contributious to older journals. From some of these papers, we make a few extracts, in order to show the comprehensive sphere of the teacher as it was understood and entered into by Arnold. It seems to me, that the education of the middling classes at this time, is a question of the greatest national importance. I wish exceedingly to draw public attention to it; and at the same time, if I may be allowed to do so, to impress most strongly on those engaged in conducting it, the difficulty of their task, as well as its vast importance; how loudly it calls for their very best exertions, and how nobly those exertions, wisely directed, may hope to be rewarded. And on this, as on other subjects, feeling sincerely that my own information is limited, I should be very glad to be the means of inducing others to write upon it, who may be far better acquainted with its details than I am. The schools for the richer classes are, as it is well known, almost universally conducted by the clergy; and the clergy, too, have the superintendence of the parochial schools for the poorer classes. But between these two extremes there is a great multitude of what are called English, or commercial schools, at which a large proportion of the sons of farmers and of tradesmen receive their education. In some instances these are foundation schools, and the master is appointed by, and answerable to, the trustees of the charity; but more commonly they are private undertakings, entered upon by individuals as a means of providing for themselves and their families. There is no restriction upon the exercise of the business of a schoolmaster, and no inquiry made as to his qualifications: the old provision which rendered it unlawful for any man to teach without obtaining a license from the bishop of the diocese, has naturally and necessarily fallen into disuse; and as the government for the last century has thought it right to leave the moral and religious interests of the people pretty nearly to themselves, an impracticable restriction was suffered to become obsolete, but nothing was done to substitute in its place one that should be at once practicable and beneficial. Now, in schools conducted by the clergy, the parents have this security, that the man to whom they commit their children has been at least regularly educated, aud, generally speaking, that he must be a man of decent life. And, if I mistake not, it is merely the prevalence of the feeling that this is so, which has in point of fact given to the clergy nearly the whole education of the richer classes. A man who was not in orders might open a school for the sons of rich parents, if he chose, but he would find it very difficult to get pupils. This state of things has been converted into an accusation against the clergy, by some pretended liberal writers; but it is evidently a most honorable tribute to that union of intellectual and moral qualifications, which, in spite of individual exceptions, still distinguishes the clergy as a body. A layman, who had obtained academical distinctions, would have the same testimony to his intellectual fitness, that a clergyman could boast of; but these distinctions prove nothing as to a man's moral character, whereas, it is felt, and felt justly, that the profession of a clergyman affords to a great extent an evidence of moral fitness also: not certainly as implying any high pitch of positive virtue, but ensuring at least, in common cases, the absence of gross vice; as affording a presumption in short that a man is disposed to be good, and that his faults will be rather those of defficient practice than of habitual carelessness of principle. But the masters of our English or commercial schools labor under this double disadvantage, that not only their moral but their intellectual fitness must be taken upon trust. I do not mean that this is at all their fault; still less do I say, that they are not fit actually for the discharge of their important duties; but still it is a disadvantage to them that their fitness can only be known after trial,--they have no evidence of it to offer beforehand. They feel this inconvenience themselves, and their pupils feel it also; opportunities for making known their proficiency are wanting alike to both. It has long been the reproach of our law, that it has no efficient secondary punishments: it is no less true that we have no regular system of secondary education. The classical schools throughout the country have universities to look to: distinction at school prepares the way for distinction at college; and distinction at college is again the road to distinction and emolument as a teacher; it is a passport with which a young man enters life with advantage, either as a tutor or as a schoolmaster. But any thing like local universities, any so much as local distinction or advancement in life held out to encourage exertion at a commercial school, it is as yet vain to look for. Thus the business of education is degraded: for a schoolmaster of a commercial school having no means of acquiring a general celebrity, is rendered dependent on the inhabitants of his own immediate neighborhood; if he offends them, he is ruined. This greatly interferes with the maintenance of discipline; the boys are well aware of their parents' power, and complain to them against the exercise of their master's authority; nor is it always that the parents themselves can resist the temptation of showing their own importance, and giving the master to understand that he must be careful how he ventures to displease them. It is manifest that this disadvantage can not be overcome by the mere efforts of those on whom it presses: the remedy required must be on a larger scale. That the evil occasioned by it is considerable, I can assert with confidence. Submission and diligence are so naturally unwelcome to a boy, that they whose business it is to enforce them have need of a vantage ground to stand upon: they should command the respect of their scholars, not only by their personal qualities, but by their position in society; they should be able to encourage diligence, by pointing out some distinct and desirable reward to which it may attain. For this the