THE BISHOP OF OXFORD ON THE SUN OF OUR EDUCATIONAL
SYSTEM.
IS thegreat patent candle manufacturer, whose admirable schools for his workmen's children are so famous, a Dis- senter? We are disposed to infer it from the Bishop of Oxford's grand rhetorical flourish at the close of his very silly and mis- chievous speech at the Tunbridge Wells' meeting held in aid of the National Schools' Society. "If you levy a rate," con- cluded the right reverend prelate (with one of those desperate snatches at a perorational metaphor which always remind one of Mr. Toots's peroration at the wedding breakfast of Mr. Feeder, B.A., " and may the flowers that we have this day
strewn in their path be," said Mr. Toots, pausing for a metaphor,—" the banishers of gloom "),— " if you levy a rate, there must be an end of the voluntary teaching of the poor for the love of Christ. By compulsion, I main- tain you would be taking the sun out of the system, and substituting for it the miserable fabricated lights of Price's manufacture." Mr. Toots's "banishers of gloom" were quite vague and abstract, no doubt, beside " the miserable fabri- cated lights of Price's manufacture." But why specially "Price's,"—unless, indeed, it was the Bishop's genial way " of sticking a knife," as Sydney Smith called it, "into a Dis- senter ?" If "Price," or whoever reigns in Price's place, be a Dissenter, and if his great night schools are perhaps even secular, then the Bishop may have had a controversial purpose in speaking of the fabrication of Price's candles as specially "miserable." If not, the point of the depreciating -emphasis on Price's venerable name is a little difficult to understand. "Price's" is not usually regarded as a rhetorical epithet, and the Bishop was apparently in want of some rhetorical epithet, when he so epigrammatically threw off this worthy candle manufacturer's proper name in its place.
But, to leave the episcopal image, which, after all, will probably be a mystery to the end of time, to the thing imaged thereby,—the thesis of the Bishop's speech was to condemn utterly and irrevocably both the kinds of educational compulsion now proposed,—that intended to compel the creation of good schools where no schools are, by the machinery of a compulsory rate,—and that intended to com- pel the attendance of children by refusing them the right to be employed for wages unless they are at the time under the process of education. The first of these steps would, in the more luminous than precise language of the Bishop, be "taking the sun out of the system,"—" the sun " being, as we under- stand the eloquent prelate, voluntary religious education. The latter, the imposing a penalty on children who will not be educated, would be simply nugatory,—playing into the hands of the idlest, instead of giving them a fresh motive for learn- ing. Now, with respect to the first and more important raeasure,—the power of compulsory rating on districts which decline to provide themselves with efficient voluntary schools,— the Bishop is apparently content with assuming that it will "take the sun out of the system." The only reason he 'ventures to offer is, that "directly you introduce the rate- payer, you must give him the real direction of the instruction which the rates he provides furnishes." No doubt ; and as the Bishop goes on to assert, and we ourselves pointed out last week, that means that in rate-founded schools the most that you can do in the way of religious instruction will be the public reading of the Bible. We think with the Bishop that no directly Church or sectarian education will be possible in such schools. We think, also with the Bishop, that the education given at such schools as these will be needlessly defective,—not because we agree with him on the importance of technical theological instruction to the young (on the con- trary, we think it oftener does harm than good), but because the highest and most energetic moral natures will take no such active part in schools of this kind as they probably would take in religious schools where they have a freer scope for their character. So far, then, we entirely go with the Bishop, that it would be a great evil, if not quite " taking the sun out of the system,"—a process of which we have no actual experience,—to supersede the denominational religious schools by rate-aided schools teaching only that " caput 9nortuum" of religion on which all sects agree. But by what rhetorical leaping-pole does the Bishop leap from the position that ratepayers' schools cannot be so complete and useful as the denominational schools, to the position that, if you once hold the threat over a place of founding a school by rates in the absence of efficient and sufficient schools of any other kind, such schools will everywhere be founded, and will everywhere supersede those which existed before ? Does the Bishop suppose that because, when a man is bank- rupt, a receiver is appointed by law to collect his debts, receivers universally supersede ordinary tradesmen ? On the contrary, would not the certainty that, if a man were to become bankrupt, no receiver would be appointed by law to collect the debts due to him, rather tend to increase than diminish the frequency of bankruptcy ? The fact that you- compel the discharge (necessarily less perfectly) of the duty which any district has neglected, and that, too, in a manner which must impose a burden appreciable by all, is no fresh inducement to neglect that duty,—but the reverse. If the various religious denominations have any such zeal as the Bishop of Oxford
