strengthen the hold it still retains on the affections of our middle classes by supplementing it with such modern branches of study as the enlarged field of modern knowledge offers, and which the founders in their day only ignored because they were as yet undeveloped ?-or are we to make a clean sweep at once of an obsolete educational theory, and give only that special training which is supposed to be a sufficient intellectual outfit for the practical business of life?

To this last alternative it is satisfactory to find that the Royal Commissioners show no shadow of favour. A cloud of witnesses, differing on many points, agree in this, that education should be general, not special. They lend no sanction to the too-prevalent heresy, that it can be tested, as it were, by weight and measure. They recognise, it is true, a growing demand for instruction in modern subjects, and more especially in those branches of natural science to which modern civilisation is so much indebted, and which are too much ignored in our higher school-training at present. Even if our sons are not to be in any way concerned, in their afterlife, in the practical application of such knowledge, it is not well for them to be ignorant of the principles of those sciences which are every day receiving new development, and exercising a wider influence on our national character. Our universities have already taken decided steps to give scientific studies an acknowledged place, not only in their teaching, but in their distribution of honours; and the example thus set may well be followed in our schools. The ap parent severance between classical and scientific education needs not be widened, but if possible lessened. Mr Arnold, in his late report on education abroad, has well touched upon the evil of this antagonism of the old learning with the new. Our upper and middle class, he

says, are at present brought up on two separate planes of education.

"We have a professional class brought up on the first plane, with fine and governing qualities, but without the idea of science; while that immense business class which is becoming so important a power in all countries, on whom the future so much depends, and which in the leading schools of other countries fills so large a space, is in England brought up on the second plane, cut off from the aristocracy and the professions, and without governing qualities."

Whatever tends to encourage this line of demarcation, in this commercial country, is a manifest evil. To sever the "gentleman" in his education or his mode of thought and feeling from the manufacturer or the man of business,-to make either class despise the other, whether for their prejudices or their ignorance,-is an enormous evil. The one class needs the refinement which ought to be the characteristic of a liberal education, as much as the other needs the practical knowledge which too often does not accompany it. We may be pardoned for quoting the words of a gentleman now engaged largely in trade, but who himself enjoyed a thorough classical education at one of our best public schools, to which he is accustomed to refer as one of the greatest advantages of his early life.

"As a man in trade, and intending my son to succeed me in my business, my wish is to make him a gentleman. First,

I want him to believe that his life is given him for higher purposes than for making money, or getting honour and Secondly, I

advancement for himself.

wish him to have the ease of manner, the consideration for others, and the

facility for expressing himself gracefully and correctly, which belong to a gentleman. For this last, I can fancy no better training than a classical education as I have known it. For ease of manner and courtesy, I should choose a school frequented by boys who from their position are most likely to be imbued with these qualities. To give him the higher views I first mentioned, I would refrain from putting before him

at too early an age the desire of money. making and worldly advancement, which boys will too readily understand is the object of those schools which lay

themselves out for the cultivation of

such subjects only as are likely to be directly useful. With these views, I care rather to give my boy a classical education, and the more because it is not likely he will go to a university."

We might attach more weight to the arguments of those who object to retaining classical literature as the groundwork of English education, if they were anything like unanimous in their suggestion of a substitute. But ably as many of them have discussed the question, on this point scarcely two of them agree. One advocates the natural sciences; another would put French in the place of Latin. Professor Seeley thinks that English is, above all things, the one needful educational training for an Englishman. Mr Stephen Hawtrey, of Eton, tells us that he has discovered the true philosopher's stone for schoolboys, which will transmute at once the dunce into the scholar. "There is a book," says he, "the study and understanding of which will make the education complete. No one who is master of that book can ever be a sciolist-and that book is Euclid." Professor Key, on the other hand, "expressed a wish to get rid of Euclid altogether, as a most illogical book." It may be as well to live on in the old house until our architects have quite settled where to build the new one.

The Commissioners, in the changes which they recommend, have borrowed one of their leading principles, together with its name, from our cousins in New England. There can be no objection to this. If the principle be a good one, as in this case we think it is, let us give the Americans full credit for it, and adopt it with many thanks. It is proposed to grade" our provincial schools.