interference of goverment seems to me indispensable, in order to create a national and systematic course of proceeding, instead of the mere feeble efforts of individuals; to provide for the middling classes something analogous to the advantages afforded to the richer classes by our great public schools and universities. Lord Lansdowne, in the late debate in the House of Lords on the government scheme of education, expressed a benevolent wish that education, if generally introduced amongst our manufacturing population, might greatly reduce the amount of crime. God forbid that I should speak or think slightingly of the blessings of education; but I greatly fear that we are expecting more from it in the actual state of our society than it can alone by possibility accomplish. Most wisely has Mr. Laing said in his most instructive account of Norway, that "a man may read and write and yet have a totally uneducated mind; but that he who possesses property, whether he can read and write or not, has an educated mind; he has forethought, caution, and reflection guiding every action; he knows the value of self-restraint, and is in the constant habitual practice of it." What we commonly call education is invaluable when it is given in time to a people possessing the education of property; when it opens to them intellectual enjoyments whilst they are yet in a condition to taste them; and so, by accustoming them to raise their standard of happiness, it prevents them from recklessly sinking to a lower condition. Education, in the common sense of the word, is required by a people before poverty has made havoc amongst them; at that critical moment when civilization makes its first burst, and is accompanied by an immense commercial activity. Then is the time for general education, to teach the man of smaller means how to conduct himself in the coming fever of national development; to make him understand the misery of sinking from the condition of a proprietor to that of a mere laborer; and if this can not be avoided at home, then to dispose him to emigrate to a new country, whilst he still retains the habits which will make him a valuable element in a new society there. But can what is called education,-can book learning really educate beggars, or those whose condition is so low that it can not become lower? Our population want book knowledge, and they also want the means in point of social well-being to render this knowledge available. This is the difficulty of the problem that we know not where to begin. And we shall have gained something, if we are well convinced that no single measure, whether of so called education, or of emigration, or of an improved poor-law, and far less any political privilege, which, when given to men unfit to use it, is an evil to themselves rather than a good,-will be of real efficacy to better our condition. If I can impress your readers with this conviction, I shall do more good than by proposing any remedy of my own, to which there might be serious practicable objections; and then he who makes these objections would be supposed to have overthrown all that I have been urging. I can not tell by myself how to mend the existing evil, but I wish to call attention to its magnitude. I wish to persuade men that a prodigious effort is required: we want every man's wisdom and every man's virtue to consider carefully the state in which we are now living, and to shrink from no sacrifices which may be called for to correct it.-Miscellaneous Works, pp. 227-230, 480–482. It would require a larger space than we have already occupied, to do any thing like justice to the other labors, besides those of the teacher, in which Arnold engaged. We must direct the reader to other sources, to Arnold's works, to Arnold's biography, if he would trace the efforts of the historian and the theologian; or if he would gain a conception of those wider prospects to which Arnold often turned as he thought of a bishopric in the colonies,-in Van Dieman's Land or New Zealand, where episcopal offices would blend with educational; where the school or the college would stand close to the chapel or the cathedral. It is hard for one who honors the subject of this sketch as the writer does, to turn from these noble aspects. Nor is it right to do so without adverting, in the way that we did at an earlier period in Arnold's career, to the strength which the aspirations of the historian, the theologian and the clergyman imparted to the teacher, invigorating his intellect, enlarging his spiritual nature, and crowning the work of the school and the university with the interest and the appreciation excited in the world of letters and of life. In the midst of these varied works, no one of them apparently completed, Arnold suddenly died on the day preceding his fortyseventh birth-day, June 12, 1842. The circle that knew him was aghast at his loss. The circle that has known of him in the fifteen years elapsing since his death, wonders at the abrupt departure of one so active, so useful, so intent upon higher objects than any as yet attained. Early, however, as the earthly existence of Arnold was ended, it did not need a year or a day to be complete. For he died just when his life had been brought to such a point, that the memory of its exertions and of its achievements would be sure to last, sure to inspire even greater exertions and greater achievements in the future. There was or is nothing so great about this man as the example which he left,—an example which could not prevail as extensively and as beneficently in life as after death. Read that example aright, and the teacher who would be one in deed as well in name will learn two truths of inestimable moment. One is that the teacher must be a Christian, not merely a Christian man, but a Christian teacher; that he must see nothing so great, devote himself to nothing so entirely, as to the religion that constitutes at once the foundation, the substance and the crown of education. There is to be nothing vague about his convictions, nothing superficial about his teachings as a Christian instructor; he is to know what religious instruction means, and in what it consists; he is to seek it and to give