Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

will hesitate as to whether Scotland would have equal value for her money, even if the recommendations of the Commissioners. were adopted, and Heriot's converted into a technical, and Donaldson's into a deaf and dumb school. But the recommendations are in full accordance with the liberal and philanthropie spirit of the age, and ought to acquit the Commissioners of the charge of cherishing aspirations beyond the sympathies of the class which George Heriot desired to favour. There were

mechanics in his day as well as in ours: he himself was one of them and it is significant of the fact that he did not conceive their interests to be bounded by technology, and consequently would not have objected to the bursaries to which the Commissioners propose to apply a portion of his funds, that he himself provided that his beneficiaries should be sent to the High School, the instruction at which was far more exclusively classical then than now.

Whatever is done in other respects, however, we trust that the better endowment of the head-masterships of the old provincial grammar schools will not be overlooked. This we regard as altogether the primary object to which the surplus funds of the educational endowments of Scotland ought to be applied; and failing them, for which public money should be given without grudging. We urge this, not only on behalf of the schools, but because we consider it likely to prove far more important than the creation of bursaries, scholarships, or any other form of assistance to youth, as an incentive to learned industry, more especially among the poorer classes. It is want of inducements to learn, far more than want of the means of learning, that depresses the higher instruction in Scotland in every department. Prudent and farseeing as Scotchmen are, the inducements which our educational reformers have hitherto presented to them will never tempt them to devote their lives to a career, however attractive, by which they cannot earn a decent subsistence.

The scholarships, and even the private generosity has recently Universities, are tenable for the never for more than four years;

so-called fellowships, which instituted at the Scotch most part only for three, the professorships, even if

superintendence, for students attending the Scottish Universities, forms the only possible justification for Lord Salisbury's proposal to confine the training of candidates for the Indian Civil Service to Oxford and Cambridge. Otherwise it must be regarded merely as an expression of the jealousy of the success of the Scotch in India which has always been felt by Englishmen.

they were better endowed, can fall only to a few, and are attainable only after a position has been gained which, in most cases, must cost the labour of more than half a lifetime. During the intermediate period, when the battle of life is hardest with him, and his own powers of work are at their height, the hapless pedagogue is sent,' as Professor Blackie once happily said, 'to break stones in the valley of poverty,' and it is not surprising that he should so often bid a sorrowful farewell to the Muses who have brought him to such a plight, and stretch forth his hand to the golden fruit which hangs on every tree except those which hedge in the despised and neglected nook of the dominie.' 'All parade of normal schools,' cried this veteran reformer, thirty years ago, and local boards, and inspectors, and ministers of public instruction, will be in vain, unless the people in this country repent of their past depreciation of the most valuable of public services, and ' determine seriously that the schoolmaster shall be treated like a gentleman.' The paramount importance of this object is one as to which there never has been the least difference of opinion amongst those whose knowledge entitled them to express an opinion at all. Listen to Professor Sellar in his address to the graduates in Arts in the University of Edinburgh last April.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

If

'If asked why Germany can realise this ideal,' of a learned class, and Scotland cannot, I should answer that the explanation is not to be found in any natural superiority of the German over our Scottish youth. There is as true a capacity for study, love of study, energetic application to study, among our own students as among any students in the world Nor is the sole or chief explanation to be found in the defective state of our secondary schools, which is itself rather a consequence and symptom of the same original cause. our secondary schools sent us up students as well prepared as those who pass the "Abiturienten Examen" of the German schools, the essential condition of training a learned class of thinkers or discoverers would still be wanting. The country provides no career for them. We cannot hold out to any considerable number of our studious youth the hope of professorships and sub-professorships which animates German industry. We have scarcely anything corresponding to the fellowships, tutorships, and other offices connected with the great English Colleges. We have never had anything like those coveted posts of learned leisure, canonries and deaneries, by the prospect of which, through their long and intimate connexion with a rich and powerful Church, the English Universities could tempt in past times their sons into the ways of learning. We have

An Appeal to the Scottish People on the Improvement of their Scholastic and Academical Institutions, p. 6.

nothing even like the well-paid and well-esteemed masterships in schools, the hope of which now animates the competition for the triposes of Cambridge and the class-lists of Oxford. If we of the Arts Faculty aimed at training, and were fully competent to train, a class of men solely to read, think, and investigate, we should have first to apply to our brethren of the Medical Faculty to discover some means by which they could live on air.'

[ocr errors]

6

These words have our unqualified assent, and we draw attention to them the more anxiously, on this occasion, because we feel that they may prevent disappointments which might not impossibly befall educational reformers who occupied themselves exclusively with the improvement of the schools as teaching institutions, and the construction of ladders' from one grade of them to another. No canny Scot will put his foot on a ladder unless he can see something substantial at the top of it. It is their failure to appreciate this national characteristic that has set our well-intentioned University reformers on what we cannot but regard as a false scent; and it is far from impossible that the same fate may be in store for those, in many cases the same public-spirited individuals, who are now striving for the improvement of our secondary schools. One single well-endowed head-mastership, like that of Fettes, known to be open to Scotch schoolmasters, provided an eligible candidate can be found amongst them, will do more to stimulate scholarship in Scotland than fifty fellowships or a hundred bursaries. Clever, ambitious, and spirited young men will laugh at the privations from which bursaries or fellowships can relieve them; but they will not risk their prospects in life, and it is an ignoble country that can ask them to do so.

