The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

agricultural society; that in the narrow round of manufacturing duties and town life people tended to lose their inventiveness and to stagnate; and that the individual degeneracy which set in in a more highly organized type of society became a social danger of large magnitude. Hence, he argued (R. 295), it was a matter of state interest that “the inferior ranks of the people” be instructed to make them socially useful and to render them “less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to measures of government.” Accordingly, he held, the State had every right, not only to take over elementary education as a state function and a public charge, but also to make it free and compulsory.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 183. ADAM SMITH (1723-90)]

 

In 1798 the Reverend T. R. Malthus’s Essay on Population appeared. This was a precursor of the work of Darwin, and another of the great books of all time. He pointed out that population everywhere tended to outrun the means of subsistence, and that it was only prevented from doing so by preventive checks which involved much misery and vice and pauperism. To prevent pauperism each individual must exercise moral restraint and foresight, and to enable all to do this a widespread system of public instruction was a necessity (R. 296). The money England had spent in poor-relief he regarded as largely wasted, because it afforded no cure. In the general education of a people the real solution lay. He said: We have lavished immense sums on the poor, which we have every reason to think have constantly tended to aggravate their misery,… It is surely a great national disgrace that the education of the lowest classes in England should be left to a few Sunday Schools, supported by a subscription from individuals, who can give to the course of instruction in them any kind of bias which they may please. (R 296.) [Illustration: FIG. 184 REV. T. R. MALTHUS (1766-1834)]

 

Agreeing thoroughly with Adam Smith that a general diffusion of knowledge was a safeguard to society, he urged the teaching of the elements of political economy in the common schools to enable people to live better in the new type of competitive society. [15]

 

In 1791-92 Thomas Paine published his widely read Rights of Man. He expressed the French Revolutionary political theory, holding that government, while capable of great good were its powers only properly exercised, was, as organized, an evil. In a well-governed nation none would be permitted to go uninstructed, he held, and he would cut off poor-relief and make a state grant of �4 a year for every child under fourteen for its education, and would compel parents to send all children to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic.

 

Each of these three books had a long and a slowly cumulative influence, and a small number of young and powerful champions of the idea of popular education as a public charge began, early in the nineteenth century, to urge action and to influence public opinion.

 

II. THE PERIOD OF PHILANTHROPIC EFFORT (1800-33) CONDITIONS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. This second period in the history of the organization of English education begins with the publication, in 1797, of Dr. Andrew Bell’s An Experiment in Education, describing his work in educating large numbers of children by means of the so-called mutual system, at the Male Asylum at Madras, India. The period properly ends with the first Parliamentary grant for education, in 1833.

In its main characteristics it belongs to the eighteenth rather than to the nineteenth century, as the prominent educational movements of the eighteenth (charity-schools, Sunday Schools, schools of industry) continue strong throughout the period, and many new undertakings of a similar charitable nature (“Ragged Schools”; associations for the improvement of the condition of the poor, etc.) were begun.

 

The period—during and after the Napoleonic wars—was one of marked social and political unrest, and of corresponding emphasis on social and philanthropic service. The masses were discontented with their lot, and were beginning to be with their lack of political privileges. Numerous plans to quiet the unrest and improve conditions were proposed, of which schemes to increase employment (industrial schools; evening schools), to encourage thrift (savings banks; children’s brigades), and to spread an elementary and religious education (mutual schools; infant schools) that would train the poor in self-help were the most prominent. “The Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor.”

founded in 1796, became a very important early-nineteenth-century institution. Branches were established all over England. Soup-kitchens, clothing-stations, savings banks, and schools were among the chief lines of activity. In particular it extended and improved Sunday Schools, encouraged the formation of charity-schools and schools of industry, and later gave much aid in establishing the new monitorial schools.

Educational interest steadily strengthened during the period, though as yet along lines that were deemed relatively harmless, were inexpensive, and were largely religious in character.

 

The eighteenth-century conception of education as a charity, designed where given to train the poor to “an honest, upright, grateful, and industrious poverty,” still prevailed; there was as yet little thought of education as designed to train the poor to think for and help themselves.

The eighteenth-century conception of the educational process, too, which regarded education as something external and determined by adult standards and needs, and to be imposed on the child from without, also continued.

The purpose of the school was to manufacture the standard man, and the business of the teacher was to so organize and methodize instruction that the necessary knowledge could be acquired as economically, from a financial point of view, as possible. The Pestalozzian conception of education as a development of the individual, according to the law of his own nature, found but slow acceptance in England. Mental development, scientific instruction, the habit of thinking, the exercise of judgment, and free and enlightened opinion were ideas that found little favor there, and hence had to be handled carefully by those who had caught the new conception of the educational process.

