by Simon Heffer
Some boys ended up on naval training ships in the Thames estuary, ‘the most effectual remedies for the enfeebled constitutions and scrofulous tendencies that their parents’ vices or their own early destitutions and wretchedness have entailed upon so many of them.’41 Such boys might indeed end up in the Navy, or the Army, whose last commander-in-chief had once said his men were the scum of the earth. ‘The boy who has been for two or three years under steady regulation and instruction in a reformatory is likely indeed to be superior both in intelligence and personal habits to the common lads taken directly from the streets and alleys of our large cities.’ The report concluded that ‘none of the institutions connected with education appear to be in a more satisfactory condition than the reformatories.’42 It said education of criminal children must be ‘compulsory’, for the good of society, and that those under ‘special temptations to crime’ should attend improved industrial schools.43
When the report was discussed in Parliament, on 11 July 1861, Lowe said the lower education spending had been settled before the government had read Newcastle’s conclusions.44 He admitted centralisation was inefficient and expensive, and conceded that the limited funds would be spent better if administered locally. He also conceded that the criticisms of the poor quality of teaching and teachers were ‘well founded’.45 The system, he admitted, was complicated. However, that was because private individuals and institutions – landowners, clergymen, religious groups – had generously paid for different sorts of schools in different places: and Lowe confirmed that the government had no intention of interfering with that system. Despite secularisation, the teaching of religion in schools, and the religious nature of many foundations that ran schools, were still of the highest importance. However, Lowe had a hidden agenda of reducing the religious influence in order to extend the availability of teaching, so that non-Anglicans could attend Church schools. This would, in time, be achieved by the State’s refusal to pay specific grants for religious instruction.
Yet while Lowe admitted many of the faults the Commission had found, he did not feel the general recommendation made to rectify them was politically feasible: namely, to maintain the existing system, but to supplement its funding by levying a local rate. He proposed instead to make the payment of a capitation fee to schools contingent on proof that the child on whose behalf the fee was being paid had reached a certain standard in the core subjects. As for some of the worst schools in the country, Lowe said they received no government money because they chose not to be under government control: otherwise, they might be better. The view that all the State would succeed in doing with education would be to make a mess of it was widespread and, indeed, the orthodoxy. Edward Baines, the MP for Leeds, speaking later in the debate, asserted that ‘in a country like this, freedom would ultimately produce higher education and higher national character than any system which placed education under Government support and control.’46
Since the recommendations were so controversial, Lowe suggested change be pursued by means of a departmental minute, and not via legislation. Granville, his chief, agreed and asked Lowe to frame a new policy. Lowe feared relinquishing central control to county authorities. His experience in New South Wales in the 1840s, where he had tried to establish an education system, had shown the danger of the centre abdicating responsibility. He sought the advice of Henry Cole and Ralph Lingen, Kay-Shuttleworth’s successor, and Lingen drafted a minute that, with feline timing, was issued as Parliament was prorogued in 1861. This ‘Revised Code’ was, as Lowe’s biographer puts it, ‘deliberately unconciliatory’.47
It stated that the grant would be paid according to the number of children who attended a school for a prescribed number of days. It said inspectors would gauge children not according to levels of attainment, but to what they had attained for their age. Each child would be tested in reading, writing and arithmetic; and failure would cause the school to lose one-third of that child’s capitation grant. Money would also be docked for shortages of trained teachers and poor facilities or equipment. Lowe described these changes in terms of his own philosophy: ‘Hitherto we have been living under a system of bounties and protection; now we propose to have a little free trade.’48
The proposals were met with almost uniform outrage from headmasters and clergy. Authorities on education also railed against it: notably Huxley, who believed the code assisted in ‘the development of every description of sham teaching’ as pedagogues sought to cram children to pass examinations and not to expand their minds. Most aggrieved of all were the inspectors, almost all of whom for different reasons felt the code to be unworkable. Arnold caricatured it: ‘A lame man walks ill and to make him walk better, you break his crutches.’49 Lowe countered by expressing his lack of confidence in the inspectors, and by accusing Anglican prelates of ‘extortion’ for their determination to extract as much as possible for their schools without using it to improve standards.50 He believed attack was the best form of defence, and went to these lengths to avoid accusations that the reform was a money-saving exercise. However, it was an exercise Lowe believed could be carried out while simultaneously raising standards.
