No More Learning

IV and xm, section 1.
3


## p. 393 (#417) ############################################

Dissenting Academies
393
it is said that in the space of a few years he had three hundred
pupils under his tuition at Rathmill, his Yorkshire home. Indeed,
the rapid increase of these 'academies' in the last thirty years of
the seventeenth century shows that some discretion was used as to
car out the law so far as it was directed against purely educa-
tional institutions which were not endowed schools or universities.
There were many academies in the provinces, and the northern
suburbs of London-Hackney, Stoke Newington, Islington, at that
time the recognised homes of boarding schools-contained some
famous dissenting academies. That kept by Charles Morton, a
former fellow of Wadham, at Newington green, was a very con-
siderable establishment; and its head was accordingly prosecuted,
and his academy dispersed, while he himself left the country.
Morton was one of many who suffered; even those who were
permitted to keep their schools or their pupils realized how
unstable was their position.
The instruction given by the academies was of different types
and standards; but, when they became established institutions, their
first care was the education of ministers; dissenting academies
supplied their earliest training beyond school age to Samuel Wesley,
the elder, to bishop Butler (of The Analogy) and to archbishop
Secker. But not all the pupils were being educated for the
ministry, and this fact was made the ground of a charge, in the
circumstances very discreditable to those who preferred it, that
the academies diverted men from the universities.
Secker complained that the Latin and Greek which he carried
from the Chesterfield free school to Jolly's academy at Attercliffe
was lost at the latter place, ‘for only the old philosophy of the
schools was taught there, and that neither ably nor diligently';
like Wesley some years earlier, he thought but poorly of the
morals of his fellow-students. In 1710, Secker, then seventeen
years old, removed to Bowes's academy in Bishopsgate street,
where he learned algebra, geometry, conic sections, read Locke's
Essay and studied French ; Isaac Watts was an inmate of the
same house. About 1711, Secker again migrated, this time to an
academy kept at Gloucester by a dissenting layman, Samuel Jones.
There I recovered my almost lost knowledge of Greek and Latin, and
added to it that of Hebrew, Chaldee and Syriack. We had also lectures
on Dionysius's Geography, a course of lectures preparatory to the critical
study of the Bible, and a course of Jewish antiquities, besides logick and
mathematics. Here I . . . began a strict correspondence [i. e. intimacy) with
Mr Joseph Butler, afterwards Bishop of Durham1.
i Secker's unpublished MS Memoir.


## p. 394 (#418) ############################################

394
Education
The academy was removed to Tewkesbury, where, says Secker,
Jones
began to relax of his industry, to drink too much ale and small beer
and to lose his temper,. . . and most of us fell off from our application and
regularity.
Yet, here, Butler wrote his letters to Samuel Clarke, Secker carry-
ing them to a distant post office for concealment's sake, lest his
correspondent's youth and real situation should shock the London
rector.
Dissenting educators were singled out for especial attack
by the framers of that legislation under Anne which culmi-
nated in the Schism act of 1714. It would seem that concerted
action against the academies was determined upon in the first
years of the queen's reign. The earliest sign was given by the
publication of Samuel Wesley's Letter from a country divine,
1702, in which he asserted that the academies fostered 'the good
old Cause,' were actively hostile to the church and disloyal to the
crown. In the following year, the dedication to the queen of the
second part of Clarendon's History contained the rhetorical
question, repeated more emphatically in the third part, 1704:
What can be the meaning of the several seminaries, and as it were
universities, set up in divers parts of the kingdom, by more than ordinary
industry, contrary to law, supported by large contributions, where the youth
is bred up in principles directly contrary to monarchical and episcopal
government ?
In 1704, also, Sharp, archbishop of York, moved for an enquiry
into the conduct of the academies; in the same year, Defoe, who,
like Samuel Wesley, had been educated at Morton's academy,
joined in the fray, and Sacheverell at Oxford, in a diatribe against
comprehension, raged against illegal 'schismatical universities. '
In 1705, they were denounced in convocation by the Irish
clergy.
The struggle had lasting and disastrous effects upon the history
of English education; the feeling aroused by it has never since
entirely subsided. In the eighteenth century, it sterilised the first
promising experiment in popular education, and the triumph of
the church was a contributory cause to the apathy which fell upon
the universities in the same century. It injured the nation by
diverting a large portion of its youth from the main stream
of national education into backwaters or into alien rivers. The
action of the majority was determined by mixed motives, more


## p. 395 (#419) ############################################

23
. .
Courtly Academies
395
political than theological; but, whatever their intentions and
whatever their provocation, the churchmen of Anne's day gave
birth to a long-lived spirit of faction and contention.
It is true that nothing was taught at the dissenting academies
which could not be better learned within the university pre-
cincts; but such newer studies as mathematics, French and modern
history formed part of the ordinary scheme of work for all their
students, and experimental study carried on within the narrow
limits of a single building must have entered more intimately
into the daily life of the majority of the pupils than was the case at
Oxford and Cambridge, where, in fact, study of this kind was not
deemed suitable for undergraduates. The academies, therefore,
are to be reckoned among the forces which gathered during the
eighteenth century to destroy the monopoly held by the ancient
curriculum.
Discontent with the customary course of studies in school and
university had long been exhibited among the classes from which
men of affairs were most frequently drawn. Neither school nor
university took special note of the changed conditions under
which the administrator, courtier, soldier and provincial magnate
lived, or adopted any special measures for their benefit. The
private tutor was called in to redress the balance, or to take the
place of the school. While the ordinary course of those 'bred to
learning' was from the school to the university, there was an
increasing tendency amongst the nobility and the wealthy through-
out the seventeenth century to ignore the school in favour of the
tutor, who taught his pupil from childhood, accompanied him to
the university and acted as guardian on his travels in Europe.
The tutor's work, in many cases, ceased when his pupil, either on
the conclusion of his university course, or in place of it, entered
one of the inns of court. Clement Ellis ascribed the popularity of
the inns to the fact that students were there free from the trouble-
some presence of tutors. They might, or might not, follow the
study of law in earnest; to be a member of an inn was deemed
a fitting conclusion to an education and a direct introduction
into life.
Notably in France, discontent with current educational practice
had led to the institution of academies' where a combination was
sought of the medieval knightly arts with modern studies, as we
now understand that term; young men learned horsemanship,
the practice of arms and of physical exercises generally, modern
languages, history, geography and mathematics, particularly in its
>
?
1
6
a


