No More Learning

Mathematics,
physics and astronomy made notable advances, the foundations of
modern chemistry were laid, the idea of biological evolution was
being carefully studied a century before the appearance of Darwin's
Origin of Species (1859); the speculations of the early French
economists were focused in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
(1776). But the most striking results of scientific research and
experiment were to be found in the applied sciences and in
mechanical inventions. From the later years of George II onwards,
there was an extraordinary growth in the number of labour-saving
machines, more especially of those employed in the cotton and
woollen industries, inventions which multiplied almost incalcul-
ably the resources of the manufacturing districts of the north and
middle of England. On the heels of these inventions came the
work of great engineers, Watt, Boulton, Rennie, Stephenson. The
enormous economy of labour, the much greater mechanical pre-
cision of the output and the increased facility of transport, all com-
bined to bring about an industrial expansion, which, assisted by the
commercial, activity of the earlier part of the century, was deep
enough and broad enough to merit the name 'revolution. Amidst
such circumstances, it was inevitable that the critics of contem-
porary education should condemn its almost absolute disregard of
useful knowledge and of modern studies.
A new people and a new order of civilised society appeared.
Population increased, great urban communities arose in the mid-
lands and in northern England, there was a general movement
away from the rural districts; a hitherto unwonted aggregation
of capital altered the scale of industrial operations. While wealth
increased, so, also, did poverty; it would be difficult to parallel
in the previous history of England the wretched state of the


## p. 382 (#412) ############################################

382
Education
[CH.
labouring poor during the last years of the eighteenth and the
first decades of the nineteenth century. The educational provision
for the mass of English children in charity, parish and Sunday
schools was very insufficient, and commonly unsuitable in character.
The desperate plight of parents and the unsparing employment
of children in mills and factories would, in many cases, have
made the offer of a complete provision little more than a mockery.
Yet, these very conditions of ignorance and of moral degradation
stirred the hearts of reformers to attempt their alleviation by
means of schools. The evils and their remedy are both described
by Wordsworth in the last two books of The Excursion (1795–
1814).
The activity directed to educational affairs, which has been
a prominent feature of English life during recent years, dates
from the time of the French revolution; but, at the moment of
that outbreak, France and Germany could look back upon a
whole generation engaged in revolutionising national education.
By the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rousseau had
protested against the prevailing rationalism, and, in the following
year, he produced Émile, a book whose destructive and constructive
proposals combined to make it the most considerable work of the
eighteenth century dealing with its subject. La Chalotais and
Basedow had enunciated the administrative principles of the lay
school and undenominational religious teaching, while the attacks
upon the Society of Jesus and its eventual suppression by papal
bull in 1773 had suspended the labours of the greatest educational
corporation of the time, and had inflicted a fatal blow upon the
type of instruction which, for some two and a half centuries, had
been general throughout Europe. Prussia, under the guidance
of K. A. von Zedlitz, Frederick the great's minister of education,
had initiated reforms, which made her, in this respect, the model
for the German people. So early as 1763, Frederick had decreed
compulsory instruction and the provision of primary schools ;
ten years later, F. E. von Rochow had shown how rural schools
of that order could be usefully conducted. In 1781, the modern
German classical school, pursuing a course of study not confined
to Latin and Greek, came into being with the curriculum which
Gedike introduced in Berlin. Within the same decade, Prussian
schools other than primary passed from ecclesiastical control to
that of a specially constituted board of education, and, by the
institution (1789) of the leaving examination,' the first advance
was made in the evolution of the modern German university.
a


