No More Learning

But, while
its indispensable place in a satisfactory curriculum might be
granted, considerable doubt existed as to the best manner of
teaching the vernacular, when admitted. Locke (Some Thoughts
concerning Education) had formulated an excellent method of
rudimentary instruction in English; but the difficulty of systema-
tising the language for the purpose of tuition had not disappeared.
The fluctuation of spelling and of idiom, and the absence of any
generally accepted manual of grammar, were the points to which
reformers addressed themselves. Swift (A Letter to the Lord
High Treasurer)1 had expressed the belief that it was desirable
and possible to ascertain,' and then 'fix' the language for ever,
the standard being sought in the English of Elizabeth, James and
Charles; his pamphlet long survived in the memory of would-be
innovators though the standard itself was shifted. A serious
attempt to grapple with the asserted instability of the mother-
tongue may be dated from the publication of Johnson's Dictionary
(1755), which was followed by other works intended to attain
similar ends. Joseph Priestley's Rudiments of English Grammar
(1761), originally intended as a school-book, is marked by a common-
sense parsimony of technical terms very unusual in writers on the
subject, and by a deference to customary usage which would
shock the pedant. Robert Lowth, in his anonymously published
A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), asserted that
the ungrammatical English of 'polite' conversation, and of such
of 'our most approved authors' as Dryden, Addison, Pope and
Swift himself, was due to sheer carelessness and not to any
inherent defect in the language. The method of Lowth's book
6
1 'A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English Tongue in a
letter to the . . . Earl of Oxford' (1712).
? See, ante, vol. 2, pp. 173 ff.
2


## p. 397 (#427) ############################################

XIV]
Rhetoric
397
6
was adopted and its terminology further elaborated in the English
Grammar (1795) of Lindley Murray, who may be regarded as the
originator of that formal, logic-chopping treatment of its subject
which long made English grammar the least profitable of school
studies. This celebrated text-book had no claim to novelty beyond
a careful selection of what was thought most useful, and its pre-
sentation in different sizes of printer's types in order to indicate
degrees of importance. Its success was immediate and extra-
ordinary. In the year of its author's death (1826), it had reached
its fortieth edition, and, in spite of abridgments in many editions
and innumerable imitations in Great Britain and America, it was
still being printed in 1877. Its immediate success testifies to the
great and increasing number of schools, chiefly private boarding
schools, which, at the opening of the nineteenth century, made an
English education' their avowed aim.
Thomas Sheridan, godson of Swift and father of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, published, in 1756, British Education, a tiresome, long-
winded work, stuffed with quotations chiefly from Locke and Milton,
in which he called for the standardising of English spelling,
pronunciation, diction and idiom, and advocated the study of
English rhetoric, the encouragement of public speaking and of
the art of reading. He appeared to believe that due attention
to these matters would effect the political, religious, moral and
aesthetic redemption of society. Yet, in spite of his sympathy
with the chief aim of the Académie Française, he would not secure
these advantages by means of any academy or society, but trusted
to the introduction of rhetoric and elocution into the ordinary
school and college course, and, thereafter, to the critical discussion
which that introduction would bring about. Sheridan proposed
to give effect to his ideas by establishing a school for the post-
collegiate instruction of the well-to-do on lines which, today, would
be termed 'vocational”; that is, the studies pursued were to bear
directly upon the future occupation of the pupil. In proposing
provision upon liberal lines for the education of the future legis-
lator, country gentleman, soldier and merchant, Sheridan was
continuing the tradition of that 'doctrine of courtesy' which had
added a multitude of books to European languages during some
two-and-a-half centuries; and these works had always upheld the
claims of vernacular languages in schemes of education. A body
of very influential persons founded the Hibernian society at Dublin
in 1758 with the intention of carrying out Sheridan's plan; but the
project was attacked by private schoolmasters as a mere pretext


## p. 398 (#428) ############################################

398
[ch.
Education
for bestowing a salaried office upon its originator. Incidentally,
these attacks show that there was a great deal of professional
as well as public sympathy with the advocates of a modern
curriculum, and some success in employing it where schools were
unfettered by ancient statute. One of the assailants, the anony-
mous writer of A letter to a schoolmaster in the country (1758),
wields an ironic pen reminiscent of Swift; he doubts the feasibility
of giving to those who have passed through the established course
of education
the air and turn of the high-rank people, as they want for a ground-work the
inanity of thought and unconnected succession of ideas which make the
specific difference between a gentleman and a pedant.
The scheme for a school or college propounded to the Hibernian
society in 1758, and similar schemes of 1769 and 1783—4, came to
nothing; but Sheridan, till the last, continued to plead for the study
of rhetoric and the practice of elocution. He was one of the earliest
students of English prosody? , phonetics and spelling-reform; by
insisting that language is primarily and essentially a thing spoken,
not written, he anticipated the principle underlying recent changes
in language-teaching.
The beginning of 'the Scottish school of rhetoric' was almost
contemporary with the labours of Sheridan and Priestley. The
earliest utterances of this school are to be found in the Essays
(1742 and 1758) of David Hume, but its earliest separate
publication was Elements of Rhetoric (1762) by Henry Home,
lord Kames. From 1759 onwards, Hugh Blair lectured on
composition' in Edinburgh with such success that a chair of
rhetoric and belles lettres was founded for him there in 1762.
The professorial discourses delivered during his occupancy of this
chair were published in the year of his retirement as Lectures on
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). The mark of this Scottish
school is the attempt, not uniformly successful, to elaborate from
the associational psychology of the time a doctrine of taste and
rules for its expression in the arts, particularly in the art of com-
position. The psychology and the rules and doctrine professedly
deduced from it wear a detached air in the writings of Blair and
Kames; in spite of their repudiation of great names and their
desire to build empirically, none of the school shakes himself quite
free from Aristotle and the great literary critics. But they did
good service in a period greatly inclined to an exclusive rationalism
6
2
1 See, ante, vol. x1, pp. 250, 255.
3 See, ante, vol. x, p. 342.


