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IV. The Religious Difficulties of National Education in England, 1800–701

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2011

G. F. A. Best
G. F. A. Best
Affiliation:
Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge
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Extract

The peculiar problems and difficulties in the way of achieving a national system of elementary education in nineteenth-century England have long been so obvious and notorious that a new attempt at an objective and comprehensive view must seem surprising and rash. My excuse for nevertheless making that attempt is not the discovery of any new material, which, even if it were to become available, could hardly alter the well-known outlines of the harrowing tale as told in the standard histories: nor could much be added to the careful sketch made of the Church's contribution by F. Warre Cornish, or the excellent summary of the educational principles in conflict given by W. F. Connell. To the details of these, and of the distillation of them which appears in the best text-books, I can suggest only one positive amendment. But looking at the matter from the sheltered advantage of one who has not to write a detailed thorough book about it, it seems to me that none of the existing books can do the subject justice, for none of them tells the whole story. If such substantial books as have already been written fail to tell the whole story, it is obvious that a brief article will not succeed in doing so, and I can only aim to suggest something which the ideal complete history must not omit. For more than half a century we have been learning that the issues of Church and State in the Middle Ages can never be understood if Church and State are regarded as susceptible of separate histories. To see them thus is to see two things where men at the time saw but one. Similarly, the problems of Victorian public education cannot properly be understood in their multi-dimensional reality if they are split into categories normal, perhaps, for our own time, but strange to theirs.

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Articles
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Cambridge Historical Journal , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , 1956 , pp. 155 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1956

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References

2 E.g. Adamson, J. W., English Education, 1789–1902 (Cambridge, 1930)Google Scholar; Barnard, H. C., Short History of English Education, 1760–1944 (London, 1947)Google Scholar; Smith, Frank, History of English Elementary Education, 1760–1902 (London, 1931)Google Scholar; Cornish, F. Warre, The English Church in the 19th Century, 2 vols. (London, 1910)Google Scholar; Connell, W. F., The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold (London, 1950).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 I.e., that up to 1870 the religious difficulty was much more really religious (so far as one can tell which of the ever-mingled political and religious attitudes predominated) than was the animosity between the Church and the Dissenters. After Forster's Act the opposition of Church to Dissent in the educational field became more straight-forward.

4 Thus, in the debates on Forster's Bill, Henry Richard's proposals for entirely freeing public money from all connexion with religious teaching were justified by the Education League's chief spokesman George Dixon as promising children ‘an education that would be really sounder and more truly religious’ than any promised by more ostentatiously religious systems 23 June 1870, Hansard 3/CCII p 800

5 Kay, Joseph, The Education of the Poor in England and Europe (London, 1846)Google Scholar and The Social Condition and Education of the People in England and Europe (London, 1850), vol II.Google Scholar

6 Laing, Samuel, Notes of a Traveller on the Social and Political State of France, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy, etc (London, 1842), chs 4–19 passimGoogle Scholar

7 R K. Webb shows just how much and how little should be made of the figures (the ‘moral statistics’, as Martineau, Harriet called them) in his excellent book The British Working Class Reader (London, 1955) which summarises his earlier conclusions on literacy in England and Scotland.Google Scholar

8 Cf. Hook, W. F., [On the Means of rendering more efficient the Education of the People—a] Letter to the Bishop of St Davids (London, 1846Google Scholar) and Baines, Edward jr, Letters to Lord John Russell (London and Leeds, 1846).Google Scholar

9 Letter to the Bishop of St Davids, p. 5.

10 Van Mildert, William, Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Llandaff (Oxford, 1821).Google Scholar

11 Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, no. II. Mr Noel Annan kindly helped me to locate this striking remark.

12 Four Periods of Public Education (London, 1862), passim.Google Scholar

13 A useful sketch of such proposals for State management is given by Jennings, H. G., The Political Theory of State-Supported Elementary Education in England, 1750–1833 (Lincoln, Pa., 1928).Google Scholar

14 Lives of the Bishops of Bath and Wells (London, 1829), 11, pp. 222ff.Google Scholar

15 Jones, M. G., The Charity School Movement (Cambridge, 1938)Google Scholar; R. K. Webb, op. cit.; Mrs Trimmer, , A Comparative View of the New Plan of Education…and of the System of Instruction founded by our pious Forefathers… (London, 1805), answered by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review, vol. IX, 1806.Google Scholar

16 The Trustees who took over from Lancaster in 1808 held their first public meeting in 1811, and their Society was called a number of things (including The Institution for Promoting the British System for the Education of the Labouring and Manufacturing Classes of Society of every Religious Persuasion) before it settled down as the B. and F.S.S. in 1814.

