Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/865

Rh the school"; but it strikes us very forcibly that it must merely be a means to an end—that is to say, that it must be secondary and subsidiary to "the system of management transacted inside the school"; and if so, the conclusion is inevitable that, as regards this far more important matter, the private schools carry off the palm for efficiency. The admission is, to our mind, a very significant one. Government can do outside work, but not inside work. It can put up buildings, provide apparatus, organize a staff of superintendents and inspectors, and make a great show over examinations; but when it comes to the vital point of teaching it breaks down, or, at best, does the work inefficiently. When will people understand that government work is esentiallyessentially [sic] "outside" work, and that, when they want inside work, they must do it themselves? Government has the taxing power, and can do whatever the command of money enables it to do; but, when more than this is wanted—when, for example, to quote the words of the Royal Commission, it is a matter of establishing an "effective sympathy between managers and teachers or managers and scholars"—state agency will not work.

It so happens that, almost simultaneously with the appearance of this report, a teacher of long standing and much experience, Mr. James Runciman, publishes in the "Contemporary Review" a most powerful arraignment of the whole system under which the board schools in England have been conducted since the passing of the Education Act in 1870. That act he pronounces to be "a failure, if we contrast the means expended with the total results obtained; in fact," he adds, "the powers of evil seem to be gaining force, if we study broad results." Speaking of his own career as a teacher, he says: "After bitter years of effort I saw that I was frittering away my life, and thus the gladdest day I have ever known was that on which I knew I should work under the useless pedantic code no more. Ninety-nine out of every hundred teachers in Great Britain would follow my example if they could, for there is no chance for a man or a woman to lead a human life, so long as the code governs them; and I say deliberately that our national millions of educational grant are mostly spent on keeping up a mischievous imposture which broods like a perpetual blight over education," "Roughly speaking," he says in a later part of the article, "we have spent fifty million pounds of money on teaching a generation how not to become good scholars, good workmen, good clerks, or good citizens, and we have performed that remarkable feat in order to satisfy the fantastic desires of a set of pedants whose judgment is scouted by every practical man." We quote only the conclusions arrived at and vigorously expressed by Mr, Runciman, because we have not space for the facts and illustrations by which he supports them; but all who turn to his article for themselves will see that he has not spoken without great and bitter cause.

The Royal Commission express the hope that it may be possible in the future to combine the special merits of state administration, consisting chiefly, as we have seen, in capacity for work "outside the school," with the strong points of voluntary effort. The hope is an amiable one, but we regard it as wholly illusory. The very life of education resides in the free competition of ideas, in private initiative, and in the feeling of individual responsibility. Education without these can be little more than a hollow mockery. It will be "outside" work in the worst sense; and, when we seek to gather from it those fruits of intelligence and morality which a system of national education might be supposed to yield, we shall find the tree smitten with a mysterious disease, and the half-formed fruit falling withered to the ground. "A mysterious disease," do we say? Yes,