## p. 399 (#429) ############################################

xiv] Scottish School of Rhetoric 399
by asserting the fundamental nature of emotion and its necessary
part in the production and enjoyment of all forms of art; their pupils
were prepared to welcome wholeheartedly the literary principles
of Wordsworth, Byron and Scott. George Campbell's The Philo-
sophy of Rhetoric, begun in 1750 and published in 1776, succeeds
best in presenting its theme systematically and without much
embarrassment from its psychological groundwork; Campbell
remains to this day a helpful critic of diction, though he
is sometimes meticulous in cases where his own sound criterion
of 'reputable use' is against him. Blair's three-volume Lectures
is a magazine for reference rather than an ordered system of
instruction; as tutorial work to be used in large classes, the
lectures may have proved interesting and useful to attentive
students, but, as a book, they are very tedious. The third
volume presents in germ the general idea of literature dis-
tinguishable from its various national varieties. A secondary
feature in the teaching of the Scottish school is the great
importance which it attributed to the arts of public reading
and speaking. In the distinct course of study proposed by Knox
(Liberal Education, 1781), he included these accomplishments,
on the ground that English ought to form a great part of an
English gentleman's education. Enfield's The Speaker (1774)
quickly established itself in common use and long retained its
vogue as an authoritative anthology of 'recitations' from Shake-
speare, Sterne, Pope and more modern writers; its author, who
was a tutor at the Warrington academy after Priestley's time,
expressly intended his book to be associated with the Scottish
teaching of rhetoric. Its early success points to a considerable
number of schools and schoolmasters in sympathy with some
recognition of the vernacular as an educational instrument.
The psychology of Locke and its educational corollaries? were
fully appreciated and further developed in France, where, by
1793, they became co-ordinated in the demand for a state-
maintained system of schools, primary and secondary, with
additional provision for higher and professional education, the
primary stage of this system at least being gratuitous and uni-
versally obligatory. In England, the desire to see a great increase
in the means of popular instruction of some sort was fairly
general amongst thinking men; but there was much hesitation
in determining the part to be played by the state itself in the
matter. As early as 1756, Thomas Sheridan in British Education
· See, ante, vol. ix, p. 401.


## p. 400 (#430) ############################################

400
[CH.
Education
-
had asserted that 'in every State it should be a fundamental
maxim that the education of youth should be particularly formed
and adapted to the nature and end of its government'-a principle
which John Brown made more explicit by a proposal for universal
instruction imposed by law with a view to instilling the manners
and principles on which alone the State can rest? ' The last word
is significant ; for Brown and Sheridan alike, the state was an
entity to which change could only be fatal. The danger attending
that opinion was exposed by Joseph Priestley (An essay on the
first principles of government, 1768), who reminded Brown and
other admirers of Spartan officialism that “uniformity is the
characteristic of the brute creation. '
Education is a branch of civil liberty which ought by no means to be sur-
rendered into the hands of a civil magistrate, and the best interests of
society require that the right of conducting it be inviolably preserved to
individuals.
The prominent position as public teacher, educational reformer,
man of science and political thinker to which Priestley attained
in later years gave an authority to this opinion which more than
counterbalanced the rambling diffuseness of Sheridan and the
industrious pamphleteering of Brown. It became an accepted
article of the radical creed that, in the interest of liberty, the
state's intervention in public education should be reduced as
much as possible; in consequence, the history of English educa-
tional administration between 1790 and 1870 marks a very slow
movement from private, cooperative activity to public control
grudgingly admitted. In her own day, Mary Wollstonecraft (A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792) stood almost alone
in her readiness to accept the French conception in full. The
prevalent opinion was better expressed by William Godwin
(Enquiry concerning political justice, etc. , 1796): 'the project
of national education ought uniformly to be discouraged on
account of its obvious alliance with national government. ' But
Godwin's doctrine, as expressed in this work, is the negation of
all social cooperation ; and the desire to extend instruction to
the great bulk of the people, when confronted with the problem
of its cost, in the end compelled the unwilling to accept state
support. For two centuries before the appearance of The Wealth
of Nations (1776), Scotsmen had been familiar with the idea of
public education supported by public funds, and, since 1696, they
had been putting the idea into practice. It is, therefore, not
1 Thoughts on Civil Liberty (1765), p. 591.


## p. 401 (#431) ############################################

Xiv]
Education and the State
401
6
surprising to discover Adam Smith laying it down that a man
uneducated is a man mutilated and that, since an ignorant person
is an element of weakness in the community, public education is
a mode of national defence. Nevertheless, he thinks that the
state's part should be limited to making elementary instruction
compulsory and to supplying the money required to meet any
deficiency in voluntary contributions; the absence of com-
petition, from which public and endowed institutions like univer-
sities and grammar schools suffer, leads unavoidably to inefficiency
and neglect. Instruction should be almost self-supporting. Still,
the state might impose an examination-test 'even in the higher
and more difficult sciences' upon all candidates for professional
employment, and an examination in reading, writing and reckoning
should be passed before a man could become a freeman, or set up
a trade in a corporate town or village. Thomas Paine (The Rights
of Man, 1791) believed that 'a nation under a well-regulated
government should permit none to remain uninstructed'; but he
would not have the state establish or directly maintain schools.
Paine endeavoured to make these opinions harmonise by suggesting
that grants, or remission of taxes, should be allowed in respect
of individual children, on condition that the parents made a pay-
ment for their instruction. Like Adam Smith, he saw no difficulty
in finding teachers : 'there are always persons of both sexes to
be found in every village, especially when growing into years,
capable of such an undertaking. ' Events proved that the magni-
tude of the task was vastly underrrated.
The subject passed beyond the range of merely academic
discussion on the appearance of Joseph Lancaster's Improvements
in Education (1803). Apart from its account of the author's
mode of organising a school, “the monitorial or mutual system,
a device for which he was greatly indebted to Andrew Bell", the
chief merit of this pamphlet lies in its scheme for making
elementary instruction general. Lancaster believed that the
matter was one of 'national concern,' which sectarianism alone
had hindered from coming by its own; but he was equally against
the enactment of a 'compulsive law,' applied either to school-
children or their teachers. He proposed the establishment of
a voluntary society 'on general Christian principles' (that is,
destitute of denominational associations), having as its objects
'the promotion of good morals and the instruction of youth
in useful learning adapted to their respective situations. ' These
Experiments in Education (1798, 2nd edn, 1805).
26
1
E. L. XIV.
CH. XIV.