The word is not in itself a pretty word; but word-building, we may manufacture in which the New be allowed to say, is a branch of Englanders think more of handiness than elegance. All endowed schools, or schools which have in any way a public character, are to be classed as of the First, the Second, or the Third Grade respectively

the last being the lowest. Such classification is to be chiefly "determined by the age at which boys are supposed to leave school altogether-at 18 or 19, at 16, or at 14, according to their destinations in life, and "correspond roughly' (says the Report) "to different classes of society and different courses of study." The schools of the First Grade would continue to be, in point of fact, very much what our public schools are now, and what the more ambitious of

the " grammar schools" at least aspire to be. They "would prepare for the universities, and therefore make the classics the staple of their teaching." They would draw their scholars chiefly from the same anks of society as those which fill our higher schools at present; with the addition probably of many sons of professional men and the poorer gentry, whose fathers, "having received a cultivated education themselves, are very anxious that their sons should not fall below them," but are unable to give them the advantages they would wish on account of the great and increasing expenses of such an education at present. The fees in schools of this grade are estimated, for day-scholars, at from 12 to 25 guineas; for boarders, from £60 to £120-certainly on a sufficiently liberal scale.

The schools of the Second Grade, whose course of education is supposed to stop at about the age of 16, are to supply the educational wants of those whose sons either must at that age begin to find

VOL. CIII.-NO. DCXXXI.

2 R

66

their own living, or are intended for such employments in life as require some special training, which ought, at about the age defined, to supersede the general education which such schools are to give; for the army, for all but the highest branches of the medical and legal professions, civil engineering, and some others." These schools are to teach Latin (but not Greek, except as an extra" or special subject), some one or two modern languages, arithmetic thoroughly, at least the rudiments of mathematical science, English literature, "the elements of political economy," and natural science, if desired. Such schools, it is supposed, would be gladly taken advantage of by many professional men, by the richer shopkeepers, the large tenant-farmers, men in business, and "all but the wealthier gentry." The necessary expenses of such an education are estimated, in a day-school of this grade, at from £6, 6s. to £12, 12s.; in a boarding-school, from £25 to £40. The school would be formed into two divisions; the first to receive boys at 7 or 8 years of age, who are to pass an entrance examination in reading and spelling easy English, the multiplication table, and writing. At 12 or 13 a boy would be expected to pass into the upper division, after a second examination, in which he would be required to read with fluency and intelligence any ordinary book, to know by heart a considerable quantity of the best English poetry, to write a clear good hand, to be expert in arithmetic as far as proportion and fractions, as well as in the working of general arithmetical questions, and to know the outlines of geography, physical and political. Some kind of third examination seems to be contemplated, in the way of a pass," at the close of the course (ie., at the age of 16) in this grade; but whether in the way of qualification for a certificate, or in order to possible admis

66

sion to a first-grade school, is not made quite clear in the Report.

The Third-Grade Schools are regarded by the Commissioners as "the most urgent educational need of the country." Of this there can be no doubt, and the fact has already engaged the earnest attention of all who have interested themselves in general education. All will endorse the conclusion at which the present Commission has arrived, and as to which they have found the evidence almost unanimous, "that the artisans, the small shopkeepers, the smaller farmers, are in many places without any convenient means of educating their children at all, and still more often have no security that what education they do get is good." It may be added, that wherever it is really good, it is gained in a fashion which, however at present unavoidable, cannot be considered as legitimate-by taking advantage, at a very low rate of payment, of the sound if not very advanced teaching now provided in most of our National schools, partly at the national expense, partly by private charity, for the children of "the poor.' In the case of the farmers, especially, wherever a regard to their social position (a feeling by no means blamable) prevents them from taking this advantage of the services of the certificated village schoolmaster, the boarding-schools to which they send their sons are of the very worst type of educational incapacity-"giving a teaching incomparably worse than that of an average National or British school, and yet at a much greater cost."

The present inquiry has of course only been able to deal with private schools of this class so far as they chose to answer questions and admit inspection; and it will be readily conceived that in the cases where such inquiry was most needed it was most unwillingly received. "They were difficult of access, and would give no returns," says one of

the Assistant-Commissioners: " as to some of them, horresco referens." Yet to such schools the work is

chiefly left. Few schools of those which can be called "public" adapt their teaching to the wants of boys of this class; and of those few, still fewer are really good. The Report names, as exceptions, the Bristol Trade School and Hele's School at Exeter. These are day-schools, and there are some two or three others which are doing this work successfully. Of boarding-schools, the school established by Mr Woodard at Shoreham, and now about to be removed to Ardingly, is "an almost solitary example" of a public school for boys of this class. It is very deservedly successful; but it must be remembered that it could not give the superior education, training, and accommodation which are there offered for the sum of £16 a-year, if it were not for the fact that its work is carried on in a spirit of large self-sacrifice, in the desire to afford to the lower-middle classes a Church-of-England education, and that the masters give their services for a wholly inadequate remuneration.

