High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  There was no question of the State paying for the education, above and beyond the grant already made. It could not – or rather would not – afford it. The parents of children who had attended school in 1869 had paid £120,000 for the privilege. Some wanted these fees abolished, but Forster feared that the total cost if education were made free for all might be two or three times that figure. And if the working classes had free education, the middle classes would demand it too. ‘Why should we relieve the parent from all payments for the education of his child?’ he asked.93 In cases of absolute hardship ‘free tickets’ would be given to children and those tickets would have ‘no stigma of pauperism attached to them’. Education would be funded a third by the parent, a third by taxes and a third from local funds. Where those were inadequate an education rate would be levied. However unpopular this was, Forster argued that it would ‘save the prison rate and the pauper rate’.

  Forster then dealt with compulsory attendance. ‘To leave it alone is to leave the children untaught, and to force the taxpayers and ratepayers to pay for useless schools.’94 He said he was putting before the House the principle of direct compulsion. It had already been conceded, in that no child could work unless it went to school for part of the day. The Act would therefore place a duty upon a parent to send a child to school, and on the local board to enforce it, using a by-law passed by the board. Parents who shirked this duty without a reasonable excuse – including there not being a school within a mile of where they lived – could be fined up to 5s.

  The government’s aims were ‘to bring elementary education within the reach of every English home, aye, and within the reach of those children who have no homes.’95 This revolution – for it was nothing less – would require ‘enormous labour’, but that was the State’s duty. He concluded with an argument straight from Lowe:

  We must not delay. Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity. It is of no use trying to give technical teaching to our artisans without elementary education; uneducated labourers—and many of our labourers are utterly uneducated—are, for the most part, unskilled labourers, and if we leave our work-folk any longer unskilled, notwithstanding their strong sinews and determined energy, they will become overmatched in the competition of the world. Upon this speedy provision depends also, I fully believe, the good, the safe working of our constitutional system. To its honour, Parliament has lately decided that England shall in future be governed by popular government. I am one of those who would not wait until the people were educated before I would trust them with political power. If we had thus waited we might have waited long for education; but now that we have given them political power we must not wait any longer to give them education.96

  MPs praised Forster for his measure, and for his courage. However, dissenters did not wish to subsidise Church of England schools – or to be forced to send their children to them, as in some areas they would be the only schools available. For attendance to be compulsory, this had to be overcome. It was feared elections to school boards would become a battleground for sectarianism. Therefore, on 14 March George Dixon, one of three Liberal MPs for Birmingham, moved an amendment to force all schools assisted by the rates to be non-sectarian: and to ensure that in other schools religious instruction could be given at a specified time when children from different denominations could miss it. It could not, the amendment said, be left to local authorities to decide what the religious instruction in their schools would be. Dixon’s amendment was consistent with the ideals Joe Chamberlain had drawn up for the Birmingham Education Society in 1867.

  Chamberlain was the driving force behind the National Education League and, although he did not yet sit in Parliament and was unknown to the Liberal front bench, it would be he who would shape the debate on education, unseen and unheard. He had, on behalf of the League, sent what he described as an ‘inflammatory’ circular to all its branches advising Nonconformists to let their MPs know the force of their objections to Forster’s proposals.97 He briefed Dixon, whom he knew well, and arranged for him to lead a deputation of forty-six MPs and more than 400 Nonconformists to Downing Street on 9 March. Chamberlain joined the deputation, and it was the first time he met Gladstone.

  He addressed the Prime Minister on behalf of the League, principally on their fear that the bill would hand over education to the Church of England, but also on the importance of the State paying fees for children whose parents could not afford them. Chamberlain also argued that a ‘conscience clause’ would be inoperable. It was on that point, notably, that the government and the Nonconformists would disagree. William Harcourt, a Liberal, thought the notion of rival sectarians teaching religion out of school hours would be ‘nothing but denominationalism run mad.’98 The government agreed to modify the bill to allow all shades of feeling to be represented: not least because, as Lowe said on 15 March, the State owed a debt to the voluntary system for all it had done before the State had recognised ‘the undoubted duty of the Government of England to provide for the education of the people’.99 The voluntary system did not deserve to be trampled under a desire for uniformity. Forster, however, became irritated by the infighting between various sorts of Liberal and various sorts of clergy. He wrote on 1 April 1870 to Charles Kingsley, a supporter of the National League. ‘I still fully believe I shall get my bill through,’ he told him, ‘but I wish parsons, Church and others would all remember as much as you do that children are growing into savages while they are trying to prevent one another from helping them.’100

  It took until May for the Cabinet to devise suitable compromises. These included the opting out of religious instruction and the end of inspection of that subject. They also permitted school boards to give money to denominational schools, provided it was used only for secular instruction; and schools subsidised by the rates should offer non-denominational religious instruction. Lowe, however, was the only member of the Cabinet to object: notably to allowing money for ‘secular instruction’. He felt opposition to such a proposal was so strong that the bill would be lost.