## p. 402 (#432) ############################################

402
[CH.
Education
objects were to be attained by the bestowal of the society's
patronage upon masters and mistresses already at work in their
own schools who proved worthy of encouragement, by offering
prizes to school-children for regular and punctual attendance, by
establishing schools (this was inserted with some hesitation), by
setting up a public library containing books on education for the
information of teachers, by enabling teachers to obtain school
material at cost price and by instituting a teachers’ friendly
society. Lancaster assumed that the aims of his proposed
association could be achieved in some hundreds of schools
amongst many thousands of children at an expence that probably
would not exceed £1500 per annum. '
Lancaster's suggestion that his proposed society should rest
upon an undenominational basis roused the opposition of Sarah
Trimmer, who had become obsessed by the notion that a conspiracy
against Christianity, originally contrived, as she conceived, by the
French Encyclopedists, was threatening these islands. To defeat
this plot, she had established The Guardian of Education (1802-
6), a magazine full of orthodox prejudice which is of importance
to the bibliographer of education, though the book-notices of which
it chiefly consists possess few other merits. Lancaster's Improve-
ments was thought to deserve not only an elaborate review in this
periodical, but, also, a counterblast in the form of a bulky pamphlet,
A comparative view of the New Plan of Education promulgated
by Mr Joseph Lancaster (1805). Mrs Trimmer agreed that 'an
interference of the Legislature in respect to the education of the
common people' was highly necessary. But she declared that
a national system already existed, and she entirely disapproved
of societies founded on so indefinite a conception as 'general
Christian principles. ' Instead of adopting this conception (the
appearance of which in the field of education she rightly traced to
the German apostle of natural religion, J. B. Basedow (1724—90)),
she would, with Priestley, leave each religious body free to instruct
its children in accordance with its own tenets. The church of
England was the established church, and the acts of Uniformity
prescribed the study of the church catechism and the use of the
Book of Common Prayer; these, therefore, constituted a national
system of education, with the charity schools and grammar schools
as its agents, and with the bishops in the exercise of functions that
had belonged to them from time immemorial as its chief authorities.
Yet Lancaster desired to replace this legally constituted system by
an innovation which, notwithstanding its merit as a chief and


## p. 403 (#433) ############################################

XIV]
Bell and Lancaster
403
feasible mode of organising popular schools, was ill-grounded
and mischievous. John Bowles (Letter to Whitbread, 1807) put
Mrs Trimmer's point of view succinctly : 'when education is
made a national concern, youth must be brought up as members
of the national church. '
The main issue thus raised took the discussion at once into the
wider arena of political questions, where it secured considerable
attention. Lancaster's 'undenominational' system was regarded
by tories and churchmen as a deliberate attack upon the estab-
lishment; whigs and dissenters cherished it as a guarantee of
religious liberty. The essential weakness of the method of
instruction advocated by Bell and Lancaster, in which pupils
were entirely taught by fellow-pupils, was forgotten by the critics
in their anxiety to deal with an accident of the Mutual System,
namely, the character of the religious instruction to be imparted.
Wordsworth (The Prelude, 1799–1805) and Coleridge (Bio-
graphia Literaria, 1815–17) had ridiculed methodisers and
mechanical forms of teaching; but both were warm adherents of
Bell. Pamphlets, reviews and sermons urged the respective merits
of the ‘Madras' and 'Lancasterian'systems,' or the claim of their
respective authors to rank as discoverers. ' Sydney Smith, Robert
Owen, Henry Brougham, William Wilberforce, Romilly, Samuel Rogers
and James Mill were sympathisers with, or active supporters of,
Lancaster. Southey, in a Quarterly Review article (October 1811),
vindicated against The Edinburgh Review (November 1810) Bell's
right to be considered Lancaster's forerunner, and exposed the
evils and absurdities which he held to mark Lancaster's mode of
school management. The climax of the dispute was reached in a
sermon preached at St Paul's in June 1811 by the Cambridge
lady Margaret professor, Herbert Marsh, in which he repeated
Mrs Trimmer's arguments on national education, the church and
undenominationalism. The sermon was followed immediately by
the formation of a committee whose labours took effect, in October
1811, in the institution of the National Society for promoting the
education of the Poor in the principles of the Established Church. '
The rival organisation was 'the British and Foreign School
Society' (1814), the successor of the Royal Lancasterian institute
and Lancaster's committee founded in 1808. Thus, the voluntary
system' of English elementary schools was begun, and a com-
promise between state interference and individualism was effected,
which lasted till 1870. The desire, fervently expressed in The
Excursion, for a state-controlled education based on the Madras
6
26-2


## p. 404 (#434) ############################################

404
[CH.
Education
system was not realised; although many Englishmen were willing
to extend a modicum of instruction to the poor as an act of grace,
very few agreed with Wordsworth, Pestalozzi and Kant in regarding
education as a sacred right' inherent in human nature.
The faults of the mutual or monitorial system are obvious;
yet, contemporary opinion ranked it as a great discovery or
invention, a nostrum for all the ills of education. Bell honestly
believed that he was introducing no mere expedient for making
a minimum of mechanical instruction accessible to large numbers,
but a true educational organon capable of changing the whole
aspect of society and applicable to all grades of instruction.
Lancaster's claims were not a whit more restricted. Mutual instruc-
tion was introduced into Charterhouse (1813), where it survived
in favour for at least five years; a few grammar schools and some
private boarding schools followed the example. Families of wealth
and position in London combined to form their own little Madras
school, with 'a most charming monitor boy' from the Central
school in Baldwin's Gardens to act as master. Pillans employed
the plan in the High School of Edinburgh. Measures were taken
to make the system known on the continent, particularly in France;
and it attained a new distinction from the genius and devotion
which father Girard displayed in the elementary schools of Fribourg.
Jeremy Bentham (Chrestomathia, 1816) identified himself with an
abortive scheme for founding The Chrestomathic [i. e. Useful
Knowledge] Day school,' to teach a thousand boys and girls the
circle of the sciences on the lines of the New Instruction System. '
At first, the National and British societies had no association
with the state; but their contributions to national education were
so many and so important that when, in 1833, parliament agreed
to an annual grant of £20,000 'to be issued in aid of private
subscriptions for the erection of school houses for the education
of the children of the poorer classes in Great Britain,' the money
was handed to the societies for allocation, on condition that at
least an equal sum was privately subscribed.
The earliest attempts of Robert Owen to revolutionise society
were made by way of the school. When, in 1799, he took over the
New Lanark mills from David Dale, he found a plan of instruction
in operation for mill-children, which had but small success, owing
to the fact that it was conducted in the evening at the termination
of a long day's work. By gradual elaboration, carried out between
1799 and 1816, this instruction was expanded into the New Insti-
tution for the Formation of Character, which, in its full form,