## p. 396 (#420) ############################################

396
Education
application to the art of war. These French academies handed on
the tradition that the courts of princes and the houses of great
nobles were the natural places of education for those who were to
spend their lives in the personal service of the sovereign. In Italy,
the princely academies had given birth to a literature devoted to
'the doctrine of Courtesy, of which Castiglione's Il Cortegiano
(1528) may be regarded as the original, and Henry Peacham's
Compleat Gentleman (1622 and frequently reprinted with additions)
the most popular English exemplar? . Clarendon gave the subject
the benefit of his experience and good sense in two very readable
dialogues Concerning Education and of the Want of Respect due
to Age:
Peacham advises the study of such branches of knowledge as
modern history and geography, astronomy, geometry, music, draw-
ing, painting, all with an eye to the needs of the soldier and man
of action, for whose benefit physical training in various forms is
prescribed. But his typical gentleman is, also, a virtuoso interested
in 'antiquities,' and a cultivated man accustomed to sweeten his
severer studies by reading poetry, Latin and English ; no Greek
poet is named. Peacham exhorts his reader to 'forget not to
speak and write your own (tongue] properly and eloquently,' and
to read the best and purest English'; to which end a long list of
poets and prose-writers is given, including the names of Chaucer,
Spenser and Bacon, but omitting Shakespeare's. The manifold
interests of a cultured, travelled Englishman of a later date are
well illustrated by the mere mention of topics which Evelyn
treated in his various essays; these include forestry, architecture,
gardening, ‘sculptura' (engraving), painting, navigation, agri-
culture, horticulture and the dressing of salads. The list may be
compared with the 'manual arts' which Locke thought desirable
in a gentleman : gardening, woodwork, metalwork, varnishing,
graving, the polishing of glass lenses and the cutting of precious
stones (Some Thoughts concerning Education)*:
Higford's Institution of a Gentleman (1660) and The Courtier's
Calling (1675) by 'a Person of Honour' are courtesy books
1 See ante, vol. III, chap. XIX.
? See ante, vol. IV, p. 526.
3 See ante, vol. VII, pp. 220, 444.
* Swift, in the preface to A Tale of a Tub, announced that it was intended to erect
a large academy (to which only wits would be admissible) capable of containing nine
thousand seven hundred and forty-three persons, 'pretty near the current number of
wits in this Island,' who were to be distributed over the several schools of the academy,
there to study such matters as · Looking-glasses, Swearing, Criticks, Salivation,
Hobby-Horses, Poetry, Tops, the Spleen, Gaming. '
6
6


## p. 397 (#421) ############################################

6
Courtesy Books
397
which still afford interest to the student of educational history.
Jean Gailhard's The Compleat Gentleman (1678) and Stephen
Penton's Guardian's Instruction, written between 1681 and 1687,
and his New Instructions to the Guardian (1694), although dealing
with the same theme, take different lines, Gailhard recommending
private education and foreign travel with a tutor (he had been
a tutor himself), and Penton, sometime principal of St Edmund
hall, Oxford, preferring a university education. Both books
appear to have been familiar to Locke when he wrote Some
Thoughts. The courtesy books proper come to an inglorious
termination in such compilations as The Fine Gentleman (1732)
of Mr. Costeker. '
Variants of the courtesy books are Francis Osborn's Advice to
a Son (6th edition, 1658), The Gentleman's Calling and Clement
Ellis's The Gentile (i. e. 'genteel') Sinner (2nd edition, 1661).
Osborn's philosophy of life is that of his friend, Thomas Hobbes ;
in this popular bookhe displays much contempt for universities
and those long resident in them, and is without any belief what-
ever in a gentleman's need for 'learning' as usually acquired.
The other two works are of a sermonising, even ranting type,
abounding in generalities, but altogether wanting in the directness
of earlier books on the upbringing of a gentleman.
The miscellany of schemes which Defoe styled An Essay
upon Projects (1697) includes one for an English academy to
darken the glory' of the Académie Française and 'to polish and
refine the English tongue,''the noblest and most comprehensive of
all the vulgar languages in the world? ' A second scheme proposes
a royal academy for military exercises, which should provide a
scientific education for soldiers, and, incidentally, encourage
shooting with a firelock' as a national pastime in the place of
'cocking, cricketing and tippling. '
The species of academy on the French model, giving instruction
in military exercises and in the whole range of modern studies,
did not secure a footing amongst English institutions, in spite
of numerous attempts to found one in this country. Lewis Maid-
well approached parliament, or the government, on four several
occasions between 1700 and 1704, with the purpose of obtaining
official sanction, a public standing and a state subsidy for such
an academy, to be established in his house at Westminster. The
details of the project took different shapes at different times,
but instruction in navigation was put forward as an aim in all
1 See ante, vol. VIII, p. 377.
2 Cf. ante, p. 7.