## p. 383 (#413) ############################################

XIV]
The Universities
383
Austria and other regions of catholic Germany had entered upon
a path of reform with purposes similar to those of Prussia; but
these steps were rapidly retraced during the reaction which
followed the events of 1789 in France. Outside Germany, but
amidst a German-speaking population, Pestalozzi had completed
the inconclusive experiment in rural education which he had
been conducting upon his farm, Neuhof (1774–80).
The philosophy, psychology and, in a less degree, the educa-
tional doctrines which Europe had learned from John Locke lay
behind the greater part of this strenuous activity; yet the external
history of English education during the period 1760—90 exhibits
a complete contrast with that of her continental neighbours.
Oxford, Cambridge and the public schools, as a whole, were
educating a smaller number of men and boys than had resorted
to them in the days of Anne. At Oxford, in the first quarter
of the eighteenth century, the number of boys admitted often
exceeded 300; it never reached that number between 1726 and
1810, while it often fell below 200 in the mid-century? A similar
decline occurred at Cambridge, and at both universities there
was a fall in the number of those who graduated, which is not
fully accounted for by the diminished tale of freshmen.
An agitation for the relaxation of all formal professions of
religious belief had been carried on since the middle of the
century by a numerically small but active group of clergymen.
At the universities, the movement led to repeated attempts
between 1771 and 1787 to free bachelors of arts from subscrip-
tion to the Thirty-Nine Articles or from a statement of adherence
to the church of England. These attempts failed, and, as a
consequence, Oxford and Cambridge degrees remained closed to
the conscientious dissenter, whose membership of a college could
only be maintained, if at all, by subterfuge.
The statutory exercises for degrees represented a system of
education which had long been obsolete, and the toleration of
a merely formal compliance with the requirements had reduced
the exercises to farce? The proportion of fellow-commoners and
gentlemen-commoners amongst the undergraduates was large; and,
as a class, these young men of birth and wealth furnished an
element of idleness and dissipation which only intensified evils
i Brodrick, G. C. , Memorials of Merton College.
? These are described, with some natural exaggeration of phrase, in a locus classicus
of Knox, Vicesimus, Essays, Moral and Literary (1782), vol. I, pp. 331 ff. , 'On some
parts of the discipline in our English universities. '


## p. 384 (#414) ############################################

384
Education
[CH.
already too common in both universities. Vicesimus Knox, who
was at Oxford from 1771 to 1778, and fellow of St John's college
from 1775, asserted, in his Liberal Education (1781), that to send
a son to either university without the safeguard of a private tutor
would probably 'make shipwreck of his learning, his morals, his
health and his fortune. ' Yet boys of fifteen often became under-
graduates. Many of the professors never lectured, and some did not
make up for the omission by advancing knowledge in other ways.
Those of them who did offer this compensation might fairly urge
that the business of instructing the majority of those in statu pupil-
lari was efficiently performed by the college tutors. The others
were not likely to feel abashed in a predominantly clerical society
where the pluralist and the absentee holder of a benefice were
familiar figures. But the neglect of teaching by those whom the
university had especially appointed for that purpose was the con-
sequence of a process—the supersession of the university by its
colleges—which had been going on for two centuries. Concurrently,
Oxford and Cambridge, for the greater number of their residents,
were becoming places of education rather than seats of learning.
The change is reflected in A Letter to Lord North, which Knox
addressed to the Oxford chancellor in 1789. This pamphlet
suggested the intervention of parliament, and advocated a stricter
discipline, a diminution of personal expenses, the strengthening of
the collegiate system, an increase in the number of college tutors,
the cost to be met by doubling tuition fees and abolishing 'use-
less' professors, with confiscation of their endowments. College
tutors were to exercise a parental control over their pupils, and
professors not of the 'useless' order were to lecture thrice weekly
in every term, or resign. Long after this letter was written,
Cambridge undergraduates who broke rules were subject to the
schoolboy punishment of ‘learning lines' by heart.
But, even in this period of stagnation, reformers and some
reforms were not wanting within the universities themselves. At
Cambridge, the written examinations held in the Senate house
reduced the ancient exercises in the schools to mere forms of no
intrinsic importance; although the latter survived till 1839, the
Senate house examination from 1780 onwards set the standard
and determined the direction of academic study. At this time,
there was but one tripos, the examination including natural
religion, moral philosophy and ‘Locke' as well as mathematics,
the last being the dominant and characteristic part of the test;
some contemporary critics believed that the effect of the tripos
6