## p. 405 (#435) ############################################

<
XIV]
Robert Owen
405
included an adult evening-school, a day-school for children whose
ages ranged from six to ten and an infant-school for little ones of
a year old and upwards. It was an axiom of Owen that character
is formed from without, not attained from within, that 'circum-
stances' are all-powerful in the process of its formation. The
basal principles of the New Institution were that a child's mind
is absolutely plastic and that human nature is innately good, two
characteristic eighteenth century beliefs derived from Locke and
Rousseau. The instruction given in the two schools was presented
conversationally and intuitively: that is, knowledge of things was
communicated not through books, but by means of the things
themselves, or representations of them other than verbal. It was
impressed upon each child that he 'must endeavour to make
his companions happy. The teaching included reading, writing,
summing, the Bible and the Shorter catechism, history, geography,
music, dancing and the military discipline’ for both sexes. Owen
claimed that his schools made children both rational and altruistic;
the fame of New Lanark was widespread, and visitors, many of
them distinguished, came in large numbers to inspect the social
life of the place, and of its children more especially. But, by his
attacks on all particular forms of religion, Owen shocked the
majority of his partners in business, and, in 1824, these succeeded
in destroying the peculiar character of the New Institution by
bringing it within the system of the British and Foreign School
society. The New Lanark experiment played a considerable part
in demonstrating the value and feasibility of popular schools at
a time when the subject was prominent in the public mind; its
more precise result was the institution of infant-schools, whose
extension throughout England was primarily due to the Infant
School society (founded in 1824) and to the labours of its super-
intendent, Samuel Wilderspin.
The establishment of The Edinburgh Review', in 1802, brought
Scottish and English education into a new and unanticipated
relationship. During its early days (1807—11), the reviewers,
more especially Sydney Smith and Henry Brougham, developed
a policy of hostile criticism, of which English educational insti-
tutions were the object. The monopoly conferred upon Greek
and Latin by grammar schools and universities, the consequent
indifference to the claims of useful knowledge,' the futility
of current modes of educating girls, were all unsparingly de-
nounced; Lancaster was supported as a genuine apostle of popular
1 See, ante, vol. xii, chap. VI.


## p. 406 (#436) ############################################

406
[CH.
Education
instruction, while his orthodox rivals were ridiculed. Brougham's
own education was chiefly Scottish; the studies in mathematics,
physics and chemistry which, while an Edinburgh undergraduate, he
had followed under such distinguished savants and teachers as John
Playfair and Joseph Black, left an indelible impression upon his
sympathies and mode of thought. He was a great admirer of the
Scots parish school, that unbroken channel between the veriest
rudiments and the classes of the college. As member of par-
liament, he was associated with Samuel Whitbread and others
belonging to the active group which advocated popular instruction
and the monitorial system. After Whitbread's death, Brougham
became the parliamentary leader of this group, and, in 1816, he
secured the appointment of a select committee to enquire into the
education of the lower orders of the metropolis. This committee
extended its enquiries to schools outside London and to schools not
usually regarded as coming within the terms of their reference.
The administration of educational endowments in general was im-
peached by the committee's report of 1818, and by Brougham's
Letter to Samuel Romilly . . . upon the abuse of charities (1818),
a pamphlet which ran through ten editions within a few months.
The committee's enquiry was prejudiced in origin, its chairman,
Brougham, was dictatorial and its report menaced innocent as well
as guilty; its inaccuracy was proved in particular cases like Win-
chester and Croydon? Yet, the abuses denounced were notorious.
Masters who had few or no free pupils, or no pupils at all, were
endowed with schoolhouses and incomes; in some places, where
the demand for grammar schools had died out, trustees were, in
effect, misappropriating the endowments for their own benefit.
Brougham and his friends were mistaken when they interpreted
the phrase pauperes et indigentes, describing the beneficiaries
of educational endowments, as though it were used in the sense
conveyed by the English term 'indigent poor'; but there was
reason in their contention that those endowments were not doing
all that was possible for national education. A blind alley seemed
to bave been reached by Eldon's ruling in the chancery court
(1805; reaffirmed some twenty years later), that grammar schools
must employ trust funds for the teaching of Latin, Greek and
Hebrew alone; to draw upon them for instruction in French,
German or other modern studies would be misappropriation.
But, in spite of chancery and their own statutes, a good many
1 Bowles, W. L. , Vindiciae Wy kehamicae ; dean Ireland, Letter to Henry Brougham
(1819).


## p. 407 (#437) ############################################

6
xiv] Brougham and The Edinburgh Review 407
grammar schools, perhaps one-fourth of the total number, were
being conducted as elementary or commercial' schools
The situation, as Brougham conceived it, was that property
of great value had been devised for the education of the indigent
poor, but that the bequest was useless because instruction was
confined to three ancient languages. The parliamentary remedy
seemed plain; he brought in two bills, the first (1818) to direct
a comprehensive survey of all educational charities, the second
(1820) to apply the parish school system of Scotland to her
southern sister. By the latter bill, it was proposed to empower
grammar schools to teach reading, writing and arithmetic as well
as the statutory classical tongues; elementary schools were to be
built at the national expense in every parish, whose householders
were to pay the schoolmaster's salary. This second bill was
defeated by the dissenters, who regarded it as a measure for
increasing the authority and powers of bishops and parish clergy.
The bill of 1818 passed into law, but lord Liverpool's government
emasculated it by confining its sphere to charities unquestionably
intended to act as poor-relief. So late as 1835, lord Brougham
was still advocating the principles of 1818 and 1820; but, by that
time, he had satisfied himself that the voluntary system’ was
competent to satisfy the claims of national education.
The rapid increase in number, throughout Great Britain, of
Mechanics' institutions confirms the statement of contemporary
observers that there was a widespread desire among urban popu-
lations for instruction. They owed their beginning to an associate
of the first Edinburgh reviewers, George Birkbeck, a fellow-student
and lifelong friend of Brougham. Birkbeck, who was professor
of natural philosophy at the Andersonian institution, Glasgow,
from 1799 to 1804, opened, in 1800, a free course of Saturday
evening lectures to artisans, intended to familiarise them with some
of the scientific principles underlying the employment of tools and
machinery. The class met with immediate success and survived its
originator's removal to London. Under his successor, it ex-
perienced a variety of fortunes, till, in 1823, a number of seceding
members established the Glasgow Mechanics' institution and
made Birkbeck its president. In the meantime, he was practising
medicine in London, where he had become a member of the
circle which included George Grote, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill,
Joseph Hume, David Ricardo, John Cam Hobhouse, Sir Francis
1 See A letter to Henry Brougham. . . from an M. A. of Queen's College, Oxford, upon
the best method of restoring decayed grammar schools (1818).


