The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal

7. Report of the Consultative Committee on Attendance, compulsory or otherwise, at Continuation Schools. (Cd. 4757-8.) 1909. 8. Continuation Schools in England and elsewhere. Edited by M. E. SADLER. Manchester University Press. 1907.

9. Some Thoughts concerning Education. By JOHN LOCKE. 4th ed. enlarged. 1699.

of educational energy is passing

A NOTABLE wave at the present time. never before has

VOL. CCXVIII. NO. CCCCXLV.

army, of whom three-quarters are women, have become class-conscious and may in time fulfil the fear of Mr. Robert Lowe by affecting the course of politics. The lawyer, the architect, and the doctor, as well as the divine, are now busily at work on educational problems. The psychologist, the social economist, the eugenist, have turned their refreshing labours to the field of youth. The specialist, hand in hand with the publisher, is opening new avenues of inquiry to the eyes of the child. And, most significant of all, historians, such as Professor Foster Watson, are studying in meticulous detail the history of pedagogy, the history of method, of manners, of educational administration, of schools, and of school books. This painful study of the history of education is significant indeed, for it means that the methods of Hegel and Darwin are at last to be turned upon the problem that is the most important among human interests-the problem of (to use the phrase of a seventeenth-century writer)' making ' a man.' After a century of activity unexampled in the history of the world, of activity devoted in a singularly peaceful period to the acquisition of both material wealth and enormous territorial possessions, we have realised that the Midas-touch has worked the unmaking of many millions of men and women. The business of education is the making of men; England at this time is making wealth rather than men. For threequarters of a century our educational system has been at work and it has never succeeded in overtaking the social problem. If some traveller from a happier planet desires to read the record of our educational efforts he has but to look down on the faces of two million children with their school life behind them, waiting for the call of life, untrained, unfit, unhappy. It is no matter for wonder that an impulse of educational energy is running through the nation, that workers are looking across our unique educational past in search of some inspiration for the future.

The history of English education is no mean story. The records go back even into the centuries of the Roman occupation. From the days of Alfred and the Saxon and Danish period we inherit a tradition of mind-work and hand-work moving together. Soon after the Conquest we see the gradual creation of schools for more advanced thinking, and of machinery for more advanced technical work, deliberately intended

to supplement an established network of parochial elementary schools. Early in the thirteenth century we find two great universities crowning a national educational system-a system adapted, no doubt, to meet the needs of a comparatively restricted population, a system hampered in many ways, but one that kept alive the tradition of the Roman Imperial schools and that set store on thought and scholarship, on art and handicraft, in days when cathedrals rose and great works were written amid the threat of famine, plague, and sword. The culture and the industry of those rude, but tutored, times are a perpetual reminder of what a nation can do even in circumstances of social unrest and economic instability. Despite the dark days of the late fifteenth century, despite the revolutionary effects of the Reformation, the Renaissance did not forget England, and the Elizabethan age saw the germination of the seed that magicians of the Middle Ages, such as Roger Bacon and Geoffrey Chaucer, had sown.

In certain senses the Elizabethan age was the golden age of English education. No doubt in detail any particular point or aspect of education in that age has been exceeded in our own. The heirs of all the ages, we have greater scholars, riper teachers, possibly better books; but taken as a whole, as a national concern affecting every filament and nerve and brain-cell of the body politic, the Elizabethan age was unique, almost incomparable. That age had, though of course on a vastly smaller scale, the very problems to solve that face us to-day, and it solved them. Few students realise the extent to which university and technical as well as school education permeated the nation. Idleness was of no account in those days. The sturdy beggar had short shrift. The State professed to transform, not to manufacture him. The Elizabethans had, as we have, a stern problem with which to deal. The Wars of the Roses, the economic changes in land-holding, the break-up of both the feudal and the monastic systems, had left many poor uncared for, many families ruined. As early as 1535 it was provided that beggar children over five years and under thirteen years of age were to be given over to masters of husbandry or other crafts 'to be taught. 'by which they shall get their livings when they be come to 'age.' The forethought of this provision puts our own time to shame. It was supplemented by the Statute of Apprentices

of 1562, which, however, exempted from compulsory work a student or scholar in any of the universities, or in any 'schools.'

The educational progress during the half-century that followed was in its nature almost miraculous. The schools and universities were relieved of all the burdens of taxation. The curricula of and attendances at the schools were closely supervised by the diocesan authorities. The parochial schools were deliberately worked as feeders of the grammar schools and the universities. The endowment of new elementary schools and grammar schools progressed with wonderful rapidity. Local authorities began to stir in educational matters and even sent promising scholars to the universities. The legislature devoted itself with special care to securing the efficiency of intermediate and university education. Everything was done that could be done to knit up the grades of education, to purify the administration of educational trusts, to secure good teaching. And beside these schools stood trade schools, and the entirely admirable system of apprenticeship by which the child was grafted into his master's home and sent out into the world a trained man.

Throughout the Elizabethan age education in all its grades and, best of all perhaps, the technical education of the poor had an importance in the public mind that it has never had since. Then it interested both the parent and the State. This was, indeed, the most significant manifestation of the Renaissance spirit. There was a clamour for equal educational opportunities and for the best teaching. The passion for education filled up the Universities to a level scarcely since surpassed. In 1612 there were at Oxford 2920 students. If we assume that the population of England at the opening of the seventeenth century was 5,000,000, that the two hundred or more really efficient grammar schools, as supplemented by private schools and tutors, educated 20,000 boys, and that the universities contained 5000 students, it would follow that one in every 500 of the whole male population was at a university, that one per cent. of the male population of school age (which could not exceed 500,000) and one quarter of the boys in the grammar schools passed to a university. It may well be that more than 20,000 attended the grammar schools-there were, of course, more than 200 grammar schools

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The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal, Volume 218