## p. 398 (#422) ############################################

398
Education
of them. Though nothing came of Maidwell's plan, it aroused
opposition from the universities'; its absurd scheme of raising
funds by a registration fee imposed upon all printed matter showed
the author to be no man of business.
During the latter half of the seventeenth and the beginning
of the eighteenth century, it became the fashion among wealthy
country gentlemen and their imitators to substitute for the school
private tuition at home, more especially in the case of eldest
sons. As this fashion spread, less care was bestowed on the
choice of a tutor, who sometimes became the tool of a too indul-
gent mother bent upon playing special providence. Swift (Essay
on Modern Education, c. 1723) makes this charge; Defoe
(Compleat English Gentleman, c. 1728—9) denies its justice; but
it is frequently brought at this time against those who were in
well-to-do circumstances. Swift supports the classics, the birch,
schools and universities, against private education, coddling and
the modern studies. He thinks that the popularity of the army
has given the latter their vogue, and that education grew corrupt
at the restoration. But, in truth, this particular 'corruption
was of much earlier growth, and its cause is to be sought in the
defects of that mode of education which Swift championed. Defoe
represents the eldest sons of wealthy landowners who lived on
their estates as growing up in gross ignorance, the learning of
schools and universities being regarded as a trade suitable for
clergy and others who had to earn an income, but quite un-
necessary for gentlemen. Swift (On the Education of Ladies)
speaks of the shameful and almost universal neglect of good
education among our nobility, gentry and indeed among all others
who are born to good estates. ' The statement is, in effect,
reiterated by novelists as well as by professed writers on education.
The wellknown decline in the number of boys at public schools
during the greater part of the eighteenth century to some
extent confirms Defoe. In the public mind, the distinction between
learning and education was becoming more appreciated, and
schools were identified with learning chiefly. A great part of
the learning now in fashion in the schools of Europe. . . a gentle-
man may in a good measure be unfurnish'd with, without any
great disparagement to himself or prejudice to his affairs 3. '
The transition is short from the courtesy books to the reform
of education in general. The most notable instance of the passage
i See post, p. 413.
8 Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 1693.
Op. cit.


## p. 399 (#423) ############################################

-;;
Locke's Thoughts on Education
399
is afforded by the work just quoted, the greatest of English books
of its time which deal with its subject, and the most trenchant
condemnation of the mode of education then in favour. The book
is the fruit of Locke's experience of tuition, but still more is it
the outcome of reading and reflection. His debt to Montaigne is
extensive. The general principles of the two writers are very
much the same; where Montaigne gives details of procedure, Locke
adopts and elaborates them; many passages in his book are but
free renderings of the earlier writer's French. Isolated passages,
when compared, are not without significance; but the really
instructive comparisons are those of general principles, of outlook
and attitude. So compared, it is evident that Montaigne is the
source of much of Some Thoughts. Both writers have chiefly in
mind the future man of affairs in whose education learning is much
less important than the discipline of judgment and character.
Both desire to make their pupils grow in practical wisdom, both
employ the same method of action, practice, example, as against
the bookish method of the school. The serious business of educa-
tion, as Locke saw it, was not a matter for children. The training
which he would give a child was, primarily, a moral or a quasi-
moral one ; at that stage, intellectual exercise should be altogether
subordinate. So far as knowledge is concerned, it is enough for
the child and boy to enjoy a moderate use of the intellectual powers,
to avoid unoccupied moments and to get a little taste of what
industry must perfect at a later period. Childhood, in Locke's
view, is that “sleep of reason' to which Rousseau afterwards
appealed in justification of the dictum that early education should
be purely negative. In spite of mistakes which a better informed
psychology has exposed, this conception of childhood gave birth,
in due time, to much in modern practice which distinctly benefits
the little child ; it was also a fruitful conception in eighteenth
century theorising about education in general.
This is not the place to attempt to follow Locke's many pre-
scriptions respecting the course of study, and the method of
teaching. He was in sympathy with the innovators of his day
who proposed to admit modern studies, and it is evident that
he was convinced of the value of the instruction given by
French academies to young nobles and gentlemen who resorted
to them from all parts of Europe, Britain included. Yet, even
in respect of academies, Locke asserts his own point of view,
1 Cf. ante, vol. VIII, p. 346.


## p. 400 (#424) ############################################

400
Education
passing lightly over their distinctive arts of riding, fencing,
dancing, music, but dwelling at length upon the manual arts,
particularly the useful handicrafts, as woodwork and gardening.
The importance of Some Thoughts was recognised from the
first, as witness the amended and amplified editions which
appeared during the author's lifetime. Leibniz valued the book
highly. Richardson introduces it into Pamela as a suitable
present for a young mother. It reached the continent so early
as 1695 in Coste's defective French translation, which passed
through five editions in fifty years. In 1763, it was translated
into Italian, and, in 1787, two German versions appeared. These
translations show that there was a greater demand for the work
than could be met by the French, a language familiar to the
educated all over Europe.
Locke's second contribution to the literature of education is
the fragmentary and posthumously published Of the Conduct of
the Understanding, an addition to the great Essay of 1690, and
one which Locke put forward as a substitute for the text-books of
logic studied by undergraduates in their first year at the university.
Of the Conduct and Some Thoughts are mutually complementary.
Originally, at least, the latter was meant to express Locke's opinions
concerning the education of children ; Of the Conduct is a manual
of practice for young men, who are educating themselves. It is
in this work that we find the true Locke, independent of the
authorities which lie behind Some Thoughts, intent mainly upon the
problem of building up, confirming, and making continuously
operative the essentially rational character of the mind. Locke
believes the solution of the problem to be largely independent
of schoolmasters and tutors; and every man in proportion to his
opportunities is called upon to face the question for himself. This
view of the educational process was unlikely to influence those
who wrote on, or dealt with, education as customarily understood.
The educated person, as he is drawn in Of the Conduct, is one
who before all else has learned to think for himself. Convinced that
reason will enable him to attain so much of truth as he needs to
know, he has habituated himself to its skilful exercise. Mathematics
and divinity are named as his appropriate studies; the concluding
pages of Some Thoughts enable us to add ethics, civil law and con-
stitutional history. A healthy, graceful body and considerable
manual skill are desirable possessions for whose attainment the
latter book gives many directions. The contrast between Locke's
ideal of culture and our own is sufficiently obvious. It is not