## p. 408 (#438) ############################################

408
[CH.
Education
Burdett, Francis Place, Brougham and others whose political prin-
ciples ranged them with the philosophical radicals. A suggestion
made in 1823 by The Mechanics' Magazine, that the Glasgow
example should be followed in London, was eagerly taken up by
Birkbeck and his friends; the result was the creation of the
London Mechanics' institution (better known today as Birkbeck
college), the development of which became the lifelong pre-
occupation of the man whose name it now bears. Thirteen hundred
members registered themselves at the outset; the course of
study was chiefly scientific and practical, though it found room,
also, for ‘French, stenography, botany, mnemonics and phreno-
logy. '
Brougham, with Birkbeck, one of the four original trustees of
the new institution, greatly strengthened the educational policy of
the group to which he and his friend belonged, by the publication,
in 1825, of Practical Observations upon the education of the
people addressed to the working classes and their employers, a
pamphlet which gained as much attention as had been accorded
to his Letter to Romilly. Here, in brief compass, the whole
scheme for adult education was described. Two main lines of
activity were proposed. Lectures to artisans, libraries, book clubs
and 'conversation societies,' that is, tutorial classes, constituted
the first; the encouragement of cheap publications and the pre-
paration of elementary treatises on mathematics, physics and
other branches of science formed the second.
It was Brougham's
opinion that the business of controlling Mechanics' institutions
was a valuable element in the education of their members, and
that the institutions themselves, once started, should and could
be self-supporting He probably overrated, in both respects, the
ability of the working men of the time, as he certainly over-
rated the value of public lectures to persons whose preliminary
instruction and training were slender. For a score of years after
the foundation of the earliest of them, Mechanics' institutions
increased in number and in extension over England and Scotland ;
but, at an early stage in their history, they ceased to be recruited
in greater part from among artisans. It was this failure, added to
the defective conception of education encouraged by Mechanics'
institutions, which led Frederick Denison Maurice, F. J. Furnivall,
Thomas Hughes, J. M. Ludlow, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin
and others to form, or support, the Working Men's college (1854),
the word 'college' emphasising the close relationship between all
who shared its life, either as teachers or pupils. The object of the


## p. 409 (#439) ############################################

xiv]
Popular Education of Adults
409
college was to place a liberal education within the reach of working
men by providing instruction in those subjects which it most
concerns English citizens to know. The absence of a clearly
defined purpose in the minds of the working men auditors goes far
to explain the failure of Mechanics' institutions to help those
for whom they were especially started. The driving force of such
a purpose is illustrated by the success of the Working Men's
college, the much later Ruskin college and, more especially, the
University Tutorial classes of the Workers'Educational association? .
In spite of the heavy duty on paper (threepence on the pound
weight), a periodical like The Mechanics' Magazine, devoted
to applied science and the processes of manufacture, and
published weekly at threepence, secured 'an extensive circulation. '
Brougham, therefore, hoped that cheapening the cost of book-
production would render possible the publication of reprints of
works on ethics, politics and history. This part of the scheme was
realised in the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge, founded in 1827, with Brougham as its first
president. The prevalence, in these works, of the principles which,
about that time, came to be known as 'utilitarian,' and the
omission of reference to Christian beliefs, caused them to be
regarded askance by Thomas Arnold and others, whose genuine
interest in the education of working people cannot be ques-
tioned. The society's publications (most of them issued by
Charles Knight) included The Penny Magazine (1832—7), The
Penny Cyclopaedia (1832, etc. ), The Quarterly Journal of Educa-
tion (1831–5), The Library of Entertaining Knowledge, The
Library of Useful Knowledge and an uncompleted Biographical
Dictionary (1842–4). Lord Brougham and Birkbeck took part in
the movement for the abolition of the tax of fourpence a copy
levied on newspapers; the tax was reduced in 1836 to one penny,
at which figure it remained till its disappearance in 1855.
Reviews of La Place's Mécanique Céleste (1808; probably by
Playfair) and of Falconer's Strabo (1809; in part by Sydney
Smith) gave The Edinburgh an occasion for attacking the uni-
versities, both of which were held responsible for the backward
state of mathematical investigation in England. Cambridge made
mathematics the great object of study, but, like the sister uni-
versity, adhered exclusively to antiquated methods; Oxford
taught only the rudiments, ‘mistaking the infancy of science for
its maturity. According to the reviewer, while the elder university
See Mansbridge, A. , University Tutorial Classes (1913).


## p. 410 (#440) ############################################

410
[CH.
Education
possessed a richly endowed press, it published badversions of classical
texts, edited in 'Oxonian Latin,' whose 'parent language' was no
other than the vulgar English 'of the day. These reviews were fol-
lowed, in 1810, by Sydney Smith's attack on the public school system
of education, the charge against it being that it failed to produce men
eminent in science or letters. Edward Copleston, at the moment
professor of poetry, defended Oxford in three Replies to these
calumnies,' in which, incidentally, he described the degree examina-
tions and the tutorial system, which he preferred to the professorial
lectures of the Scottish universities. But the defence was weak
and largely irrelevant. Copleston was on fairly safe ground so long
as he argued that a truer education results from the knowledge
of men which is conveyed by literature, than from the knowledge
of matter and motion which is derived from science. But, when
the function of a university is in question, he fails to meet, or
even to understand, his adversaries. He held that universities
are schools for those who are to become political leaders or clergy-
men, and that for these classes the humanities are the most
fitting instruction. The Edinburgh reviewers knew that there were
other classes requiring advanced instruction of a kind which the
literary curriculum of the English universities could not give.
Copleston thought it sufficient to reply that 'miscellaneous know-
ledge,' as he called it, was esteemed and encouraged' at Oxford,
though it was 'the subordinate and not the leading business of
education. ' A man with a well disciplined mind can attain know-
ledge of this kind after he enters into life. ' This, of course, was
what the critics denied; and, if it were so, the universities were
ignoring their duty of research. They were places of education, but
not homes of learning or sources of that useful knowledge which the
times imperatively required.
Two visits to the newly founded university of Bonn (1818), paid
by Thomas Campbell in the summer and autumn of 1820, made a
deep impression upon the poet. In particular, he appears to
have conceived, at that time, the idea of a university for London
which should reproduce the educational aims, scope and pro-
fessorial organisation of the German model, with which his own
Glasgow education predisposed him to sympathise. He mooted
the idea among his associates, and finally made it public in a
letter to The Times (9 February 1825), thus coming into touch
with Henry Brougham and the group of thinkers who were anxious
for the general diffusion of knowledge and a radical change in
English educational institutions. The nonconformist bodies of
6