In these proposed third-grade schools, then, the education is to be such, on the whole, as is suitable for boys whose school life would naturally end at 14. It should embrace "a thorough knowledge of arithmetic, the ability to write a good letter," and the usual requirements of a commercial life. The

school is to be formed in two divisions, the lower receiving boys at the age of 6 or 7, and retaining them until 12, by which time they ought to be able to pass the necessary examination for promotion into the upper. In this, while none of the lower subjects are dropped,

"English reading should be continued so as to give some knowledge of our best authors, and the outlines of English history and political economy should be commenced. But to these should be added either the elements of Latin or some modern language. In the same way, to the arithmetic should be added

either algebra or practical geometry; and to the geography either botany or some branch of experimental physics, or Drawing also should be taught, either the rudiments of inorganic chemistry. as a necessary or as an optional subject."

The schools in the lower grades are not to be considered as preparatory to the grade above them. "Three different kinds of work," say the Commissioners, "require three different kinds of school; each kind of school should have its own proper aim set before it, and should be put under such rules as will compel it to keep to that aim." A boy is to receive in a lower-grade school not "a fragment of an education," but an education to a certain extent completed.

In one point it will be found that this new Commission breathes the same spirit as that which lately dealt with the great Public Schools. It has no mercy for dunces. As in the former case the Commissioners recommended that no boy should be even admitted without passing an examination, and no boy allowed to remain in the lower forms after a certain age, so here none are allowed to remain in a lower-grade school after 14, or in the secondgrade after 16; and all are to pass an examination in their remove from the higher to the lower divisions. What is to become of the boys who fail? Those who have read 'Alice's Adventures in WonderLand' (and who has not?) will remember that when the mad hatter had finished giving his evidence, the King graciously said, "You may go," to which the Queen promptly added-"And take off his head outside." Whether any such summary disposal of the waste material of boyhood is contemplated under new arrangements, is more than we can say. But unless some place of repentance is invented for those who break down in this multiplication of examinations, it will need that some new educational benefactors should arise to found for us moderns a hospital for incurables.

But while, in this classification, the Commissioners propose, as the first requisite, "to assign definite functions to each grade, so as to prevent all trying to answer every purpose, and thereby few succeeding in any," they have also made provision for retaining in practice what they rightly consider "the old glory of the grammarschools" the aid and encouragement which they offered to boys of exceptional ability and industry to rise to distinction from the humbler ranks of life. "No arrangement of this matter would be complete," the Commissioners think, and their view is supported by the majority of their most intelligent witnesses "unless it were possible for boys of exceptional talent to rise to the highest education which the country could supply." With this view amongst others, while careful to recommend that the course of study in each grade should be complete in itself-turning out the lad of 14 from the lower school as fairly educated for his probable work in life, as the young man of 18 or 19 who leaves the higher for the university-they have also recommended the preservation of some one leading study as a link between the three grades, a connecting thread" running through the whole; so that the scholar who is moved from the lower to the higher, either on account of some special ability which he develops, or owing to some change in his parents' plans for his future, may not find his previous training wholly unsuited for the new studies amongst which he is thus thrown. This connecting link they find in Latin. The great majority of the witnesses whom they have examined rightly consider language as "the most efficient instrument of education." And, in the choice of some one language, "there was a very great preponderance of evidence in favour of Latin." Partly the beauty of the language recommends it for careful study; partly

66

the fulness and precision of its accidence; partly the fact that it enters so largely into the composition of our own language, and is also "a common gateway to French, Italian, and Spanish.' To these is added another reason for the choice, which stands on a much lower level, but has considerable practical cogency-"the fact that a very large number of the examinations of the present day require a knowledge of Latin, and that schools are therefore compelled to teach it in order to meet this requirement." This, of course, is in some sort a begging of the whole question. Unless the said examiners are right in their views, it must be a grand mistake, when we are remodelling public education, to meet and so confirm them. Another argument of the same character must, we suspect, although unconfessed, have had some weight in the decision of a Commission which has evidently throughout its task retained a kindly feeling for the old classical curriculum, and has willingly availed itself of the popular feeling which still attaches to Latin an undefined and mysterious educational value which it has never extended to Greek. This feeling indeed was very generally expressed even by those witnesses who might have been supposed more or less hostile to a classical education in any shape. "Lawyers, medical men, farmers, engineers agreed in wishing that a certain amount of Latin should form part of the preliminary education for their several occupations." These witnesses would be of course the more intelligent of their class; but the feeling extends very widely. Even the farmer and the shopkeeper like their boy to know a little Latin; it has the savour of a gentleman about it; and they will hardly send their sons to a boardingschocl the master of which does not at least profess to teach it. The druggist's apprentice knows it

imperfectly, as some of the drug