The business of education is not, as I think, to make them perfect in any one of the sciences, but so to open and dispose their minds, as may best make them capable of any, when they shall apply themselves to it.-JOHN LOCKE.

The primary principle of education is the determination of the pupil to self-activity—the doing nothing for him which he is able to do jor himself.-SIR William Hamilton.

In education the process of self-development should be encouraged to the fullest extent.-HERBERT SPENCER.

English

National Education.

Chapter I.

The Reign of the Voluntary System.

Primary education, for the children of the workingclasses, did not exist, in any general sense, till the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is true that almost all the grammar and other endowed schools, so freely founded during the sixteenth century and earlier, made provision for the education of "poor scholars". But either this had never meant much more than exhibitions, as we should now call them, for the children of those whose parents' means had become very much reduced, or it may have been intended only for a few bright and fortunate individuals, who, by some happy accident or good fortune, came under the favourable notice of those who were able to secure their admission to a school. Thus it is said that George Abbott, who afterwards became Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Archbishop of Canterbury, was first brought into notice because of some remarkable circumstances attending his birth. He was born in 1562, and his mother was the wife of a poor clothworker at Guildford. Before his birth, his mother dreamt that, if she could eat a jack or a pike, her child would become a great man. When taking a pail of water from the river which flowed by the house, she found therein a jack, which she forthwith cooked, and ate nearly the whole of

it. The matter was noised abroad, and several persons of quality, on hearing of it, offered to stand sponsors at the child's christening. The offer was gladly accepted, and, doubtless as a result of this, the boy was afterwards sent to a Free Grammar School in the town, founded by a grocer of London, in 1553, for thirty "of the poorest men's sons" of Guildford, to be taught to read and write English, and cast accounts perfectly, so that they should be fitted for apprentices. From the grammar school he went to Balliol College, Oxford. His elder brother was also fortunate, and became Bishop of Salisbury; whilst his younger brother became a rich London merchant, Lord Mayor, and member of Parliament.

But such remarkable successes were very few and far between, and only serve to impress upon one the neglected condition and profound ignorance of the great majority. Speaking of the general condition of things at this period (the sixteenth century), with regard to the education of the children of the very poor, Mr. A. F. Leach, a writer of great authority, says: "We may approach this matter from another point of view, and ask whether it is likely that, in days when the labouring classes were still serfs, and Parliament actually petitioned the Crown against their being allowed to go to the Universities or Schools, that bishops and lords and county gentlemen would, at great expense and labour, found educational institutions for the benefit of half a dozen poor choristers? The poor who are spoken of in these old foundations are not the poor in our sense, the destitute poor, the unsuccessful among the labouring classes, but the relative poor, the poor relations of the upper classes. That occasionally bright boys were snatched up out of the ranks of the real poor and turned into clerics, to become lawyers, civil servants, bishops, is not to be doubted. But it was the middle class, whether country or town, the younger sons of the nobility and farmers, the lesser landholders, the prosperous tradesmen, who created a demand for education, and furnished the occupants of Grammar Schools.

The same writer says that of 159 schools existing at

the time of the Reformation, of which records still remain, 93 were Grammar Schools which were not free, 21 were Free Grammar Schools, 23 were Song Schools (in which boys were trained for church choirs, and received a kind of superior elementary education), and 22 were Elementary Schools. Now these last named were by no means schools for the very poor, but schools in which only reading, writing, and arithmetic were taught. In some of them only reading was taught, in others only writing, and in others only arithmetic. The class of pupils who attended such schools may be judged of by the fact that Sir Isaac Newton was sent to a village school, where he was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic; and that the great Dr. Johnson was first taught reading by a dame who kept a school for little children in Lichfield. Primary schools such as these appear to have been first established in the fourteenth century; but Mr. Herbert Spencer holds that there were elementary schools in the villages as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

But most of the really primary schools which existed. were entirely private in their nature, and there seems to be no evidence of any endowment or corporate control of them, except in so far as we might include the Song Schools. Indeed, the nearest approach to anything like state education was in the reign of Alfred the Great, who is said to have given one-eighth of his whole revenue to founding a school for the sons of the nobles. He is also believed to have re-established many of the old monastic and episcopal schools. It was his desire that "all the youth of England . . should be well able to read English". He compelled every person of rank or substance, who, either from age or want of capacity, was unable to teach himself to read, to send to school either his son or a kinsman, or, if he had neither, a servant, so that at least he might be read to by some one. Thus some at least of the very poor doubtless received an education from the state in those days.

Also, inasmuch as some of the Grammar Schools were established by royal charter, and sometimes endowed