## p. 411 (#441) ############################################

XIV]
University of London
411
London, whose members were virtually shut out from the older
universities, heartily welcomed the scheme, and they were joined
by churchmen who desired to see in the metropolis a university
devoted to modern studies and free from the expense entailed by
residence in colleges. So marked was the adhesion of these born
opponents, that Campbell feared it would be necessary to provide
two theological chairs, one for church and one for dissent; but
Brougham succeeded in eliminating divinity from the scheme. In
February 1826, the proprietors and donors who had furnished the
capital formally constituted themselves an institution for the
general advancement of literature and science by affording young
men opportunities for obtaining literary and scientific education at
a moderate expense’; the institution being styled 'the University
of London. ' The duke of Sussex laid the foundation-stone of the
building in Gower street early in 1827 and, on 2 October 1828,
lectures began to some 300 students. In the meantime, the
church became alarmed at the divorce between education and
religion represented by the new establishment. At midsummer,
1828, the duke of Wellington, then prime minister, presided over
a public meeting which resolved to found a college for general
education in which, while literature and science were subjects of
instruction, it should be essential that the doctrines and duties of
Christianity, as inculcated by the church of England, should be
taught. This second institution received its charter as King's
college, London, in August 1829, and the college was opened in
October 1831.
One of the gravest objections to the existing English university
system made by the innovators was that it reduced the university
and its accredited teachers, the professors, to impotence, and
installed in their stead the colleges and the tutorial system. This
objection was almost savagely urged by Sir William Hamilton in
The Edinburgh Review (June and December 1831); were the
practice reversed, the advancement of knowledge would follow
and, incidentally, one serious obstacle to the admission of non-
conformists to universities would be removed. In these opinions
Thomas Arnold concurred. The institution of two colleges in
London, therefore, infringed an essential principle of the scheme
introduced by admirers of the Scottish and German organisation
of university teaching. The same disregard of this principle was
shown in the foundation of the university of Durham in 1832.
Of the two London colleges, the earlier did not succeed in
securing a charter, though, in 1831, it came very near doing so.


## p. 412 (#442) ############################################

412
[CH.
Education
Both colleges were impeded by the partisan squabbles which were
inevitable in consequence of their origin ; but a workable agree-
ment was reached by the ministry of Sir Robert Peel in November
1836. On the same day, the elder college received its charter
under the style ‘University College, London' and a new corpora-
tion was created
persons eminent in literature and science to act as a board of examiners
and to perform all the functions of the examiners in the Senate house of
Cambridge; this body to be termed “The University of London. '
Students of the two colleges alone were at first admissible to
these examinations ; but the qualification was, in 1850, extended
to a number of affiliated colleges in different parts of the country,
the result proving so unsatisfactory that, in 1858, the restriction of
affiliation was removed altogether, while it was laid down that
(with the exception of certain medical requirements) all degrees
and distinctions were to be obtained solely by proficiency shown
in the examinations of the university. In other words, its work,
henceforth, was confined to examining, a function whose importance
was unduly exaggerated in consequence; the link with the two
chief London colleges was, in effect, broken, and the possibility of
bringing order and system into the higher education of London
was postponed for some forty years.
Hamilton's dislike of the tutorial system and the exaggerated
reverence for German educational institutions, which he and
Campbell did much to propagate, blinded him to the merits of
moderate reforms proposed by such men as William Whewell. In
Thoughts on the Study of Mathematics (1835), Whewell had con-
trasted 'philosophy’taught by lectures with mathematics taught
tutorially, and had asserted that the latter was by far the more
efficient instrument of education ; but the advantage was lost, if
the teaching were too abstract and dissociated from that great
system of physical knowledge. . . with the character and nature of
which no liberally educated man ought to be unacquainted. ' He
suggested that mechanics and hydrostatics should be included in
every examination for the B. A. degree. Hamilton's review was a
tiresome piece of pedantry and bad writing, which ignored Whewell's
agreement with the contention of the earlier reviewers. The Cam-
bridge tutor turned the tables upon bim very happily, and the subse-
quent history of German universities in their adoption of laboratory
and tutorial methods fully justified the position taken by Whewell
.
6
| The Edinburgh Review (June 1836).
? On the principles of English university education (1837).


## p. 413 (#443) ############################################

XIV]
Public School Reform
413
6
Popular tradition, supported by Stanley's Life (1844) and
Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857), regards Thomas Arnold
as the universal reformer or re-creator of public schools. But, so far
as the purely professional side of school-keeping is concerned, he
was anticipated by Samuel Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury from
1798 to 1836, of which period only the last eight years fall within
Arnold's tenure of office at Rugby (1828–42). The decline
from which public schools had suffered was nowhere more evident
than at Shrewsbury, where, in 1798, there were not more than
twenty boys. Assisted by a reconstituted governing body, Butler
built upon this remnant a flourishing school, whose achievements
and organisation became models for Eton and Harrow, as Hawtrey
headmaster of Eton from 1834 to 1853, generously acknowledged
to Butler himself. Periodical examinations, and a carefully super-
vised scheme of marks'assigned for merit and industry, sustained
an emulation that gave new life to the studies of Shrewsbury boys,
which was manifested in their extraordinary successes in competi-
tion for university scholarships. The responsibility thrown upon
'preposters'—'the eight boys to whom the master delegates a
certain share of authority'-revived an ancient usage whose in-
vention is often ascribed to Arnold alone. The importance which
Butler attached to 'private work,' study done in the boys' leisure
time and under no supervision, was part of his unwavering policy
of training his pupils to initiative and self-reliance? . Stanley
claimed for Arnold the credit of being the first to introduce
modern history, modern languages and mathematics into the
regular routine; but, here again, Shrewsbury forestalled Rugby.
The truth is, that no public school ventured, of its own motion,
to reform curriculum. Even the preparation of Latin and Greek
grammars for common use throughout the schools, a project of
Arnold in 1835, had to wait till 1866 for partial realisation in The
Public School Latin Primer. The admission of mathematics,
modern history and geography to full recognition as studies was a
surrender to public opinion and a tardy imitation of the custom of
commercial or 'English'schools, chiefly under private management,
which educated the great majority of the middle classes. But not
much came of the introduction of these studies into public schools,
as the Clarendon commission of 1861—4 complained. Arnold was
of opinion that it was 'not right' to leave boys and young men 'in
ignorance of the beginnings of physical science'; nearly thirty
years later, this royal commission was saying the same thing. The
· Fisher, G. W. , Annals of Shrewsbury School, p. 362.