## p. 385 (#415) ############################################

XIV]
Nonconformist Academies
385
upon schools was to depreciate classical, in favour of mathematical
learning? Between 1773 and 1776, John Jebb, of Peterhouse,
made several unsuccessful attempts to bring about an annual
examination by the university of all its undergraduates; his
persistent agitation is evidence of impatience with the obsolete
forms which hindered progress in both universities. Knox, when
proposing a similar scheme to lord North, made the proviso that
examinations should be conducted with such delicacy as not to
hurt the feelings of the diffident and modest. ' Oxford's agitation
for the reconstitution of the exercises for a degree was closed in
1800 by the passing of the Public Examination statute.
During the third quarter of the century, prizes for Latin essays
and for Greek and Latin odes and epigrams were founded, an
evidence of decline in literary arts which had long been practised in
both universities. But a quite different purpose led to the founda-
tion at Cambridge of the Townshend's prize for an English essay on
an economic question (1755—6), the crown endowment of the chair
of chemistry (1766), the Jacksonian professorship of natural and
experimental philosophy' (1783) and the chair of the laws of
England (1788). At Oxford, the Radcliffe observatory dates from
1777 and the Rawlinson professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1795.
It is significant of the time that the Cambridge professor of
chemistry (Farish) treated his subject in its application ‘to the
arts and manufactures of Britain,' 'a new and useful field of
instruction’; his prospectus of lectures for 1793 is a miscel-
laneous programme of applied science in general. Unofficial
teachers then resident in Cambridge offered opportunity for the
study of modern languages. William Gooch, second wrangler in
1791, who sailed in that year for the Pacific on a boundaries'
commission, proposed to take with him not only mathematical
books, but also works in Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish;
he learned the last from Isola, Gray's tutor in Italian.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, nonconformist
academies? decreased in number, and the attempt to make them
places of general education, released from particular denomi-
national or professional ties, did not succeed. Some of their
teachers were men of distinguished attainments, of whom Joseph
Priestley, in early life a tutor in the Warrington academy, was the
greatest and most versatile. Their readiness to experiment with
1 Ingram, R. A. , The necessity of introducing divinity,' etc. (1792); Remarks upon
the enormous expense, etc. (1783).
* See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 392–5, and vol. x, pp. 381—3.
E. L. XIV. CH. XIV.
25


## p. 386 (#416) ############################################

386
[CH.
Education
new courses of study was even more pronounced than it had been
a century earlier. But, at a time when, in spite of ancient prestige
and material advantages, the universities failed to inspire public
confidence, the new institutions suffered from disabilities of their
own. Their teachers were too few to treat efficiently the wide
range of studies attempted, and students were seldom able enough
to digest an encyclopaedic curriculum. In consequence, there was
ą toleration of the superficial which may have contributed to
prevent the academies from becoming instruments of university re-
form; and their acceptance of the position of theological seminaries
for the training of ministers, a position which they had always
partially occupied, removed them finally from the main current
of national education. Nevertheless, they had done good service
in the cause of history, literature and modern studies, particularly
in respect of science and those forms of knowledge which are
immediately applicable to the affairs of daily life? . Thomas Barnes,
afterwards principal of the Manchester academy, with the support
of the newly established Literary and Philosophical society of that
town founded (1783) a college of Arts and Science, which anticipated,
in a humble way, the scientific and technical work of modern
universities and university colleges?
At the public schools, the studies and the method of education
remained in substance the same as they were in the earlier period
described in a former volume. The interesting point in their
history is the prominent social place now assumed for the first
time by Harrow, under a succession (1760—1805) of former Eton
masters, Sumner, Heath and Drury, and by Rugby under another
Etonian, Thomas James (1778–94). The number of boys in
residence Auctuated considerably during the second half of the
eighteenth century, and in some schools that number, at the
close of the century, was very much less than it had been at the
beginning. Westminster, Winchester and, in particular, Shrews-
bury, are cases in point. Cowper's incomplete and prejudiced
picture of the public school, which he drew in Tirocinium, was
less true in the year 1785, when the poem appeared, than in his
own school-days (1741–9); but the character of turbulence
ascribed by the poet to public school education was well deserved
at both the later and the earlier period. The stock question
addressed by George III to Etonians whom he chanced to meet-
f
1 See Priestley's Miscellaneous Observations (1778).
: Thompson, J. , The Owens College (1886), introductory chapter.
3 See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 408 ff.
9


