Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters Part 11

This was an unusually liberal choice, and the Academy was evidently one designed more particularly for the children of n.o.ble or wealthy people. He adds:--

"Or any young Gentleman design'd for Travel, there are persons of several Nations fit to instruct him in any Language.

"Likewise any one that hath a desire to have any New Songs or Tunes, may be furnish'd by the same Person that serves his Majesty in the same Imployment."

This is altogether worth attention. It is a pity that we cannot arrive at the name or locality of the college where all these advantages and temptations (in the way of buying your Songs of the King's own purveyor) were held out to the aspiring gentry of two centuries ago.

IV. In all the great provincial centres there were, of course, educational inst.i.tutes supported by local or royal endowment; and in all these the method of teaching and general policy followed that pursued in the metropolis, except that, as we shall presently see, some of the establishments in the country trod in the footsteps of the Academy just described more promptly and more cordially than St. Paul's or Merchant Taylors', which modified their const.i.tutions only to save themselves from ruin.

Of the seventeenth-century school at Manchester we gain an accidental glimpse and notion from the _Delectus of Latin Phrases_ which was prepared for use there by a former scholar, Thomas Bracebridge. It is a MS. volume of no interest or moment, unless it is locally and personally regarded; but one is apt to cherish every added fraction of light as to the state of education in the Midlands in former days; and this _Delectus_ carries us back precisely to the Restoration, so far as its mere date is concerned, but furnishes a fair idea of the sort of phrase-book which a Manchester teacher of 1660 thought suitable for the boys of his old school.

In Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson and schoolmaster, Shakespear has not improbably preserved to us some fragmentary reminiscences of his own school-days at Stratford. The probation through which William Page is put by Sir Hugh at his mother's instance might very well be a literal or close transcript from actual experience. With what mingled feelings the poet must have contemplated a cla.s.s of men to whom such minds as his have ever owed so little!

Both Sir Hugh and the Reverend Doctor Primrose may be accepted as provincial types of the clerical preceptor, as they seemed to two excellent observers in their respective centuries. We easily remark the difference between them and such a creation as Holofernes.

The course of studies followed in the rural districts of England at a later period is ill.u.s.trated by a letter from Hazlitt, the essayist, to his elder brother, the miniature-painter, when the former was attending a school at Wem in Shropshire in 1788. He was at that time ten years old.

After stating that he had been learning to draw, he proceeds:--"Next Monday I shall begin to read Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ and Eutropius.... I began to cypher a fortnight after Christmas, and shall go into the rule of three next week.... I shall go through the whole cyphering book this summer, and then I am to learn Euclid. We go to school at nine every morning. Three boys begin by reading the Bible. Then I and two others show our exercises. We then read the Speaker [by Enfield]. Then we all set about our lessons.... At eleven we write and cypher. In the afternoon we stand for places at spelling, and I am almost always first.... I shall go to dancing this month."

The glimpse which we here obtain of a small private seminary in a Shropshire village a hundred years ago affords a not unfavourable notion of the standard of provincial education. From another letter of Hazlitt a little later on (1790) it appears that the celebrated Dr. Lempriere, whose name the lad transformed into Dolounghpryee, was a visitor at the school; but he had not yet produced his Dictionary, of which the first edition was in 1792. It was still in use at Merchant Taylors' in 1850.

The proprietary establishments for boys, which spread themselves by degrees over the land, formed a valuable succedaneum to the Edward and other endowed schools, and useful nurseries for pupils who aimed at more than elementary learning. But they at the same time proved a source of emulation and material improvement; and during the last fifty years the distance between the two systems has sensibly decreased.

The great charities and other ancient foundations like St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors', Eton, Harrow, have only maintained their relative superiority by reforming and extending their prospectus; and there is scarcely a country town at the present moment without one or more private seminaries, where a better education is given than was within the reach of our grandfathers at any of the large public schools of the metropolis.

Even in the time of Carlisle, who wrote in 1818, some of the princ.i.p.al inst.i.tutions in the provinces were treading closely on the heels of Christ's Hospital and other endowments, and one or two, as at Dorchester, at Abingdon, and at Witton near Chester, seem to have been on a more liberal and enlightened footing.

