by Simon Heffer
VI
There was an abiding sense after Clarendon that, however many Royal Commissions investigated the question, education would not be improved until the government gave a sufficient lead; and it would not be able to give that lead until it had recognised the need for a proper Ministry of Education, under a dedicated minister. The Committee of the Privy Council that currently disbursed grants was composed of men with other jobs. Lowe ran the Board of Health while speaking on behalf of the Committee; the other members were the Lord President, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the first Lord of the Treasury, the Foreign Secretary, the Lord Privy Seal, the first Lord of the Admiralty and the President of the Poor Law Board.
Such was the workload of these ministers that education, however committed each might be to its cause, could only be an afterthought in their political lives. In 1865 Pakington attempted to have a select committee appointed to discuss whether the time had not come for a better system of overseeing education. He claimed that because of inadequate administration, out of 15,000 parishes in England no fewer than 11,024 received no benefit from the £700,000 or so disbursed as a grant.174 It had been left to extra-governmental forces – notably the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts – to suggest improvements, such as the grouping of rural parishes under the charge of a certificated teacher – to counteract what Pakington called the relative ‘inaction’ of the Committee since 1839.
Lowe, who had resigned in 1863 over a perceived slight to his honour, stressed that the government’s role should be to assist the voluntary system – though it had a duty to ensure the schools it assisted were good enough to merit the help. He felt that the purpose of Newcastle had been to examine whether the Committee of the Privy Council had been adequate. Members of that Committee had been examined, and re-examined, continually: and Lowe felt they had not been found wanting.175 He feared that any bureaucracy such as Pakington wanted would use up funds that could otherwise be spent on schools. Others feared the bureaucracy would have to become localised, to provide proper accountability: and that, too, would be expensive. Yet the Commons had to concede that the present arrangements might not have been equal to the demands of the modern State: Pakington got his select committee, and was made chairman.
However, Clarendon’s recommendations were not finally legislated upon until 1868. The process also included the establishment and deliberations of a select committee, which included three members of Clarendon’s Commission and was chaired by Clarendon himself. He introduced a bill in 1865, but it ran out of parliamentary time. It was reintroduced in a much-amended form in 1866, but was going through at the change of ministry in June 1866. Clarendon, fearing his work would come to nothing, wrote to Gladstone on 8 July to ask him ‘will you give the Public Schools Bill the advantage of your protection in the H of C or, if not, will you ask one of our late colleagues to take charge of it? After the delay that has inevitably occurred I should be sorry to have the Bill postponed for another year, and I don’t think there will be much opposition to it – though we must endeavour to insert the clause empowering the Executive Commissioner to reform the Governing Bodies which Derby by a majority of one struck out in the H of Lds, although he had agreed to it after much consideration in the Select Committee.’176
Another amended bill was introduced in 1867, by the Conservative government and taking, therefore, a less radical line. It, too, was savaged in the summer of 1868 by radical MPs who suspected it did not force sufficient reforms on the finances of Eton and Winchester. It was further amended, though remained the subject of intense criticism, and finally received the Royal Assent in July 1868, the Liberals still complaining that their views had received inadequate consideration. It did, however, start a top-down process of reform of the English secondary education system that not least in terms of curriculum would set an example to the more humble establishments that grew up after Forster’s Act in 1870.
VII
Arnold and Gladstone had come to know each other in 1859, when Gladstone read a pamphlet by him on Italy and sent a note of approval to Longman, his publisher. ‘It is an honour to be read by you,’ Arnold told him, ‘a still greater honour to be read by you with sympathy – the greatest honour of all to be read by you with sympathy when one writes of Italy, for which you yourself, by what you have written, have done so much.’177 He was further grateful in 1864 to Gladstone for sending him a copy of his translation of Homer, and they agreed to meet, not least to discuss the utility of hexameters. Having established this intellectual consonance with so prominent and powerful a politician, Arnold presumed further on their relationship to put into the highest political circles his views on extending high-quality education to the middle classes, and on the need for the State to play a larger role in education than contemporary views would consider acceptable. ‘Meanwhile you must allow me to intrude upon you yet once more, by sending you a book on the Popular Education of France, which I am going to publish in a few weeks . . . if you could find time to give a glance at the introduction, and at one or two of the latter chapters, I should be very glad.’178
Arnold went to France on behalf of Newcastle for several months in 1859 ‘enquiring into the working of the French law of public instruction’, as he had told Gladstone.179 ‘In the last few months,’ he said on 5 August 1859, writing from Dover, ‘I have visited nearly every part of France and seen all classes of society from archbishops and prefects to village schoolmasters and peasants.’ The result of his travels was A French Eton, first published in 1864, which begins with the joke that ‘in that famous seat of learning, a vast sum of money was expended on education, and a beggarly account of empty brains was the result’.180
He sent a copy to Gladstone on 10 June 1864, calling it ‘a little essay upon a subject for which no-one can do so much as yourself – Middle Class Education.’181 Lowe – Arnold’s bête noire – would define the middle classes educationally as those who would never send their children to elementary schools used by the lower classes, but lacked the money to send them to public schools.182 The findings of the Taunton Commission were largely anticipated by Arnold, and, inevitably, exceeded by him. He knew what a pool of talent resided in the middle classes, and a talent moreover often coupled with a drive and energy not always found in the more languid and privileged upper classes. His work can be read as an attack on the official mind in Britain, which he regarded as lacking in perception and intelligence, and certainly in radicalism. He also saw it as tainted by utilitarianism, and undermined by rote-learning. These suppositions, and Arnold’s regular assertions that things were ordered better on the Continent, help explain why he did not enjoy great popularity among the Establishment, and why promotion in the inspectorate was so elusive.