## p. 387 (#417) ############################################

XIV]
Girls' Education
387
‘Have you had any rebellions lately, eh? eh ? '-might have been
put quite as aptly to any public school boy of the time. From
1770, when the Riot act was read to the Wykebamists, down to
1832, when Keate suppressed his last rebellion at Eton, there was
a constant recurrence of these outbreaks ; insubordination was
met by arbitrary measures that seem to show an ignorance or
wilful disregard of boy-nature, which in itself gives a partial
explanation of the boys' unruliness. But, rough as public school
life confessedly then was, it was not wanting in gentler elements.
At Eton, a small editorial committee, of which John Hookham
Frere was a member, produced, in 1786, The Microcosm, modelled
on the periodical essays and miscellanies in which the time was
prolific. The rival school, Westminster, had its Trifler in 1788,
to which Robert Southey, then in the school, made a rejected
contribution; his management of his own magazine, The Flagel-
lant, led to his expulsion. Like most of their kind, of which they
were the first, these school miscellanies were ephemeral.
Of the education of girls above the purely elementary stage,
it is unnecessary to add to the account already given of its
condition during the first half of the century! , except, perhaps,
to say that its imperfections had become more obvious to con-
temporary critics, and that some steps had been taken to amend
them, as Sir Anthony Absolute and Mrs Malaprop indirectly testify.
• We have young ladies. . .
. . . boarded and educated, says Miss Alscrip (in
Burgoyne's The Heiress, 1786), 'upon blue boards in gold letters in every
village, with a strolling player for dancing master, and a deserter from
Dunkirk to teach the French grammar. '
The mother-tongue and drawing were regarded as studies especially
appropriate to girls, and by the end of the century botany had
been placed in the same category. The opinion was fairly general
that girls and young women of all but the highest social standing,
or great wealth, ought to receive instruction of a distinctly ‘useful'
domestic kind, with small regard to its formative value; the others
were to acquire 'accomplishments' for the purpose of ornament
and to occupy time which would otherwise certainly be spent
in mischief. This ideal of the socially distinguished had great
attraction for those who lacked both time and means to realise
it in any appreciable degree, and the consequence was that,
throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the pursuit
· See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 401–4.
: Adam Smith unreservedly praises the current manner of educating girls on this
very ground.
25-2


## p. 388 (#418) ############################################

388
[ch.
Education
6
of 'accomplishments,' as such, reacted injuriously upon the in-
struction of girls and women generally. A work on education
long very popular in France and England, Adèle et Théodore
(1782), by Madame de Genlis, bluntly asserted that women 'are
born to a life both monotonous and dependent. . . . In their case,
genius is a useless and dangerous endowment, which takes them
out of their natural state. ' So long as this judgment reflected
public opinion, a superficial education for girls was more than
tolerated. Only a revolutionary like Mary Wollstonecraft could
plead that sex alone should not determine the course of study,
and that schoolboys and schoolgirls should be educated together.
The aims and methods of schools of good, but not of the first,
standing, may be inferred from Knox's Liberal Education. The
author, who was master of Tunbridge school from 1778 to 1812,
and a very popular writer for some forty years, was always &
staunch upholder of 'the established manner' in education. The
basis of all sound instruction was to be found in Latin and Greek
alone; but, when the foundation had been laid, it was desirable
to include modern studies in the superstructure. The school was
primarily concerned with the grammar of the two languages and
the writing of verse and of prose in both ; the list of authors to
be read was but a short one. To these indispensable studies there
might be added, as opportunity offered, the elements of geography
and history, French, some mathematics and such accomplishments
as music, drawing and fencing. These last received only a tepid
encouragement from Knox, who was more warmly in favour of
dancing and 'the learning of the military exercise, which is now
very common. ' Boys were expected to read English and easy
Latin books in their leisure time; it was a general rule of
practice with Knox that as much self-initiated effort as possible
should be exacted from the pupil. He set his face against all
such debilitating aids as translations, 'keys,' 'introductions and
the like.
That the established curriculum was not universally satis-
factory is evident from the pains Knox took to show the
inadequacy of the instruction given in many private schools,
commonly termed 'academies,' which prepared boys for business'
and 'the office. ' Though these academies professed to teach many
things, of which Latin or, more frequently, French was one, Knox
asserted that their success was confined to reading, writing and
summing. Forty years later he repeated this opinion ; but the
public demand in the interval had brought about a great increase
6