Whilst these pages are passing through the press, the last of the publications which we enumerate has come into our hands. It is a vigorous pleading for the retention of the Scotch Education Board as a permanent institution, and for the extension of its powers; and as it is not only based on resolutions adopted by the Glasgow branch of the Educational Institute, but expresses what we believe to be the prevailing opinion in Scotland, we call attention to it gladly. By many the intrusion of English educational ideas into Scotland is regarded as little better than a covert attempt to avenge Bannockburn.

'We in Scotland,' says the writer, 'feel, and are to be excused if we feel, that we would have more confidence in having our education controlled by men who live among ourselves, and are influenced by the causes which so strongly influence us in respect of what is particular in kind and needful in arrangement for the proper development of our own national system of education. We think we have something particular in our educational system, and that this should be continued and preserved; and hence we think it inevitable that if you have lords

and gentlemen and officials who have a special care of English education, the mere naming of them "the Scottish Education Department," when they come to deal with Scottish education, will not prevent the influence of the greater country from dominating in deciding what they shall require and pay for as proper instruction in an ordinary Scottish school.' (P. 5-6.)

And he urges his plea mainly in behalf of the secondary education.

'But, further, is secondary education ever again to have that encouragement which it once had, and so much requires to-day in Scotland? Then how is this to be attained, and its quality, and its results tested and paid for as elementary education now is? Is it to be left,' as the Act now leaves it, to the discretion of the School Boards in each burgh to do as they please? I believe it cannot be so left, and that if it could, it ought not. What, then, is to be done? The Education Department will not undertake its supervision. Mr. Sellar, in his Manual of the Act (p. 11), says that in Committee on the Bill, June 13, 1872, the Education Department, through the Vice-President of the Council on Education, repudiated all responsibility with regard to higher education. But we in Scotland have always connected elementary and secondary education, and have found it to our advantage to do so, and we cannot see how in one part of its work, and that the lower education, a School Board should be supervised, and so strictly too, while in the other part, and that relating to the higher education, it should be in effect free from control. We think a Scottish Board could very well have both committed to it, and be trusted to manage both to the satisfaction and advantage of the country, and we would hope, also, to the admiration of the world. But, lastly, here, I look at what the Board has done during the three years of its existence-and while not saying that it has committed no errors, which would be to say its members and officials are not human, I point to the general satisfaction given to the country by their services, notwithstanding the unexpected amount, variety, difficulty, and novelty of the work required of them.'

We cannot join in the distrust, which this writer expresses, of the School Boards. Even as regards secondary education we believe they have left little undone that the Act placed within their power. But the School Boards cannot be left entirely to themselves; and the opinion that their supervision by the Education Department in London has been, and is. likely to be, injurious to the interests of secondary instruction is so universal in Scotland as to form a serious objection to its continuance. The grand objection to the present arrange'ment,' exclaims the author of this pamphlet, is that the 'whole tendency of it is to lower Scottish education' (p. 6). Whilst it is held in so little honour, we counsel the Department, for its own sake, to put a Scottish Board between it and the people of Scotland.

ART. IX.-The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. By GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, Esq., M.P. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1876.

IN N the early years of this century two men were born in England, destined to exercise no common influence on the literature of their country and the opinions of their own age, and possibly of all future time. Both of them were devoted by natural gifts, by education, and by taste to the cultivation and the love of letters, and as men of letters they will be judged by posterity. The power they wielded, and sought to wield, was that most enduring of all dominions, the dominion of the pen. Statesmen, warriors, orators, judges, inventors cross the stage of life, but the great writers remain upon it. The influence of a Homer, a Thucydides, or a Bacon is not only untouched, but it is extended, by time. Countless generations will feel it, as past generations have felt it, as we feel it now. These are the fixed stars of human history; they shine with the pure lustre of thought; their constellation never sets; whatever is most abiding in the fitful destiny of man, abides in them.

To attain to some share in this influence was the object to which the two lives we have now in view were directed. From infancy they followed it with unconscious passion, for at an age when children are commonly engrossed by their toys or their grammars, these boys revelled in the works of great thinkers, poets, and historians. Their amazing powers of memory retained all these impressions with a vivacity and reality seldom acquired by the most laborious study. Like beings endowed with another sense, they only perceived by later observation that their fellow creatures achieved by infinite drudgery what came to them by nature and intuition. The infancy and boyhood of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay were marvellous, and, what is not less amazing, they both fulfilled the promise of their earliest years.

But here the parallel must cease, or rather the parallel becomes a contrast. We shall not again retrace the effects on Mill of the dogmatism of unbelief, of the excessive strain on the reasoning faculties, of a sensitive nature bound in an iron philosophical creed, of the absence of all tender domestic influences, of a passion rebellious to the laws of the world if not of morals, and of a morbid dislike to society, which soured his views of life and left him in doubt of all things. Invert every one of these propositions, and you have a Macaulay. He was, we

« AnteriorContinuar »