Читать книгу Leading Articles on Various Subjects - Hugh Miller - Страница 14

Table of Contents

General Outline of an Educational Scheme adequate to the demands of the Age––Remuneration of Teachers––Mode of their Election––Responsibility––Influence of the Church in such a Scheme––Apparent Errors of the Church––The Circumstances of Scotland very different now from what they were in the days of Knox.

Scotland will never have an efficient educational system at once worthy of her ancient fame, and adequate to the demands of the age, until in every parish there be at least one central school, known emphatically as the Parish or Grammar School, and taught by a superior university-bred teacher, qualified to instruct his pupils in the higher departments of learning, and fit them for college. And with this central institute every parish must also possess its supplementary English schools, efficient of their kind, though of 89 a lower standing, and sufficiently numerous to receive all the youthful population of the district which fails to be accommodated in the other. In these, the child of the labourer or mechanic––if, possessed of but ordinary powers, he looked no higher than the profession of his father––could be taught to read, write, and figure. If, however, there awakened within him during the process, the stirrings of those impulses which characterize the superior mind, he could remove to his proper place––the central school––mayhap, in country districts, some two or three miles away; but when the intellectual impulses are genuine, two or three miles in such cases are easily got over.

We would fix for the teachers, in the first instance, on no very extravagant rate of remuneration; for it might prove bad policy in this, as in other departments, to set a man above his work. The salaries attached at present to our parish schools vary from a minimum of £25 to a maximum of about £34. Let us suppose that they varied, 90 instead, from a minimum of £60 to a maximum of £80––not large sums, certainly, but which, with the fees and a free house, would render every parochial schoolmaster in Scotland worth about from £80 to £100 per annum, and in some cases––dependent, of course, on professional efficiency and the population of the locality––worth considerably more. The supplementary English schools we would place on the average level maintained at present by our parish schools, by providing the teachers with free houses, and yearly salaries of a minimum of £30 and a maximum of £40. And as it is of great importance that men should not fall asleep at their posts, and as tutors never teach more efficiently than when straining to keep ahead of their pupils, we would fain have provision made that, by a permitted use of occasional substitutes, this lower order of schoolmasters should be enabled to prepare themselves, by attendance at college, for competing, as vacancies occurred, for the higher schools. It would be an arrangement worth £20 additional salary to every school in Scotland, that the channels of preferment should be ever kept open to useful talent and honest diligence, so that the humblest English teacher in the land might rise, in the course of years, to be at the head of its highest school; nay, that, like that James Beattie who taught at one time the parish school of Fordoun, he might, if native faculty had been given and wisely improved, become one of the country’s most distinguished professors. In fixing our permanent castes of schools, Grammar and English, we would strongly urge that there should be no permanent castes of teachers fixed––no men condemned to the humbler walks of the profession if qualified for the higher. The life-giving sap would thus have free course, from the earth’s level to the topmost boughs of our national scheme; and low as an Englishman might deem our proposed rates of remuneration for university-taught men, we have no fear that they would prove insufficient, 91 coupled with such a provision, for the right education of the country.