## p. 389 (#419) ############################################

XIV] Elementary Education
389
in the number and efficiency of schools of this kind, the monopoly
of the grammar school and the severely classical course being
seriously impaired in consequence.
Carlisle (Endowed Grammar Schools, 1818) records the
foundation of twenty-eight schools between 1700 and 1798, of
which only six belong to the later half of the period ; at least
one-fourth of these twenty-eight schools, in spite of their name,
confined their instruction to English reading, writing and sum-
ming. In one or two cases, the endowment was expressly said to
be for the benefit of girls as well as boys. The charity schools,
which, at the beginning of the century, had promised to develop
into a widespread system of popular schools, ceased before the
accession of George III to increase in number, and those that
survived had outlived their usefulness. Sarah Trimmer (Reflections
upon . . . charity schools, 1792), a critic not entirely unfriendly,
describes them as teaching by rote religious formularies greatly
beyond the capacity of children, while many of the teachers were
incompetent to do better, and the whole plan of instruction was too
sedentary.
The primary purpose of the Sunday schools started in 1780
by Thomas Stock, a Gloucester clergyman, and Robert Raikes,
a newspaper proprietor of the same city, was the religious and
moral instruction of the poor; all these schools taught reading,
some taught writing also and a few added to these arts simple
arithmetic or 'accounts. During the early nineteenth century,
writers on public education invariably include Sunday schools
and their very numerous pupils as part of the national equipment
in education. These schools outdid the rapid success of the
charity schools ; so early as 1784, Wesley reported that he found
them springing up wherever he went. In the following year, their
organisation was assured by the creation of the Sunday Schools'
Union. The teachers were not all volunteers ; in some instances,
where there were eighteen children in a school, the teacher was
paid as many pence for his day's work, and a penny a day was
deducted, or added, for each pupil less, or more, than the normal
eighteen. This was done deliberately in order to induce teachers
'to be more careful about the attendance of the scholars'; it
was one of two, or three, devices employed in the early Sunday
schools which were adopted by the government in respect of
elementary day-schools at a later time.
For those who could pay a few pence weekly, there were,
by the close of the eighteenth century, an unknown number of


## p. 390 (#420) ############################################

390
Education
[CH.
privately conducted schools which taught reading, writing and
summing, either in the evening or day-time; and many men and
women followed the ancient practice of supplementing their
domestic employment by teaching children. Mrs Trimmer and
Joseph Lancaster (who began life as the master and proprietor
of a school for the poor) both drew unfavourable pictures of the
instruction given under these conditions ; but their statements
imply that the instruction itself was widely desired by the poor
themselves and accessible even in villages? . For the benefit of
an even humbler rank, 'schools of industry'gave instruction, for
the most part to girls, in spinning, knitting and plain needlework,
and to a smaller number of boys in weaving, gardening and
minor handicrafts ; in some cases, manual exercises were supple-
mented by the teaching of reading and writing. Mrs Trimmer
and Hannah More were conspicuous in organising and conducting
this voluntary extension of casual and strictly local efforts, some-
times supported from the parish rates, which, from the sixteenth
century onwards, had been made on behalf of pauper children
The inception of the 'school of industry' seems to have been
due to a most retiring, public-spirited woman, Mrs E. Denward,
of Hardres court, Canterbury, who, about the year 1786, induced
Mrs Trimmer to put the idea of such a school into practice.
In method and intention, these English schools may be compared
with the experiment in educating the very poor which Pestalozzi
began at Neuhof some twelve years earlier.
The disproportionate attention accorded to some features of
Chesterfield's Letters to his Sons has deprived their author of his
undoubted right to be ranked among the educational reformers
of his time. He illustrates very fully the aristocratic prejudice
against schools and universities in favour of the courtly training
given by private tutors and foreign academies. But, in this
respect, he is a survival from an earlier generation; boys of
Chesterfield's rank who were intended, like his son, to pursue
a public career swelled the revived prosperity of Eton and built
up the fortunes of Harrow, in the generation which immediately
followed. As an educator, Chesterfield is most emphatically a
humanist. The fundamental study recommended to his son is
that of his fellow-men, particularly as they exist in courts and
9
1 See, especially, Trimmer, S. , The Oeconomy of Charity (1801), pp. 182—3, Lancaster,
J. Improvements in Education (1803), pp. 1–21.
2 See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 405—6.
3 See, ante, vol. x, chap. II.