## p. 401 (#425) ############################################

6
Essay concerning Human Understanding 401
surprising that he says little of the educational advantage to be
got from the study of physical science, though his lifelong interest
in research shows this was not an oversight. But of the culture of
the human spirit, which literature confers, Locke says nothing, and
such cultivation of fine art as he recommends is chiefly for utili-
tarian ends. The development of the rational is, for him, wellnigh
everything: imagination and sentiment are not merely left out,
but are more than once referred to as objects of distrust. Locke
believed that the ancient authors observed and painted mankind
well and [gave] the best light into that kind of knowledge’; but
of English writers Some Thoughts recommends by name for the
pupil's reading, only two, Cudworth and Chillingworth, and neither
for that kind of knowledge. '
Locke's significance in the history of education is not to be
sought in his expressly pedagogical works. An Essay concerning
Human Understanding (1690), whence the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries derived their experimental psychology and their
rationalist and sceptical philosophies, is, also, the source of its
author's great influence upon subsequent educational theory and
practice, more especially as these developed in France and
Germany. The teaching of An Essay respecting the relation of
experience to mental development is paralleled by the doctrine
that formal education is a process which profoundly modifies the
minds subjected to it; when philanthropic feeling is added to this
doctrine, the desire of making instruction universal is bound to
arise. Locke's exposition of mind as itself a development leads
straight to the conception that the method of teaching is con-
ditioned, as to nature, material and sequence, by mental develop-
ment. Hence, the demand so frequently reiterated in eighteenth
century educational theory for the training of the senses, and for
modes of instruction, which will make children discover everything
for themselves ; hence, also, the impatience of authority, the anti-
thesis, sometimes foolishly expressed, between 'words' and 'things,'
and an inadequate test of what constitutes usefulness. In short,
from An Essay's teaching is derived much of the educational
theory of Rousseau, La Chalotais, Helvétius, Basedow and their
sympathisers, down to Herbert Spencer.
The education of girls above the humblest rank was wholly
private. Swift, in a fragmentary essay on the Education of Ladies,
states the practice thus : 'the care of their education is either
>
!
!
1
1 Cf. ante, vol. VIII, pp. 334 ff.
E. L. IX.
CH, XV.
26


## p. 402 (#426) ############################################

402
Education
entirely left to their mothers, or they are sent to boarding schools,
or put into the hands of English or French governesses,' generally
the worst that can be gotten for money. ' The ideal wavered
between what was deemed most fitting to the housewife, the
devotee or the fine lady severally. Swift says that the common
opinion restricted a woman's reading to books of devotion or of
domestic management; anything beyond these might 'turn the
brain. ' In Law's Serious Call (1728) Matilda's daughters read
only the Bible and devotional books, but their chief anxiety is to
appear 'genteel,' though they become anaemic and die in conse-
quence. In every case, the ideal carefully avoided any appearance
.
of thoroughness outside the domestic arts. Lady Mary Pierre-
point (1689–1762) (afterwards Lady Mary Wortley Montagu),
writing in 1710 to bishop Burnet, complains that it is looked
upon as in a degree criminal to improve our reason, or fancy we
have any. "
The domestic instruction of girls of course depended for its
thoroughness and for its precise scope upon the circumstances of
the household and the opinions and capacity of the mother. The
results must have differed greatly; but the general level was a
low one, especially in those numerous cases where it was thought
unnecessary to train the girl as a housewife though it was not
possible to furnish her with highly competent instructors. Swift,
in A Letter to a very young lady on her marriage, declares that
not one gentleman's daughter in a thousand can read or under-
stand her own language or ‘be the judge of the easiest books that
are written in it. ' They are not so much as taught to spell in their
*
childhood, nor can ever attain to it in their whole lives. ' Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu received lessons in carving in order to
take the head of her father's table on public days, occasions on
which she dined alone an hour beforehand. She was taught French
in childhood and Italian as a young woman of twenty; Latin she
studied surreptitiously for two years in her father's library, working
five or six hours a day, when it was thought she was reading novels
or romances. Elizabeth Elstob, editor of Aelfric's Homilies and
author of the earliest Old English grammar, pursued her early
education under similar discouraging circumstances.
The medieval distinction between the types of education of the
sexes was a distinction of function, and the difference between the
education of women and that of men was not greater than the
difference between the education of the knight and that of
the scholar. But, in the eighteenth century, the difference was
6


## p. 403 (#427) ############################################

Education of Girls
403
م
regarded as based on capacity. "You can never arrive in point
of learning to the perfection of a school-boy,' Swift assures a newly-
a
married girl, and he advises that, for some hours daily, she should
study English works on history and travel, so that she may prepare
to take an intelligent part in conversation. From this platform, it
is but a short step, and too often a downward one, to the 'accom-
plishments' of the seventeenth and eighteenth century boarding
school. Here, as in home education, the differences of aim and
method were very great. These are at their most ambitious point
in An Essay to revive the antient education of Gentlewomen
(1673) which, in truth, is a thinly-veiled prospectus of a new
boarding school for girls, to be established, or recently established,
at Tottenham cross by Mrs Bathsua Makin, a lady who acquired
an extraordinary reputation as 'tutress' to Charles I's daughter,
Elizabeth'.
The interest of the essay, probably written by
Mrs Makin herself, lies in the account of her school. We learn
that the things ordinarily taught in girls' schools were 'works of
all sorts, dancing, music, singing, writing, keeping accompts. ' Half
the time of the new school is to be devoted to these arts, and the
remainder to Latin and French, "and those that please may learn
Greek and Hebrew, the Italian and Spanish, in all which this
gentlewoman hath a competent knowledge. ' The mixture of aims
and indecision as to means are strikingly illustrated in the optional
studies, 'limning, preserving, pastry and cooking,' and in the
branches to be taken up by those who remained long at school,
astronomy, geography, arithmetic, history. Mrs Makin was an
admirer of Comenius and warmly recommended his plan of
teaching Latin and 'real' knowledge in association. Experimental
philosophy may be substituted for languages in the new school,
which has 'repositories for visibles,' collections of objects, for the
purpose.
Swift's proposal for the reform of girls' instruction already
alluded to is not unlike that recommended in 1753 by Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu for the benefit of her grandchild, the countess
of Bute's daughter, except that she adds arithmetic and philosophy,
and attaches special importance to needlework, drawing and
English poetry. Reformer as she was, she shares the general
opinion that scholarly attainments were the affair of the pro-
fessional man and, accordingly, to be considered derogatory in the
owner of a title or of great estates. Lady Mary, therefore, is
careful to say that she considers the kind of education which she is
1 Princess Elizabeth died at the age of fifteen in 1650.
26_2


