultimately prove to be a 

 not unjust condition of receiving public money. 



Yet again a sense of the importance attaching to the personal and professional 

 qualities of the teacher leads almost necessarily to an insistence upon official 

 registration as a condition of undertaking educational work, upon the training 

 and testing of teachers by all such means as are suitable to prepare them for 

 their responsible duties, and upon pension-schemes for facilitating the retire- 

 ment of teachers when they have lost or are losing their vigour and have earned 

 a period of repose. For education is a science ; it is exacting as all sciences 

 are; and while the educational profession needs to be made as attractive as 

 possible, especially in days when so many other professions enter into com- 

 petition with it, and while it loses attractiveness if teachers, both men and 

 women, are compelled to retire from it at too early an age, yet it is obviously 

 wrong to sacrifice the many to the individual or the scholars to the teacher by 

 obliging a school master or mistress to continue in office when he or she is no 

 longer able to perform the duties of the scholastic calling with full efficiency. 



More than forty years have elapsed'since the passing of the Education "Act of 

 1870. ' That Act was a signal legislative achievement; it still reflects lustre 

 on the names of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster. In the intervening years it 

 has been subjected to severe controversy, not so much on educational as on 

 ecclesiastical grounds. It has undergone some grave modifications at various 

 times, especially in 1902. But after all the main principles embodied in the 

 Act of 1870, viz., that education is a national concern, that the children are the 

 greatest asset of a State, and that it is the interest no less than the duty of 

 the State to provide, or to see that provision is made, for the education of all 

 children in elementary or other schools, have not been and in all probability 

 will not be seriously challenged. 



The Act of 1870 has proved to be a great moral reform. It lifted the nation 

 as a whole to a new level of self-respect. For the child who has acquired even 

 such elementary learning as is popularly symbolised by the 'Three R's ' is a 

 higher being than the child who cannot read or write. The elementary school 

 teacher, not in denominational schools alone, has been a missionary of civilisa- 

 tion, and, I think I may say, of Christianity, in many a dark region of many 

 a populous city. I have been told that to the influence of the Board Schools 

 in East London was traceable a marked advance among children in kindness to 

 the lower animals. Any disparagement or depreciation of the Education Act 

 of 1870 is little less than treason to the moral interests of the people at large. 



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