We are not sure that we quite comprehend the sort of machinery meant to be included under the term Local or Parochial Boards. It seems necessary that there should exist Local Committees of the educational franchise-holders, chosen by themselves, from among their own number, for terms either definite or indefinite, and recognised by statute as vested in certain powers of examination and inquiry. But though a mere name be but a small matter, we are inclined to regard the term Board as somewhat too formidable and stiff. Let us, at least for the present, substitute the term Committee; and as large committees are apt to degenerate into little mobs, and, as such, to conduct their business noisily and ill, let us suppose educational committees to consist, in at least country districts or the smaller towns, of some eight or ten individuals, selected by the householders for their intelligence, integrity, and business habits, and with a chairman at their head, chosen from among their number by themselves. A vacancy occurs, let us suppose, in either the Grammar or one of the English schools of the place: the committee, through their chairman, put themselves in communication with some of the Normal schoolmasters of the south, and receive from them a few names of deserving and qualified teachers, possessed of diplomas indicating their professional standing, and furnished, besides, with trustworthy certificates of character. Or, if the emoluments of the vacant school be considerable, and some of the neighbouring teachers, placed on a lower rate of income, have distinguished themselves by their professional merits, and so rendered themselves known in the district, let us suppose that they select their names, and to the number of some two, three, four, or more, submit them, with the necessary credentials, to their constituents the householders. And these assemble on some fixed day, 92 and, from the number placed on the list, select their men. Such, in the business of electing a schoolmaster, would, we hold, be the proper work of a committee. In all other seasons, the committee might be recognised as vested in some of the functions now exercised by the Established presbyteries, such as that of presiding, in behalf of the parentage of the locality, at yearly or half-yearly examinations of the schools, and of watching over the general morals and official conduct of the teacher. But the power of trial and dismission, which, of course, would need to exist somewhere, we would vest in other hands. Let us remark, in the passing, that much might come to depend ultimately on the portioning out of the localities into electoral districts of a proper size, and that it would be perhaps well, as a general rule, that there should be no subdivisions made of the old parishes. There are few parishes in Scotland in which the materials of a good committee might not be found; but there are perhaps many half, and third, and quarter parishes in which no such materials exist. Further, the householders of some country hamlet or degraded town-suburb, populous enough to require its school, might be yet very unfit of themselves to choose for it a schoolmaster. And hence the necessity for maintaining a local breadth of representation sufficient to do justice to the principle of the scheme, and to prevent it, if we may so speak, from sinking in the less solid parts of the kingdom. A parochial breadth of base would serve as if to plank over the unsounder portions of the general surface, and give footing to a system of schools and teachers worthy, as a whole, of the character and the necessities of a country wise and enlightened in the main, but that totters on the brink of a bottomless abyss.

The power of trying, and, if necessary, of dismissing from his charge, an offending teacher, would, however, as we have said, require to exist somewhere. Every official, 93 whether of the State or Church, or whether dependent on a single employer or on a corporation or company, bears always a twofold character. He is a subject of the realm, and, as such, amenable to its laws; he has also an official responsibility, and may be reprimanded or dismissed for offences against the requirements and duties of his office. A tradesman or mechanic may go on tippling for years, wasting his means and neglecting his business, untouched by any law save that great economic law of Providence which dooms the waster to ultimate want; but for the excise officer, or bank accountant, or railway clerk, who pursues a similar course, there exists a court of official responsibility, which anticipates the slow operation of the natural law, by at once divesting the offender of his office. And the State-paid schoolmaster must have also his official responsibility. But it would serve neither the ends of justice nor the interests of a sound policy to erect his immediate employers into a court competent to try and condemn: their proper place would be rather that of parties than of judges; and as parties, we would permit them simply to conduct against him any case for which they might hold there existed proper grounds. A schoolmaster chosen by a not large majority, might find in a few years that his supporters had dwindled into a positive minority: parents whose boys were careless, or naturally thick-headed, would of course arrive at the opinion that it was the teacher who was in fault; nay, a parent who had fallen into arrears with his fees might come to entertain the design of discharging the account simply by discharging the schoolmaster; and thus great injustice might be done to worthy and efficient men, and one of the most important classes of the community placed in circumstances of a shackled dependency, which no right-minded teacher could submit to occupy. What we would propose, then, is, that the power of trial, and of dismission if necessary, should be vested in a central national board, furnished 94 with one or more salaried functionaries to record its sentences and do its drudgery, but consisting mainly of unpaid members of high character and standing,––some of them, mayhap, members ex officio; the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, let us suppose––the Principal and some of the Professors of the Edinburgh University––the Rector, shall we say, of the High School––the Lord Advocate, and mayhap the Dean of Faculty. And as it would be of importance that there should be as little new machinery created as possible, the evidence, criminatory or exculpatory, on which such a board would have to decide could be taken before the Sheriff Courts of the provinces, and then, after being carefully sifted by the Sheriffs or their Substitutes, forwarded in a documentary form to Edinburgh. It would scarce be wise to attempt extemporizing an official code in a newspaper article; but the laws of such a code might, we think, be ranged under three heads,––immorality, incompetency, and breach of trust to the parents. We would urge the dismissal, as wholly unqualified to stand in the relation of teacher to the youthhead, of the tippling, licentious, or dishonest schoolmaster; further, we would urge the dismissal (and in cases of this kind the corroborative evidence of the Government inspector might be regarded as indispensable) of an incompetent teacher who did not serve the purpose of his appointment; and, in the third and last place, we would urge that a teacher who made an improper use of his professional influence over his pupils, and of the opportunities necessarily afforded him, and who taught them to entertain beliefs, ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical, which their parents regarded as erroneous, should be severely reprimanded for such an offence in the first instance, and dismissed if he persevered in it. We would confer upon the board, in cases of this last kind, no power of deciding regarding the absolute right or wrong of the dogmas taught. The teacher might be a zealous Voluntary, who assured the 95 children of men such as the writer of these articles that their fathers, in asserting the Establishment principle, approved themselves limbs of that mystic Babylon which was first founded by Constantine; or he might be a conscientious Establishment-man, who dutifully pressed upon the Voluntary pupils under his care, that their parents, though they perhaps did not know it, were atheistical in their views. And we would permit no board to determine in such cases, whether Voluntaryism was in any respect or degree tantamount to atheism, or the Establishment principle to Popery. But we would ask them to declare, as wise and honest men, that no schoolmaster, under the pretext of a zeal for truth, should with impunity break faith with the parents of his pupils, or prejudice the unformed and ductile minds entrusted to his care against their hereditary beliefs. Should we, however, do no violence by such a provision, we have heard it asked, to the conscientious convictions of the schoolmaster? No, not in the least. If he was in reality the conscientious man that he professed to be, he would quit his equivocal position as a teacher, in which, without being dishonest, he could not fulfil what he deemed his religious duty, and become a minister; a character in which he would find Churches within which he could affirm with impunity that Dr. Chalmers was, in virtue of his Establishment views, little better than a Papist, or that Robert Hall, seeing he was a Voluntary, must have been an unconscious atheist at bottom.