## p. 391 (#421) ############################################

xiv] Chesterfield's Letters
391
capital cities; protracted residence abroad, and the knowledge
of languages and literatures are merely auxiliary to this study,
or to rhetoric, the instrument by which men are to be persuaded
or cajoled. But the humanism of Chesterfield is chiefly concerned
with the humanity of his own day, with its purposes and insti-
tutions of all kinds. It is this which causes bim to anticipate
the changes which were completed in French and German
schools before the century ended. He craves 'a pretty large
circle of knowledge, which shall include not only Latin and
Greek, but, also, the spoken tongues and some of the classical
books of England, France, Italy and Germany, modern history
and geography, jurisprudence, with a knowledge of logic, mathe-
matics and experimental science. Much of this learning is to be
acquired through intercourse rather than through books; manners,
which are of the first importance, can only be learned in the
same school, with assistance from those exercises of the academy
which train the body to health and grace. Much of this ‘large
circle’ is avowedly superficial.
Chesterfield feels no scruple on
'
that account, if only his pupil can command the power of the
orator to influence men’. From the outset of the Letters, the
study of rhetoric is insisted upon; style is wellnigh everything,
matter is of less importance. The Letters to A. C. Stanhope
(which are more instructive and much more entertaining than
those to Stanhope's son, Chesterfield's successor in the title) drop
this insistence upon the cultivation of oratory; but the character
of the up-bringing there recommended is much the same as that
prescribed in the earlier series of letters.
Lord Kames's Loose Hints upon Education (1781) perfectly
justifies its title. Its main topic is the culture of the heart,' a
topic characteristic of its time, treated according to the system
of nature. ' But, in spite of the author's admiration of Émile,
this does not mean the system of Rousseau, for its corner-stone
is parental authority, and Rousseau's proposal to employ natural
consequences as a moral discipline is dismissed as smoke. '
The eighteenth century exhibits no more sincere exponents of
Locke's educational ideas than the Edgeworths of Edgeworths-
town, who, for three generations, laboured persistently to apply
1 Sheridan, Thos. , British Education (1756), p. xiii, refers to Chesterfield's un.
realised proposal, made while lord lieutenant of Ireland (1745—6) 'to the provost
and fellows of the university for the endowment of proper lectures and exercises in
the art of reading and speaking English. '


## p. 392 (#422) ############################################

392
Education
[ch.
those ideas to practice within the limits of a large family. The
literary monuments of their activity are the work of Richard
Lovell Edgeworth and his daughter, Marial; but the initial move-
ments were due to Richard's mother, Jane (Lovell).
She had read everything that had been written on the subject of education
and preferred with sound judgment the opinions of Locke; to these,
with modifications suggested by her own good sense, she steadily adhered?
Edgeworth's own education, obtained partly in Ireland, partly in
England, was very desultory; but its most effective elements owed
very much more to his temperament, genius and casual oppor-
tunities than to school or university. He married the first of his
four wives before he was one-and-twenty; his first child was born
two years after the publication (1762) of Rousseau's Émile.
Between the ages of three and eight, this son was brought up
on Rousseau's 'system,' with results which did not entirely satisfy
the father, whose subsequent experience taught him to recognise
the fundamental weaknesses of Rousseau as a guide to conduct
and learning. It was at this time that Edgeworth's college friend,
Thomas Day (in later years author of Sandford and Merton) was
superintending, at the age of twenty-one, the education of two
orphan girls with the purpose of marrying one of them, leaving
the result to decide which; he married neither. The express
function of domestic educator which Edgeworth assumed from
the beginning of his married life he continued so long as he lived ;
his last marriage was contracted at the age of fifty-four, and the
number of his children was eighteen. His daughter, Maria,
described him as a teacher at once patient, candid and stimulating,
with a sympathetic understanding of his children and skill in
adapting instruction to their individual needs : qualities hardly
to be expected from his keen, vivacious temperament. But his
interest in education was by no means confined to the family
circle. He read widely on the subject, and, in his later years,
paid special attention to the educational institutions of France;
at Paris, in 1803, he met 'a German, Pestalozzi . . . much celebrated
on the Continent, who ‘made anatomy a principal object in his
'
system of education'—one more illustration of Pestalozzi's diffi-
culty in making his ideas understood. Edgeworth proposed (1809)
a scheme of secondary'schools (the word is his) to be established
throughout the country under the management of a private
association; the proposal, no doubt, was suggested by a similar
but much more extensive plan for popular instruction described
See, ante, vol. xi, chap. XIII.
· Edgeworth, R. L. , Memoirs, p. 66.
6


