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Untitled Article
mattered not what they teach , or in what method they teach it , we might in this country expect to see all the ends of a national education speedily attained with little assistance from government . In a country containing thirteen millions of people , the whole expense of the schools to the state , not only for the lower but for the
middling classes , did not amount , in the year 1831 , to 35 , 000 £ . When we remember "that , as it is asserted on the highest authority , 1 , 200 , 000 / . are voluntarily raised for the support of our extremely defective popular schools , we have surely no reason to despair that if our management were equal to our means , ample provision would be found for the suitable education of the whole people . ' *
The £ 20 , 000 granted by Parliament last year for building school-houses called forth private contributions of nearly treble the amount . Independently of all this , we have the immense endowments which the charity commissioners have brought to light , and proved to have been for generations embezzled and
wasted . As far , therefore , as quantity of teaching is concerned , the education of our people is ., or will speedily be , amply provided for . It is the quality which so grievously demands the amending hand of government . And this is the demand which is principally in danger of being obstructed by popular apathy and ignorance .
^ The very first condition of improvement is not yet realized ; the public are not sufficiently discontented . They are not yet alive to the bad quality of the existing tuition . The very people who furnish so vast an annual sum for the maintenance of schools , often oppose themselves to the wish of their own schoolmasters to give valuable instruction . With many of these patrons of education , whose support Lord Brougham fears will be withdrawn if a state provision be made for education , the constant alarm is , not lest too little , but lest too much , should be taught . And even where the state . of their inclinations is unexceptionable , can we expect any judgment or intelligence in providing education for
their inferior ** in the scale of society , from people who allow the places of education for their own children to be in the wretched state in which we find almost all the schools for the higher and middle classes of England ? Are not those schools , and the influence which parents exercise over them , correctly described in the following passage : t—
Let us look at home , and examine whether with all the grievous abuses of the endowed seminaries of Great Britain , they are , after all , a particle worse than , or even so bad as , almost all our other places of education . We may ask , whether the desire to gain as much money with as little labour as is consistent with saving appearances , be peculiar to the endowed teachers ? Whether the plan of nineteen-twentieths of our unendowed schools be not an organized system of charlataneric * Sir W . Molesworth ' a speech . f From a pamphlet , entitled , * Corporation and Church Property resumable by the State . From the Jurist of February , 1833 /
Untitled Article
504 Reform in Education .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1834, page 504, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2635/page/44/
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