SECONDARY EDUCATION. (Hansard, 19 July 1898)

§ *LORD NORTON

I have to put the question of which I have given notice to the noble Duke the Lord President of the Council, whether he is prepared now to state to your Lordships the intentions of the Government on the subject of secondary education. I put this question to the noble Duke in the month of March last, and the noble Duke replied that after Easter he would be ready to make a statement to your Lordships on the subject. The noble Duke went one step further in order to indicate the nature of the proposals he intended to make on the part of the Government, and that, I thought, seemed to give your Lordships great satisfaction. He mentioned that it was no intention whatever of the Government to undertake to establish a system of secondary education, but that their idea was to organise that which already exists upon the subject throughout the country. I was told by the noble Duke that I seemed to expect rather too rigid a line between primary and secondary education. I feel that if I at all expressed that opinion I was quite wrong, and that the two are parts of the course of education. But that there is an essential 255 distinction. Primary education involves the commencement of secondary instruction, and secondary instruction must keep up primary instruction, or it is valueless in itself. The two are, however, distinct in idea and distinct also in the treatment they must receive in any national system. The idea of education in elementary schools is the training of the faculties, intelligence, and discipline. The idea of secondary instruction as following primary is more in the nature of apprenticeship. The classes that are to be dealt with are the working classes, and their secondary education should be distinctly in the nature of an apprenticeship to a special business. That is the distinction in idea between the two. But our primary schools unfortunately have very much swerved from the province of elementary education, and have hastened prematurely into special subjects and sciences. They have shown a contempt for manual labour, though nine-tenths of the pupils who go into our rural elementary schools must go into manual labour, and it is a necessity in any country that that should be so. They also propose the same curriculum for all localities, urban and rural—a rigid, inflexible code. These are two of the evils in our primary system at the present moment, and yet people are perfectly ready to say that they are content, and that during the last 28 years, since 1870, national education has advanced enormously. It would be hardly possible, I think, for 12 millions a year to be spent in education without some advance in the instruction of the people who come within the reach of it. The only question is whether the system has not been one of extravagant waste and a hindrance of what might have been done much better. It has been argued in the Report which has lately come out from the "Acland" Commission that we may consider as a proof that the nation accepts the present system, that it is contentedly paying so much as 12 millions a year for it. Really they are paying a good deal more, because if you add what is paid by voluntary contributions and what is paid by the State for reformatories, industrial, and other schools, I should say it is nearer 20 than 10 millions. But is it a proof that the nation is contented with 256 the present state of national education by their paying 12 millions a year for it? I say the truth is that they are not so contented. There is a general complaint of apathy and of non-attendance. The parents say that they want their children to help them earn their livelihood, and the magistrates refrain from enforcing the law. Those complaints rather prove that there is a sort of sense of unfitness in the present system which justifies the apathy of the parents throughout the country, and the want of enforcement of the law by the magistrates. Yet the Government do not seem to recognise that there is a sense of unfitness in the system, but they propose that those children who will not attend elementary schools should be obliged to attend continuation schools. The sailor boy going to sea at an early period is to be caught by the nape of his neck and held over a book of trigonometry for a couple of years more before he goes to sea, and, if he does not attend, his parents are to be sent to prison. The attendance of the children at the school is also to be bribed, by gratuity and prizes—to relieve parents of the obligation to educate their children, and to undertake their education at the expense of the State. Not only that, but it is actually proposed that we should feed them also. I can hardly conceive anything more injurious to this country than a system to relieve from parental responsibility. The proposal which I hope the noble Duke has in his mind is, in the first place, to restrict primary education to its own office—to the general training of the faculties, and the elementary instruction of the children of the working classes. The smaller number who may go on to higher instruction will be the subjects of the secondary education, for which we hope the noble Duke has got a plan prepared in his mind; as in other countries, the children should not be admitted to this secondary education without a certificate of completion of their primary instruction. Secondary should follow primary instruction. The poorer children of the working classes who would be fitted for secondary education should be enabled to take it by means of free scholarships provided by the State; but the greater part would be the children of well-to-do parents. I know of great municipal institutions for secondary and technical 257 instruction which are freely attended, not by the artisan classes, but by the sons of rich manufacturers. There is no reason whatever why we should relieve those parents of the burden of their children's education; on the contrary, it would be most mischievous to do so, and most senseless and useless. We want to know now whether what the noble Duke told us in March last is still the intention of the Government, not to undertake a system of Government education, but to organise existing institutions, and that his plan will be not to accept the secondary education as undertaken in a most confused and desultory manner by various bodies, both public and private, but to bring them to something like a complete organisation, but in no case an education undertaken by and at the expense, as well as control, of the Government, and that he will adopt the requirements of secondary education to the special and varied interests of the localities. He will concentrate a central, and give discretion to the local authorities. That, I hope, will be the nature of the Measure which the noble Duke proposes. One word more. What I think has led the country to premature snatches at science in elementary schools has been the cry of foreign competition. It is rather curious that this bugbear about foreign competition is just as much started in other countries. The French are equally afraid of the superiority of England. At this very moment there is a small book written by a Frenchman, which is all the rage in Paris, proving the extraordinary superiority of the English, system. The competition of England is just as much a bugbear there as the competition of France is a bugbear here, and I have no doubt that in both cases, the people have equally been led astray as to the nature of the education which they think they require. I can hardly conceive English enterprise having a worse foster parent than the State as it is on the Continent. The idea that French State education is to raise from the gutter to the university. That seems to be the growing idea in the minds of many doctrinaires here, and that body which has the title of the Headmasters' Association has just issued a grand report in favour of it in this country. I have the most perfect confidence in the good sense and the states- 258 manship of the noble Duke, and I now beg to ask him whether he can inform your Lordships a little more in detail than he did in last March as to what the intentions of the Government are.