## p. 393 (#423) ############################################

XIV]
The Edgeworths
393
in Joseph Lancaster's Improvements in Education (1803). One
of the latest measures of the Irish parliament before the Union
was a bill for the improvement of Irish education introduced by
Edgeworth, who became an active member of the royal com-
mission which subsequently enquired into the state of Irish
education (1806-12).
Edgeworth's second wife, Honora Sneyd (who was married in
1773 and died in 1780) would seem to have determined the main
lines upon which the Edgeworth theory of education was shaped.
She and her husband wrote for their children a small book,
Harry and Lucy (1778), which, undertaken as a supplement to
Mrs Barbauld's writings, itself became the originator of Sand-
ford and Merton", the work of their friend, Day, begun with
the intention of assisting their scheme of domestic instruction.
Honora Edgeworth 'was of opinion that the art of education
should be considered as an experimental science' and, to give effect
to that opinion, in 1776 began to keep a register of observations
concerning children, upon which her husband was still engaged
nearly twenty years after her death. That record guided Maria
Edgeworth in writing the collection of tales for children which
she called The Parent's Assistant (1796); it formed the basis of
fact beneath the theory applied in Practical Education (1798),
the joint work of herself and her father and the most considerable
book on its subject produced in England between John Locke and
Herbert Spencer.
Practical Education derives its essential principles from Locke
and from the experiential psychology expounded by Hartley and
Reid ; Rousseau's Émile is used with discrimination. It attaches
the highest importance to the training of character and to the
cultivation of the understanding; to effect the latter, the educator
must persistently suggest to the pupil motives for acquiring
knowledge. The leading theme is, of course, domestic education;
.
in relation to the education given at a public school (which is
regarded as almost exclusively a place of instruction in the two
classical languages) the indispensable business of the home is to
lay a firm foundation of habit and moral principles, without which
the subsequent schooling is in danger of proving mischievous.
True to its origin, the book makes utility the arbiter in the choice
of studies and strongly urges the claims of hand-work and of
1 See, ante, vol. XI, p. 382. The quasi-narrative form, by which Rousseau's Émile
(1762) tried to soften the asperities of educational theory, had many popular
imitators, French and English.