 

In the political reaction following the end of Napoleon’s rule the upper and ruling classes of England, in common with those of continental lands, became exceedingly suspicious of much education for the masses. To secure contributions for schools it became necessary “to avow and plead how little it was that the schools pretended or presumed to teach.” [16]

England now experienced a great development of manufacturing and commerce, a great material prosperity ensued, and the growing demand for education was met by a counter-demand that the education provided should be systematized, economical, and should not teach too much. Such a system of training was now discovered and applied, in the form of mutual or monitorial instruction, and was hailed as “a new expedient, parallel and rival to the modern inventions in the mechanical departments.”

 

[Illustration: FIG. 185. THE CREATORS OF THE MONITORIAL SYSTEM

REV. ANDREW BELL (1753-1832)

JOSEPH LANCASTER (1778-1838)]

 

ORIGIN OF MUTUAL OR MONITORIAL INSTRUCTION. In 1797 Dr. Andrew Bell, a clergyman in the Established Church, published the results of his experiment in the use of monitors in India. [17] The idea attracted attention, and the plan was successfully introduced into a number of charity-schools. About the same time (1798) a young Quaker schoolmaster, Joseph Lancaster by name, was led independently to a similar discovery of the advantages of using monitors, by reason of his needing assistance in his school and being too poor to pay for additional teachers. In 1803 he published an account of his plan. [18] The two plans were quite similar, attracted attention from the first, and schools formed after one or the other of the plans were soon organized all over England.

 

Increased attention was attracted to the new plans by a bitter church quarrel which broke out as to who was the real originator of the idea, [19] Bell being upheld by Church-of-England supporters, and Lancaster by the Dissenters. In 1808 “The Royal Lancastrian Institution” was formed, which in 1814 became “The British and Foreign School Society,” to promote Lancastrian schools. This society had the close support of King George III, the Whigs, and the Edinburgh Review, while such liberals as Brougham, Whitbread, and James Mill were on its board of directors. This Society sent out Lancaster to expound his “truly British” system, and by 1810 as many as ninety-five Lancastrian schools had been established in England. His model school in Borough Road, Southwark, which became a training-school for teachers, is shown on the following page. Lancaster was a poor manager; became involved in financial difficulties; and in 1818

left for the United States, where he spent the remainder of his life in organizing such schools and expounding his system. For a time this attracted wide attention, as we shall point out in the following chapter.

 

Lancaster’s work stimulated the Church of England into activity, and in 1811 “The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales” was formed by prominent S.P.C.K. (p. 449) members and Churchmen, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as president. This Society was supported by the Tories, the Established Church, and the Quarterly Review, and was formed to promote the Bell system, [20] “which made religious instruction an essential and necessary part of the plan.” Within a month �15,000 had been subscribed to establish schools. Among many other contributions were �500

each from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A training-school for teachers was organized; district societies were formed over England to establish schools; and a system of organized aid was extended for both buildings and maintenance. By 1831 there were 900,412 children receiving instruction in the monitorial schools of the National Society alone.

 

[Illustration: Fig. 186. THE LANCASTRIAN MODEL SCHOOL IN BOROUGH ROAD, SOUTHWARK, LONDON

This shows 365 pupils, seated for writing. The room was 40 x 90 feet in size and contained 20 desks, each 25 feet long. The boys of each row were divided into two “drafts” of from eight to ten, each in charge of a monitor. Around the wall were 31 “stations,” indicated by the semicircles on the floor.]

 

The mutual-instruction idea spread to other lands—France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark—and seems to have been tried even in German lands. In France and Belgium it was experimented with for a time because of its cheapness, but was soon discarded because of its defects. In Teutonic lands, where the much better Pestalozzian ideas had become established, the monitorial system made practically no headway. It was in the United States, of all countries outside of England, that the idea met with most ready acceptance.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 187. MONITORS TEACHING READING AT “STATIONS”

Three “drafts” of ten each, with their toes to the semicircles painted on the floor, are being taught by monitors from lessons suspended on the wall.]

 

THE SYSTEM OF MUTUAL OR MONITORIAL INSTRUCTION. The great merit, aside from being cheap, of the mutual or monitorial system of instruction lay in that it represented a marked advance in school organization over the older individual method of instruction, with its accompanying waste of time and schoolroom disorder. Under the individual method only a small number of pupils could be placed under the control of one teacher, and the expense for such instruction made general education almost prohibitive.

Pestalozzi, to be sure, had worked out in Switzerland the modern class-system of instruction, and following developmental lines in teaching, but of this the English were not only ignorant, but it called for a degree of pedagogical skill which their teachers did not then possess. Bell and Lancaster now evolved a plan whereby one teacher, assisted by a number of the brighter pupils whom they designated as monitors, could teach from two hundred to a thousand pupils in one school (R. 297). The