## p. 414 (#444) ############################################

414
[ch.
Education
first steps in a real reform of courses of instruction among schools
of this type were taken by the early Victorian foundations, chiefly
proprietary, such as Cheltenham, Liverpool, Marlborough, Rossall,
Brighton, Radley and Bradfield.
But Arnold's claim to greatness does not rest upon any purely
professional achievement. His moral earnestness and strong re-
ligious conviction were naturally reflected in his administration
of Rugby, as, also, was his intense belief in the responsibility
of his position. His moral fervour, accompanied though it was
by much heart-searching and an abiding distrust of the immaturity
of boy-nature, worked an extraordinary change in the life of
Rugby, and, through Rugby, in public schools and in English
education at large. In his view, 'the forming of the moral prin-
ciples and habits' alone constituted education, and, in this country,
the process must be based on Christianity. On the latter ground,
he desired the admission of all nonconformists, unitarians excepted,
to the full membership of Oxford and Cambridge; and he regretfully
resigned his seat (1838) in the senate of the newly created univer-
sity of London because he failed to carry his colleagues with him
in an acknowledgment of the paramount claim of religion in public
education. He regarded with pity and apprehension the material
condition of the working classes during the last years of his life; nor
is it possible to measure the influence upon social reform which,
at a much later time, he exercised through his pupils and admirers.
Falling trade, poor harvests, dear bread and the shock of
a salutary but radical change in poor-law administration brought
acute distress upon the working classes, more particularly during
the years which immediately followed the passing of the first
Reform bill. The consequent unrest was intensified by the feeling
that. that measure had not gone far enough along the road of
reform. While some sought to remove or alleviate the trouble
by further political or fiscal changes, others saw in the careful
upbringing of the children the promise of permanent improvement.
William Ellis, William Ballantyne Hodgson and Richard Dawes,
dean of Hereford, hoped to remedy the evil plight of the poorer
classes by careful moral training independent of religious teaching,
and by 'the introduction of lessons on economical science into
schools of primary instruction'; George Combe, the phrenologist,
and William Lovett, the moral force Chartist,' were, at different
times, associated with Ellis in this project. Ellis was the most
active in the cause; between 1848 and 1862, he opened in London
seven schools (usually called Birkbeck schools, from the fact that
6


## p. 415 (#445) ############################################

XIV]
Ellis. Ruskin
415
the first of them was held in the London Mechanics' institution'),
instructed teachers in his aims and methods, wrote, lectured and
aroused considerable interest in his ideas among teachers and
school managers. The Prince Consort, in pursuance of the eclectic
scheme of education which he laid down for his children, succeeded
in making Ellis a sort of 'visiting master' at Buckingham palace
for upwards of a year. The special feature of the Birkbeck schools
was the attention given to instruction relating to bodily health
and to the science of human well-being,' that is, the practical
application of the principles of political economy to individual
conduct. Most of these schools failed to compete with the board
schools created by the Education act of 1870; one or two of them
still survive as secondary schools assisted by the county council.
It was a sound instinct which led Ellis to train his teachers him-
self; his aims required for their attainment, as he often said,
something of 'apostolic' fervour, which could not be expected
from all teachers as a matter of course.
John Ruskin never ceased to denounce the blindness of political
economists; William Ellis, while confessing the charm of Ruskin
and other men of letters who touched economic problems, thought
that they one and all 'failed to convince. Yet, these two men
were in substantial agreement as to the kind of up-bringing which
their fellow-countrymen needed. Moral training and enlighten-
ment, bodily health, knowledge and skill applied to the daily
calling were the great matters; an intelligent apprehension of his
physical surroundings, some instruction in science and mathematics,
the thrifty employment of his wages, the attainment of leisure and
ability to enjoy it worthily were the next important factors of the
future workman's education. Ruskin, fully cognisant of the value
for mental development of bodily activity and manual skill, thought
‘riding, rowing and cricketing' the most useful things learned at
a public school; he would have boys of all ranks taught a handi-
craft. But the man of letters and the student of economics viewed
the whole subject from opposite standpoints; Ellis was thinking
of the individual, Ruskin of the community. Throughout the
seventeen years, dating from the appearance of The Stones of
Venice in 1853, during which he kept the subject before the
public, education and government were inseparable ideas in his
mind. 'Educate or govern, they are one and the same word,' he
said at Woolwich in 1869? It was government's duty to provide
free, universal instruction and to compel all to receive education;
1 See, ante, p. 408.
The Crown of Wild Olive, par. 144.


## p. 416 (#446) ############################################

416
[CH.
Education
in return, all must yield obedience to government. All pros-
perity begins in obedience? '; as Carlyle had said long before in
Sartor Resartus, ‘obedience is our universal duty and destiny;
wherein whoso will not bend must break. ' Ruskin's first object
was an organised and, above all, a disciplined people; his model
was the Prussian polity as shaped, first, by Frederick the great and,
secondly, by Frederick William's ministers after the disaster of
Jena.
The policy of reform initiated by the Oxford Examination
statute of 1800 developed slowly at Oxford and Cambridge during
the succeeding fifty years. At the former, the single 'school,' or
examination for the degree, was made two by the institution of
the mathematical school in 1807. In similar fashion, the solitary
Cambridge 'tripos' (virtually a mathematical examination) became
two in 1824 by the establishment of the classical tripos. At Oxford,
the 'honours' and 'pass' examinations were separated, and
an increasing quantity of written work was demanded from
candidates. In 1850, Oxford recast its arrangements. A new
test, The First Public Examination before Moderators' (who
were empowered to award honours), was set up mid-way in the
degree course, and two new schools, Natural Science and Law and
Modern History were made; subsequently, the latter school became
two and Theology was added. A similar recognition of modern
studies was made at Cambridge in 1848 by the creation of the
Moral Sciences and Natural Sciences triposes, these two examina-
tions both comprehending a very wide range of studies. But the
agitation for reform first powerfully expressed by The Edinburgh
Review was not relaxed. Even improvements intensified it. The
interest aroused by classical and mathematical examinations ab-
sorbed attention from other studies; professorial lectures were
neglected in favour of teaching by college tutors, which bore
directly upon the struggle for honours and degrees. At Oxford,
in 1850, out of 1500 or 1600 students, the average attendance at
the modern history course was eight; at the chemistry course, five
and a half; at botany, six; at Arabic, none; 'medicine, Anglo-
Saxon and Sanscrit are in a similar condition. ' The regius
professor of Greek did not lecture, no pupils offering themselves.
'Indeed the main body of professors are virtually superseded by
the present system. Oxford, instead of being one great university,
consists of twenty-four small universities called colleges? '
1 The Crown of Wild Olive, par. 134.
? A Letter to. . . Lord John Russell. . . with suggestions for a Royal Commission of