17 The attack on the Lancasterians was well-advanced by 1811 and had been answered, for instance, by Fox's, JosephA Scriptural Education the Glory of England; being a Defence of the Lancasterian Plan of Education and the Bible Society in answer to the late publications of C. Daubeny, Dr Wordsworth [the poet's clerical brother Christopher], Dr Spry, &c. (London, 1810).Google Scholar

18 Cf. R. and Southey, C. C., Life of Andrew Bell (London, 1844), n, pp. 316–64;Google ScholarChurton, E., Memoir of Joshua Watson (Oxford, 1861), I, pp. 102–32.Google Scholar

19 I hope soon to elaborate these remarks in a study of Church and State in early nineteenth century England.

20 15 May 1818, Hansard, XXXVIII, p. 710

21 Letter to William Smith, Esquire, M P. (London, 1817).Google Scholar

22 High Churchmen especially believed in t h e virtue of Church societies for national ends: thus their demand for t he State's exclusive recognition of the National Society, the S P.C.K. and the S.P.G (which in fact enjoyed such recognition in colonial affairs), and t he Church Building Society But this notion of t he quasi-constitutional function of voluntary bodies was very widespread. The Irish Protestants and their English sympathizers, for example, could not understand why Government looked at their Orange and Brunswick Associations in the same light as the Roman Catholic Association, which did not, in their opinion, claim to maintain the constitution.

23 Benthamite radicals, disestablishmentarians and anti-clericals of course thought differently Their almost fanatical insistence on centralization led them not only to overlook the virtues of the Societies but also to a peculiar form of misrepresentation of the actual scale on which schools were provided To say, as Adams, Francis, the Secretary of the National Education League, said in his bitter History of the Elementary School Contest (London, 1882), that Parliament's expenditure of £20,000 in 1833 was shameful when set beside Prussia's £600,000, was simply to confuse form with substance and conveniently to forget the immense sums poured annually by private benevolence into educational work. Mrs Fawcett and Sir William Molesworth were quoted approvingly by Dicey for doing the same—see his Law and Public Opinion, (2nd ed.) p 46.Google Scholar

24 Earlier interferences with education, by the less direct means of Factory Acts, Apprentice Laws, Poor Laws, etc, are listed by de Montmorency, J E.G., State Intervention in English Education (Cambridge, 1902).Google Scholar

25 A similar system was also tried out in the municipal schools reformed by the reformed Liverpool Corporation in 1835. Denominational enmities, above all No Popery, soon wrecked it. See White, B. D., History of the Corporation of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1951), pp. 21–3.Google Scholar

26 In 1825, for instance, the Protestant Charter Schools got £17,000; the Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland (alias the Kildare Place Society), £14,000; the Association for Discountenancing Vice, £8385; and the Lord Lieutenant's Discretionary Fund, £7000.

27 The astonishing activity of these years was the more remarkable in that no such boards had been founded since 1811 (Durham) and 1813 (Norwich, Leicester, Northampton, and York). See the Newcastle Commissioners’ Report (London, 1861), pp. 18 ff. and 575–6.

28 12 Feb. 1839, Hansard 3/XLV, p. 309.

29 Blomfield and Phillpotts in the Lords’ debate of 5 July 1839, and Inglis in those of 12 Feb. and 20 June 1839. Many Churchmen denied that anyone in the Church held such an extreme view (e.g. Ashley on 14 June, Gladstone on 20 June, Peel and Stanley on 4 and 14 June respectively), but they were certainly mistaken, if they were not simply being politic.

30 28 May 1839. Much of his speech is given in Biber, G. E., Bishop Blomfield and his Times (London, 1857), pp. 245 ff.Google Scholar

31 E.g. Sumner, G. H., Life of Charles Richard Sumner (London, 1876), pp. 261 ff.Google Scholar

32 The Committee of Council's Minutes were promulgated as its regulations and accordingly became the national code of education, such as it was. Kay-Shuttleworth was the all-powerful Secretary, Lansdowne the first President. This first difficulty between the Committee and the National Society was over the appointment of Inspectors. See Lansdowne and Howley, 16 July 1840, Hansard, 3/LV, pp. 753–4, and Sandon, ibid. p. 978.

33 The most important being the Congregational Board of Education in 1843.

34 Colchester's, LordDiary and Correspondence (London, 1861), II, pp. 352–94 passim, andGoogle Scholar the Southeys’ Life of Bell, II, pp. 406 ff.

35 The Congregationalist Voluntarists’ views were put forward most vigorously by Baines and in the 1848 Crosby Hall Lectures. By 1870 both Baines and Miall had become State interventionists.

