High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Is it not better that gentlemen should know the things which the working men know, only know them infinitely better in their details, so that they may be able, in their intercourse and their commerce with them, to assert the superiority over them which greater intelligence and leisure is sure to give, and to conquer back by means of a wider and more enlightened cultivation some of the influences which they have lost by political change? . . . The lower classes ought to be educated to discharge the duties cast upon them. They should also be educated that they may appreciate and defer to higher cultivation when they meet it; and the higher classes ought to be educated in a very different manner, in order that they may exhibit to the lower classes that higher education to which, if it were shown to them, they would bow down and defer.70

  Lowe’s biographer acquits him of class prejudice; and argues that he was merely paving the way for a meritocracy of the sort that came after 1918. Giving evidence to Taunton, Lowe had contended that some endowment money be used to fund school and university scholarships for the poor.71

  He put down an amendment to the Public Schools Bill in 1868 to ensure boys in elite schools took an annual test – with the results made public – in subjects such as reading, writing, arithmetic, English history and geography that any child in a National School would have been trained in. This naked utilitarianism caused Arnold to ridicule him as a philistine, in Friendship’s Garland and Culture and Anarchy: however, both agreed that what the middle classes did in education would shape what the working classes would do when given schools; so setting the right example was crucial. Arnold and he also agreed that getting education right should be a prelude to the widening of democracy, not its consequence. However, after 1867, it was too late for that.

  IV

  Gladstone told Arnold on 30 March 1869, having received Culture and Anarchy, that ‘I have always thought it one of the great blanks of my life not to have known Dr Arnold . . . my work, like his, was hard, and I little anticipated how soon the door was to be closed against me.’72 However, twenty-five years after his death, Dr Arnold prepared to exert his greatest influence yet on British education. His daughter Jane had, in 1850, married the Quaker industrialist William Forster; and in 1867 Forster, by then a Liberal MP whose view of education was profoundly shaped by the beliefs of his late father-in-law, made his first, unsuccessful, attempt to introduce a bill advancing elementary education.

  Going to Bradford in the 1840s, he had been shocked by the ignorance in which most seemed to live: and believed the State had an obligation to rectify this. He joined a committee of Leeds and Bradford worthies in 1849 to lobby for a national system of education: but many who believed in education felt the State had no place interfering between parents and children. He was greatly informed too by the experience as a schools inspector of his brother-in-law Matthew Arnold. Gladstone appointed Forster vice-president of the Council, with special responsibility to introduce what would now be a government bill to improve the provision of education for the masses.

  Forster’s father had been a philanthropist and his mother an associate of the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. He was of the same cast of mind, influenced by Carlyle, whom he had met in his twenties. He went into partnership with William Fison, a wool manufacturer, in Bradford in 1842, and over the next decade the business expanded. In 1852 he and Fison moved to Burley-in-Wharfedale, and became model industrialists. They established a mill school in 1854 and in 1859 a board of health, and built various public buildings at Burley. Forster frequently visited Burley school, and other schools in the district, studying education. He was nominated to the Taunton Commission on ‘middle class schools’, and served from 1864 until 1867.

  In February 1869 Forster introduced a bill to implement some of Taunton’s recommendations: notably to allow the inspection of endowed schools, to certificate schoolmasters according to their competence, and to put the funding of the schools on a basis that might allow more poor scholars to attend them. The schools sent some boys to university; but many left at sixteen or seventeen to be articled in the professions, or to become cadets in the services, and some at fourteen to work in family businesses, notably agriculture. These boys were vital to the professions in an age when many educated at the Clarendon schools would have found working for a living unnecessary or undesirable. It was important, therefore, that they had decent teaching.

  Taunton had found many schools woefully deficient in teaching reading, writing and arithmetic. The British Medical Association found that many who sought to be trained as doctors had ‘highly unsatisfactory’ levels of knowledge in scientific subjects.73 Nearly 40 per cent of young men in the previous decade had failed to pass the London University matriculation examination, thanks to inadequate preparation at school. Forster told the Commons in March 1869 that a total of 2,957 endowed schools had a gross income of £593,281, of which £340,000 was appropriated to education. It was, he said, an income that ‘ought to do a great deal’: but it did not.74

  In one school the headmaster was content to live off the £200 endowment. Another, in a school with an endowment of £651, had made his nephew and son the next two masters in the school. The assistant commissioner who inspected it ‘found the discipline most inefficient, and the instruction slovenly, immethodical, and unintelligent; there was no one subject in which the boys seemed to take an interest, and which had been taught with average care or success.’ Nearby had been another school with thirteen pupils when the endowment would have provided for almost ‘the education of the entire neighbourhood.’ In an age of ambition this was unacceptable. All over the country, there were schools with hardly any pupils, the endowments acting as a slush fund for the masters, or providing them with a form of indoor relief. Forster also complained that these schools were increasingly patronised by the children of the rich, who did not need the subsidy. He hoped that the sons of indigent professional men, such as clergy, lower-ranking civil servants or schoolmasters, would benefit more from the charity of the schools.