## p. 394 (#424) ############################################

394
[CH.
Education
positive knowledge, particularly that of natural phenomena, to
inclusion in the curriculum. The reiterated recommendation of
play and of spontaneous activity in general as agents of instruction
is an anticipation of Froebel, without a trace of the German's
mysticism. Edgeworth's own tastes and inventive skill were
naturally imitated by some of his children, and his sympathetic
knowledge of the experimental science taught by Franklin and
Priestley inevitably brought similar studies into the domestic
school-room. Notwithstanding these marks of the innovator,
Edgeworth is no revolutionary in reference to the long-established
rhetorical instruction of the schools. He regards as very neces-
sary the writing and, above all, the public speaking of good
English, the practice of which he would make habitual from child-
hood. In Professional Education (1809), he lays it down that
the making of verses is waste of time and the writing of Latin
prose is not necessary for any but the professed Latinist; yet,
he considers 'a knowledge and a taste for classical literature'
'indispensably necessary to every Briton who aspires to distinction
in public life, for in this country a statesman must be an orator. '
As evidence of the care bestowed by Edgeworth on teaching
the rudiments of English to children, it may be noted that he
devised (and published in A Rational Primer) a set of diacritical
marks which virtually make our alphabet phonetic; his ideas
concerning the teaching of grammar, vernacular or foreign, and
his sense of the importance of modern languages bring him abreast
of the best modern practice. Yet, he and his daughter shared a
common prejudice of their time against fairy-tales for children.
Maria's stories in The Parent's Assistant were written as sub-
stitutes for those classics of the nursery, which father and daughter
thought are not now much read'-a dismal judgment which was
confirmed by Wordsworth in The Prelude-
Professional Education is the work of Edgeworth alone. Its
title notwithstanding, it has very little to say respecting purely
technical instruction, whether clerical, military, medical or legal.
The main theme is the nature of the general, preparatory instruc-
tion which a boy should receive with a view to his life's work:
a purpose which, in the author's opinion, universities and public
schools ignored. The plan of the book appropriately includes a
consideration of the education proper to the professions of country
gentleman, statesman, prince. If the book were written today, its
title would probably be 'Vocational Education. ' Sydney Smith
1 See, ante, vol. XI, chap. xvi.
6


## p. 395 (#425) ############################################

XIV]
Wordsworth
395
made it the occasion of an Edinburgh review (1809), in which
he condemned the excessive amount of time devoted in English
education to Latin and Greek and more particularly to Latin
verse-making, with a consequent impoverishment of knowledge
amongst Englishmen in general.
Edgeworth represents the best of the many system-makers
who tried to give effect to the principles of Émile. Wordsworth,
although as ready as Rousseau to rely upon liberty and childish
instinct as guideposts for the educator, poured scorn upon
system-mongers and their product, the model child,' a prodigy of
useful information, precocious criticism and self-conceit. The
Prelude relates the course of the poet's own upbringing at school
(1778—86) and at Cambridge (1787—91), and parenthetically shows
how he himself would educate 'according to Nature'; but he is,
perhaps, too prone to see the general in the particular, and, conse-
quently, to overlook the powers and the needs of commonplace
boys and men. A different note is struck in The Excursion
(1814), the eighth and ninth books of which expose the essential
evils of the industrial revolution, and express the poet's confident
belief that a national scheme of education following the pro-
posals of Andrew Bell could yet overcome them. Thirty years
later, he recorded his sorrow that no such plan had been put
into operation.
Maria Edgeworth's earliest book, Letters for Literary Ladies
(1795), presents the then customary arguments on female disability
as conceived by the complacent male, who is allowed, on the whole,
to get the better of the dispute; incidental reference is made to
the increasing attention then being paid to the education of girls.
The modern touch is not wanting; a good cook, we are told, is
only an empirical chemist.
A quite unmerited neglect has fallen upon the educational
writings of the Edgeworths, who taught principles which have
since been accepted as revelations, when presented by a German
or an Italian author. This is the more to be regretted, since these
two Irish writers were capable of wisdom so unusual as the
following:
In education, we must, however, consider the actual state of manners in
that world in which our pupils are to live, as well as our wishes or our hopes
of its gradual improvement.
Joseph Priestley's Miscellaneous Observations relating to
Education (1778) contains an anticipation of the first chapter
of Herbert Spencer's Education so close in thought and phrase


## p. 396 (#426) ############################################

396
Education
[ch.
as to suggest Spencer's familiarity with the book. The theme
is education as preparatory to 'subsistence, and the study of
natural science is the means proposed. Priestley urges a claim
for a type of instruction suitable to those whose destination is
neither the university nor the counting-house. Like many of his
contemporaries, he believed that, if the customary curriculum was
to escape general repudiation, useful knowledge must be included
in it; but he was even more anxious to base a liberal education
upon a course of modern studies.
No subject had greater interest for the reformers than the
mother-tongue, whose educational value had been persistently
asserted in England for more than a century past. 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.