Page:The probable course of legislation on popular education, and the position of the church in regard to it.djvu/13

 its claims undivided, and a good score of attendances then run up. From November to March, for instance, there need be little if any interference. At other times, evening classes might follow on the day's employment. Nor let any one fancy that such teaching for shorter periods is worthless. There is no doubt that our drawn-out teaching all day long is not advantageous. A dull sodden mindlessness does ensue on the prolonged din of the school process.

The kind of nature, mental and moral, of our lower orders, needs the quickening of change, else schooling becomes the dreariest of mechanical routines. But, if applied, as a relief from toil, the benefit is mutual, and there is a proportionate increase of knowledge through a more lively interest and keener intelligence. Any one acquainted with our Reformatory Schools, where a limited amount of school teaching is made the relief from farm-work, knows that the results attained would bear comparison with those arrived at elsewhere, through much longer periods of instruction.

But there is a previous point to that of the kind of Education, or the mode of enforcing and ensuring it. Whilst many writers and speakers are now-a-days dwelling pro and con on compulsory attendance at school, and even legislation has partially required it, it seems to have been forgotten that you must have your schools before you can compel children to come into them. No doubt the neglect of such educational opportunities as exist, is a grave matter—but that there are not opportunities, and that too where most needed, is a much graver; and it may be, that looking to what is really the first thing first, may do something, if not every thing, to meet those points which are really secondary.

How to supply schools, must precede how to fill or how to use them; and quite possibly these two latter questions may find their solution in the means necessary for meeting the first.

Supposing the demand to be sincere, that where schools are not they shall be, and that without delay; there can be little doubt whence they must come. Dark rural and dense urban populations, untouched now by the present system, are to have schools somehow; that will be the first thing laid down and decided. Can it be by the present system? Unless it can be promptly and at once, this will be answered in the negative, and other machinery found. Mere experiments or expedients will not be taken—that known as Mr. Walter's plan, for instance, who, because he keeps a very good school without Government aid, and a very good schoolmaster from sitting for his certificate, would hope to remedy the evil by poor schools under unauthorized teachers getting help from the State if they can; or Miss Burdett Coutts's plan, which postulates for its operation three clergymen, and three sets of school-managers, and three school-teachers, and three several schools, all of one mind, or rather, all prepared to adapt their minds each to the other; and the other poor little nostrums for poor little districts. Neither will permissiveness be sufficient. Must and may are not convertible terms: one cannot be the co-efficient of the other. This was one