XII.

Educational condition of SCOTLAND--Beneficial influence of Knox and his supporters--Buchanan and other early writers on grammar--Thomas Ruddiman and his important contribution to the spread of elementary teaching--Decline of culture during the Civil War.

I. When we turn to Scotland, we find the compendium of the Grammar of aelius Donatus, of which I have already furnished some account, in use there from time almost immemorial. It appears that the Scotish seminaries adopted this favourite cla.s.s-book in common with those of England at least as far back as the time of Andrew of Wyntown, who was nearly contemporary with Langland and Chaucer. In his _Original Chronicle of Scotland_ he speaks of the Barnys (bairns) lering Donate at their beginning of Grammar; which is a very interesting and important piece of testimony in its way, since there is so little to enable us to form an opinion of the rise and growth of elementary learning in North Britain, although there may be just sufficient light cast incidentally or indirectly on the subject to lead us to judge that Scotland, if not indeed the North generally, was in this respect, as in others, far behind the Southern English.

In Scotland, the influence of Knox and his supporters favoured the early inst.i.tution of parochial schools throughout the country, where a cla.s.s and range of instruction prevailed which, combined with native religious tendencies, had the effect of increasing, in comparison with England, the average of educated intelligence without developing much breadth of thought or much intellectual refinement.

The aims of the parish schools are humble, and beyond its limited possibilities there are its impediments and its snares. In addition to schools, the friends of education in the North, as early as the reign of William III., commenced an agitation for the establishment of parochial libraries even in the Highlands. The movement was set on foot by certain ministers of the Presbyterian Church, and its basis and scope would have been narrow enough if the idea had been realised. But nothing beyond a discussion and some correspondence seems to have resulted at the moment.

Nor do we, even as time goes on, find much information obtainable on this part of the subject. But both the systems and the books employed were for some centuries of foreign origin; and the grammatical publications of an Aberdeen man, John Vaus, whose name seems to be the earliest on the roll of native authors, were, so far as we at present know, without exception published, as well as written, in France, to which Scotland perhaps owed, among other matters, her adoption of the Continental law of Latin p.r.o.nunciation.

Vaus grounded his _Rudiments_, printed at Paris repeatedly about 1520, on the old _Doctrinale_ of Alexander Gallus, which bespeaks a backwardness of information, since at this date Lily's Grammar was already in use in the South, and even the systems of Whittinton and the other disciples of the Magdalen School method had been almost completely discarded there, except, perhaps, as occasional auxiliaries.

At a later period, the eminent Scotsman Buchanan wrote his little work on Prosody, and two others of his countrymen, Andrew Symson and James Carmichael, reduced to a simpler plan the principles of elementary learning and the outlines of etymology.

The first explicit attempt to produce a grammar in Scotland for the special use of that country is due, however, to Alexander Hume, who is known to us not only as an educational reformer, but as a philological student. His _New Grammar for the Use of the Scotish Youth_, 1612, was a popular compendium founded on Lily; it seems to have met with limited and brief acceptance, and his tract on the _Orthography and Congruity of the British Tongue_, which was a literary essay intended rather for the closet (to use the old-fashioned parlance), remained till lately in MS.

II. But books of instruction and for employment in schools continued, down to the days of THOMAS RUDDIMAN, to be at once scarce and unsatisfactory, insomuch that, side by side with these and other unrecovered productions, it was found possible and convenient to keep in print the old text-books of Stanbridge, of which editions continued to be issued at intervals both here and in England down to the middle of the seventeenth century.

Ruddiman may be considered as the apostle of scholastic education and literature in Scotland; and as he was not born till 1674, this amounts to a proposition that his country was at least two centuries behind England in knowledge and culture. Even Ruddiman was brought up at the parish school, and was, moreover, for some time a parochial teacher. But, partly by force of character and partly by good fortune, he extricated himself from his early a.s.sociations, and became the Lily of the North. His _Rudiments of Grammar_ were published in 1714, when he was already in middle life; they were little more than the St. Paul's Primer calculated for the meridian of Edinburgh; but they proved eminently successful, and encouraged him to proceed with that more important philological enterprise the _Inst.i.tutions of Latin Grammar_, which, like the disquisition of Alexander Hume recently mentioned, was an ordinary unprofessional piece of authorship.