## p. 404 (#428) ############################################

404
Education
6
6
advising suited only to those women who will live unmarried and
retired lives; and even they should conceal their learning, when
acquired, as they would a physical defect.
Mary Astell, the ‘Madonella' whose 'seraphic discourse' and
'Protestant nunnery' furnished Swift' with topics for coarse satire,
was a great admirer of Lady Mary but a reformer on different
lines. Her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) attracted con-
siderable attention and opposition, partly on account of its suggested
conventual education, partly because its author was a known
controversialist on the church of England side. Her 'religious'
were to undertake the education of girls, instructing them in
“solid and useful knowledge,' chiefly through the mother tongue.
The ladies themselves were to substitute French philosophy and
the ancient classics (presumably in translations) for the romances
which formed most of the reading of fashionable women. William
Law held women's intelligence and capacity in at least as high
esteem as he did those of men; but the education which he advised
for girls is confined to plain living, and the practice of charity and
devotion.
Defoe's Essay upon Projects (1697) deprecates the idea of a
nunnery and proposes academies which differ but little from
'
public schools, wherein such ladies as were willing to study should
have all the advantages of learning suitable to their genius. ' He
indicates the customary instruction of girls of the middle class.
6
6
One would wonder indeed how it should happen that women are con-
versible at all, since they are only beholding to natural parts for all their
knowledge. Their youth is spent to teach them to stitch and sow, or make
bawbles; they are taught to read indeed, and perhaps to write their names
or so; and that is the heighth of a woman's education.
а
Defoe's academy 'would deny women no sort of learning,' but,
in particular, it would teach them history, languages, especially
French and Italian, music and dancing. This readiness to expand
the course of studies appears again in the same author's Compleat
English Gentleman, where Latin and Greek are said to be
not indispensable; but modern studies and, notably, the cultiva-
tion of the mother tongue, are described as essential.
The beginning of popular education is an obscure subject, as to
which we can with safety make only such general assertions as
that rudimentary instruction in the vernacular was first given
in response to a commercial, industrial or other distinctly utili-
tarian demand, and that teachers were private adventurers,
i The Tatler, XXXII, 1709.


## p. 405 (#429) ############################################

2
Elementary Education
405
frequently women, who carried on their small schools unlicensed.
Long before the period under review, children of all ranks but
the highest received their earliest schooling in dames' schools.
Brinsley (1612) speaks of poor men and women who, by such
teaching, ‘make an honest poor living of it, or get somewhat
towards helping the same'; at the close of the century, Stephen
Penton refers to the horn book . . . which brings in the country
school dames so many groats a week. ' Francis Brokesbyl writes :
There are few country villages where some or other do not get a livelihood
by teaching school, so that there are now not many but can write and read
unless it have been their own or their parents' fault.
The writer has a doubtful thesis to support, and therefore must
not be taken too literally. Shenstone had a much better right to
assume the presence of a dame school ‘in every village mark'd
with little spire’? ; but he wrote a whole generation later. In
spite of its banter and the prominence assigned to the rod, this
burlesque idyll is a tribute of respect to school dames and to the
value of their work amidst very unscholastic surroundings. The
instruction was usually confined to reading and the memorising
of catechism, psalms and scriptural texts ; writing was an occasional
'extra. ' Fielding and Smollett throw some light on the country
schools of their time.
Schools above this grade taught, or professed to teach,
arithmetic, history, geography and, sometimes, the rudiments of
Latin; others, of a grade still higher, prepared for Eton and West-
minster. Smollett makes Peregrine Pickle (1751) attend a boarding
school kept by a German charlatan who undertook to teach French
and Latin and to prepare for these two schools, though, in the end,
'Perry' was sent to Winchester.
But, of whatever grade, all these private schools were for
persons who could pay a fee; the very poor and the indifferent
were not helped by them. In spite of casual attempts of town
councils, vestries and private persons to provide instruction, the
number of the illiterate and untaught was great and the morals of
6
i Of Education, 1701.
3 The School-Mistress, 1742.
8 Thus, in Joseph Andrews (1742) the hero is said to have learned to read . very
early,' his father paying sixpence a week for the instruction. Tom Jones's henchman
had been a village schoolmaster, whose pupils numbered exactly nine, of whom seven
were 'parish-boys' learning to read and write at the ratepayers' cost; their comrades
were the sons of a neighbouring squire, the elder, a boy of seventeen just entered into
syntax,' a dunce too old for a more suitable school. Partridge eked out his income by
acting as parish clerk and barber, his patron providing a ten pound annuity.
6


## p. 406 (#430) ############################################

406
Eaucation
a large part of the population gave anxiety to thoughtful men
The increase of pauperism between 1692 and 1699 intensified the
evil, and the earliest attempts at amelioration were on economic
rather than educational lines. John Bellers came forward with
Proposals for Raising a Colledge of Industry (1696) which, in
fact, consisted of a proprietary workhouse in close association with
a farm, by whose means Bellers hoped to eliminate the middleman,
solve the puzzle of the unemployed and pay profits to the proprietors.
The teaching to be given in the school was to be addressed mainly
to reading, writing and handicrafts, children beginning to learn
knitting and spinning at four or five years old; the inmates might
remain to the age of twenty-four. The scheme secured the approval
of William Penn, Thomas Ellwood and other quakers, but it was
full of generalities and platitudes, without showing capacity to
found a living institution ; Cowley was the real author of some
of the notions which Bellers presented very nebulously.
In 1697, Locke, then a member of the commission of Trade
and Plantations, wrote a memorandum in which he ascribed the
increase of pauperism to relaxation of discipline and corruption
of manners. He put forward the more practicable portions of
Bellers's scheme, suggesting the erection at public expense in all
parishes of 'working schools' for pauper children, between the
ages of three and fourteen, who were to learn spinning, knitting or
other handicraft, and to be brought to church on Sundays! . Half
the apprentices of a district should be chosen from these paupers,
for whom no premium was to be paid. Locke estimated that the
children's labour would pay for their teaching and for a sufficient
ration of bread and water-gruel. Defoe (Of Royall Educacion,
c. 1728) expressed the opinion that 'in the manufacturing towns
of England, hardly a child above five year old but could get its
own bread. '
While men like Locke and Bellers addressed themselves chiefly
to the economic side of the problem presented by pauperism, others
tried to solve it by means of instruction, more particularly through
instruction in religion. There was, indeed, a growing uneasiness in
religious minds respecting the spiritual condition of the people
,
not only in these islands but in France and Germany also. Between
1678 and 1698, forty-two 'religious societies,' chiefly of churchmen,
were started in London alone, and similar associations were formed
at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin and elsewhere, the object of all
being that deepening of personal piety which, at a later date and
* Fox Bourne, Life of John Locke, vol. I, p. 388.
6


