Elementary Education

Abstract

LORD NORTON and his friends seem determined to take eyery opportunity of hunting down the present system of education in Government elementary schools Last week the subject was again introduced in the House of Lords, with, as before, an unsatisfactory result. The action of Government with reference to Scottish educational endowments is rather an impressive commentary on the conduct of the obstructives who are so anxious to reduce the standard of education in England. The effect of the Scotch measure will be greatly to extend the means of education for those who usually attend Board Schools, placing as it does at their disposal the education to be obtained in secondary schools, an advantage, we should think, likely to be largely taken advantage of. Until some similar course be taken with reference to England, where so many valuable educational endowments have been diverted from their legitimate purpose, it seems to us cruel rigidly to limit the function of elementary schools in reference to pupils of exceptional promise. Still more cruel is it to turn out the great bulk of the children with an education quite unworthy of the name, and which renders them little better fitted to cope with their surroundings than if they were entirely unlettered. It is our bounden duty, since we insist on keeping children at school till a certain age, to do the best we can for them; and to turn them out equipped with nothing more useful than the three R's is a mere mockery of education. If reading at all events, is to be a really useful acquisition, let us make them understand that there are things quite as wonderful and quite as well worth reading about as the horrors of the penny dreadfuls. Many of these children the working men and working women of the future? will have but little time to put the three R's to much use, whereas if well grounded in the elements of one or two of the most useful of the sciences, they will have a continual source of pleasure within themselves, requiring neither books nor pens, but only the exercise of thoughtful observation. That education is admittedly the best which enables one to cope most successfully with the difficulties of his surroundings, and we cannot see how any candid man will deny that for this purpose an accurate training in the science of common things is worth all the books in the world. That the Government system as at present established commends itself to the sense of the people is clear from the fact that Government schools are practically killing all competitors. As to the dread of the over-education of the people, this is a bogy which only needs to be stared at to vanish. Do we find any lack of men and women to do all sorts of work in Germany or France, or in any other country where the people have a really substantial education? In nearly every county of the kingdom are local scientific societies, many of which are composed mainly of working men who have educated themselves into whatever they may know of science; but we have yet to hear that they are more discontented with their position than unlettered Hodge. The real truth is, as is too clearly shown on the Continent, the better educated the working man is, the better workman does he turn out to be. The great mistake is to confound a smattering with a grounding, and this, it seems to us, is the mistake made by Lord Norton and those who side with him, and possibly may account for the opposition to the Fourth Schedule. The exclusive use of such a reading-book as Lord Norton threatens to compile would be the best help to a smattering education; a very few hours a week devoted to a few well-selected experiments, the judicious use of specimens and diagrams, a little training of the observing faculties of children, and the systematic teaching of the great elementary facts of one or two sciences would be a welcome relief to the pupils, and would do far more for their real education than a library of reading-books.