Let us next consider what the influence of the ministers of our Church would be under a national scheme such as that which we desiderate, and what the probability that the national teaching would be religious. The minister, as such, would possess, nominally at least, but a single vote; and if he were what an ordained minister may in some cases be––merely a suit of black clothes surmounted by a white neckcloth––the vote, nominally one, would be also really but one; nor ought it, we at once say, to weigh in 96 such cases an iota more than it counted. Mere black coats and white neckcloths, though called by congregations, and licensed and ordained by presbyteries, never yet carried on the proper business of either Church or school. But if the minister was no mere suit of clothes, but a Christian man, ordained and called not merely by congregations and presbyteries, but by God Himself, his one vote in the case would outweigh hundreds, simply because it would represent the votes of hundreds. Let us suppose that, with the national schools thrown open, a vacancy had occurred in the parish school of Cromarty during the incumbency of the lamented Mr. Stewart. The people of the town and parish, possessing the educational franchise, would meet; their committee would deliberate; there would be a teacher chosen,––in all probability, the present excellent Free Church teacher of the town; and every man would feel that he had exercised in the election his own judgment on his own proper responsibility. And yet it would assuredly be the teacher whom the minister had deemed on the whole most eligible for the office, that would find himself settled, in virtue of the transaction, in the parish school. How? Not, certainly, through any exercise of clerical domination, nor through any employment of what is still more hateful––clerical manœuvre––but in virtue of a widespread confidence reposed by the people in the wisdom and the integrity of the minister sent them by God Himself to preach to them the everlasting gospel. In almost all the surrounding parishes––in Resolis, Rosskeen, Urquhart under the late Dr. M’Donald, Alness, Kiltearn, Kincardine, Kilmuir, etc. etc. etc.––in similar cases similar results would follow; and if there are preachers in that vast northern or north-western tract––which, with the three northern counties, includes also almost the entire Highlands––in which such results would not follow, it would be found that in most cases the fault lay rather with the ordained suits of black, 97 topped by the white neckcloths, than with the people whom they failed to influence.