Arnold also argued that each school had its own social context that made it impossible to apply centralised rules to it. Schools were penalised if the children – now empowered as ‘earners’ of the capitation grant – did not turn up for the annual examination. This took no account of bad weather, of harvests in rural areas, the needs of parents, or any of a thousand other things outside the school’s control. The inspectorate mocked the idea that a child should inevitably have attained a certain standard by a certain age; for they had seen the effects of a shifting population and family breakdown in urban areas. Lowe, ever the ideologue, took no account of this. Such was the outcry that Palmerston ordered the minute be not implemented until Parliament had debated the matter. The measures had, however, acquired the powerful support of Gladstone, who was attracted by the economising aspect.
However, the Revised Code was revised again, with less emphasis on payment by results, though two-thirds of the grant would still depend on the outcome of examinations: and, especially painful to Lowe, children would not be examined by age but by what their teachers considered their levels of attainment. With these compromises, the twice-revised code was passed. Lowe remained angry, however, and through his friend the editor of The Times fought a proxy war against the clerical conspiracy he regarded as having done him down. The deepening cynicism of Lowe’s approach caused Arnold to reflect that the Revised Code was ‘the heaviest blow dealt at civilisation and social improvement in my time.’ He wanted a minister of education with a broader view of the State’s responsibilities, rather than one who sought to enforce more rote-learning. Teachers and inspectors were demoralised by the code, and rote-learning bored the children, who were more frequently punished. Lowe did, however, champion the cause of the certificated teacher, whom he came to regard as the only remaining guardian of proper expenditure of public money.
Fitzjames Stephen had been cleverer than even he knew when describing Arnold’s ‘mission’, for his determination to have people better educated was precisely that. Arnold savaged the ‘twice revised code’ in an article of that name in Fraser’s Magazine in March 1862. He had it printed as a pamphlet, and Kay-Shuttleworth had copies sent to every MP and peer. Disraeli used it as his brief for attacking the code. Arnold had read Kay-Shuttleworth’s own pamphlet on the subject and felt it ‘too copious’ for the general reader: and so decided to write his own, shorter, less detailed, but more pungent.51 He said the revised code would ‘reduce considerably the grants at present contributed by the state towards the support of schools for the poor.’ Kay-Shuttleworth’s estimate of the reduction was £175,000 a year, two-fifths of the existing grant. Arnold mocked Lowe’s wishes as being ‘to obtain the greatest possible quantity of reading, writing, and arithmetic for the greatest number’. He clearly wished to end the ‘extravagant’ expenditure incurred when, in the p
ast, ‘paying for discipline, for civilisation, for religious and moral training, for a superior instruction for clever and forward children’.52 And, Arnold mused, it had been shocking that inspectors had spent their time and efforts commenting on the general discipline and tone of schools while ‘the indispensable elements, the reading, writing, and arithmetic, were neglected’.
Given the damage Arnold feared the code would do, he regarded the government’s claim that it would extend education into the ‘waste places’ as ‘utterly and entirely delusive’.53 He cited examples of schools in such places – in rural Wiltshire or Nottinghamshire – that would currently receive £30 a year but which, after the code, would have only £10. There might be the supplement of the prize-grant, awarded according to payment by results: but this would take no account of how generally good a school was, and how high its tone, merely of the statistical outcome of the tests in reading, writing and arithmetic. These were ‘the sole objects judged worthy of the grants’, though Lowe, under protest, had said the teaching of religion would be ‘encouraged’ in a similar way.54 Since Arnold could not believe that he and his brother inspectors would see anything in a school that would force them to recommend a cut in its income, he assumed the scheme would be subverted from the start.
