Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters Part 1

Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters.

by W. Carew Hazlitt.

PREFACE.

Although the commencing section has been thrown into the introductory form, it has seemed to me necessary to annex a few lines by way of preface, in order to explain that the following pages do not pretend to deal exhaustively with the subject of which they treat, but offer to public consideration a series of representative types and selected specimens. To have barely enumerated all the authors and works on British education would fill a volume much larger than that in the hands of the reader.

My main object has been to trace the sources and rise of our educational system, and to present a general view of the principles on which the groundwork of this system was laid. So far as I am capable of judging, the narrative will be found to embody a good deal that is new and a good deal that ought to be interesting.

The bias of the volume is literary, not bibliographical; but its production has involved a very considerable amount of research, not only among books which proved serviceable, but among those which yielded me no contribution to my object.

W. C. H.

BARNES COMMON, SURREY, _November 1887_.

SCHOOLS, SCHOOL-BOOKS, AND SCHOOLMASTERS.

I.

Introductory survey of the old system of teaching--Salutary influence of the Church--Education of Englishmen in their own homes and on the Continent--Severity of early discipline--Dr. Busby.

I. A fair body of authentic evidence has been collected, and is here before us, exhibiting and ill.u.s.trating the origin and progress of the educational movement, and the opportunities which our ancestors acquired and improved for mental cultivation and literary development.

An attentive consideration of the ensuing pages may bring us to the conclusion that the English and Scots, at all events, of former days were not ill provided with facilities for mastering the rudiments of learning, and that the qualifications necessary and sufficient for ordinary persons and careers were within the reach of all men, and, as time went on, women, of moderate intelligence and resources.

Moreover, when the taste for a more elaborate and extended system of training, and for a circle of accomplishments, set in with the Stuarts, the appliances of every kind for gratifying and promoting it were superabundant; and London and other cities swarmed with experts, who either attached themselves to academies or worked on their own account, waiting on their clients or receiving them at their own places of business. The youth of family who had pa.s.sed from the grammar-school or the tutor to the University, enjoyed, from the moment when professors began to flock hither from France, Italy, and Germany as to the best market, greatly increased facilities for completing themselves in special departments of science, as well as in such exercises as were thought to belong to gentlemen. As our intercourse with the Continent became more regular and general, its fashions and sentiments were gradually communicated to us, and we began to overcome our old insular prejudices. A familiarity with other languages and literatures than our own, and with the pursuits and amus.e.m.e.nts of countries which a narrow strip of sea separated, was the beneficial consequence of the French and Italian sympathies which the union of the crowns, after the death of the last of the Tudors, introduced into England.

We are scarcely ent.i.tled to plume ourselves on the elevation from which it is our privilege to look back on obsolete educational theories and principles. The change which we witness is of recent date and of political origin. It is within an easily measurable number of years that the democratic wave has loosened and shaken the direct clerical jurisdiction over our schools and our studies. What more significant fact can there be, in proof of the conservative bigotry of those who so long exercised control in schoolroom and college, that a primer compiled in the first quarter of the sixteenth century was still substantially the standard authority less than a hundred years since?

When we regard a History of English Literature, and the works which either const.i.tute its princ.i.p.al strength and glory, or even such as, rather from the circ.u.mstances connected with them than their own intrinsic importance, lend to it a certain incidental or special value, it becomes natural to inquire by what process or course of training the men and women whose names compose the roll of fame became, or were aided at least in becoming, what they were and remain?

As for the women, they followed their studies at home under governesses and professors; and Ballard's volume on Learned Ladies will shew what was capable of accomplishment in a few isolated and conspicuous cases, before any scheme for the higher education of the s.e.x had been broached. But it is with the men that I have more particularly to deal.

Every eminent Englishman who has done more or less to augment and enrich our literary stores, and an infinitely greater number who have adopted other vocations, pa.s.sed of course through the scholastic ordeal. They were sent to school, and perhaps to college; and they had books put into their hands, as our boys have books put into theirs--books written by the scholars of the time up to the knowledge and opinion of the time.

With the fewest exceptions, the boy was the father of the man, and what he had himself acquired he was content to see his children acquire. There were centuries during which the lines of instruction and the scope of culture varied little.

The greater part of our early English teachers came across the sea, or had been educated there; our best books were modelled on those of French or Roman grammarians, and the improvement in our system was due, when it came, to the _gymnasia_ and academies of the Continent.

II. We all know that the Church in early times, before it became a conflicting and mischievous influence, did much valuable work toward the development and progress of literature and art, and was instrumental in preserving many monuments of ancient learning and genius, which might otherwise have perished. But the strong clerical element in the old social system operated beneficially on our English civilisation in another equally important way.