## p. 417 (#447) ############################################

xiv] University Reform. Newman
417
Reformers traced most of the abuses prevalent in the uni-
versities to this subordinate position of the university corporations
themselves. The heads of the college societies formed an oli-
garchy which, entrenched behind obsolete statutes and traditional
glosses centuries old, in effect governed the university upon a
basis of privilege. In closest association with the church, the
authorities at Oxford excluded nonconformists absolutely, whilst
Cambridge refused to admit them to degrees, the effect being to
shut them out from any share in honours or powers of govern-
ment. Competition for fellowships and other college emoluments
was frequently nullified by statutes of endowment which restricted
candidates to particular localities, schools or families. As the
universities themselves were legally incompetent to change the
condition of affairs, a memorial, supported by many Oxford and
Cambridge graduates, was addressed, in 1850, to the prime
minister, lord John Russell, requesting the appointment of a
royal commission to make enquiry and suggest reform. The
request was promptly granted and the commission reported in
1852. Parliamentary legislation (1854—6) and the amendment
of college statutes, which it made possible, broke the college
monopoly of university government, enlarged the professoriate
and endowed it with college funds considered superfluous, freed
colleges from obsolete obligations, in large measure threw open
fellowships and other prizes and removed disabilities which
prevented nonconformists from taking degrees, though without
enabling them to hold fellowships. The consequence of these
radical changes was an extraordinary access of new life in
all branches of the universities' activity and a closer approach
to the life of the nation than had been witnessed for nearly two
hundred years.
The principle of undenominational education embodied in the
university of London was extended to Ireland in 1849 by the
foundation of Queen's colleges at Belfast, Cork and Galway and
their incorporation as Queen's university in the next year,
notwithstanding the protests of Daniel O'Connell, the Irish Roman
catholic bishops and Pius IX. The hierarchy determined to
establish a catholic university in Dublin and to place John Henry
Newman at its head; the university was canonically founded in
1854, Newman being its first rector. He had acted in that
Inquiry into the Universities (1850), p. 19. This pamphlet (said to be by Row, C. A. )
is & searching statement of the grievances which led to the appointment of the royal
commissions of 1850_2.
E. L. XIV.
CH. XIV.
27


## p. 418 (#448) ############################################

418
[CH.
Education
capacity previous to the formal opening, and, during 1852, he
delivered those addresses on the scope and nature of higher
education which were published under the title, The Idea of
a University? These discourses deliberately traversed those
conceptions of knowledge and of instruction which, first rendered
powerful by Brougham and the utilitarians, had become very
popular doctrines in the mid-century. In opposition to the
demand that universities should place research and the advance-
ment of knowledge in the forefront of their activities, Newman
asserted that the chief business of a university is to teach, and in
particular to illuminate the intelligence and to inculcate habits of
accurate, thorough and systematic thinking. Notwithstanding its
many acknowledged benefits, the diffusion of useful knowledge
tended to support false, illiberal notions of what constituted
instruction, to tolerate smattering and to prepare and make
current 'nutshell views for the breakfast table. While the pre-
vailing idea was to separate theology and religious teaching from
all educational institutions, Newman asserted that, as all know-
ledge, fundamentally, is one, the knowledge of God cannot be
divorced from other forms of knowledge without causing general
injury to knowledge as a whole. The elimination of theology
meant that some other branch of knowledge would usurp the
vacant place to its own detriment. At a time when reformers
regarded professors' lectures and examinations as the most
efficient mode of university education, Newman ventured upon
an outspoken justification of the practice of the ancient univer-
sities and public schools, the enforcement of college residence
and tutorial supervision. The moving passage in which he reverts
to his Oriel days is well known; so, too, is 'the taunt directed
at the Baconian philosophy, 'a method whereby bodily discomforts
and temporal wants are to be most effectually removed from the
greatest number. ' Science and literature must both occupy a
great place in university education. But the former ignores sin,
and the latter knows it only too well. It is a contradiction in
terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man'a home-
thrust at the sixteenth-century compromise known as pietas
litterata. Therefore, the church must fashion and mould the
university's organisation, watch over its teaching, knit its pupils
together and superintend its action. The suppressed premiss in
this argument (an infallible church) fails to conceal the prosaic
fact that the moulding and fashioning must be committed, not to
· See, ante, vol. XII, chap. XII.


## p. 419 (#449) ############################################

XIV]
State Responsibility
419
an abstract entity, but to the hands of possibly very fallible and
always concrete ecclesiastics.
Shortly before parliament, in 1833, voted £20,000 per annum
in aid of schools for the people, John Arthur Roebuck unsuccess-
fully moved a resolution in the commons in favour of universal,
compulsory education, the professional training of teachers in
normal schools and the appointment of a minister of education,
in all these proposals avowedly following the example of Prussia
and of France. The state policy here outlined was only partially
realised during the ensuing seventy years, throughout which period
it was almost continuously discussed. The appointment in 1839 of
a committee of the privy council on education to 'superintend
the application of any sums voted by Parliament for the purpose
of promoting public education' was an assumption of direct
responsibility by the state which promised to have far-reaching
consequences. But the committee suffered defeat at the very
outset. The first requirement of a great system of public educa-
tion was the existence of a body of competent teachers. Lord
Melbourne's ministry, therefore, proposed to establish a national
normal school, the details of their plan being committed to the
secretary of the committee, James Phillips Kay (Sir James
Kay-Shuttleworth), a close student of Swiss educational practice.
In order to maintain religious instruction as an integral part
of the scheme, and to respect 'the rights of conscience, it was
proposed to give both denominational and undenominational
instruction in such a manner as to safeguard conscientious
objectors.