Nor did he think the government’s standards especially demanding. He felt that only a quarter of those who attended a school could read proficiently. He quoted one inspector who said that in not more than twenty out of 169 schools he had visited could he find a class at the top of the school able to read a newspaper at sight. The government idea that three-fifths of children should be able to read at that standard was nonsense, especially if funding were cut. Arnold believed such proficiency would be taught only as a part of a general education in which an element of culture was placed at the heart of the experience, and not when teaching was merely by rote. ‘If for the object you have in view,’ he asked, ‘good reading, cultivation in other subjects is necessary, why cut off all grants for these subjects in the hope of thereby getting better reading? How are you thus brought one step nearer to the end you have in view? How are you not rather pushed several steps farther back from it?’55
Arnold’s most vociferous complaint was that the Privy Council Office had not bothered to consult those, such as himself, who were ‘practically conversant with schools’, and no notice had been given to voluntary bodies that mainly supported the schools.56 ‘Their own inspectors, education-societies, school-managers, are astounded,’ he wrote. He was particularly angry at what he saw as the breaking of the link between the State and education. ‘The revised code, by destroying – under the specious plea of simplifying, of giving greater liberty of action to managers – this vital connexion, takes the heart out of the old system.’57 Arnold knew how poor the teaching was in some schools, and regretted that ‘all serious guidance, all initiatory direction by the State’ would end under the new system. ‘It turns the inspectors into a set of registering clerks, with a mass of minute details to tabulate’, who would ‘necessarily withdraw their attention from the religious and general instruction and from the moral features of the school.’ He said it was ‘as if the generals of an army – for the inspectors have been the veritable generals of the educational army – were to have their duties limited to inspecting the men’s cartouch boxes.’
In response to the outrage, Lowe had withdrawn proposals to test children under six, and had discovered the importance of encouraging schools to retain children after eleven. But he still planned to impose the code. Arnold did not know Lowe, and would not have known certain of his harsh characteristics, such as the class prejudice that he (to his subsequent regret and embarrassment) vented during the reform debates of 1866–7. However, in Arnold’s conclusion, he almost seems to have Lowe’s personality in his sights, when he condemns ‘the selfish vulgar of the upper classes, saying in their hearts that this educational philanthropy is all rubbish, and that the less a poor man learns except his handicraft the better.’ Arnold warned that if this cast of mind prevailed ‘there will be only one sufferer; the education of the people.’58
Nor was this his last word. In his General Report as an Inspector for 1863 he wrote that the old system of inspection had effectively been ended – ‘I am speaking of the old inspection considered as an agency for testing and promoting the intellectual force of schools, not as an agency for testing and promoting their discipline and their good building, fitting and so on.’59 Because children were tested according to what it was felt they had attained, rather than in the context of their class, ‘the life and power of each class as a whole, the fitness of its composition, its handling by the teacher’ were not tested.60 He argued that if the examination were persisted with it should be disconnected from the inspection, so the latter could be conducted with the most beneficial effects. He also confronted Lowe, with the realities of examining children in an impoverished area: ‘When a boy of 11 or 12 years of age is so shy that he cannot open his mouth before a stranger, one may without harshness say that he ought to have been taught better and refuse him his grant; but when a child of seven is in this predicament one can hardly, without harshness, say the same thing.’61
Partly because of foreign travel, and partly because of discontent with the system, Arnold did not submit a General Report for the next four years. In his 1867 report he reflected on how things had changed in that time. He detected ‘a deadness, a slackness, and a discouragement which are not the signs and accompaniment of progress. If I compare them with the schools on the Continent I find in them a lack of intelligent life much more striking now than it was when I returned from the Continent in 1859.’62 There had been an ‘ardent and animated body’ of schoolmasters and pupil-teachers, but ‘the school legislation of 1862 struck the heaviest possible blow at them; and the present slack and languid condition of our elementary schools is the inevitable consequence.’63 The pupil-teacher system was especially hard hit: its numbers fell from 13,849 in 1863 to 10,955 by 1866.64 The next year an additional grant was introduced for teacher training, for the system risked breaking down and leaving schools without properly qualified staff. Other problems remained. Arnold found the humanities suffering for want of financial incentive to teach them; with the decline of literature, history and geography, so did he record a further decline in the intellectual life of schools. He would complain about this for the rest of his career – he retired in 1886 – but it was not until the 1890s, after his death, that the system was finally changed.