As for the religion or the religious teaching of the schools, we hold it to be one of the advantages of the proposed scheme, that it would really stir up both ministers and people to think seriously of the matter, and to secure for the country truly religious teaching, so far as it was found to be at once practicable and good. Previous to the year 1843, when the parish schools lay fully within our power, there was really nothing done to introduce religious teaching into them; we had it all secure on written sheepskin, that their teaching should and might be religious, for we had them all fast bound to the Establishment; and, as if that were enough of itself, ministers, backed by heritors and their factors, went on filling these parish schools with men who stood the test of the Disruption worse, in the proportion of at least five to one, than any other class in the country, and who, if their religious teaching had but taken effect on the people by bringing them to their own level, would have rendered that Disruption wholly an impossibility.[16] And then, when that great event occurred, we flung ourselves into an opposite extreme,––eulogized our Educational Scheme as the best and most important of all the Schemes of our Church, on, we suppose, the principle so well understood by the old divines, that whereas the other schemes were of God, and God-enjoined, this scheme was of ourselves,––introduced, further, the design of ‘inducting’ our teachers, as if an idle ceremony could be any substitute for the indispensable commission signed by the Sovereign, and could make the non-commissioned by Him at least half ecclesiastics.[17] And then, after teaching our 98 schoolmasters to teach religion, we sent them abroad in shoals––some of them, no doubt, converted men, hundreds of them unconverted, and religious but by certificate––to make the children of the Free Church as good Christians as themselves. And by attempting to make them half ecclesiastics, we have but succeeded in making them half mendicants, and somewhat more,––a character which assuredly no efficient schoolmaster ought to bear; for while his profession holds in Scripture no higher place than the two secular branches of the learned professions, physic and the law, he is as certainly worthy of his reward, and of maintaining an independent position in society, as either the lawyer or the physician. In schools truly national––with no sheepskin authority to sleep over on the one hand, and no idle dream of semi-ecclesiastical ‘induction’ to beguile on the other––the item of religious teaching, brought into prominence by both the Free and the Established Churches in the preliminary struggle, would assert 99 and receive its due place. Scotland would possess what it never yet possessed,––not even some twenty years or so after the death of Knox,––a system of schools worthy, in the main, of a Christian country. We are told by old Robert Blair, in his Autobiography, that when first brought under religious impressions (in the year 1600), ‘he durst never play on the Lord’s day, though the schoolmaster, after taking an account of the Catechism, dismissed the children with that express direction, “Go not to the town, but to the fields, and play.” I obeyed him,’ adds the worthy man, ‘in going to the fields, but refused to play with my companions, as against the commandment of God.’ Now it is not at all strange that there should have been such a schoolmaster, in any age of the Presbyterian Church, in one of the parish schools of our country; but somewhat strange, mayhap, considering the impression so generally received regarding the Scottish schools of that period, that Blair should have given us no reason whatever to regard the case as an extreme or exceptional one. Certainly, with such a central board in existence as that which we desiderate, no such type of schoolmaster would continue to hold office in a national seminary.

Further, it really seems difficult to determine whether the difference between the old educational scheme of Knox and that proposed at the present time by the Free Church, or the difference between the circumstances of Scotland in his days and of Scotland in the present day, be in truth the wider difference of the two. Knox judged it of ‘necessitie that every several kirk should have one schoolmaster appointed,’––‘such a one at least as was able to teach grammar and the Latine tongue;’ ‘that there should be erected in every notable town,’ a ‘colledge, in which the arts, logic, and rhethorick, together with the tongues, should be read by masters, for whom honest stipends should be appointed;’ and further, ‘that fair provision should be 100 made for the [support of the] poor [pupils], in especial those who came from landward,’ and were ‘not able, by their friends nor by themselves, to be sustained at letters.’ We know that the notable towns referred to here as of importance enough to possess colleges were, many of them, what we would now deem far from notable. Kirkwall, the Chanonry of Ross, Brechin, St. Andrews, Inverary, Jedburgh, and Dumfries, are specially named in the list; and we know further, that what Knox deemed an ‘honest stipend’ for a schoolmaster, amounted on the average to about two-thirds the stipend of a minister. Such, in the sixteenth century, was the wise scheme of the liberal and scholarly Knox, the friend of Calvin, Beza, and Buchanan. Are we to recognise its counterpart in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a scheme at least three-fourths of whose teachers are paid with yearly salaries of from £10 to £13, 13s. 4d.––about half ploughman’s wages––and of whom not a fourth have passed the ordeal of a Government examination, pitched at the scale of the lowest rate of attainment? The scheme of the noble Knox! Say rather a many-ringed film-spinning grub, that has come creeping out of the old crackling parchment, in which the sagacious Reformer approved himself as much in advance of his own age, as many of those who profess to walk most closely in his steps demonstrate themselves to be in the rear of theirs.