For a vast length of time the schools attached to the monasteries were not only the best, but almost the sole seminaries where an education of the higher cla.s.s could be obtained. They were, in point of fact, the precursors of the similar establishments subsequently attached to some of the colleges; and it is further to be remarked, that, besides the ordinary features of a mediaeval scholastic _curriculum_, they taught music for the sake of keeping a constant succession of candidates for the choir of the chapel. It was through the monks and through an ecclesiastical channel that we derived both our most ancient schools of music and our primitive educational machinery, the two alike destined to become sensible, in course of time, of a potent secular influence, scarcely imaginable by their monastic inst.i.tutors.

Bishop Percy says that the system of instruction appears to have consisted of learning the Psalms, probably by heart, and acquiring the principles of music, singing, arithmetic, and grammar. Some of the boys, he adds, who had made the art of music their profession, a.s.sisted in later life at the religious services on special occasions, while others relinquished their original callings, and sought their fortune as minstrels and instrumental players.

Altogether, it is evident that music and other branches of a liberal training were primarily indebted at the outset, and long subsequently, for their encouragement and diffusion to the only cla.s.s which was at the period capable of undertaking tuition. We have to seek in the Church of the Middle Ages the source of all our scholastic erudition and refinement, and of all the humanising influence which music, in all its forms, has exerted over society.

III. Carlisle, in his well-known work on the Endowed Schools, supplies us with some very desirable facts touching the cathedral inst.i.tutions which preceded the lay seminaries, and over which the bishop of the diocese presided _ex officio_. The pupils in these inst.i.tutions were termed the scholastics of the diocese; and one of the latest survivals of the system was, perhaps, the old St. Paul's, which Colet's endowment eventually superseded. The preponderant element here was, of course, clerical; the boys were, as a rule, educated with a view to ecclesiastical preferment; and those studies which lay outside the requirements of the early Church were naturally omitted. It was a narrow and warping course of discipline, which lasted, nevertheless, from the days of Alfred to the age of the Tudors.

But these cathedral schools themselves had grown out of the antecedent conventual establishments, of which hundreds must have at one time existed among us, and consequently the former represented a forward movement and a certain disposition to relax the severity and exclusiveness of purely religious education. As we see that subsequently it was the practice to attach to a college a preparatory school, as at Magdalen, Oxford, so in the mediaeval time almost every monastic house had its special educational machinery for training aspirants to the various orders. This point does not really come within my immediate scope; but I thought it well to shew briefly how, as the lay schools evolved from the cathedral schools, so the latter were an outcome from the conventual. There seems, however, to have been one marked difference between the monastic or conventual and the cathedral programmes, that in the latter the sciences of law and medicine, having become independent professions, were abandoned in favour of the academies, where youths on quitting school were specially inducted into a knowledge of those Faculties.

Prior to the inst.i.tution of colleges and schools of a better cla.s.s, the n.o.bility and gentry often sent their children to the monasteries and convents to be initiated in the elements or first principles of learning.

The sort of education obtained here must have been of the most meagre character; the course was restricted to grammar, philosophy of the cast then in vogue, and divinity; the cla.s.sics were treated with comparative neglect, and a study of the living languages was still more remote from their design.

Even so late as the Tudor time, those who could afford to send their children abroad found the education better, and probably cheaper; some distinguished Englishmen, driven from their country by political or religious differences, brought up their families whitherever they fled as a matter of necessity.

Sir Thomas Bodley, in the account of his life written by himself in 1609, acquaints us with the fact that when his father was living at Geneva, the great centre of the Protestant refugees, and he was a boy of twelve, he was sufficiently advanced in learning, through his father's care, to attend the lectures delivered at that University in Hebrew, Greek, and divinity, in which last his teachers were Calvin and Beza; and besides these studies he had private tutors in the house of the gentleman with whom he boarded, including Robertus Constantinus, the lexicographer, who read Homer to him. On the return of the Bodleys to England upon the accession of Elizabeth, the member of the family who was destined to immortalise their name was sent to Oxford.

Bishop Waynflete appears to have been among the earliest men who perceived the necessity, at all events, of grounding boys more thoroughly in grammar, and he was the prime mover in the establishment of schools at Waynflete, Brackley, and Oxford, where the Accidence and Syntax were taught on an improved plan. The last-named seminary was within the precincts of Magdalen College, and became by far the most important and most famous of the three, in consequence of its good fortune in having among its masters men like Anniquil and Stanbridge, who took a real interest in their profession, and bred scholars capable of diffusing and developing the love of acquiring knowledge and the art of communicating it.

As Knight observes, grammar was the main object; but then the method was a great advance on the old monastic plan. Even Jesus College, Cambridge, was merely erected and endowed for a master and six fellows, and a certain number of scholars to be instructed in grammar.

At the time of the Civil War, John Allibone, a Buckinghamshire man, and author of that rather well-known Latin description of the University as reformed by the Republicans in 1648, was head-master of Magdalen School.