  He suggested to Gladstone that the money come from the Treasury, not local rates. ‘Increase the Privy Council Grant by one half and the thing is done and done in the way most agreeable to the recipients. If this were done I should relieve the Board of ratepayers from any connection whatever with schools other than rate-supported schools. You would thus attain a double advantage, i.e. circumscribe the functions of the dreaded local authority and relieve your proposal from the obloquy of a fresh burden on the rates.’101 Gladstone agreed and within a few hours had persuaded the rest of the Cabinet. Lowe had, by his refusal to accept the original plan, caused the foundation of what came to be known as the ‘dual system’: the coexistence of board schools and voluntary schools.

  Gladstone outlined this to the Commons at the bill’s committee stage on 16 June. He was proceeding ‘without involving the State in religious controversy, but confining its central function strictly to its work of obtaining beneficial secular results . . . the great and paramount advantage and blessing of elementary education.’102 Disraeli said his party had been prepared to support the bill as it stood. He was willing to recognise ‘the determination of the great majority of the people in this country that “national education” is to be a “religious education”.’103 However, he was ‘at a loss’ to know how what Gladstone had just proposed would achieve that. He saw instead ‘vacillation of purpose’.104 Not only did he not have a ‘precise and clear idea’ what would happen to voluntary schools that were unwilling to be supported by school boards, he also believed there were members of the Cabinet who did not.105 The bill was therefore a sham, and he and his side could not support it. He wanted longer to consider what the government was proposing, not just a few hours.

  There remained serious objections to what it was feared would be a monopoly of Church of England schools. Even the promise that schools could be financed out of the rates, with no denominational religious instr
uction, was felt an inadequate safeguard against the sectarianisation of those schools. It was feared boards would be dragged into local rows with schools, and that many such complaints would end up with the Privy Council, which would not cope. There was no desire to stop teaching religion: it was felt to be especially good for, as one MP put it, ‘precisely that class for which a system of primary education was specially intended – namely, the toiling millions of our countrymen, in order to soften the asperity of their lot, and to irradiate the darkness of their present life with the light of a hope that is full of immortality.’106 Yet to contrive an ecumenical form of instruction backed by all religions and denominations appeared impossible.

  Forster wanted basic religious instruction in schools. He doubted it would be so well organised or delivered if provided only out of school, for he also doubted either children or their parents would attend, or ensure attendance at, such instruction in the evenings or on Saturday afternoons. He could not understand why fellow Liberals were prepared to use ‘the force of religious and denominational zeal’ to prevent the early attack upon ‘the mass of ignorance, destitution, misery and crime’ that was the lot of the lowest classes.107 After four days of debate, secularism was rejected by 421 votes to 60. The bill was back on course, but only because of Conservative support, and by dividing the Liberal party between its Anglican and Nonconformist wings. George Trevelyan wrote to Gladstone on 21 June that ‘an extension of the grant to denominational schools’, having been ‘definitely offered and accepted as a main condition of the Education Bill’, meant that he would have to resign as a Civil Lord of the Admiralty.108 ‘I cannot compromise my future action in this matter,’ he explained.

  Some MPs could not understand why, if the lower classes were to be forced to go to school, the middle and upper classes should not be forced too. The government had to handle claims that families in agricultural districts would be severely affected economically if their children were compelled to attend school rather than helping with farm work. Concessions were made on universal compulsion for this reason. The bill was also amended to allow parents, on the grounds of conscience, to withdraw children from school at a specific time when religious instruction alien to their beliefs was being given. One clause – clause 25 – to allow poor children at denominational schools to have their fees paid by the board slipped through without debate. It caused outrage when spotted by Nonconformists after Royal Assent, who feared subsidising children at schools of whose doctrines they disapproved.

  The bill had its third reading on 22 July. Its opponents threatened to seek to amend the Act the minute Parliament returned for the 1871 session. There were also concerns that State funding had not been found to ensure that all families could afford to pay the minimal fees. On compulsion and fees, change would come within a few years. The opponents had mainly been Liberal Nonconformists, and they saw the measure would pass not least because of support from the Conservatives: a clear, early sign, in retrospect, of the reforming tenor of Disraeli’s ministry from 1874.

  It was also the start of a fractiousness in Gladstone’s party that would lead to his defeat in 1874. Gladstone admitted the final measure was not ‘perfect’: but warned his opponents against their ‘declaration of war’ upon it, intimating that the country would not forgive further rancour just when the people had realised the national and moral importance of getting more children into education. He gave the voluntary schools credit for avoiding a narrowness in their interpretation of Christianity, and expressed the hope that their sense of philanthropy would help them overcome any denominational difficulties. He welcomed the idea that schoolmasters should engage in ‘free exposition of the scriptures’, and pleaded for those who still disagreed with that not to impede the education of countless young people by carrying their objections further.109 Once the bill had gone through the Lords, England and Wales had a system of national education within the reach of every child, providing a school place to between a million and a million and a half who previously had no access to one. And in the Lords, Shaftesbury pointed out that the 300 Ragged Schools, with their average attendance of over 32,000 and with teachers of every denomination, had never in the twenty-five years of their existence experienced the slightest problem with religion.110