  ‘We need powers to form, if necessary, fresh trusts, and to reform the management of these endowments,’ Forster said. ‘We must be provided with power to give the schools, in many cases, fresh governing bodies, to enable the governors to see that the masters teach the subjects which the parents want the children to learn—to give the head master authority over his assistant masters—to give girls, whose education is now the worst cared for, that share in the advantages of these schools, which I am sure was the intention of many of the founders that they should have.’75 He promised ‘free admission by merit’ to help put a ladder down to the children of the working classes, to help them out of poverty. To avoid the problem of rich parents having their children better prepared for an entrance examination, Forster promised elementary schools a right to a certain number of places.

  Such a system had been established by the headmaster of King Edward VI’s School, Birmingham, the Reverend Charles Evans. The school sponsored elementary schools as feeders, and Forster took it as a model. He was determined to start a rigorous system of inspections, to ensure schools did not revert to their former inadequacies. He shrank, at this stage, from legislating for towns to levy a rate to build more secondary schools. He hinted that the government would seek such a law in the next two or three sessions, after a wider change in the provision and regulation of elementary schools.

  Forster’s bill also sought to remove what he called the ‘religious difficulty’ in the endowed schools: ‘All public schools must be open to the public. It is the pride and glory of these Endowed Schools that they are public; that means that they are open to the public; and it is our duty to see that that large portion of the public who are not members of the Church of England are not excluded from them.’76 He wanted boarding schools with Anglican masters to offer places to day boys of other denominations, who could follow their religious observances at home. Nor did he wish to enforce attendance at Anglican acts of worship.

  The Charity Commissioners would be
charged to end the improper use of endowment funds. Children would be examined annually and masters issued with certificates of competence – or not, as the case might be. Forster was driven by a modern vision that he allied to the spirit of the age when, as he said, many of the foundations with which he was now dealing were started. ‘Now, again, new ideas have power—this new central idea, bringing with it many others, that no special class is to guide the destinies of England—that not the aristocracy, nor the bourgeoisie, no, nor yet the working class, is to govern England—but that England for the future is in truth to be self-governed; all her citizens taking their share, not by class distinction, but by individual worth.’77

  Forster wished girls to have more educational chances and to have a greater share of the funds. However, he suspected that even if that happened the demand for places by girls would be less than by boys, and boys would be disadvantaged by having such a cut in their funding. Some MPs advocated developing the intellectual culture of girls; one, George Gregory, dismissed it. He said it had been ‘too readily assumed that one of the principal things for which women were qualified was teaching. He would remind the House that the great business of their lives lay in the domestic circle, and things which could not be taught in schools.’78 Northcote asserted that ‘nobody wished that women should be educated in precisely the same way as men’.79

  The Queen’s Speech in February 1870 announced that ‘a Bill has been prepared for the enlargement, on a comprehensive scale, of the means of National Education.’80 Mill wrote to Dilke a few days later about the ‘struggle’ the Education League proposed to have over church schools. ‘I myself would rather, and I should think that the intelligent part of the working class would rather, have no National Education Act for the next five years than have one which should comprise the rush to establish schools on the denominational principle . . . all schools founded by the Government, either general or local, should be purely secular.’81 He said on this he ‘would make no compromise’.

  Lowe, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, had come under the influence of Jowett, who had told him that, having considered the question with other dons, they had concluded that ‘the first step was to have educational districts on which the inspectors could report, and that this would involve divesting the inspectors of their denominational character.’82 Jowett and his friends were, however, against compelling parents to send their children to school. Where Lowe was ahead of his party – and of Jowett – was in believing in compulsion. This must, he felt as a matter of logic, come from central government, implemented through local boards. Unrepentant about the Revised Code, he wanted these boards to provide incentives for the highest results. The system he desired should be secular in character.

  Jowett, who had come to see Lowe as education’s brightest hope in the Commons, was alarmed by the rigidity of his new position – Lowe, as a logician, could be little other than rigid – and on one occasion ‘ventured to give him a short lecture about being more conciliatory, and the necessity of uniting persons and classes if he means to do anything about education.’83 Lowe seems not to have listened. He argued two other points that Forster would adopt in the Education Bill of 1870: the end of denominational inspections, as Jowett had wished, and State funding being made available to denominational schools only if they had a conscience clause, to allow pupils to opt out of religious instruction. Lowe then set out a blueprint for the new system, also specified in the bill, whereby all parishes had a duty to have a school, and the Privy Council had a duty to assist it. Although the 1870 Act was Forster’s child, Lowe was a parent too.

