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Untitled Article
reading can read fluently f or have had the meaning of half the words they laboriously spell out , explained to them ? Put a book into their hands , and see how many of them will answer that they can only read in the book they are accustomed to . And is this the teachings the multiplication of which has rendered a national education unnecessary ? Mr . Roebuck , whose advocacy of education , as of every thing else , is that of a person really in earnest about it , has announced for next week , a motion similar to that by which he did so much good last year . But a more important motion still , and one which we trust we shall see him introduce—for of any other of the professing friends of education we have small hope—would be one for an address to the crown , to appoint a commission
for ascertaining and reporting upon the quality of the instruction at the various existing schools . Anything less than a public in- ^ tigation , embracing the whole country , would not suffice . Cases resting on private authority will not do ; they will be denied , or represented as exceptions selected to make out a case . The abuses of the Poor Laws would have been so represented , if there had been no Poor Law Commission . But when an inquiry was set on foot ,, with a real desire to make it an effectual
one , the evils which we had heard of as occasional , perhaps even frequent , were found to pervade the whole country ; and what proved to be the rare and scattered exceptions , were the cases of good , not those of bad administration . An inquiry is wanted into the state of education , as searching and as comprehensive as that into the administration of the Poor Laws . Until there has been
such an inquiry nothing will be done , nor will the public feel the necessity of doing anything , to bring the education of the people generally , under a more active and intelligent superintendence . Meanwhile the Ministers will deserve high praise , if they are serious in their purpose of establishing Normal Schools . This is at once the most important step towards a national system , and a good in itself of inestimable value . If a scheme for the education of the whole people had already received the sanction of the Legislature , its execution must have waited until an improved
race of schoolmasters could be raised up ; but if even without founding any schools of our own , we educate teachers for the Existing schools to a standard greatly exceeding the present average , we shall , by this single measure , change the whole character of the education of the country . The great school societies would , it is to be hoped , supply themselves with schoolmasters from the Normal Schools ; and private teachers not trained at these institutions , could only stand their ground by showing qualifications equal to that high standard which the public would earn to exact . Normal Schools , sufficient for all the wants of the country might be founded and carried on at a very moderate expense }
Untitled Article
S&& Notes on the Newspapers .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1834, page 358, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2633/page/46/
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