## p. 407 (#431) ############################################

Charity Schools
407
on a more extensive scale, became methodism. In the last decade
of the seventeenth century societies for the reformation of
manners' endeavoured to effect improvement by setting in force
the laws against swearing, drunkenness, street-debauchery and
sabbath-breaking; their success was but trifling, and they died
out about 1740.
One of the immediate objects of the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge (founded in 1699) was the institution of
schools for instructing poor children between the ages of seven
and twelve in reading, writing and the catechism ; all boys and
some girls were to be taught to cipher, and all girls were to
learn sewing, or some other handicraft. The instruction was to be
given by a master or mistress, a member of the church of England,
licensed by the bishop. A convincing proof of the great popularity
of these schools in their earlier period is furnished by the
venomous attack upon them made by Bernard Mandeville in his
Essay on Charity, and Charity Schools (2nd edition, 1723). That
habitual paradoxmonger was dead against popular schooling : yet
he notes an enthusiastic passion for charity schools, a kind of
distraction the nation hath laboured under for some time,' a wide-
spread interest in their fortunes, and a great desire to share in
their management. He thought that the money bestowed on them
would be better spent upon higher and professional education. If
parents are too poor to afford their children the elements of
learning “it is impudence in them to aspire any further. '
These schools obtained a large measure of support during the
reigns of Anne and George I, but, with the accession of George II,
there came a check in their increase, and a decline in their
efficiency set in, which grew as the century advanced, while an
immense field for popular instruction was either unoccupied, or
occupied by even humbler schools. Their own defective course
and methods of instruction but partly account for the failure
of charity schools, which was mainly due to their connection
with the church and the supposed Jacobite sympathies of their
managers. Responsible persons like archbishop Wake and bishop
Boulter, of Bristol, formally warned the authorities of the schools
against any appearance of disloyalty.
Charity schools failed to expand, partly because they did
not retain the support of the crown, and partly because their
managers were too often partisan in their dealings with parents ;
readers of Fielding will remember why little Joseph Andrews did
not receive a charity school education. But these schools played


## p. 408 (#432) ############################################

408
Education
a part in our educational history which makes them memorable.
They familiarised men with the idea of a system of popular schools
centrally directed, yet very closely associated with the several
localities in which the schools were placed; they founded the
tradition that the three R's' are the primary ground of all school
work, and they first represented that voluntary system to which
English popular education owes much.
Eton and Westminster were commonly accounted the public
schools par excellence during the first half of the eighteenth
century, Winchester taking third place. Rugby's greatness only
began with the headmastership of Thomas James (1778–94), while
Harrow and Shrewsbury suffered from that instability, or decline
in number of pupils, which was general throughout the century
at all public schools. The fact is paralleled by the paucity of
grammar schools founded under George I and George II. Carlisle
gives nineteen schools as founded between 1702 and 1760, of
which eight belong to the reign of Anne: scarcely one of the
nineteen can lay any claim to importance.
Not in the official plan of studies alone had schools lost touch
with the general life of the nation. While domestic manners,
comforts and existence generally had become much less austere
than they were in the sixteenth century, public schools re-
tained their severity of discipline and roughness of manners.
The retention was valued by some as affording a counter-agent
to the supposed effeminacy of the times; but it accounts for the
unwillingness of many mothers to entrust their boys to boarding
schools. Nor were roughness of manners and frequent floggings
the most serious objections to be found in school life. The brutality
of an earlier time survived in some of the school sports ; at Eton,
the 'ram-hunt, in its most cruel and cowardly form, was not
abolished until 1747. 'All that gentleman's misfortunes arose from
his being educated at a public-school,' said parson Adams, com-
menting on the downfall of the dissipated Mr Wilson.
Schools were understaffed, and it was not possible, therefore, to
fill all the waking hours with a supervised routine which would
keep the more audacious spirits out of mischief. “Westminster's
bold race' was notorious for its readiness to defy law and order,
whether of the school or of the city. “Schemes,' or illicit excur-
sions out of bounds, were by no means confined to the hours of
daylight, and boys in their 'teens were brought into contact with
some of the worst evils of a great city. It was at Westminster that
young Qualmsick acquired 'a very pretty knowledge of the Town,'
6


