SCIENCE -Supplement. 



I 



FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1886. 



PBI3IARY EDUCATION IN ENGLAND. 



Two of the functions which almost every mod- 

 ern state has been obliged to assume, whether in 

 other respects its policy is laissez faire or state 

 interference, are the support of its helpless poor 

 and the education of its ignorant youth. Both of 

 these matters were attended to in the Europe of 

 the middle ages by the church, which, on account 

 of its large endowments and its literary stores, was 

 perhaps better fitted to relieve misery and spread 

 the light of education than the state as then organ- 

 ized. England formed no exception to this rule. 

 The early English monasteries could find almost 

 the only reasons for their being, in the fact that 

 the poor and helpless found, under their hos- 

 pitable roofs, shelter and support, and that the 

 children of the neighboring districts obtained 

 the instruction they so sadly needed in the schools 

 connected with them. These schools were estab- 

 lished at about the same time that Christianity 

 was adopted by the English people. Such a one 

 was the school established in 680 by Theodore, 

 archbishop of Canterbury. Later, schools were like- 

 wise provided in almost all the cathedral towns. 

 These schools were employed by the clergy to 

 keep their hold on the people ; and with the refor- 

 mation there naturally came a change in the 

 educational system, which reflected that which 

 had taken place in the relations between chui'ch 

 and state. The laity were to have a share in the 

 management of the schools, which were, how- 

 ever, to be supported in somewhat the same way 

 as before. 



The intention of the leaders of the reformation 

 was to appropriate for school maintenance a large 

 share of the property of the monasteries ; but the 

 king's friends were able to secure most of this 

 property for themselves. Such schools as lived 

 tlu'ough this stormy period at all, or such as 

 were founded soon after, had to subsist on private 

 charity. A great many schools were founded as 

 the immediate result .of the reformation, but they 

 were mostly grammar or higher schools, whose 

 influence was necessarily limited ; and it was not 

 until considerably later that any attention was 

 paid to pi'imary education, — the only kind of ed- 

 ucation that can interest the masses of the people. 

 Attempts had indeed been made to make some 

 provision for the education of the children of the 



poor. Statutes had been passed in the sixteenth 

 century under which schools for poor children 

 were to be maintained by the clergy in each 

 parish. But the great inequality in the distribu- 

 tion of the income of the state church — an in- 

 equality which all the expedients that have 

 been devised have not done away with — gave 

 the great majority of parishes barely enough for 

 ecclesiastical needs : little, therefore, could be 

 spared for the establishment of an efficient sys- 

 tein of primary education. Parochial scliools did 

 exist in the richer parishes, it is true, but they 

 were of a very poor character, and were supported 

 by means of school-fees, or by the revenue of 

 foundations ; but in the larger number of the 

 rural districts no schools at all were to be found. 



But what the church had neglected to do was 

 taken up by private associations, beginning with 

 the latter part of the last century. In 1781 

 Robert Raikes founded the first Sunday schools ; 

 in 1803 was founded the British and foreign 

 school society, managed by the dissenters ; in 1811, 

 the National society, the orga)) of the state 

 church ; in 1837 the Ragged-school society had its 

 origin ; and in 1850 thei'e was formed by the 

 large factory-owners the Lancashire public-school 

 association. The two gi-eat names in this period 

 are those of Andrew Bell and Joseph LE&caster, 

 — the one a churchman, the other a non-conform- 

 ist, and each the founder of the school society 

 recognized as the agency of the religious body 

 to which he belonged. To these two men, it has 

 been said, England must "allow the credit of 

 conceiving some sort of scheme for popular edu- 

 cation, and of submitting proposals by which it 

 might be carried out ; " and it was through the 

 societies founded by them or their followers that 

 state aid, when it was finally given, was distrib- 

 uted. This began in 1832, with an appropriation 

 of twenty thousand pounds. For several years 

 before that, attempts had been made to secure 

 state aid, but they were frustrated by the jeal- 

 ousies of the church and non-conformists. The 

 " church was alarmed at any thing which seemed 

 to trench upon what she naturally thought to be 

 her appointed task. The dissenters dreaded what 

 might add to the impregnability of the church's 

 strongholds." 



With this appropriation in 1832 begins, then, 

 the assumption by the English state, of the duty, 

 which is now universally recognized, of educating 

 its ignorant youth. The period between 1833 and 