He urged Gladstone to note his suggestions not as Chancellor of the Exchequer, but as MP for Oxford University: ‘I have noticed from time to time what you have said against State interference; but, even though it may be true that the perfect end to reach at last is that individuals should do all things well and rightly for themselves, I cannot but think that before reaching that end, and in order that we may reach it, we in this country shall have to use the State’s help much more freely than we have hitherto done.’ He hoped Gladstone would at least listen to his arguments: and added that ‘in a now twelve years’ acquaintance with British schools all over the country and with their promoters, I have perhaps had more than common opportunities for studying the English middle class and particularly one of its strongest and most characteristic parts, the Protestant dissenters; this, and the reflexions such a study irresistibly awakened, is my excuse for touching a subject which is certainly social and political rather than literary.’
Arnold doubted Eton could teach ‘profound wisdom’, but felt it did teach ‘her aristocratic pupils virtues which are among the best virtues of an aristocracy – freedom from affectation, manliness, a high spirit, simplicity.’183 He hoped this would affect the non-aristocratic pupils, but feared unrealistic expectations: ‘T
o convey to Eton the knowledge that the wine of Champagne does not water the whole earth, and that there are incomes which fall below £5,000 a year, would be a kindness towards a large class of British parents, full of proper pride, but not opulent.’184 Later on, he argued that ‘for the class frequenting Eton, the grand aim of education should be to give them these good things which their birth and rearing are least likely to give them: to give them (besides mere book learning) the notion of a sort of republican fellowship, the practice of a plain life in common, the habit of self-help.’185
This was what the middle classes needed, but Clarendon would not help them. ‘I hope that large class which wants the improvement of secondary instruction in this country – secondary instruction, the great first stage of a liberal education coming between elementary instruction, the instruction in the mother tongue and in the simplest and indispensable branches of knowledge on the one hand, and superior instruction, the instruction given by universities, the second and finishing stage of a liberal education, on the other – will not imagine that the appointment of a Royal Commission to report on nine existing schools can seriously help it to that which it wants.’186 He regretted that the commissioners had felt unable to look further afield for examples, because he felt France had much to teach Britain.
Arnold had noted how the lycée system was organised by the State and funded partly by it and partly by the locality, with small fees paid by the pupils – from £4 8s 4d a year to £7 4s 2d a year. No school could charge even this modest fee without the State inspector’s having approved it as equal to the task for which it was charging. Arnold felt, too, that through exercise and healthcare the physical well-being of the youths he had seen was superior to that of their English counterparts. He admired the curriculum too. This brought him to his big question: ‘Why cannot we have throughout England – as the French have throughout France, as the Germans have throughout Germany, as the Swiss have throughout Switzerland, as the Dutch have throughout Holland – schools where the children of our middle and professional classes may obtain, at the rate of from £20 to £50 a year, if they are boarders, at the rate of from £5 to £15 a year if they are day-scholars, an education of as good quality, with as good guarantees, social character, and advantages for a future career in the world, as the education which French children of the corresponding class can obtain?’187 He conceded there was nothing like Eton in France, and that ‘the English public school produces the finest boys in the world’. However, he added, ‘but then there are only five or six schools in England to produce this specimen-boy; and they cannot produce him cheap. Rugby and Winchester produce him at £120 a year; Eton and Harrow (and the Eton schoolboy is perhaps justly taken as the most perfect type of this highly-extolled class) cannot produce him for much less than £200 a year.’ For £30, Arnold mused, one did not get much quality.