But, notwithstanding the useful labours of Ruddiman, his country, from political and other agencies, remained yet for a considerable length of time in a very stagnant condition, nor had any sensible improvement been achieved in the educational machinery of that portion of the empire within the recollection of those still living. Mental training and culture, as they are now understood, are the growth of the last half century. But the cost of such accomplishments as were taught at Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St.

Andrews was lower than in England, and the standard higher than in Ireland; and from both countries pupils were often sent in former days to complete their education, where their parents could not have afforded the means to maintain them at Oxford or Cambridge. From a hundred to a hundred and thirty years since, the fees at Glasgow University did not exceed 20 a year, and a frugal lad found seven or eight shillings a week sufficient for his board and lodging.

III. Many causes contributed, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, to favour the disorganisation and decay of scholastic learning; but, above all, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the consequent disorder, depression, and inquietude, seem to have reduced the educational standard, and to have thrown the task of instruction, in a great number of cases, into the hands of the clergy, from the want of funds or the lack of inclination to support the former lay-teachers. The acute political crisis, which lasted without interruption from 1640 to the commencement of the Protectorate in 1653, affected even the ancient academical and civic endowments; and the two Universities, the n.o.ble foundations of Edward VI., and the public seminaries inst.i.tuted in London and other great centres by private munificence, suffered a common paralysis.

The alliance between the Church and the schools was one formed or developed at a period of exceptional difficulty and pressure; but even when the immediate necessity for such a bond existed no longer, and affairs in England had returned to their normal state, the clergy saw too clearly the importance of the hold which they had gained on the national training and thought to allow education to pa.s.s back, farther than was avoidable, under lay control.

In the time of the Commonwealth, and when Cromwell a.s.sumed the supreme authority, there were all over the country, throughout England and Wales, men in holy orders and in the enjoyment of benefices who combined with their sacerdotal functions, as many do still, the duties of schoolmasters and lecturers. Doubtless, among them there were some fairly qualified for the trust which they received and undertook; but the majority is alleged, in an authentic official doc.u.ment before me of 1654, to have been far otherwise. This State-paper is called "An Ordinance for the Ejection of Scandalous, Ignorant, and Insufficient Ministers and Schoolmasters," and was published in the autumn of the year above named.

Two singular features it unquestionably possesses: the intimate a.s.sociation between the parson and the pedagogue, and the striking picture which it presents to our view of the lax and profligate condition of the cla.s.s which Cromwell and his advisers saw thus clothed with the twofold responsibility of mental and spiritual tuition.

The points on which the Commissioners of the Protectoral Government were authorised to inform themselves, and to exercise the discretion vested in them by the ordinance, reveal a very unsatisfactory and corrupt state of things, and the existence of abuses for which neither the Civil War nor the Republican administration can be thought to have been answerable.

There is scarcely a vice or irregularity which is not named or implied in the instructions delivered to the Commission; and the encouragement of "Whitson-ales, Wakes, Morris-Dances, Maypoles, Stage-plays, or such like licentious practices," strikes one as relatively a very venial offence against good morals and professional decorum. But the antipathy to sports and dramatic exhibitions was an inheritance from the more rigid Puritans, and the Articles of Inquiry in the archidiaconal visitations of this period never forgot such profane infringements of clerical morality.

The persons who were selected to sit on these committees for the several urban and provincial districts included many G.o.d-fearers of the prevailing type; but at the same time the choice was evidently made with some judgment and impartiality, and the printed lists exhibit a notable proportion of divines and others not likely to sanction or recommend too violent a course.

In fact, so considerate was the temper of the Administration itself, that an express proviso was inserted in the ejecting ordinance, by which some of the stipend of the cure was to be set apart, where the minister and schoolmaster was judged incompetent, for the support of his family.