it in the simplest and in the vastest studies, amid the lispings of the child and the maturer utterances of the man. If public opinion, or the sentiments of his own society are against him, he must be strong; place must be resigned, emoluments sacrificed, ease and facile labors exchanged for trials and wearing anxieties, rather than that he falter for one instant in his allegiance. If fail he must, he will not, he can not altogether fail. He will have taught himself, if he has taught none besides, that the true scholar is the true Christian; that the real man of intellect is the real man of heart; loftier intellectually, because lofty spiritually; profounder in the learning that is of man, because profound in the learning that is of God. The other truth involved in Arnold's example is this, that the teacher must be more than a teacher merely. If teaching is the end, there must be something besides teaching for the means. It is not necessary to be precisely what Arnold was,-a theologian and a historian, a master of a school and a professor in a university; it is given to few to enter upon spheres so various and so wide. But there must be no clinging to a single spot or to a single office; no dependence upon any one work as the solitary employment of the teacher's days. He must be a student, he must be a writer, or a man of public relations; he must be learning if he would teach, working if he would teach, and living a life of service to men if he would live one of service to his pupils. NOTE.-By a "public school" in England, is meant one of the large endowed grammar schools, and the title was formerly confined to Eton, Westminster and Winchester; but in these latter days is extended to Harrow, Rugby, and possibly to a few others of national reputation. They differ from the public schools of this country generally, inasmuch as they are not day schools for elementary as well as for higher instruction, but boarding schools for a liberal education and are supported, not by a tax on the property of the municipality where they are located, or by grants from the state treasury, but by the income of endowments, to which are attached certain conditions and privileges, and by payments made by the pupils who are not admitted on the foundation or endowment. They are public because they are not the results of private enterprise, but are endowments held in trust for the public good. They are open to the whole community of the realm, subject to the conditions of the founder, or charter. By a "grammar school," is meant a school for the study of the Latin and Greek language and literature. It was so-called, because grammatica, (the study of language and linguistic literature,) formed the leading feature of the course of all liberal study,-a part of the Trivium of every school, beyond the grade of the "song scole" or "reade scole." Since mathematical and physical sciences have been added to the course of study in these schools, the term has ceased to convey its original meaning, especially in this country, where schools bear the title of grammar schools, in which the study of language beyond the elementary uses of the vernacu lar is excluded. Of grammar schools, or schools for the study of Latin and Greek, there are upward of five hundred in England, with an annual income of nearly $900,000. By a "free school," was originally meant, not a school in which instruction was to be given without fee or reward, but a public school, free from the jurisdiction of any superior institution, open to the public of the realm, and in some instances, a school of liberal education. In the primary ordinance enacted in the reign of Elizabeth, for the government of the "Libera Schola Grammaticalis Regis Edwardi Sexti," in Shrewsbury, it is enacted that " "every scholar shall pay for his admission, viz., a lord's son, ten shillings; a knight's son, six shillings and eight-pence; a son and heir apparent of a gentleman, three shillings, and for every other of their sons, two shillings and six-pence; every burgess' son, four-pence, and the soa of every other person, eight-pence. II. THE SCHOOL AND TEACHER IN LITERATURE. (Continued from page 190, Vol. IV.) GEORGE CRABBE, 1754-1832. GEORGE CRABBE was born at Oldborough, in Suffolk county, December 24, 1754,-and, with such early training as the Dame and the Latin school of the Borough afforded, was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary, at fourteen, and in due time essayed practice-but failing to obtain it, in 1775 went to London to try his fortune as a writer-was, in the hour of his utmost need, domesticated in the family of Edmund Burke, and encouraged by him in the publication of the Library,-in 1781, showing a strong partiality for the ministry, he was appointed chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, at Beloni Castle, and afterward a curate of his native village,-in 1783, appeared his poem, the Village,-in 1807, his Parish Register,-in 1810, the Boroughs,-in 1813, Tales in Verse, and in 1817 and '18, the Tales of the Hall. He died at Trowbridge, in February, 1832. His pictures of humble life of the trials and sufferings of the poor-his tenderness and practical wisdom, will secure him a permanent place in English literature. He has not forgotten his early dame school and schoolmistress, nor the schools of the borough where he was born, whose characters and local history he thus reproduces. SCHOOLS OF THE BOROUGH. Schools of every Kind to be found in the Borough-The School for Infants-The School Preparatory: the sagacity of the Mistress in foreseeing Character-Day-Schools of the lower Kind-A Master with Talents adapted to such Pupils: one of superior Qualifications-Boarding-Schools: that for young ladies: one going first to the Governess, one finally returning Home-School for Youth: Master and Teacher; various Dispositions and Capacities-The Miser Boy-The BoyBully-Sons of Farmers: how amused-What Study will effect, examined-A College Life: one sent from his College to a Benefice; one retained there in Dignity-The Advantages in either Case not considerable-Where, then, the Good of a literary Life-Answered-Conclusion. To every class we have a School assign'd, (1.) |