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THE re-animating and, it
might almost be said, recreative Renaissance at the end of the fifteenth and
beginning of the sixteenth century, preceded and
intermingled with the Reformation, necessarily
stimulating it, but sometimes trying to limit and
divert it. Many of the scholars and apostles of the
Renaissance, like Erasmus, the chief of them all,
while mercilessly exposing and bitterly satirising
the scandalous corruptions into which the Western
Church had fallen, wished to preserve its wonderful
organisations, thoroughly purified, and with a
General Council instead of the Pope, in supreme
command. This was an alterative, although it
turned out to be a thoroughly impracticable
ideal. The art of printing, which unfettered and gave
wings to the vast stores of classical and Christian
lore formerly imprisoned in manuscripts which were
only accessible to the few, was the chief agency in
producing the Renaissance movement in its diversified
forms and manifestations. It was a contributive
coincident that simultaneously the Vatican should
have sunk to its lowest point of degradation; and something, too, was due to
the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, and the flight of learned
Greeks carrying precious manuscripts with them to
Western countries. The Renaissance took a strong
and early hold on England. Caxton's early press
set an example to the reformers which they soon
learned to imitate. Henry VIII. was born and
trained under the influence of the Renaissance.
Cardinal Wolsey, using the funds of dissolved small
and scandalous monastic institutions, founded and
endowed Christ Church College, Oxford, with several
professorships, and gave his native town of Ipswich
a college which, unfortunately, had but a short
existence. Dean Colet spent his fortune in founding
and endowing St Paul's School, London. He was
the friend of Erasmus, and quite as an advanced
reformer as that learned Dutchman. A vigorous
and popular preacher, Dean Colet attacked the
Church and monastic vices of his age, and spoke
with a good man's scorn of the celibacy of the
clergy, which was so badly abused by many of those
who took the vow. It was, perhaps, fortunate for
himself that he died in peaceful retirement before
Bluff Hal quarrelled with the Pope, but one cannot
help believing that had he lived to have had a hand
in educational affairs after the separation from Rome,
the schooling of the English people would have
profited thereby, as his views in regard to teaching
was of a piece with his views in regard to preaching,
that it should reach down to the masses.
Zeal for extending the light
of the new learning was not confined to the leaders of the religious
Reformation movement, which had to pass to severance through many wars and
troubles. Sir Thomas More a son of the Renaissance who adhered to and died for the Roman Catholic Church
was a keen student of classical lore, and had
generous, even Utopian, views of his own upon the
spread of education and a reconstruction of society
on something like more scientific principles than
feudalism. Colet's example in founding and endowing grammar schools was followed largely by Edward VI., Queen Elizabeth,
private individuals, and trade guilds. Nor was it lost sight of in after
times. Oxford and Cambridge were splendidly equipped for keeping the lamps
of the higher learning brightly burning, and for advances in science and
arts. Several of the grammar schools did the work of
complete colleges, and the hurnblest of them were local centres of light and
leading. The Reformation and the discovery of America, superadded to the art
of printing, which gave wings to ancient lore, woke the nations out of long
uneasy slumbers to a life of extraordinary intellectual activity, daring
speculation, and romantic adventure. Out of that came
the magnificent crop of the Elizabethan literature.
But while the children of the landed gentry and of
professional classes, and rich citizens were enjoying
what was, for the age, high educational privileges,
and breathing the intoxicating air of almost a new
life, the masses of the people were left without much
schooling, except what came to them from Church
and ruling classes, or what they acquired by
experience as sailors, soldiers, and apprentices to
artizans and traders. In the century of unsettle-
merit and resettlement, England had great scholars
and great authors, and the multitudes followed
their leaders and under them performed glorious
achievements. But while England had many Colets
and Cranmers, many thinkers, many poets, one
Shakespeare, and able statesmen and sea-kings in
abundance, it missed having a John Knox with fiery
eloquence and a brain to conceive and a backing
strong enough to give effect to a system of parochial
schools by which the whole people would be brought
into an all sweeping educational net. True it is
that aspirants from the lowest social grades were
not excluded from English grammar schools and
universities. On the contrary, fair provision was
made for their entrance and maintenance; but with-
out a national system of elementary education, the
masses could not be much raised by the few from
among them who shot out of their birth-spheres by
means of superior knowledge and ability.
So much from the passing of
the Reform Bill
downwards had been said and written about the
deficiency of popular education in England that I
was quite surprised and delighted to find so little
evidence of it in the Bradford district. Very few
of the native people were incapable of reading the
Bible, the Prayer Book, hymn book, and news-
papers. Absolute inability was only to be found among
in -comers from the country and from Ireland, and in
the second generation of them also it was surely
disappearing. With little book knowledge, the old
women of the native working classes were, as wives,
housekeepers, and mothers, a credit to their sex and
a blessing to their country; and among them were
many who were as full of individual character and
proverbial philosophy, garnished with sharp personal
observation, as Mrs Poyser herself. It is only just
to the Congregationalists to state that all along they
had striven, by means of private and boarding
schools, to give their children a fair amount of
education. As a body they were a select and
prosperous host of middle-class people. The
Wesleyan revival and the counter evangelical
revival in the Church of England produced
along with the religious an educational
awakening among the masses. But the transition
period of the industrial revolution caused a serious
backset until the Factory Acts rescued the children
from being wholly made mill slaves, bereft of
schooling instruction and healthy open-air exercise.
Before legislation checked it, rather serious damage,
physical, moral, and mental, was done to the child
slaves of the mill; but home life kept that damage
from spreading as widely as would otherwise have
been the case, and has been the case in other
countries, where family and religious influences have
not been equally strong.