Let us next mark how entirely the circumstances of the country have changed since the days of the First Book of Discipline. With the exception of the clergy, a few lay proprietors, and a sprinkling of the inhabitants of the larger towns, Scotland was altogether, in the earlier period, an uneducated nation. Even for more than a century after, there were landed gentlemen of the northern counties unable, as shown by old deeds, to sign their names. If the Church had not taken upon herself the education of the 101 people in those ages, who else was there to teach them? Not one. Save for her exertions, the divine command, ‘Search the Scriptures,’ would have remained to at least nine-tenths of the nation a dead letter. But how entirely different the circumstances of Scotland in the present time! The country has its lapsed masses,––men in very much the circumstances, educationally, of the great bulk of the population in the age of Knox; and we at once grant that, unless the Churches of the country deal with these as Knox dealt with the whole, there is but little chance of their ever being restored to society or the humanizing influences of religion, let Government make for them what provision it may.[18] But such is not the condition of the membership of at least the evangelical Churches. Such is palpably not the condition of the membership of the Free Church, consisting as it does of parents taken solemnly bound, in their baptismal engagements, to bring up their children in the ‘nurture and admonition of the Lord,’ and of the children for whom they have been thus taken bound. Save in a few exceptional cases, their education is secure, let the Church exert herself as little as she may. She is but exhausting herself in vain efforts to do what would be done better without her. She has all along contemplated, we are told, merely the education of her own members; and these form exactly that portion of the people which––unless, indeed, the solemn engagements 102 which she has deliberately laid upon them mean as little as excise affidavits or Bow Street oaths––may be safely left to a broad national scheme, wisely based on a principle of parental responsibility.

‘If thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time,’ said Mordecai to Esther, ‘then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed.’ Scotland will have ultimately her Educational Scheme adequate to the demands of the age; but if the Free Church stand aloof, and suffer the battle to be fought by others, her part or lot in it may be a very small matter indeed. What, we ask, would be her share, especially in the Highlands, in a scheme that rendered the basis of the educational franchise merely co-extensive with the basis of the political one? Nay, what, save perhaps in the northern burghs, would be her share in such a scheme over Scotland generally? A mere makeweight at best. But at least the lay membership of the Free Church will, we are assured, not long stand aloof; and this great question of national education being in no degree an ecclesiastical one, nor lying within the jurisdiction of presbyteries or assemblies, true lovers of their country and of their species, whether of the Established or of the Free Churches, will come forward and do their duty as Scotchmen on the political platform. In neither body does the attitude assumed by the ecclesiastical element in this question, so far as has yet been indicated, appear of a kind which plain, simple-minded laymen will delight to contemplate. The Established Church courts are taking up the ground that the teaching in their parish schools has been all along religious, and at least one great source from which has sprung the vitalities of the country’s faith. And who does not know that to be a poor, unsolid fiction,––a weak and hollow sham? And, on the other hand, some of our Free Churchmen are asserting that they are not morally 103 bound to their forlorn teachers for the meagre and altogether inadequate salaries held out to them in prospect, when they were set down in their humble schools, divorced from all other means of support, to regulate their very limited expenditure by the specified incomes. Further, they virtually tell us that we cannot possibly take our stand as Scotchmen on this matter, in the only practical position, without being untrue to our common Christianity, and enemies to our Church. It has been urged against our educational articles, that we have failed to take into account the fall of man: he would surely be an incorrigible sceptic, we reply, who could look upon statements such as these, and yet doggedly persist in doubting that man has fallen. But, alas! it is not a matter on which to congratulate ourselves, that when the Established Church is coming forward to arrest the progress of national education with her strange equivocal caveat, the Free Church––the Church of the Disruption––should be also coming forward with a caveat which at least seems scarce less equivocal; and that, like the twin giants of Guildhall––huge, monstrous, unreal––both alike should be turning deaf and wooden ears to the great clock of destiny, as it strikes the hours of doom to their distracted and sinking country. O for an hour of the great, the noble-minded Chalmers! Ultimately, however, the good cause is secure. It is a cause worth struggling and suffering for. We know a little boy, not yet much of a reader, who has learned to bring a copy of Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, which now opens of itself at the battle of Bannockburn, to a little girl, his sister, somewhat more in advance, that she may read to him, for the hundredth time, of Wallace and the Black Douglas, and how the good King Robert struck down Sir Henry Bohun with a single blow, full in the sight of both armies. And after drinking in the narrative, he tells that, when grown to be a big man, he too is to be a soldier like 104 Robert the Bruce, and to ‘fight in the battle of Scotland.’ And then he asks his father when the battle of Scotland is to begin! Laymen of the Free Church, the battle of Scotland has already begun; and ’tis a battle better worth fighting than any other which has arisen within the political arena since the times of the Reform Bill. Your country has still claims upon you: the Disruption may have dissolved the tie which bound you to party; but that which binds you to Scotland still remains entire. The parental right is not dissolved by any traditionary requirements of the altar; nor can we urge with impunity to our country,––‘It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me.’