Page:An address on compulsory education.djvu/8

4 strenuous efforts have been made, both in and out of Parliament, to establish a thorough system of national education. The Education Act, recently become law, is a palpable indication of the recognised fact that the people must be educated.

Now I maintain that any scheme originated to educate the poor children of our land, should be universal in its application to them. Every child capable of being taught should be educated. It is well known that in numerous cases, it is useless to offer education. To the minds of some members during the debates in Parliament, this offering of education was deemed a sufficient panacea to dispel the ignorance of our land. But we may provide an adequate number of schoolrooms, and a sufficient and efficient staff of teachers—we may even go further and offer education gratuitously,—and still large numbers of our children will not be educated. Writers in the daily journals have asserted that the voluntary system has failed. Why has it failed? Simply because there is no law to compel children to attend school. So, too, will the rating system fail to educate the children of our country, unless every board uses its powers of compulsion. For what does it matter whether the schools are built and supported by the rates or by voluntary subscriptions, so that they are built and supported. To make education national in every sense of the word, and to obliterate even a residuum of ignorance, some system of compulsion must be resorted to. Parents must be compelled to send their children to school.

In order to substantiate these assertions, I will examine a few of the causes which keep children from school.

1st.—I believe the most fruitful source of all to be the apathy of the parents. So much ignorance and its natural companions, poverty and vice, exist among the lower classes, that having no education themselves they do not see the necessity of it for their children. Many say, "I have got along through life without knowing how to read or write, and so can my children." They are also so absorbed in obtaining the bare necessaries of life, or in the gratification of their sensual desires,—for, alas! in many, the life of the mind is torpid or dead—that they are entirely careless about the education of their children. Hence, the children of such parents never go to school, and never will, unless they are compelled by the power of the law. Do we not see every day numbers of children running about during school hours? But some will say—this system of compulsion will interfere