  A memorandum Forster submitted to Gladstone on 21 October included four options for a national system, one of which was lifted from Lowe’s Edinburgh speech. One was for a greater voluntary system, which Forster believed would not work; another was for an entirely publicly funded one, which he feared would be cripplingly expensive and would remove all incentives for such a voluntary system as existed to continue. The third plan was to allow local authorities to levy a rate to build schools where no other local means could be found, to avoid ‘educational destitution’; but he considered this impracticable because of the threat of conflict with ratepayers who refused to fund denominational schools.84 So the fourth option was adopted, with educational ‘districts’ based on the parish set up to provide schooling.

  Gladstone, for whom God suffused everything, was alert from the outset to the difficulties of religion in setting up a wider provision of State education. His party was thick with Nonconformists whose differences with the Established Church he had no option but to respect. With his customary pragmatism, he wrote to Lord de Grey, the Lord President of the Council, on 4 November 1869, having read Forster’s submission, and asked: ‘Why not adopt frankly the principle that the state or the local community should provide the secular teaching, and either leave the option to the ratepayer to go beyond this sine qua non, if they think fit, within the limits of the conscience clause, or else simply leave the parties themselves to find Bible and other religious education from voluntary sources?’85 Prussia had dealt with a similar problem when establishing State provision, and Gladstone asked de Grey to see how it had done so. Unfortunately, the absolutist fashion in which Bismarck dealt with such questions was not easily replicable in Britain.

  Mill had in part enunciated the principles upon which the 1870 Elementary Education Act was founded in a letter of January 1868, two years before the bill’s introduction. ‘All parents should be required to have their children taught certain things, being left free to select the teachers, but the sufficiency of the teaching being ensured by a government inspection of schools and by a real and searching examination of pupils.’86 He was firmly opposed to the government’s having any direct control over schools, all the governance residing in a local school committee. So Forster’s bill of February 1870 was permissive rather than compulsory, and sought to provide an education – for which parents would still have to pay a fee, and which children would not be compelled to avail themselves of – to all between the ages of five and twelve who wanted it. A system of local boards would regulate the schools, as Mill had envisaged, and would have the power to pass a by-law compelling attendance.

  As long ago as 1852 Mill had written to the Reverend Henry Carr, a South Shields clergyman, to tell him that ‘what the poor as well as the rich require is not to be indoctrinated, is not to be taught other people’s opinions, but to be induced and enabled to think for themselves . . . they cannot read too much. Quantity is of more importance than quality, especially all reading which relates to human life and the ways of mankind: geography, voyages and travels, manners and customs, and romances, which must tend to awaken their imagination and give them some of the meaning of self-devotion and heroism, in short, to unbrutalise them.’87 Others – such as Lowe, before 1867 – seemed keen to keep them brutalised. Mill understood this to be a deficiency in the education of the upper and middle classes, and until that was resolved – as Dr Arnold and his disciples had sought to do – there would be no light for the lower orders.

  Forster’s bill was debated in the Commons on 17 February 1870. In a 100-minute speech he claimed the children of the lower classes who were getting an education were getting an ‘imperfect’ one.88 The government was not helping 1 million children aged between six and ten, and another half-million between ten and twelve. He conceded that some of these might go to schools that were voluntary aided: but added that ‘the schools which do not receive government assistance are, generally speaking, the worst schools, and those least fitted to give a good education to the children of the working classes.’89 He conceded there were exceptions: but his assertion would be borne out by the inspectors’ reports.

  Attendance was especially bad in industrial cities. In Liverpool 20,000 children between the ages of five and thirteen attended no school and another 20,000 attended a bad one. In Manchester a quarter in that age group – 16,000 – were not at school, but had fewer really poor school
s. ‘Leeds appears to as bad as Liverpool; and so also, I fear, is Birmingham.’90 This was why a demand came from all over the country for a system of national education. Forster added: ‘I believe that the country demands from us that we should at least try to do two things, and that it shall be no fault of ours if we do not succeed in doing them—namely, cover the country with good schools, and get the parents to send their children to those schools. I am aware, indeed, that to hope to arrive at these two results may be thought Utopian; but our only hope of getting over the difficulties before us, is to keep a high ideal before our minds, and to realise to ourselves what it is we are expected to try to do.’91

  The government’s solution would be bureaucratic: the division of the country into districts, and surveys done in each of the availability of education, to ascertain what should be provided. Forster said England was far behind, in municipal organisation, other European countries and America. The State would provide only where essential. He said that inspection, which had hitherto been denominational, would no longer be so: it was discriminatory and inefficient. He said that if the taxpayer was funding education it should not be an education to whose religious nature he would object. A conscience clause would be included, that allowed a child to be withdrawn from any religious instruction of which his parents did not approve. All children would, though, be taught the Bible so as to have a ‘Christian training’.92