Elementary education made a
great advance in
England between 1835 and 1860. The Church of
England tried to establish a national school, not only
in every parish, but in every part of a town, or
district of a country parish, in which there were
children to be gathered together for weekly
instruction. The Wesleyans showed similar zeal
and enterprise in building many schools. Roman
Catholics, and smaller Christian and non-Christian
sects, followed suit. State aid, encouragement, and
grant payments, according to results of examination
by official inspectors, gave increased momentum to a
movement which had the whole-hearted sanction of
public opinion. On every hand sprung up mechanics'
institutes, which turned smiling faces to science and
politics, and shrugging shoulders to the religious
teaching in the denominational schools, which in
England were by this time doing the work that had
long been done in Scotland by parish schools and
side schools. The Secularists had a hall in Brad-
ford, in which Bradlaugh and Holyoake expounded
their views, while Huxley and other scientific
agnostics gathered large audiences in St George's
Hall to listen to their lectures. There also, blind
Mr Fawcett vigorously endeavoured to elevate
political economy, impressed with the seal of the
then, in towns, all popular Manchester School, to
the rank of an exact science.
Between the numerous
State-aided and State-inspected denominational schools and many private and
boarding schools, which were doing excellent work in an unobtrusive way, and
old grammar schools which needed to be reformed so as to better adapt them
as connecting links with colleges and universities, Bradford and its
district were well furnished with educational machinery before the first
English Elementary School Bill was passed. The Minister of Education who
sponsored that Bill was one of the Bradford members of Parliament, Mr
William Edward Forster, as honest, patriotic, and fair- minded a man as ever
stood in shoe leather. He was a broad churchman himself, and the pupil and
son-in-law of Dr Arnold, of Rugby, but was by lineage connected with Quaker
families of high standing and historical renown. He entered enthusiastically
into the Volunteer movement, and took a deep and enlightened interest in
foreign and colonial affairs. Fate, in the shape of Mr Gladstone, played him
a cruel trick on the defeat of the Beaconsfield Government, by making him Chief Secretary for Ireland,
where, although the kindest of men by nature and
training, he got the nickname of" Buckshot Forster."
On the education question Mr Forster was
an optimist, who thought that the Board School
system to be established by his Bill would only add
3d in the pound, or at the utmost 6d, to the rates.
He proclaimed with conviction that the new system
would not supersede or despitefully ill-use, but
merely fill up the gaps left by the State-aided and
State-inspected schools already in existence, on
which the people of different religious persuasions
the Church of England leading had spent vast
sums of their money. It was confessed on all hands
that better general organisation was desirable; that
in many places there were sad gaps waiting to be
filled up, and that compulsory attendance of children
in school should, up to a reasonable limit, be en-
forced. Mr Forster had great admiration for the
Scotch parish school system, which, without much
intermediate help from higher-grade schools, enabled
clever and studious lads from the country districts
and the villages, as well as the farm-houses and
mansions, to get to the universities, and afterwards
to distinguish themselves in all callings and professions. I had some correspondence with him before
he introduced the Scotch Bill, which was to be the
companion and complement of the English one, from
which I gathered that he was anxious to preserve as
far as possible the features and qualities of the
Scotch schools, which had succeeded so long and so
successfully in continuously eliminating an aristocracy, not of wealth, but of merit, out of the whole
Scotch people.
As three-fourths of the
Scotch people were
Presbyterians who all professed adherence to the
Westminster Confession of Faith as their subordinate
standard; as the Free Church schools were to be
willingly handed over to the new School Boards;
and as "use and wont" was to be conceded, it was
much easier to deal in bulk with the Scotch than it
was with the English education problem. Mr
Forster had in his large-minded way of measuring
others by his own reasonableness, overlooked the
sleepless hostility of the Liberation Society to the
Church of England, and the dead certainty that it
would use for its disestablishment levers every fulcrum that malevolent and skilled observation, or
even imagination, could find or read into the
Elementary Education Act. On the 25th clause of
the Act an agitation was at once raised, which made
a good deal of noise, but received less support than
its promoters had expected. It was in that agitation
that, along with Dr Dale, Dr George Dawson, and
others, Mr Joseph Chamberlain made his first
appearance in public life. Birmingham agitators
were so far advanced towards Unitarianism and
Agnosticism that the Nonconformists who still clung
to old Puritan doctrines, were unwilling to accept
them as leaders. But all Nonconformists that
marched under the Liberation Society banner voted
for members holding disestablishment views at the
first election of School Boards, and wherever the
men they returned found themselves in a majority
balm in Gilead was found for their party ; and gall
and wormwood for the Church of England and the
schools on which its public had spent their millions
of money. When he spoke of a 3d to a 6d rate, in
the vast majority of cases Mr Forster optimistically
assumed that the School Boards would only put up
their schools where there were glaring gaps of
educational machinery. Wherever they had the
power, the Liberation Society men, disregarding the
pockets of the ratepayers, ran up palatial school
buildings in open opposition to the national and
other denominational schools which had to be
content with humbler buildings, and in these had
done educational services of the highest importance
to the children of the masses, and poorer middle
classes. The Congregationalists, who looked well to
the education of their own children, generation after
generation, had, in proportion to their wealth and
numbers, done least of all for the education of the
masses until they got their hands, by control of
School Boards, into the pockets of the ratepayers.
As soon as they got their opportunity, they found
deficiencies everywhere, and plausible arguments for
tacking profligate expenditure on equipment and
costly fads arid fancies to the reading, writing, and
arithmetic limits of elementary education. |