Samuel Harmar, in his _Vox Populi, or Gloucestershire's Desire_, 1642, represents the want of proper maintenance for teachers, although many persons of moderate resources were willing to contribute liberally to the object; to the burden on families by reason of the gratuitous instruction of children, who, if they were but in the way of earning even twopence a day, might help themselves and their parents, whereas they wasted their time in playing about the streets, and acquired the habit of swearing and other immoral practices. The restriction of educational management, for the most part, to the clergy accounts for the dearth of literature shedding real and valuable light on the condition of the young and the state of schools in very early days; and Harmar's pamphlet is princ.i.p.ally occupied with vapid theological inept.i.tudes. His main proposal was excellent; it declared for the establishment of schoolmasters in every parish throughout the country; but even this was merely what Knox and his supporters had long before advocated, and partly accomplished, in Scotland.

There is a little volume by Richard Croft, Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, being a sermon preached by him at the opening of the Free School of f.e.c.kenham in 1696, throughout the sixty-eight pages of which there is not an iota worthy of citation, nor a hint serviceable to my inquiry. How different it might have been, had a layman been the writer!

XIII.

Female education--Women of quality taught at home--General illiteracy of the s.e.x--Strong clerical control--Ignorance of the rudiments of knowledge among girls--Shakespear's daughters--Goldsmith's _Poems for Young Ladies_--Rise of the Ladies' School--Political importance of the training of women.

I. The neglect of female education in the United Kingdom down to a recent date proceeded from an absence of any adequate or organisable machinery for the purpose, and from the complete monopoly of learning by men in early times. In Scotland this mischief was remedied to a certain extent much sooner than in England, owing to the inst.i.tution of Academies, where both s.e.xes received instruction under one roof from the same masters; and this circ.u.mstance may help to explain the general superiority of the Scots, within certain limits, to the Southern Britons in this respect, the better upbringing of the mother communicating itself to her children.

Common academies for boys and girls were not wholly unknown in England, however, but they were of very rare occurrence, and have now become still rarer, as they barely exist at all except as dame-schools.

Now-a-days, of course, the most elaborate and costly apparatus is provided for the mental cultivation and training of girls of all ranks; and the daughter of a citizen may acquire accomplishments which were long beyond the reach of daughters of kings. Formerly the lower cla.s.ses of females remained as illiterate as the corresponding rank of men, and the studies of the gentlewoman were superintended by her parents and her tutor or her governess. But in the Middle Ages, and long after the revival of learning, the only persons capable of conducting the education of a lady who had emerged from the nursery and pa.s.sed the rudimentary stage were ecclesiastics; and the laymen who gradually qualified themselves for the task, such as Ascham and Buchanan, were scholars of a scarce type, who had gained their proficiency in the gymnasia and universities of Italy, Germany, or France. The Italian influence was doubtless the earliest, but the German was the most powerful, and has proved the most lasting.

In France from a very remote period the dame-school appears to have existed in some measure and form, for a fourteenth-century sculpture, already mentioned in the remarks on scholastic discipline, depicts an establishment of this kind--a petty school for boys kept by a woman. If there was any such thing among us, I have met with no record of it; but the practice, from the early intimacy between those countries, would be more apt to find its way first of all from the French into Scotland.

To such as have had under their eyes the letters and other literary monuments which reveal to us the condition of the more cultivated section of the English female community in the old days, it seems superfluous to insist on the strange ignorance of the _principia_ of knowledge, and on the fallow state of the intellectual faculties which these evidences establish. The Paston and Plumpton Correspondence, Mrs. Green's _Letters of Ill.u.s.trious Ladies_, and Sir Henry Ellis's three Series of Original Letters, may perhaps be quoted as affording an insight into the present aspect of the question before us; and I think that the most striking proofs of the inattention to female culture in this country are to be found in doc.u.ments previous to the Reformation, when the influence brought to bear on the s.e.x was almost exclusively monastic or clerical.

The great political and religious movement which Henry VIII. was enabled by circ.u.mstances to carry through undoubtedly imparted a large share of lay feeling and prejudice to the educational system; and this tendency was promoted and strengthened during the short reign of Edward VI. by the foundation of chartered schools throughout the kingdom for the instruction of youth in grammar and other primordial matters.

II. But the progress thus made did not sensibly affect the other s.e.x.