SCHOOLS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6889, 20 April 1929, Page 4

SCHOOLS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

Commencement of Public Education ' W.E.A. LECTURE BY ME A. ERNEST MANDER The series of free public lectures under the auspices of the W.E.A. and Victoria University College was continued by Mr A. Ernest Mander in St. Andrew's hall on Thursday evening, when the subject dealt with was • ‘ Schools a Hundred Years Ago. " Mr Barry presided. The lecturer commenced by presenting a novel view of the relations between the schools and the unemployed. He showed how, a hundred years ago, it was economically impossible for the whole of the working population to be employed productively, when more and more of the work previously done by labour was being taken over by machinery. The inventions of power-driven machinery meant that fewer and fewer workers \fere required in proportion to the output of industry; and though a much greater output was achieved, yet the population was increasing equally rapidly, and the labour supply continued to be in excess of what was required. "The whole situation," said the lecturer, "can.be simply expressed in terms of supply and demand. Too Many Children

"At this time the masses of the workers were, in their ignorance, cutting their own throats by having too many children. That is the simple truth of the matter., Ultimately, apart from immigration, the supply of labour is determined by the workers themselves. If they have too many children in ratio to the amount of labour required, they cause the supply of labour to be greater than the demand, and the price of labour goes down. If there is still a surplus, that surplus will be left? unemployed altogether. "But granting this, it is equally clear that, until 1830 or 1850, the wrong sort of people were employed, and the wrong sort were left as the surplus. Up to this time, all over the world, the working population had included the women and children of the masses. Now there was a surplus of labour available. But it was clearly bad .that hundreds of thousands of children should be employed while hundreds of thousands of grown men were left unemployed. It would have been infinitely better to have employed the men industrially—and sent the children to school. "In the end, this is more or less what was done. I do not say that the solution was arrived at consciously; it was not. But eventually they stumbled blindly into the solution of the problem by taking the children out of the mills and factories , and sending them to school, thus reducing the supply of labour and allowing the majority of the unemployed to be absorbed. If the population had not still continued to increase, no doubt the problem would thus have been finally solved." He suggested that the same remedy might be applicable to-day through the raising of the school-leaving age to 15. “Dame” and Grammar Schools The lecturer gave a description of the various kinds of schools in England in the early part of the nineteenth century. In the villages there were still the little "dame schools” which had been in existence for centuries. In nearly every village there was some poor old woman who scraped a scanty living by keeping a little school. Her educational attainments, as a rule, were meagre in the extreme. She herself would probably bo "lost" by an ordinary modern child in Standard 111, and certainly by a child in Standard IV. Mr Mander gave a variety of word pictures of these villago schools, some of them pleasant pictures, some of them disagreeable, but none of them very inspiring from the educational standpoint. It was clear that the children in the dame schools ■ could have learnt nothing beyond spelling simple words .writing with difficulty, and doing very easy sums. In the cities, however,'and in the old market towns, there were grammar schools taught by masters. Some were supported by endowments of land taken from the monasteries at the time of the Reformation, or endowments made by the Crown later. Others were founded by merchant guilds in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Others again were supported by church funds and were connected with the cathedrals and other churches. In addition to "the three R’s’"the boys spent much time at Latin grammar and in learning to recite long passages of Latin verse and prose. Public Schools Mr Mander continued with an outline and explanation of the development of the few "public schools" (in the English sense of that term), and gave a description of life in these schools of the squire and merchant class a hundred years ago. He made a comparison between the schools of England and those of Scotland. The latter portion of the lecture was devoted to an account of tlio BellLancaster schools, which were founded to cater for the children of the working classes in the new industrial towns. "This is the scheme as explained by the national secretary of the society. To establish a school it would be necessary to obtain the use of some disused workshop or warehouse. For each school of 900 to 1000 pupils, one teacher would be required. He must have a month’s training; then the school could be opened. Out of the thousand children, about 30 of the apparently most intelligent were to be selected as monitors. These 30 would be admitted to school half an hour before the rest of tho children. In that half-hour they would be taught the lesson for the day. Then the doors would be opened, and the remaining 900 children would troop in. Each of the little monitors would be given a group of 30, and the monitors would spend the day teaching others the lesson

which they themselves had been taught in that first half-hour.” Evolution of Education. This scheme was adopted, and hundreds of schools were established in the industrial towns. Attendance was voluntary, but by 1835 there were nearly a million children being allegedly educated under this system. The lecturer concluded by describing the evolution, from this beginning, of the modern English primary schools and the evolution of the old grammar schools into modern secondary schools. He briefly indicated the standard vf the educational work done at successive stages in the development of these schools, and emphasised the importance of the date, 1876, when school attendance in England was made compulsory. "In education,” said the lecturer, “we have come a long, long way during the last hundred years! But we have still a long way to go. Nevertheless, we are moving on all the time; and even during the last twenty years the progress has been simply amazing. ’