36 E.g. Sir John Pakington, Gladstone and John Walter, in the June debates of 1870.

37 Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Lincoln (London, 1849).Google Scholar

38 As the flood of useful knowledge continued to rise after the Reform Bill, and the inquiries into the conditions of factory and slum life revealed the prevalence of many causes of death, disease and suffering which could be remedied by even small amounts of thought and knowledge, the case for the ‘secular’ parts of education became stronger. It rested on the not unreasonable proposition, that cleanliness, though admittedly next to godliness, could be learnt without it.

39 The Utilitarian test of legislation is the most conspicuous example of going by material ‘results’. In the field of education one might instance the movement for diffusing useful knowledge and that ‘civilizing’ of the masses—their acquisition of fundamental notions of cleanliness, literacy, social behaviour, etc.—which Lowndes, G. A. N. describes as the great achievement of the national system after 1870 (The Silent Social Revolution (Oxford, 1937)).Google Scholar

40 30 March 1829, Hansard, n.s./xix, pp. 1608–9. ‘No, Sir,’ he had said in 1828, ‘differences must always exist, and the removal of the present matter of grievance will only bring the discontent one step nearer. I therefore prefer that the contest shall still continue about the outworks, and that we should not surrender them, because I am too sure that, in that case, we should have to fight for the citadel.’ Hansard, n.s./XVIII, p. 715.

41 (2nd edn. 1878), p. 73. He neverceased to avow his Protestant Christianity and the absolute necessity of a religious education. Denominational equality was evidently his chief dogma, while his Christianity was dogmatically undogmatic.

42 Russell emphasized this when he introduced the Committee of Council to the Commons on 12 Feb. 1839, Hansard, 3/XLV, pp. 273 ff, esp. p. 280. He said that the Government proposed to entrust the management of its plan to a committee ‘not from any one religious body or sect, or from members of various sects, but from the official servants of the crown’; as if their official position and responsibilities made their religion a matter of indifference. This was a good Whig position, rather like Macaulay's when, contesting Leeds in 1833, he refused to tell a Methodist questioner more about his religion than that he was a Christian.

43 ‘General: Religion to be combined with the whole matter in instruction, and to regulate the entire system of discipline. Special: Periods to be set apart for such peculiar doctrinal instruction as may be required for the religious training of the children.’

44 According to Lansdowne himself, 19 April 1847, Hansard, 3/XCI, p. 942.

45 Letter to the Wesleyan Conference Committee of Privileges and Education, 7 April 1847, printed in the Explanatory Minute of 28 June 1847. Parliamentary Papers (1847), XLV, P. 13.

46 An instance of what was understood by such principles may be quoted from the published Basis of the National Public School Association, 1851: ‘…a strict regard to truth; justice, kindness, and forbearance in our intercourse with our fellow creatures; temperance, industry, frugality, and all other virtues conducive to the right ordering of practical conduct in the affairs of life.’ The Scheme of Secular Education proposed by the N.P.S.A. compared with the Manchester and Salford Boroughs Education Bill (London and Manchester, 1851), p. 32.

47 21 June 1870, Hansard, 3/CCII, pp. 629, 631–2.

48 Local observers took a different view of the phenomena from the party orators. The Manchester and Salford Education Aid Society reported in 1806 that ‘the lamentable indifference on the part of parents to their children's early training is accounted for by the utter absence of education among the parents themselves, especially amongst the mothers, whose influence at home is paramount’. Cited by Maltby, S. E., Manchester and the Movement for National Elementary Education, 1800–1870 (Manchester, 1918), p. 99.Google Scholar

49 Article on Warburton, William in Typical English Churchmen, ed. by Collins, W. E. (London, 1902), p. 218.Google Scholar

50 Witness the confusion about the League's and the Dissenters’ objectives (not for the first time) in the debates of 1870, and the divisions in the League admitted by Adams, op. cit.pp. 202 ff.

51 It may be recalled that the Huddersfield Short Time Committee's circular in October 1831 stigmatized child labour in factories as ‘a shame and a disgrace… in a Land emphatically called the Land of Bibles…’ Driver, C., Tory Radical (New York, 1946), p. 102.Google Scholar

52 See e.g. his letter to John Bright, 25 Nov. 1871, in D. C. Lathbury, Gladstone's Correspondence on Church and Religion (London, 1910), II, p. 144.

53 Speech at Leeds, 27 Jan. 1870, in Macdonell, J. C., Life and Correspondence of William Magee (London, 1896), I, pp. 157ff.Google Scholar