The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

foundation incomes, of an extensive and well-organized system of Charity-Schools (p. 449). The “Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge” dates from the year 1699, and the “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts” from 1701. The first worked at home, and the second in the overseas colonies. [5] Both did much to provide schools for poor boys and girls, furnishing them with clothing and instruction (R.

292), and training them in reading, writing, spelling, counting, cleanliness, proper behavior, sewing and knitting (girls), and in “the Rules and Principles of the Christian Religion as professed and taught in the Church of England” (R. 238 b). The Charity-School idea was in a sense an application of the joint-stock-company principle to the organization and maintenance of an extensive system of schools for the education of the children of the poor, the stock being subscribed for by humanitarian-minded people. The upper classes had for long been well provided, through tutors in the home and grammar schools and colleges, with those means for education which have for centuries produced an able succession of gentlemen, statesmen, governors, and scholars for England, and many of the commercial middle-class had, by the eighteenth century, become able to purchase similar advantages for their sons. These now united to provide, as part of a great organized charity and under carefully selected teachers (R. 238 a), for the more promising children of their poorer neighbors, the elements of that education which they themselves had enjoyed.

 

The movement spread rapidly over England (p. 451), and soon developed into a great national effort to raise the level of intelligence of the masses of the English people. Thousands of persons gave their services as directors, organizers, and teachers. Traveling superintendents were employed. A rudimentary form of teacher-training was begun. The preaching of a Charity Sermon each year [6] with a special collection, became a general English practice.

 

THE VOLUNTARY SYSTEM. The rise of the Methodist movement, [7] after 1730

(p. 489); the earthquake shocks of 1750; the rise of the popular novel and newspaper; the printing of political news, and cheap scientific pamphlets (p. 492); and the growing tendency to debate questions and to apply reason to their solution—all tended to give emphasis in England to these eighteenth-century charitable means for extending education to the children of those who could not afford to pay for it. Unlike the German States, where the State and the Church and the school had all worked together from the days of the Reformation on, the English had never known such a conception. The efforts, though, of the educated few, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to extend the elements of learning, order, piety, cleanliness, and proper behavior to the children of the masses, formed an important substitute for the action by the Church-State which was so characteristic a feature of Teutonic lands.

 

We see in these eighteenth-century efforts the origin of what became known in England as “the voluntary system” and upon this voluntary support of education—private, parochial, charitable—the English people for long relied. Of action by the State there was none during the eighteenth century, aside from an Act of 1767 (7 Geo. III, c. 39) relating to the education of pauper children. This established the important principle—

unfortunately not followed up—of providing that poor parish children of London might be maintained and educated “at the cost of the rates.”

 

THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL MOVEMENT. One other voluntary eighteenth-century movement of importance in the history of English educational development should be mentioned here, as it formed the connecting link between the parochial-charity-school movement of the eighteenth century and the philanthropic period of the educational reformers of the early nineteenth.

This was the Sunday-School movement, first tried by John Wesley in Savannah, in 1737, but not introduced into England until 1763. The idea amounted to little, though, until practically worked out anew (1780) by Robert Raikes, a printer of Gloucester, and described by him (1783) in his Gloucester Journal (R. 293), after he had experimented with it for three years. [8] His printed description of the Sunday-School idea gave a national impulse to the movement, and Sunday Schools were soon established all over England to take children off the streets on Sunday and provide them with some form of secular and religious instruction. [9]

 

The movement coincided with new religious, social, and economic forces which were at work, and which awakened an interest not only in the education of the children of the poorer working-classes, but caused the upper and middle classes in society to feel a new sense of responsibility for social and educational reform. The cold and unemotional religion of the English Church in the early eighteenth century had created an indifference to the simple truths and duties of the Gospels. The great religious revival under Wesley and Whitefield had challenged such an attitude, and had done much to infuse a new spirit into religion and awaken a new sense of responsibility for social welfare. The rapid growth of population in the towns, following the beginnings of factory life (p.

493), had created new social and economic problems, and the neglect of children in the manufacturing towns had shocked many thinking persons. The way in which parents and children, freed from hard labor in the factories on Sundays, abandoned themselves to vice, drunkenness, and profanity caused many, among them Raikes himself (R. 293), to inquire if “something could not be done” to turn into respectable men and women “the little heathen of the neighborhood.” The Sunday School was his answer, and the answer of many all over England. [10]

 

In 1785 “The Society for the Support and Encouragement of Sunday Schools in the different Counties of England” was formed with a view to establishing a Sunday School in every parish in the kingdom, and the Queen headed a subscription list, following a general appeal for funds. By 1787

it was estimated that 234,000 children in England and Wales were attending a Sunday School, and by 1792 the number had increased to half a million.