imputes to them, the prospect of having the work of educa- tion taken definitively out of their hands and put into the hands of persons who, whatever their religious convictions, will not be allowed to teach them, will be a new stimulus to exertion, not a new discouragement. If they have no such zeal as the Bishop imputes to them, are we to be told that because they do not do their duty the children of the district are to be utterly neglected,—that because their re- ligious principles are already neglected, they are to be neglected altogether, and allowed to grow up like little savages ? We cannot understand the right reverend prelate. He appears to us to argue in favour of allowing voluntary denominational exertion to be as remiss and negligent as it chooses in provid- ing for the educational wants of the country, lest it should be disheartened by the prospect of being superseded by some less perfect system. We have more confidence in the religious schools than the Bishop. We believe that the effect of giving them notice that they will inevitably lose their mono- poly unless they provide efficiently for the population round them,—in which case they will be assisted by Governmen t,— will be to make them redouble their efforts after efficiency. But if not,—why so much the worse for them. The children of the poor are not to be left ignorant because the Christian Churches and Sects are indifferent. If the best education is wanting, we must give the best we can get. The Bishop's notion of providing no remedy for negligence on the part of religious bodies, strikes us as the quaintest device for stimulat- ing their zeal which even an ingenious mind like Dr. Wilberforce's ever gave birth to. If you want to make a man work hard, do you promise him that you will never fill up his place by any one else ? The process which the Bishop of Oxford describes as " taking the sun out of the system " seems to us, even in the sense which he appears to give to that tremendous metaphor, to be better described by putting the sun into it.
As to the Bishop's attack on the proposal to prevent children from taking wages under a certain age who are not under education,—we may characterize it simply as ignorant. " Has it ever occurred to these wise philosophers of Laputa," says the ironical prelate, " who are dealing with these things on some system of trigonometrical surveys " [we fail to catch here the point of the Bishop's sarcasm] "that even if the father shall not be able to employ our lout in a neighbouring farm- yard unless our lout has gained a necessary amount of learning, our lout very likely dislikes work in a farm-yard? So if they say, 'You shan't work for Farmer Hobbes because you haven't learnt so much,' he will answer, Then I shall go and play marbles;' and no doubt that will suit his temperament a great deal better." Is the Bishop quite unaware that the system he makes so much heavy fun of, has been in operation for a great number of years in our factory towns, and has answered perfectly ? Because if he is not, he might condescend to take into account the perceived and known effects of this system, instead of so painfully imagining results which do not in fact occur. The truth is, that on the whole, the Bishop's imaginary lout' is not a practical being. Extraordinary as Dr. Wilberforce may perhaps think it, it is yet true that an average English child is anxious to earn something, and will feel it a very great privation to be prevented from earning something for himself. And as this is known on long experience to be the state of the case, we do not see why it should be ignominious to act upon that knowledge. If it is " trigonometrical " to take account of facts,—and trigonometry really does take account of some facts,—we can only say we prefer being trigonometrical to the Bishop's more lively procedure of imagining "louts " who have no practical existence, and building his conclusions on the hypothesis of their preferences. Really a Bishop who cannot employ his abilities better than by launching imbecile irony at the most important educational reforms of the day, had better not pretend to any interest in the educational cause at all.
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