The effects of the revised code would, in certain areas, be stark. Thomas Guthrie, chairman of a charity running a Ragged School in Edinburgh, wrote to Gladstone on 22 November 1864 to say that ‘since the Educational Department of Govt reduced our allowances to a comparatively small sum we are thrown almost entirely on the good will of the people – I regret we ever trusted to anything else.’65 He said the continued solvency of the Edinburgh school depended on a big public fund-raising meeting the following month: and he implored Gladstone to come and chair it, to attract a crowd. ‘We all feel that could we get you persuaded to come north and preside over us, it would be hundreds to our coffers, and so some children saved from inevitable ruin.’
Lowe has been vilified by generations of educationists, following Arnold, for what one of his rare defenders, D. W. Sylvester, calls ‘impoverishing the curriculum’.66 However, Sylvester points to a lack of evidence for a broad curriculum before 1862; indeed, Newcastle’s witnesses proved the opposite. Apart from the three Rs, a fourth – religious instruction – dominated the curriculum. Other subjects such as geography or history were sometimes taught, but only to the oldest and cleverest pupils. Also, many inspectors after 1862 found no evidence that payment by results had driven the more ornamental subjects out of the curriculum. Lowe’s policy ensured the three Rs remained predominant; but it cannot be said to have altered much else.
III
Lowe believed that solving the problem posed by religion in Anglican schools was
largely a matter of enforcing a ‘conscience clause’ so that Nonconformists and Catholics could attend them without being made to participate in worship or religious instruction there. This made Lowe enemies in the Church, who saw him imposing secularisation on a Christian country. However, as a utilitarian he continued to regard much education as useless: he said it ‘does not communicate to us knowledge . . . it does not communicate to us the means of obtaining knowledge, and . . . it does not communicate to us the means of communicating knowledge’, because of its continued concentration on dead languages.67 He was especially afraid that the middle classes would seek to imitate the schools of their betters, with their largely ornamental curriculum that Lowe considered unequal to the challenges of modern life. What they needed, he believed, to acquaint them better with that life and to assist the country, were science and mathematics. And, ironically, he now was in no doubt that the only way to ensure a proper education was provided to these people was to enlist the State. Like Gladstone, when Lowe changed his mind, he did so comprehensively.
Lowe had refused to serve on the Newcastle Commission because of what, with typical haughtiness, he regarded as the low calibre of some of the other members. He had, however, appeared as a witness, and argued for reform and the end of imparting ‘obsolete’ knowledge.68 As Lowe’s biographer has noted, whereas Arnold wanted to civilise the nation Lowe wanted to modernise it. He believed the pursuit of pleasure in all its forms was the main goal of most people: Arnold, lacking this utilitarian cynicism, felt the pursuit of higher ideals, such as the development of taste, was more important. Lowe was also open to the attacks of other cynics: one, a pamphleteer called A. C. Weir, dismissed his arguments that he was seeking to liberate people from ignorance and to allow them to thrive in the modern world. He said, instead, that Lowe sought to use education as a means of social control, to help maintain the status quo against the ‘destructive assaults of the untaught’. He claimed education would be a knife turned in the ‘hands of the masses against the masses themselves.’69 There is much in Lowe’s own pronouncements, both about education and reform, that supports Weir’s view. In his speech in Edinburgh in 1867 he had said:
