Education and the War
Part V of ‘England in Arms’
By W. Lacey Amy
From The
Canadian Magazine, September 1917.
Digitized by Doug Frizzle, July 2016.
You may upset a nation’s
electoral system, revolutionize its labour principles, inaugurate a new
standard of health—you may even alter its morals and reorganize its methods of
trade—without a complete
picture of national regeneration. But when the functions and direction of
education are disturbed it is safe to conclude that the nation is stirred to
its depths. And all these changes, even
the last, the war has introduced into Great Britain.
Naturally
such a creature of tradition has shifted its ground with a measure of apology,
of denial even of that which it was in the very act of doing, but it has,
nevertheless, accepted the lessons of experience and set about ordering its
house. It is not the manner in which one works that counts, but the quantity
one does. “If anyone doubted the value of our elementary schools,” said Mr. H.
A. L. Fisher, the new Minister of Education, in his memorable announcement of
educational reform to the British House of Commons, “that doubt must have been
dispelled by the experience of the war.” And thereupon he proceeds to pull the
system to pieces and to build from the ruins a new structure that will prepare
the nation still more efficiently for the next war as well as for peace.
Great
Britain, even before the war, was beginning to question her system of education
as a complete equipment for modern commerce and competition. But with the
first few months of the great struggle her gaze became focused on outstanding
faults that were looming larger and larger with the ups and downs of the armies
in Flanders. Something was wrong. The British soldier was as firm a bulwark as
ever, but that which stood behind the perishable flesh and blood of the
trenches was not fulfilling its part. German preparedness was demonstrating to
a nation which had always had reason for pride that loyalty, a record for
unconquerableness, selfconfidence, and determination were poor obstacles to
the inventions of modern warfare. As Mr. Fisher put it: Great Britain was
discovering that “the capital of this country is not merely cash and goods, but
brains and body”. “There is something in your d— board school education after
all,” a ship commander, glorying in the service of his men wrote him. But both
Mr. Fisher and the House that listened knew the compliment was but an
introduction to a practical expression of national dissatisfaction.
“One
might have imagined,” said the Minister, “that the war would have so occupied
and exhausted the mind of the country as to leave room
for no other thought. But is has had quite the opposite
effect. Quite naturally, and as it seems to me quite rightly, this great
calamity has directed attention to every circumstance which may bear upon our
national strength and national welfare. It has exhibited the full range of our
deficiency, and it has invited us to take stock of all the available agencies
for their improvement.” After such a confession of weakness, the most intolerant
critic of the old educational system is content to await that firm stand for
reform which is characteristic of the British nation when it sees its mistake.
The
English educational system laboured under several disadvantages. First of all,
in characteristic fashion, it was constructed like its castles— with an eye to
its permanency. It is the British habit to build for all time. But if anything
has been revealed by modern progress it is the superior value of adaptability
to permanence.
It may seem treason to fly in the face of the
hitherto much-quoted tribute of Sir Joshua Fitch to the English system of
education. “The public provision for the education of the people of England is
not the product of any theory or plan formulated beforehand by statesmen or
philosophers; it has come into existence through a long course of experiments,
compromises, traditions, successes, failures and religious controversies. . . .
It has been affected . . . only to a small degree by legislation. The genius—or
rather characteristic habit—of the English people is averse to the
philosophical system, and is disposed to regard education, not as a science,
but as a body of experiments to be discovered empirically and amended from
time to time as occasion may require.” But the new Minister of Education—and he
is the first practical educationist in the forty-seven years of compulsory education
who has filled the important post of Minister of Education—took issue, and the
applause of the country proved that he shocked no sensitive susceptibilities in
so doing. “More grant.” he announced, “will be paid to an authority which
believes in flesh and blood than an authority which puts its trust in bricks
and mortar.” And the House cheered as much at the suggestion of symbolism as at
the reforms outlined.
The
history of British educational legislation is so closely entangled with another
of education’s drags that it seems to demand attention here. In a country where
Church and State have never been dissociated it
was certain that the most
influential institution should be demanded by the Church as its prerogative.
And the struggle of the Church to maintain its hold has written a record of
educational progress in Great Britain which is not a proud one.
The
first state education came in 1832, when treasury grants were given in aid of
elementary schools. Naturally at that time the early influences were religious
rather than economic. It is in this condition, continuing through the decades since,
that lay the strong foundation on which classicism stands, the dead languages
being the door to theological learning of that period. Also, being controlled
by the theologists. education, from the earliest days, was not conceived as a
right to the masses, but as a privilege to those who might increase its power
as well as be increased thereby. The baneful influence of the Church was
evident in the long struggle that was fought out by old educationists concerning
the basis of education. The Grammar School Act of 1840 attempted to improve
elementary education without that subservience to its classical branches which
had been considered its very essence, but the Church resisted the application
of ancient endownments to schools not under its control. Up to the time of the
Endowed Schools Act of 1869-1874 educational endowments, unless there was
evidence to the contrary, were considered to imply instruction in the doctrines
of the Church of England. In 1870 a form of compulsory education was introduced,
but not until six years later did Disraeli make compulsion complete. In 1902,
the time of the last real change in the educational system and the only one
with evidences of permanency—in
the light of later years—the
pressure of the Established and Roman Catholic Churches for equal treatment
with the voluntary and board schools brought about the abolition of the
parochial school board and made county councils the local authorities. Two
attempts to separate education from Church control were made, in 1906 and 1908,
but both failed, the offer of the Government for the Church properties and
endowments in the latter year not being considered sufficient.
The
danger of Church control is its narrowness, its concern as much for its
authority and influence as for the efficiency of its system. But times have
changed. No flagrant deficiency, in Church or State, can long survive the
opening eyes of the masses.
The
third unfortunate influence on education in England is the snobbery of class.
Even to-day there is the unexpressed theory that education, in its more
advanced stages at least, is not for the common people. It can be taken for
granted that every system in England is somewhat under the blot of the
existing traditions of class distinctions. The war is overthrowing them in
every phase of life, but the instincts are there, even in the proletariat
itself. One has only to look at the general system of education to see it at
its worst. Elementary education of the masses is conducted at what are called
board schools. In a general way they correspond to the public schools of Canada.
But they are handicapped by this essential difference—that they are not public
schools in the sense which implies the patronage of the general public. In
practice they are confined to the lower grades of society. To attend a board
school, especially in the cities, is to be socially degraded.
Everyone
who can afford it sends his children to
private or public schools. The latter are in no sense public. Entrance is as
firmly based on certain unalterable rules—and
they have nothing to do with intellectual attainment—as
is admission to the universities. A certain standard of wealth is evidenced by
the ability to pay the fees demanded, and the boy’s outfit is more precisely
defined than the requirements of a girl in a
ladies’ college in Canada. Indeed, some social status is a
necessity in many of the public schools of England, although the depletion of
students resulting from the war is putting an end to that in the most effective
manner.
Accordingly
the system in public schools has followed a readily conceivable channel.
Denoting in its initial stages a certain plane for the
student, in wealth and often in society, the public school
is conducted to further develop an estimate of life’s responsibilities
consistent with such an inception. In this I
would not be misunderstood.
There is nothing finer than the real English gentleman, but there is no
Englishman, gentleman or not, whose outlook on life is not coloured by
generations of training in exaggerated significances of social levels. The
public school does not produce the snob so much as it produces those who
appreciate class distinctions without permitting it to make them deliberately
offensive. Its aim is to produce a
“gentleman”, that peculiar embodiment of virtues which, un-Canadian as it is in
some of its opinions, is of a much finer clay than that which comes under the usual
English designation, “gentleman”.
To
put it more affirmatively: The English public school, while it sends out a
grand type of youth, handicaps him in the outside world by developing certain
sides of him which are apt to neglect modern essentials and foreign opinions.
It goes in for sports as
a feature of the curriculum, a mark of the gentleman. It lays such stress on
“sportsmanship” that war with the Hun, for instance, is a more perilous and
costly operation than it need be. It adheres to certain lines of education in
the face of the daily revelation of their inadequacy. It strengthens the
disastrous conviction that tradition is the standard of excellence. It narrows
even while it makes more indulgent. It builds up a fine fellow at the expense
of his future in the world’s competition. And yet the public school boy is
imbued with so much of the best that is in the word British that, can he but
forget some of his indirect training, he becomes the world-citizen who has
built up the British Empire. When he fails there is nothing more intolerable.
Remove the stain of the principle behind the public school, and the public
school—barring one or two details—is beyond criticism.
An
example of the parental attitude indirectly encouraged by the public school is
afforded by a letter from a father recently read in public by a headmaster who
was much impressed with the spirit of snobbery in its reds, but failed to sense
it in its grays. “I wonder if I might ask your co-operation in regard to my
son,” it pleaded. “The boy’s extraordinary likeing for what I regard as the
most repulsive branch of natural history—newts, beetles, and insects—is a
source of much disappointment to his mother and me. Can you, either directly or
indirectly, turn his mind to a higher and more refined branch of the subject—birds,
trees, flowers I cannot help feeling that the tendency of the present study is
degrading.” It was the wail of a parent who was frank enough to acknowledge
that public school as the propagation bed for caste education.
Public
schools—there are 110 of them, with 35,000 students—are, of course, not
officially recognized, although thirty-four of them receive grants and
thirty-six are inspected.
In
their upper grades they come under the general educational classification of
secondary schools. And it is officially and popularly admitted that in
secondary school education Great Britain has failed dismally, not alone in the
snobbery it is inclined to encourage, but in the low educational standing of
its teachers. Mr. Fisher declares that, in no other country is there such a
proportion of secondary school teachers without a university degree. This is
largely due to the small salaries paid. There are, it is well known, a
comparatively small number of public schools whose standing cannot be
questioned, but being out of Government control the majority have developed
methods and standards of efficiency not conducive of the best results.
The
secondary schools, whether official or private, failed, too, because of the
multiplicity and lack of uniformity in their examinations. There are more than
a hundred examinations demanded by the different callings and professions for
which education directly prepares a boy. In every way there was discouragement
for the lad forced to consider advanced education as a means to a livelihood.
Thus there are three times as many pupils between the ages of fourteen and
eighteen receiving systematized education in France as in England, and in
Prussia six times as many.
In
the universities conditions were not so bad, but still unsatisfactory. England
has taken to itself great credit for the remarkable response of its
universities to the call to arms. It is a fact that the great Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge are almost empty, their examination rooms given over as
hospitals, their laboratories to the inventions of war. But if the higher
development of a nation’s education does not breed patriots sad indeed is the
lot of that nation. If education does not teach the true place of loyalty to
one’s country it has missed its greatest mental stimulation. It is to its
universities—to its more intelligent classes—that
any country must look for its salvation.
But
the older universities of
England had fallen into the national
habit of conservatism, of
settled lines of learning
too slow to adapt themselves to
the requirements of modern progress.
This was especially evident in the
prominence of classics at the expense of science and moderns, and
what has come to be called the
humanities. Based on
the past, on the English
reluctance to change, young men entirely unsuited for
classical education, others to whom such
training could be of
too little value
to merit its grind and time, were forced to
devote themselves to Greek and Latin, when any
modern language would have
assisted materially in fitting them
for the struggle of life ahead. And
science was comparatively neglected. This light attention to science has
exacted its penalty during these
grim days. While the German was
directing his perverted,
but well-trained, mind to
the production of the engines of war,
Great Britain was forced to rely for
counter-attack and protection upon
those acute individual brains which
have been the foundation of
Britain’s position in science, including its medical
branch. Until the misdirected brains of the country could
be switched from that form of development which tended only
to the effective in oratory and literature, in abstruse dissertation and
“intellectualism”, the interests of the warring nation were subject to the
attainments of those who had rebelled against a standard mould for the
Englishman.
To
be sure there had often struggled to the light rebellion against an unworthy
appraisal of science, but the disadvantages of such a campaign are that its
backers are obviously revolutionists, and their uncultivated weapon of
publicity is dull compared with that wielded by those whose accomplishments
are verbal, not practical. In 1889 the Technical Instruction Act supported
technical or manual instruction, and a Department of Science
and Art promised good results. But the Board of Education Act of ten years
later swallowed up the new Department. And science became a study without
direct usefulness, since it was insufficiently developed to
adapt it to the needs of industry. Through mal-nutrition,
too, even when it was productive it
failed to meet the educated Englishman’s
demand for intellectual stimulus. And in English industrial life there was
small reward for the scientist, a
good works chemist before the war
receiving a paltry six hundred dollars.
But
protest and warning were coming from many sides. A number of new universities—Leeds,
Manchester, Liverpool, and latterly,
Bristol—had sprung up to cater
to the crying need for a more
practical education. Even Oxford was looking about for some plan of organized
training in science that might be accepted
as in conformity with its high standards. The universities were pricked into
introspection by the clamour of the large
industries that faced the competition of the outside world. Reverent as these
industrial firms were towards the English university—their
heads were usually university educated —
they were the immediate
sufferers from its inherent weaknesses. The head of one
of the largest ship-building firms declared
the other day that he preferred
the university man in his works,
but “when I go up
to Oxford to look round I do
not pick the fellow who has
been first in Greek and first in History, but the
fellow who would have
been first if he had worked”. It was
a subtle pronouncement against the
final aim of Oxford education, while
applauding its general influence.
He wanted the man with the Oxford
brain, but not with the Oxford
honours—might I say, ideals.
Several
organizations were at work to
introduce remedies. The Educational
Reform Council intelligently attacked the administration. The Association of
Directors and Secretaries for Education urged a number of reforms
for continuation schools, pointing out the advantages of compulsory education
for a limited number of hours a week for young people between fourteen and
eighteen, whether in employment or not. The Oxford Association for the
Improvement of National Education, the Departmental Committee on Juvenile
Education, and the London Education Committee were striving for improvement.
But
the most effective spur to reform came from the Workers’ Educational
Association. Mr. Fisher admitted that “our popular system of education is
popular in one sense only”. He saw that the schools of the people had not
behind them the support of the working classes. The activity of opposition
from the working classes came as a war result. Higher wages were bringing
higher aims, a clearer perception of the possibilities of improved status. The
workingman was ceasing to accept the doctrine that higher education should be
reserved for the upper classes. And the Workers’ Educational Association
represented this movement, one of the most important, Mr. Fisher admitted, for
the promotion of higher education among the workers. It ridiculed as entirely
inadequate the eight hours a week suggested by the Departmental Committee,
claiming that the hours of labour should be limited and the hours of education
the real consideration.
The
small salaries for teachers was an active issue even before the war, but with
the increased cost of living and the growing demand for reformed education the
teachers took a firm stand. In London they even went on strike against the
miserly pittance allowed them as a war bonus.
The
scale of salary of the English teacher reads like the record of Quebec
Province a few years ago. In England and Wales there are 160,000 teachers, of
whom 60,000 are uncertificated and 40,000 without training college experience;
and almost none of them have university education.
Five
certificated masters—two
of them head-masters—and
219 certificated mistresses received less than $250
a year, twenty thousand (certificated) less than $375.
A headmaster. after
thirty years, had improved his pay
from $435 to $480, another in forty years from $350 to $475.
In one school in a large English county nine teachers (all
in the school) receive less than the
caretaker. The average salary for a certificated head-master
is $880. for a certificated assistant
$645. and for an uncertificated teacher
$340. And women receive only
two-thirds those amounts. In many
counties the maximum salary
for a certain
grade of head-master is $15 a
week; and the average salary
for an uncertificated assistant
is $325 for men and $280 for
women. Yet the war bonus, with food one hundred per cent,
higher, was sometimes as low
as twenty cents
a week.
Into
conditions like these there was projected
the first educationist to
hold the Ministerial position;
and in his choice Lloyd George
made one of his many demonstrations
of irreverence for tradition. Mr.
Fisher knew the state of affairs from
practical experience. Better still, he was uninfluenced
by political or personal considerations.
Starting with what he knew himself,
he sought only what affected education. And
he found it out. The result
is educational reform that would never have come from
the most honest politician
such as those who have hitherto invariably filled the Cabinet
positions.
Elementary
education he first stroked,
then admitted its deficiencies
by granting an additional $17,000,000, chiefly as teachers’
salaries. “An embittered teacher is a social danger,” he declared. And the
extra money is to be allotted by inverse ratio
to the wealth of the district.
Secondary
schools, “which are the key of the situation,” are favoured with an extra two
million dollars, the principal objects being higher salaries. more teachers,
and encouragement for advanced courses. A strenuous effort is
to be made, too, to drive out the caste system, so that “the son of the
manufacturer, the son of the foreman, and the son of the workman should be
educated side by side”. Five years ago such a principle would have been killed
at birth. For this purpose well-to-do parents are to pay for their children,
while the Government comes to the assistance of the poor. The multiplicity of
examinations is to be modified, although already a concerted attack has been
made by narrow head-masters of some of the smaller private and public schools,
who fear that candidates from uncontrolled schools might be discriminated
against. This simplification of examination has been placed in the hands of a
committee of eighteen, composed equally of elementary and higher education
representatives.
A
pension scheme for teachers is proposed.
Little
has been done with the university system as yet, although action promises in
the not distant future. Probably the Minister considered that he was
undertaking a sufficiently large proposition for the present in reorganizing
the less advanced forms of education. His tendencies with regard to the
universities were expressed in a demand for “ample provision for the
prosecution of free and independent post-graduate courses, and also for
scholarships in science, technology, and modern languages”. His attack on
tradition consisted of a desire “that every child in this country should
receive the form of education most adapted to fashion its qualities for the
highest uses”. He contended, too, for greater unity in the universities.
Without
the war education in England would have proceeded along the old lines until
the dire straits of inability to compete forced a change. While the record in
England of the years immediately preceding the war showed a waning commerce in
the markets of the world, only the very fight for existence revealed to the
nation some of its weaknesses. To be forced for two years and a half to its
limit merely to meet the war inventions of the enemy, without freedom to
develop its own originality, has been gall and wormwood to the Briton. To look
about him and see the ordinary conveniences of life missing because their
supply had crept into the hands of practical Germany while England was
advancing eagerly in philosophical and philological directions has opened the
eyes of the nation to something lacking.
Therefore,
when the new Minister proposed a drastic alteration in the very foundations of
national life, instead of the customary outcry from the admirers and
convention, Mr. Fisher is met with eager support. Education in England is being
democratized, as is everything else. And therein lies the future of the
Empire.
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