  Nonconformists, though, would not let the religious matter go. They protested that the Act was ‘inconsistent with the principles of Religious Equality’ and especially objected ‘to the specific proposal now agitated on the School Boards of the Country to pay the fees of indigent children attending denominational schools’.111 The Act did allow school boards to establish free schools for indigent children, or to remit fees in schools where they were normally paid, or to pay fees to denominational schools. Forster, however, had told the board in Liverpool that it would not be ‘just’ if it did not use ‘the whole moral weight of the Department against those Members of School Boards who are anxious to avoid using the Education Rate for the maintenance of denominational schools and who wish to provide for the free education of indigent children in schools under the control of the school board and not under the control of private managers.’112 His party, from top to bottom, was hopelessly divided: and the drive to stop the subsidy of Anglican schools continued to be led by Chamberlain, laying the foundations of his break with the party over Irish Home Rule in 1886. For the rest of the Gladstone ministry there were attempts to repeal the clause allowing the funding of Anglican schools. It succeeded only in highlighting Liberal divisions.

  A Liberal politician, barely four years later, would dismiss the Act as ‘of the nature of a very small reform’. John Morley claimed that ‘no one pretends that it is anything approaching to a final solution of a complex problem. But the government insisted, whether rightly or wrongly, that their Act was as large a measure as public opinion was ready to support or to endure. It was clearly agreed among the government and the whole of the party at their backs, that at some time or other, near or remote, if public instruction was to be made genuinely effective, the private, voluntary or denominational system would have to be replaced by a national system.’113 However, Morley argued that the government had introduced measures that would strengthen the very system it wanted to replace, thereby making the ultimate aim harder to attain. Nonetheless, an important principle – of State provision – had been established.

  V

  Even as the government received – and was, it seemed, quite chastened by – the Newcastle report, there was growing outrage about the great public schools, notably by general consent the greatest, and richest, of them all, Eton College. Two large-circulation periodicals ran articles highly critical of the school. Matthew Higgins, an Old Etonian and journalist, wrote three articles between May 1860 and March 1861 in the Cornhill Magazine, under the pseudonym ‘Paterfamilias’; and Henry Sidgwick, then a young Cambridge philosopher of radical views who would later cause the university tests to be scrapped, wrote one in Macmillan’s in February 1861. Higgins alleged that fellows – governors – of the school were siphoning off funds meant for educating the poor, and Sidgwick put a price on the racket – around £1,000 per fellow per year ‘for doing a minimum of work; and it may be doubted whether this minimum might not be most advantageously dispensed with.’114 He branded this ‘sinecurism’ and noted that ‘few men, suddenly transferred from a sphere of confined drudgery to £1,000 a year, and nothing to do, would be likely to become useful members of society.’115 Sidgwick also observed that masters at Eton made money not so much from the salaries paid by the foundation – £45 a year – but from taking in more pupils, which could make them between £1,000 and £2,000 a year. Each extra boy meant another £20 a year, so there were incentives to expand the school beyond a point where boys could be satisfactorily taught and accommodated.

  As well as being badly governed and mismanaging its endowments, Eton was said to be failing to teach a sufficiently broad curriculum – something that the pace of change elsewhere rendered all the more glaring – and corrupti
ng the morals of its boys. Since it was regarded as the nursery of Britain’s statesmen – Gladstone was but one of its old boys – this was regarded as deeply corrosive and of wider significance. Sidgwick wrote that ‘we hope that no inopportune reverence for obsolete forms, and the letter of the founder’s will, may prevent the utmost being done to make Eton more fit for the glorious work she has undertaken – that of educating the aristocracy of England.’116 Also, in an age with an ever more vigilant and inquiring press, scandals in public schools could not be ignored or hushed up as they had been a generation earlier. Sidgwick called the school ‘a perfect specimen of those “comfortable bodies” which our ruthless reforming age has insisted upon making uncomfortable, where it has not swept them away altogether. They are a useless relic of past ages – a remnant of the monastic life; ideally, a life of self-denying and learned seclusion, actually so often a life of luxurious and unlearned sloth.’

  Gladstone urged Palmerston to launch a new inquiry, along the lines of Newcastle’s, into the conduct of the great schools. On 18 July 1861 the government announced its decision to appoint a Royal Commission to look not just at King Henry VI’s Foundation at Eton, but at eight other leading establishments: Harrow, Charterhouse, Westminster, St Paul’s, Winchester, Rugby, Shrewsbury and Merchant Taylors’. Lord Clarendon, the former Foreign Secretary, was made chairman. This was a useful appointment for Palmerston, since Clarendon deeply disagreed with him and Russell, his Foreign Secretary (who within a fortnight would go to the Lords as Earl Russell), over policy towards Italy, which was about to be unified. While they would have liked to dispense with Clarendon altogether, he was much valued by the Queen and Prince Albert, so finding him an important public position that took him away from foreign affairs was the next best option.