Page:1902 Encyclopædia Britannica - Volume 27 - CHI-ELD.pdf/724

 672

EDUCATION

St Andrews, and Aberystwyth, the London School of Medicine for Women, the College for Working Women, and similar institutions. In this way, either by the erection of new buildings or by the establishment of studentships and prizes, substantial help has been given to some of the most promising of the modern enterprises by which the intellectual advance of women has been stimulated in the United Kingdom. Kecent years have witnessed a great change in the state of public opinion in regard to the professional qualifications of teachers. That teaching is a fine art, Training that underneath its rules and processes there lie teachers, principles which deserve investigation, and that the skilled practitioner is distinguished from the unskilled by his knowledge of the history and philosophy of his art, and of the reasons why some methods of instruction and discipline are right and others are wrong, are truths which are being slowly recognized by public authorities, as well as by teachers themselves. The full appreciation of the importance of training began at the lower end of the social scale. Shuttleworth and Tufnell in 1846 urged the necessity of special training for the primary teacher, and hoped to establish State Training Colleges to supply this want. The opposition of the Churches prevented the fulfilment of this design, and the one college at Battersea which was founded as an experiment was soon transferred to the National Society. Before this, Bell and Lancaster had made arrangements in their model schools for the reception of a few young people to learn the system by practice in the schoolroom, and to pursue their studies in the after hours. In Glasgow, David Stow, who founded in 1826 the Normal Seminary which afterwards became the Free Church College, was one of the first to insist on the need of systematic professional preparation. The religious bodies in England, notably the Established Church, availed themselves promptly of the failure of the central Government, and 12 diocesan colleges for men and 16 for women have been since established. In 1854 the British and Foreign School Society placed their establishments at the Borough Road and Stockwell on a collegiate footing, and subsequently founded other colleges at Swansea, at Bangor, at Darlington and Saffron Walden; the Roman Catholic Church provided two colleges for women and one for men; and the Wesleyans two—one for students of each sex. Other training institutions have since come into being. The newly founded provincial colleges of University rank have been invited by the Education Department to attach normal classes to their ordinary course, and to make provision for special training and for suitable practice in schools for those of their students who desired to become teachers, but who pursue their general literary and scientific studies in common with other learners who are not intending to enter the profession. Thus the Education Department came to recognize two kinds of training institutions—the residential colleges of the old type, and the day colleges attached to institutions of University rank. Both are subsidized by liberal grants from the Treasury, and are regularly inspected. The report of the Department for 1899 showed that in that year there were 3700 students in residence and 1230 day students. As the period of training is two years, these figures show a yearly increment to the ranks of certificated teachers of about 2400. But this supply is insufficient to meet the annual demand ; and 28'57 per cent, of masters and 51T8 per cent, of mistresses still enter the profession by serving as assistants and passing the certificate examination, but without receiving regular collegiate training. There is thus still need of more training school accommodation, and this is being gradually furnished by voluntary and municipal effort. But regular provision for training has hitherto been available for

elementary teachers only. Fashions, either in social usages or in dress, descend readily from one stratum of society to a lower, but they seldom ascend; and the accident which caused the earliest pedagogic experiments to be tried in connexion with the teachers of primary schools has led to a general impression that training was needed for lower but not for higher educational work. Hence it has happened that only slowly, and not without reluctance, teachers and public authorities have come to the conclusion that a like training and discipline might with great advantage be made available in higher and intermediate schools. The University of Cambridge in 1879 took a step which has had far-reaching consequences in this direction. It entrusted a special syndicate with the duty of providing public lectures on educational principles and practice, and of examining candidates for a special teacher’s diploma. Since 1882 the University has awarded certificates in the theory, history, and practice of education to 60 men and 1477 women. The University of London in 1883, and the Victoria University in 1895, instituted similar examinations; and in such great provincial colleges of University rank as have been founded in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds, and Cardiff, as well as in the older Universities, efforts are already made to provide courses of special preparation for secondary as well as for primary teachers. More recently, the University of Oxford has adopted a scheme for granting certificates in education. This scheme, while providing special courses of instruction and a comprehensive syllabus of examination, insists on evidence of regular and continuous practice in teaching under due observation as an indispensable qualification for the University diploma. The two permanent institutions for the training of high school mistresses are the Maria Grey Training College, near London, and the Training College at Cambridge; but several of the leading high schools for girls—notably the Ladies’ College at Cheltenham and the Datchelor School at Camberwell—have attached to themselves a training department which is becoming year by year more efficient. These institutions prepare their students for the Teacher’s Diploma of either Cambridge or London University. All these movements are symptoms of an increased sense of the need of skilled training for the teacher’s profession, and all will be greatly strengthened and encouraged by the clause in the Board of Education Act of 1899 which provides for a public registration of qualified teachers, and for the gradual elimination from the profession of those who are unqualified. But the question will still remain, How and where are the needful qualifications to be obtained, since the Government has not established a Training College of its own, and since it is hardly to be expected that the want will be supplied by the voluntary efforts of societies or by private initiative 1 In London and some of the larger towns it is already proposed to apply some of the funds available under the Excise Act to the training of teachers. It is to the Universities chiefly that the public has a right to look for at least a partial solution of this difficult problem. Experience is gradually revealing to us the conditions under which those corporations will be able to take an increasing share in the duty of giving professional training to teachers, and thus to render new and signal services to the State. These conditions are : (1) that the function of the teacher shall be recognized as one of the learned professions, and take honourable rank with Law, Medicine, and Theology; (2) that the University shall provide a Professor of Didactics or Pedagogy, whose duty it shall be, by means of postgraduate courses of study and by requiring systematic practice in the art of teaching under due supervision and criticism, to give to the future schoolmaster both a practi-