In the English _Ship of Fools_, 1509, which is a good deal more than a translation, Barclay ridicules the archaic system of teaching, and Skelton does the same in his poetical satires. It was by the indefatigable exposure of the inefficiency and unsoundness of the prevailing modes of instruction that reforms were gradually conceded and accomplished. In all political and social movements the caricaturist plays his part.

It is not surprising to find Ascham in his turn, fifty years later on, taking exception to the school-teaching and teachers which had educated, and more or less satisfied, so many anterior generations.

We naturally encounter in much of the literary work of the seventeenth century advice and information in matters relating to scholastic and academical culture wholly unhelpful to an inquiry into the training of the middle cla.s.s. In the section of a well-known book, ent.i.tled _The Gentleman's Calling_, 8vo, 1660, dedicated to our immediate subject, the anonymous author observes: "Scarce any that owns the name of a _Gentleman_, but will commit his Son to the care of some Tutor, either at home or abroad, who at first instils those Rudiments, proper to their tenderer years, and as Age matures their parts, so advances his Lectures, till he have led them into those s.p.a.cious fields of learning, which will afford them both Exercise and Delight. This is that _Tree of Knowledge_ upon which there is no interdict...."

The preceding extract points to a sphere of life which was wont to conclude its preparatory stage with the Grand Tour and an initiation into the profligacy of all the capitals of Europe; but we see that it deals with a case in which a tutor took a youth almost, as it were, from his nurse's ap.r.o.n-strings, and does not merely indicate a finishing course.

The volume from which the pa.s.sage comes has a promising t.i.tle, and might have been intensely interesting and truly important; but it was written by some dry and pedantic scribbler, and, like Osborne's _Advice to a Son_, 1656, and many other treatises of a cognate character, is a tissue of dulness and inanity. It is characteristic of the whole that portraits of Jeremiah and Zedekiah are selected as appropriate graphic embellishments.

From a woodcut on the back of the t.i.tle-page of a _Grammatica Initialis_, or Elementary Grammar, 1509, we form a conclusion as to the ancient Continental method of instruction. This engraving portrays the interior of a school, apparently situated in a crypt; the master is seated at his desk with a book open before him, and above it a double inkstand and a pen, both of primitive fabric. The teacher is evidently reading aloud to his four scholars, who sit in front of him, a pa.s.sage from the volume, and they repeat after him, parson-and-clerk-wise. They learn by rote. They have no books before them. They represent a stage in the teaching process before the science of reading from print or MS. had been acquired by the scholar, and copies of school-books were multiplied by the press. There was no preparation of work. The quarter wage included no charge for books supplied. The teaching was purely oral. So it was probably throughout. It was thus that Stanbridge, Whittinton, Lily, and their followers conducted their schools, long after the cradle at Magdalen had been reinforced by other seminaries all over the country.

There is no written record of this fashion of communicating information from the master to the pupil, so diametrically opposed to modern ideas, but conformable to an era of general illiteracy; it is a sister-art, which lends us a helping hand in this case by admitting us to what may be viewed as an interior coeval with Erasmus and More.

The modern school-holidays appear to have been formerly unknown. In the rules for the management of St. Paul's and Merchant Taylors', for instance, where a vacation is called a _remedy_, no such indulgence was permitted save in cases of illness; and it is curious that in the account which Fitzstephen gives of the three seminaries already established in London in the reign of Henry II. the boys are represented as spending the holy days (rather than holidays) in logical or rhetorical exercises and disputations.

In all the public schools, indeed, holidays were at first intimately a.s.sociated with the recurrence of saints' anniversaries and with festivals of the Church, and were restricted to them. The modern vacation was not understood; and the first step toward it, and the earliest symptom of a revolt against the absence of any such intervals for diversion from studies and attendance at special services, was an appeal made in 1644 to the Court of the Company by the scholars of Merchant Taylors "for play-days instead of holy-days."

The object of this pet.i.tion was to procure a truce with work and an opportunity for exercise and sport, in lieu of a system under which the boys, from their point of view, merely subst.i.tuted one kind of task for another; but the time had not yet arrived for reform in this matter; our elders clang tenaciously to the stern and monotonous routine which they found established, and in which they had been bred; and the feeling in favour of relaxing the tension by regular intervals of complete repose is an incidence of modern thought, which betrays a tendency at the present moment to gravitate too far to the opposite extreme.

A quite recent report of one of the great schools in the United States--the West Point School--manifests a survival of the old-fashioned ideas upon this subject, carried out by the Pilgrim Fathers to the American Plantations; and whereas in the mother country the original release from work in order to attend religious services has resolved itself into the latter-day vacation or holiday, the modern educational system beyond the Atlantic seems to withdraw the boys from the church, not in favour of the playground or the country, but as a means of lengthening the hours of study.

IV. Ingulphus, who lived in the reign of Edward the Confessor (A.D.