## p. 409 (#433) ############################################

Public School Education
409
6
?
3
before he 'took lodgings at a University,' at the age of seventeen!
School discipline was ineffectual to restrain the more reckless
boys : Smollett sees no absurdity in making Peregrine Pickle
at fourteen 'elope' from Winchester, spend some days on a visit
and return, to have his escapade winked at, or condoned by the
headmaster. Indeed, Perry's private retinue of clerical tutor and
footman furnishes a hint as to the way in which laxity on the part
of the headmaster might arise.
The growth of tutoring was, also, in itself, one of the reasons for
the decline in the number of schoolboys. While William Pitt and
his elder brother, Thomas, retained their own domestic tutor at
Eton (171926), other boys of their rank were educated entirely
by tutors and away from schools. The objections to public school
education made on grounds of health, or morality, were the more
cogent, because boys frequently entered the schools very much
younger than they do today. In 1690, we read of a child of six
being admitted to Westminster: Jeremy Bentham went to the
same school at that age in 1754. Marbles, hop-scotch, and the
rolling circle of Gray's Eton Ode? , tell of boys much younger
than the public schoolboy of the present time.
So far as the systematic and recognised studies of the schools
were concerned, Latin and Greek were the only educational instru-
ments of which every boy could avail himself; presence in 'school?
meant attendance at a lesson in one of these languages. The
spectre schoolmaster of The Dunciad declares,
Whate'er the talents or howe'er designed,
We hang one jingling padlock on the mind.
But it must not be forgotten that, for boys who passed through
the entire school course, Latin and Greek were literatures, not
'subjects' comparable with one of the studies in a modern school
time-table. Further, much of the time devoted to classical
languages was spent in the active study and exercise of composi-
tion; the old rhetorical training survived from the sixteenth
century and, in spite of its manifest faults, that training required
boys to think about a great variety of topics of the first import-
Of course, no attempt was made to teach natural science at
any English public school during the period under review; writing,
arithmetic and, at a much later period, some algebra and geometry
received the partial recognition implied in their being taught on
half-holidays by teachers of inferior standing. Modern literature,
وفي 7
تیر
3
6
มี
1 History of Pompey the Little, pp. 230—2.
2 Gray was at Eton from 1727 to 1734.
در حال


## p. 410 (#434) ############################################

410
Education
English and French, together with accomplishments like drawing,
dancing and fencing, were regarded at Eton, and elsewhere, as
occupations for leisure hours only. Boys were expected to give some
of their leisure to private reading, the absence of the highly organised
athleticism of today leaving a broad margin of time for the
purpose. Cowper at Westminster (1741–9), in this way, read with
a schoolfellow all the Iliad and Odyssey in Greek, and some of
Milton's English poems. Peregrine Pickle is represented as learn-
ing at Winchester four books of Euclid, some algebra, trigonometry
and surveying, but he learned these from Jolter, his tutor, and,
therefore, apart from the school studies. The rigour of the classical
curriculum was a little relaxed, but only a little, in the prepara-
tory schools of the London suburbs through which ‘Westminsters'
sometimes passed to their school.
There is a common consent amongst authorities to the effect
that the years between the restoration and the close of the reign
of George II constituted a period of stagnation, if not of active
decay, in the history of English universities. Those who fix their
attention upon the statutory order of studies and the terms on
which universities then granted degrees are likely to consider this
an understatement. Today, the underlying supposition is that the
degree betokens some measure of intellectual achievement; it is
the conventional certificate of a liberal education and a passport
to certain forms of professional employment. But, in the eighteenth
century, its chief function was to regularise, in academic society, the
position of men who proposed to spend some further years at the
university in anticipation of clerical preferment. Intellectual
merit alone was not regarded as establishing an unquestionable
claim to a place in the academic community, or to the conferment
of a degree. Hence, degrees were sometimes refused, or with-
drawn, on what would today be regarded as irrelevant, or even
unfair, grounds. Hence, too, an easy assent to exercises which
were mere forms; the eighteenth century sometimes allowed the
forms to become farcicall.
But, soon after the restoration, it became clear that the
medieval system was antiquated beyond any possibility of a useful
existence. The scholastic exercises for the B. A. degree comprised
disputations, frequenting public lectures, examinations and deter-
minations. At Oxford, the last two could be satisfied by repeating
1 Convenient evasions had been found at & still earlier period. In 1675, candidates
at Cambridge might put down caution-money as a guarantee that they would go through
the statutory exercises ; they could get the degree by forfeiting the money.
a


## p. 411 (#435) ############################################

University Education
411
6
a few catch-phrases in a dubious Latin, often got up beforehand or
read from notes, 'strings,' as they were called. Candidates secured
a dispensation for non-attendance at lectures which were not
delivered; the examinations of 1716—19, if Amhurst may be
believed on the point, could be crammed for in a fortnight. In
a similar spirit, the sex solemnes lectiones of the statutes for. M. A.
became, in practice, so many 'wall-lectures '-delivered, or pro-
fessedly delivered, to four walls and to empty benches.
But these statutory courses and exercises fail to give a picture
of university education at that date. In the first place, the educa-
tional system of the colleges frequently ensured that the forms
were not empty. Thus, at St John's college, Cambridge, in 1694,
a candidate for the B. A. degree was examined by two fellows of
his college during three days in rhetoric, ethics, physics and
astronomy; the three days' examination in the schools' and
"answering questions, exercises before the university at a later
stage, were merely formal? Bentley, in 1702, introduced written
examinations for scholarships and fellowships at Trinity college,
and, twelve years later, we read of 'a full examination including
two days of book-work in classical literature for fellowships at
Merton College, Oxford? '
Wallis, opposing Maidwell' in 1700, maintained that the Oxford
tutorial system was an equivalent, and more, of the continental
privata collegia, or teaching by Seminar, which Maidwell had said
did not exist in England“. It is instructive to find two popular
manuals by Cambridge tutors, Waterland's Advice to a Young
Student (1706), and Green’s ’EY UKROTaidela (1707), recommending
the reading of the best English writers as well as books on the
new philosophy, in addition to those on the classical, mathematical
and philosophical studies of the customary course. At Cambridge,
in 1730, Locke's Essay and works by English and foreign philo-
sophers and men of science were in use. English essays were
regularly prepared for the Oxford tutors at Magdalen, in 1749,
and at Hertford, in 1747. Where the tutor was interested in
intellectual pursuits and, at the same time, took his tutoring
seriously, the extension of the pupil's studies (especially if the
latter was responsive) was almost inevitable. That there were
such tutors, and that opportunities existed for a wide range of
studies at both Oxford and Cambridge between 1660 and 1760, are
facts easily demonstrated.
i Wordsworth, Scholae Academicae, p. 23. ? Brodrick, Memorials of Merton, p. 130.
* See ante, p. 397.
• A Letter from a friend of the universities.
as
!
Is


