people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of
the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate people who could
neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature,
were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the
population were getting no instruction at all. Only a few schools
flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the
country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and
dwindling; many of them had closed altogether. In the new great
centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the
factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and
under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary
contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight
against this festering darkness. It was a condition of affairs
clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of
indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were
possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian
will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the
commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian
enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.
I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social
institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they
should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust
of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the
general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about
the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train
teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and
provide properly written school-books. These things it was felt
MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was
manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in
default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money
payments. The State set up a machinery of examination both in
Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and payments, known
technically as grants, were made in accordance with the examination
results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to
send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would be
established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,
inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" was
created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.
In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant-
earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far
as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the
task of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the
most part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also
were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared
that injustice might be done. Year after year these eminent persons
set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the
increasing thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the
national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they were
careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing
the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask. As a
result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and
permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the
practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science,
but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-
earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine
education whatever.
Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of
the age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science
prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by
making graduates in arts and priests in the established church
Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private
enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according
to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district. Private
enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books. A number of
competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in
Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to produce
text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of
knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty
subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and
models and instructions that should give precisely the method and
gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book
was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the
examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former
years were appended to every chapter. By means of these last the
teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of
grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other
methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with
questions and then dictated model replies.
That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes
as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death,
and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table,
smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible
formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of
desks before him. Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to