The middle classes, he said, ‘will not pay for their children’s schooling a price quite disproportionate to their means.’188 He derided establishments that advertised ‘educational homes’ for boys of this class at £20 or £30 a year, for those who knew about education knew they were rubbish. They lacked proper supervision and public scrutiny, and had no reputation to lose. ‘The mass of mankind do not so well know what distinguishes good teaching and training from bad; they do not know what they ought to demand, and, therefore, the demand cannot be relied on to give us the right supply. Even if they knew what they ought to demand, they have no means of testing whether or no this is really supplied to them.’189
He said they did things better in France because of the over-arching role of the State there, ‘the organisation of a complete system of secondary schools throughout France, the abundant supply of institutions, with at once respectable guarantees and reasonable charges, fixing a general mean of school-cost which even the most successful private school cannot venture much to exceed.’190 Others – notably Nathaniel Woodard, founder of Lancing and, in time, ten other public schools – had noticed a problem for the middle class: it was more or less the only one for whom some State or charitable provision for education was not made. The destitute had Ragged Schools, the working class church schools; the universities and the great public schools had huge endowments. Woodard had said that ‘the lower middle class [Arnold wondered why he had added the word ‘lower’], politically a very important one, is dependent to a great extent for its education on private desultory enterprise. This class, in this land of education, gets nothing out of the millions given annually for this purpose to every class except themselves.’191 Arnold mocked Woodard for seeking public subscriptions for new schools, asking how this spared the middle classes the mercies of ‘private desultory enterprise’. Only a State system, Arnold felt, would work. Woodard could build schools in Sussex, and good schools they might be: but what could he do for the rest of Britain?
Arnold believed that ‘to the middle class, the grand aim of education should be to give largeness of soul and personal dignity; to the lower class, feeling, gentleness, humanity.’192 Only the State could do this. ‘Education is and must be a matter of public establishment. Other countries have replaced the defective public establishment made by the Middle Ages for their education with a new one which provides for the actual condition of things. We in England keep our old public establishment for education . . . we must not forget to provide for the actual condition of things.’193 He denied having any ‘pet scheme to press’. He was, though, resolutely opposed to the learning-by-rote satirised by Dickens in Hard Times, in Mr M’Choakumchild’s school where Mr Gradgrind’s system is in place; and also in The Water-Babies by Kingsley, who in a reference to Grimes the sweep’s broad Lancashire dialect says it is something ‘whereby you may perceive that Mr Grimes had not been to a properly inspected Government National School’.194 Arnold again voiced his outrage that Lowe’s inspection system was precisely calibrated to measure success in teaching ‘facts’. Within a few years, however, even Lowe would be advocating a liberal education for the middle classes at least, including the study of English literature, French, German and – to discipline the mind – at least one of the physical sciences.195
There was a prejudice that being educated by the State was akin to pauperism. Arnold ridiculed it. ‘Humiliated by receiving help for himself as an individual from himself in his corporate and associated capacity! Help to which his own money, as a tax-payer, contributes, and for which, as a result of the joint energy and intelligence of the whole community in employing its powers, he himself deserves some of the praise! He is no more humiliated by being on the foundation of the Charterhouse or of Winchester, or by holding a scholarship or fellowship at Oxford or Cambridge . . . he is no more humiliated than when he crosses London Bridge, or walks down the King’s Road, or visits the British Museum.’196
This led into a wider discussion of the State: ‘The State mars everything which it touches, say some. It attempts to do things for private people, and private people could do them a great deal better for themselves.’197 He quoted a Times editorial saying that ‘the State can hardly aid education without cramping and warping its growth, and mischievously interfering with the laws of its natural development.’ Arnold argued that the generality of what had to be done required the State to do it; but ‘we can make it our agent, not our master’.198 He said the middle class had done so well precisely because it had kept the State at bay, while securing ‘for itself that centre of character and that moral force which are, I have said, the indispensable basis upon which perfection is to be founded.’199 He would say it again in Culture and Anarchy. This class had been swept up in ‘a widespread mental movement’ indicated by its greater intellectual curiosity and its appetite for reading. ‘Will this movement go on and become fruitful: will it conduct the middle class to a high and commanding pitch of culture and intelligence? That depends on the sensibility which the middle class has for perfection; that depends on its power to transform itself.’200 That, indeed, would be the message of Culture and Anarchy: ‘Es
tote ergo vos perfecti!’
Arnold had high hopes for the ‘transformed’ middle class, ‘raised to a higher and more genial culture.’201 He said that ‘in that great class, strong by its numbers, its energy, its industry, strong by its freedom from frivolity, not by any law of nature prone to immobility of mind, actually at this moment agitated by a spreading ferment of mind . . . what a power there will be, what an element of new life for England! Then let the middle class rule, then let it affirm its own spirit, when it has perfected itself.’ It was up to them to solicit the help of the State for this advancement. The precepts he outlined would underpin the State education system created over the succeeding eighty years.
CHAPTER 13
THE END OF PRIVILEGE: INVENTING THE MERITOCRACY
I
IN THE MID-NINETEENTH century Britain was still held back by the system of appointing men – and it was almost exclusively men – to positions of influence according to their social standing, connections, means and religion rather than on merit. This was true in the state sector especially, not least because the two most glaring examples of this were the higher reaches of the Civil Service, and the officer class in the Army. However, England’s two old universities were also undermined by a form of discrimination, which meant that academic freedom existed only for members of the Established Church. Those who were not members would find higher degrees and senior college and university posts closed to them. At a time when the country needed to harness its talent as much as possible, that was a severe handicap. A rising middle class – especially if it was Nonconformist, had no private means and lacked social clout – would find Whitehall, the Army and the old universities barred to it.