## p. 412 (#436) ############################################

412
Education
The origin of the Royal society has already been told'. Sprat,
in his History of the Royal Society (1667), while protesting that
the new institution is in no sense a rival to the universities, goes
on to say that it could not be injurious to them without horrible
ingratitude, seeing that in them it had been principally cherished
and revived. ' In 1659, Robert Boyle brought from Strassburg the
chemist, Peter Stael, who taught his science in Oxford at different
times between that date and 1670. Though in no sense connected
with the university, his classes attracted men of every sort of
standing, above the undergraduate. In 1663, Anthony à Wood
and John Locke were fellow-members of Stael's 'chemical-club. '
Edward Lhwyd and his Cambridge friend John Ray were only less
interested in philology than they were in natural history.
At Cambridge, Bentley is a capital instance of the university
teacher whose catholic interest and zeal for knowledge extended
beyond his own chosen studies. As first Boyle lecturer (1692), he
attempted to confute atheism, not by the authority of the scriptures
but by a study of gravitation, physiology and psychology. This
sympathy with modern studies was not less characteristic of his
mastership of Trinity than was his desperate struggle to maintain
his office. In 1704, he made a dwelling and an observatory in the
college for one of its fellows, Roger Cotes, the first Plumian professor
of astronomy and of experimental philosophy ; the fact marks the
establishment at Cambridge of the Newtonian school of mathe-
matics. Bentley also fitted up a laboratory for Vigani, who, after
lecturing in Cambridge for some years, was made professor of
chemistry in 1703. In 1724, Bentley was instrumental in found-
ing the first botany chair in his university, and he favoured
a design for drawing up a history of modern geographical
discoveries.
Nor were these extra-academic interests confined to the seniors
or to the new philosophy. Ambrose Bonwicke (St John's college,
Cambridge, 1710—14) learned French under a private teacher in
order to study books on all sorts of learning published daily in
that language. ' In the same university, René La Butte taught
French from 1742, and there, also, Isola taught Gray Italian. At
Oxford, in 1741, Magdalen college employed Magister Fabre,
praelector linguae Gallicanae ; a little earlier, Shenstone, Graves
and Whistler met in each other's rooms at Pembroke to 'sip
Florence wine' and to read 'plays and poetry, Spectators or
Tatlers and other works of lighter digestion. ' Dr John Wallis,
1 Ante, vol. VIII, chap. XVII,
6


## p. 413 (#437) ############################################

1:1
6
6
University Chairs
413
in 1700, while arguing that Maidwell's projected academy was
superfluous, states that instruction was then accessible at Oxford
in anatomy, botany, pure and applied mathematics, French, Spanish,
Italian, music, dancing, fencing, riding and other manly exercises.
Nor must it be assumed that the universities in their corporate
capacity were insensible to the advance of knowledge or of their
own responsibility for it. The old curriculum retained its function
as an instrument of education, partly because the newer studies
had not yet reached that stage of systematisation which is requisite
in any branch of knowledge designed to educate. As early as
1683, Oxford found it necessary to open Ashmole’s ‘elaboratory'
‘for promoting several parts of useful and curious learning,' and
the study of chemistry was regularly pursued by members of the
university under the first 'custos,' Robert Plot. About the same
date, a philosophical society, consisting of a number of distinguished
a
seniors, including heads of houses, was instituted to correspond
with the Royal society and with a similar society in Dublin? . By
the close of the seventeenth century, the Newtonian mathematics
began to take possession of the Cambridge schools, not by statutory
regulation but simply in recognition of the advance in knowledge.
Between 1702 and 1750, Cambridge founded chairs in chemistry,
astronomy and experimental philosophy (Plumian), anatomy,
botany, Arabic, geology, astronomy and geometry (Lowndean);
and Oxford instituted chairs of poetry, Anglo-Saxon and anatomy.
It cannot be said that the regius professorships of modern history,
founded in 1724 by George II at both universities, did much to
advance the study of modern history during the eighteenth century;
still, they are, at least, evidence of goodwill on both sides, though
spoiled by vaguely conceived aims and faulty organisation. The
work of antiquaries like Anthony à Wood and Thomas Hearne was
more to the purpose.
The lethargy which seized upon English university life in the
mid-eighteenth century seems to have been less profound at Cam-
bridge, the university which enjoyed a measure of court favour;
Oxford was persistently Jacobite down to the death of George II,
and, in consequence, forfeited influence and lost opportunities for
usefulness. The Cambridge senate house was opened in 1730 and,
almost immediately, was made the scene of university examina-
tions, which, from that time, became of a serious character. The
1 In two pamphlets, printed with Maidwell's proposal, in the Oxford Historical
Society's Collectanea, First Series, 1885.
Clark, Life and Times of Anthony à Wood, vol. III, pp. 75–8.
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## p. 414 (#438) ############################################

414
Education
6
chancellor's regulations of 1750, which aimed at stiffening dis-
cipline and reducing the expenses of undergraduates, produced
a flood of pamphlets which give incidental information on the
condition of the university. The Academic, one of the best
known of these, credits undergraduates with 'taste for music and
modern languages, and due attention to mathematics, natural
philosophy and the ancient languages. The Remarks on the
Academic, while dissenting from the conclusions of its opponent,
agrees with it as to the condition of learning at Cambridge.
Edward Gibbon's impeachment of the Oxford system is well
known; he was at Magdalen college (when not elsewhere on
'schemes') for fourteen months, in 1752-3, entering from West-
minster before he completed his fifteenth year. But his remarks
are obviously too prejudiced to be accepted as a plain story of
events which happened many years before he wrote his Memoirs;
Oxford's chief offence was that it was clerical and tory. Still, the
charge of idleness which he brings against fellows of colleges had
been made as early as 1715 by dean Prideaux, and, in the interval,
the circumstances of clerical life at Oxford had not improved.