738 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 



the educational value of this second motive. I am not looking at it from the 

 religious point of view — that is not my business to-day. But as an instrument 

 of culture the value of a desire for learning, based on something other than 

 its relation to worldly success, is obviously great. It may be that the school 

 education actually prevailing in Scotland is better now than that of fifty years 

 ago, that the examination of the school inspector is more searching if less 

 stimulating than was that of the Presbytery, that the average or backward child 

 is less sacrificed to the clever one than used to be the case, and that general 

 intelligence is more developed. But the parents, who felt their children's 

 schooling to be their private concern, valued it more, took more personal 

 interest in it, and felt more personal responsibility for their children's progress 

 than parents can do now. And it is a serious question whether the loss of this 

 close link with home life has not had a bad educational effect, taking education 

 in its wider sense, which is not compensated for by possible improvement in the 

 schools. 



I must admit that in saying this I have in mind only a limited area. 1 

 have made no wider investigation. The population I am thinking of is an 

 entirely rural one in a purely agricultural district in the South of Scotland, 

 with which I was intimately acquainted as a young woman, and which I revisit 

 from time to time. In such a district compulsion to send the children to 

 school was unnecessary. It probably was required in the large towns and the 

 more industrial parts of the coimtiy. I do not complain of the introduction 

 of compulsion, but it did strike me at the time of its introduction that it was of 

 very doubtful advantage in my own part of the country; and this impression 

 has not diminished since. 



To see if it was shared by others I wrote to a friend, more familiar with the 

 district than I am now, to ask whether he did not think that parental interest 

 in the children's school education had decreased, and also whether he thought 

 that, as judged, for instance, by the books they borrowed from the parish 

 library, the grown-up population was less inclined to serious reading than they 

 used to be. I received from him a very interesting reply. He agreed with 

 what I have just said as regards the first question, and after speaking of the 

 warm and genuine wish in old times to give the children a good education., 

 added : 



' The parents might, indeed, let their older children be absent for short 

 times from school for light farm work or the like. But this was more than made 

 up for by the zeal with which they were sent to winter evening classes, which 

 could be gathered then far more easily than now. It is an unfortunate effect 

 of legislation that it has largely deprived us of the great asset we had in the 

 keenness of parental interest. It came about in this way. Government maue 

 it compulsory that no child should be employed in wage-earning who had not 

 passed the fifth standard. Almost instantly the ideal of our people was lowered. 

 A child was "educated" who had passed the fifth standard! And when by 

 and by Government made it compulsory that a child should be at school till 

 fourteen years of age, the parents in many cases felt this hard upon them, and 

 our School Board every year has applications for permission to children to 

 work before they are fourteen on various pretexts. I do not say that our 

 people are not interested in their children's education. They still inherit that 

 interest. But compulsion, and the fact of the responsibility being taken by 

 Government, has greatly changed their attitude.' 



With regard to my second question — ' Whether there is in country parishes 

 as much reading of serious books, books of weight, history, travels, &c.' — he 

 says he 'must answer A^o.' He thinks that the young people are perhaps more 

 intelligent than they used to be, ' but the reading is in enormous proportion 

 novels and very light literature.' He goes on to tell me of an old man who 

 died two years ago ' of the finest old Scottish type — devout, independent, 

 interested in religious reading, in lives of men like Livingstone, in travels 

 (he was reading Nansen in his ninetieth year and most interested in his Hear- 

 ing the Pole). But the list of books in his steady reading from the library 

 here was of quite different character from that opposite other names in our 

 catalogue of the same rank.' He says also that forty or fifty years ago good 

 audiences could be got for lectures — historical, travel, &c., but that now a good 