The Parliamentary return for 1818 showed 5463 Sunday Schools in existence, and 477,225 scholars; in 1835 the returns showed 1,548,890 scholars, half of whom attended no other school, and approximately 160,000 voluntary teachers. [11] In Manchester, then a city scourged with almost universal child-labor, the schools (1834) were in session five and a half hours on Sunday and two evenings a week. The moral and religious influence of these schools was important, and the instruction in reading and writing, meager as it was, filled a real need of the time.

 

OTHER VOLUNTARY SCHOOLS; “RAGGED SCHOOLS.” The Charity Schools and the Sunday Schools were the two most conspicuous of the voluntary-organization type of undertakings for providing the poor children of England with the elements of secular and religious education. Many other organizations of an educational and charitable nature, aided also by many individual efforts, too numerous to mention, were formed with the same charitable and humanitarian end in view. Others, similar in type, charged a small fee, and hence were of the private-adventure type. Sunday Schools, day schools, evening schools, children’s churches, bands of hope, clothing clubs, messenger brigades, shoeblack brigades, orphans’ schools, reformatory schools, industrial schools, ragged schools—these were some of the types that arose. Only one of these—“Ragged Schools”—will be described.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 182. A RAGGED SCHOOL PUPIL

(From a photograph of a boy on entering the school; later changed into a respectable tradesman. From Guthrie)]

 

[Illustration: PLATE 15. JOHN POUNDS’S RAGGED SCHOOL AT PORTSMOUTH]

 

[Illustration: PLATE 16. AN ENGLISH VILLAGE VOLUNTARY SCHOOL

(Reproduced from an early nineteenth-century engraving, through the courtesy of William G. Bruce)]

 

The originator of the “Ragged Schools”—schools for the education of destitute children, waifs and strays not reached by other agencies—was a large-hearted cobbler of Portsmouth, by the name of John Pounds (1766-1839), who divided his time between cobbling and rescue work among the poorest and most degraded children of his neighborhood. His school is shown in the picture facing this page. (Plate 15.) In his shoeshop he taught such children, free of charge, to read, write, count, cook their food, and mend their shoes. He was a schoolmaster, doctor, nurse, and playfellow to them all in one. His workshop was a room of only six by eighteen feet, yet in it he often had forty children under his instruction. His work set an example, and “Ragged Schools,” or “Schools for the Destitute,” began to be formed in many places by humanitarians.

These took the form of day schools, night schools, Sunday Schools, and the so-called industrial schools (R. 294). The instruction in most of them was entirely free, [12] but some charged a small fee, in a few cases as high as a shilling a month. It was one of these schools that Crabbe described when he wrote: [13]

 

Poor Reuben Dixon has the noisiest school Of ragged lads, who ever bowed to rule; Low in his price—the men who heave our coals, And clean our causeways, send him boys in shoals.

To see poor Reuben, with his fry beside-Their half-check’d rudeness and his half-scorned pride-Their room, the sty in which th’ assembly meet, In the close lane behind the Northgate street; T’ observe his vain attempts to keep the peace, Till tolls the bell, and strife and trouble cease, Calls for our praise; his labours praise deserves, But not our pity; Reuben has no nerves.

‘Mid noise and dirt, and stench, and play, and prate, He calmly cuts the pen or views the slate.

 

In 1844 “The Ragged School Union” was formed in London, and maintained there many of the types of schools mentioned above. The “Constitution and Rules of the Association for the Establishment of Ragged Industrial Schools for Destitute Children in Edinburgh” (R. 294) gives a good idea as to the nature, support, and instruction in such schools. As late as 1870, when national education was first begun in England, there were about two hundred of these Ragged Schools in London alone, with about 23,000

children in them. Upon many such forms of irregular schools England depended before the days of national organization.

 

OTHER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INFLUENCES. During the latter half of the eighteenth century French Revolutionary thought [14] and American political action began to exert some influence on public opinion in England. The small upper ruling class, alarmed at the developments in France, became confirmed in its opposition to any general popular education aside from a little reading, writing, counting, and careful religious training, while on the other hand men of more liberal outlook felt that popular enlightenment was a necessity to prevent the masses from becoming stirred by inflammatory writings and speeches. The increasing distress in the agricultural regions, due to the rapid change of England from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation; the crowding of great numbers of working people into the manufacturing towns; and the social misery and political unrest following the Napoleonic wars all alike contributed to a feeling of need for any form of philanthropic effort that gave promise of alleviating the ills of society. There now grew up a small but influential body of thinkers who favored the maintenance of a system of general and compulsory education by the State, and the separation of the school from the Church. The most notable proponents of this new theory were Adam Smith, the Reverend T. R. Malthus, and the Anglo-American Thomas Paine. The first approached the question from an economic point of view, the second from an economic and biologic, and the third from the political. In 1776 Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared. This was one of the great books of all time. Among other matters he dealt with the question of education. He pointed out that English society was now becoming highly organized; that the new manufacturing life had completely changed the simple conditions of an earlier