MIDDLE-CLASS EDUCATION.

THE condition of Middle-class Education has recently occupied much attention in England, and some practical steps towards its improvement have been taken by the Universities of Oxford and London. Nor has the subject been altogether ignored in Ireland. The President of Queen's College, Cork, in his Address at the opening of the present Session, drew public attention to the subject, and the Board of Trinity College, Dublin, held some deliberations on it during the course of last summer. Under these circumstances, some discussion of the subject in these pages will be probably not unacceptable to our readers, and we propose to lay before them - first, some considerations respecting middle-class education, and the causes of its present low condition; and secondly, a brief account of the efforts which have been lately made in England, and which, with certain modifications, ought now to be made in Ireland, to place this education on a more satisfactory footing.

I. The phrase "middle-class education" may seem at first sight to be indefinite in meaning, inasmuch as the different sections of our middle class exhibit the widest diversity in the kind and amount of education which they receive. But much of this indefiniteness will disappear from the expression when the adjective "middle class" is understood to apply, not so much to the individual educated as to the education itself, as one lying between the high culture attainable at a University, and the humble rudiments acquired at a parish school. It is an education, then, which, while it does not aspire to make philosophers or scholars, yet aims at qualifying a man for higher work than that of hewing wood and drawing water; one which fairly develops his faculties of observation, of judgment, of reasoning; which enables him to bring some intelligence to the affairs of his office, his shop, or his farm; which prepares him for the ordinary duties of a citizen in a free state; and gives independence to his vote, and weight to his opinion. Such an education need not involve a knowledge of Greek, of Metaphysics, or of the higher Mathematics, but it ought to bestow some command over English and French, some insight into History, Political Economy, and Physical Science, and some power of enjoyment in the fields of Literature and Art. It will, perhaps, assist our description of this education to say that it is one which would completely satisfy the conditions of an educational franchise. All our political parties are now

agreed as to the desirability of such a franchise; but the difficulty in the way of its realization is the absence of a suitable educational test. The ability to read and write is too low a test; the possession of a University degree, if not too high, is at least too arbitrary a test, being a mark not so much of education in general as of a special kind of education, and of one limited to a few particular professions. But a middle-class education, such as we have endeavoured to describe, would be a real qualification for political rights; and, supposing its attainment were placed within easy reach of the middle and of some portion of the working classes, a degree or diploma attesting the possession of it would afford just the criterion required for this much needed political reform.

The two great instruments by which this kind of education is attempted are the school, first, and subsequently, the popular lecture. Of neither of these instruments can it be said that it is in an efficient state, or that the work done by it is commensurate with our educational wants. Isolated lectures, or isolated courses of lectures, are delivered from time to time in most of our towns, and exhibit more or less merit as expositions of their several subjects; but the mutual connexion of these subjects, their logical dependence one upon the other is hardly ever thought of, and the natural order of study is as often inverted as preserved. As the lecturer has no means of co-ordinating his labours with those either of his predecessors or his successors, he neither attempts to build on the foundations of the former, nor cares to leave a foundation for the latter. His own subject he is obliged to treat in a fragmentary and exclusive spirit; and thus to divest it to a great extent of its natural interest and of its educational value. The student who will resolutely follow many courses of lectures delivered on this principle will acquire, of course, a certain amount of knowledge; but it is knowledge the value of which is sadly impaired by want of rationality in plan, and of coherence in its parts. The intellectual result may be compared, not to a wellproportioned edifice, every apartment of which is furnished fitly for its purpose, and the whole pleasant and convenient to dwell in; but rather to a broker's store, in which furniture of all kinds is jumbled together, so that no one article exhibits its proper utility or beauty. To other hearers, however, and these the majority, the result is simply weariness, and a growing disbelief in popular lectures as a means of instruction. Hence the empty benches that often chill the efforts of our best lecturers; and hence the attempts made by inferior lecturers to excite a factitious interest by puerile experiments, which surprise, but do not in

struct; by fanciful speculations, meant to amuse the vacant mind; and sometimes by indifferent jokes, or pointless anecdotes, or obsequious platitudes.

Much that is faulty in our present popular lecturing would, no doubt, be remedied at once by a higher intellectual tone and a better scientific preparation on the part of the audience. This is only saying that there is a mutual reaction between the audience and their lecturer, and that the educational instrument would improve along with the material on which it had to operate. The question then arises,-to which of the two parties in the process, the agent or the patient, ought the reform to be first applied? We answer, to both simultaneously, for an improvement in either is possible independently of the other, and necessitates an improvement in that other. But if we should be forced to make a choice between the two, we would prefer to begin with the audience, seeing that their intellectual preparation depends mainly on the state of our schools, and these are much more under our control and amenable to reform than our system of popular lecturing.

That the education given at our middle-class schools is in general meagre and slovenly,-that these schools are far less effective for their purpose than classical schools are for University education, or than most parish schools now-a-days are for primary education,—seems to be generally admitted. If a labouring man or handicraftsman can only leave his son a reasonable time at a national school, the boy will be able to acquire all the education that his future station and occupations in life require. Or if a youth who is designed for a University career avails himself of the teaching afforded at our classical schools, he will find himself, on entering College, very fairly prepared to address himself to the studies imposed on him. But a boy may remain till 16 or 17 in a middle-class school, and may learn all that the school teaches, and yet leave it most inadequately prepared for the business and the social position which await him. Whence this difference? It is not from any difference in the masters; for in the common case of mixed schools, where the same master directs the education both of classes preparing for the Universities, and of classes preparing for business, we constantly find that the University education is excellent, while the middle-class education, usually that of the majority, is grossly neglected. Nor is the difference due to anything inherent in the nature of middle-class education, for the subjects it includes are naturally more attractive to boys than the dead languages, and present a more obvious utility. The

causes are perhaps manifold: but the following three appear to us to be at once the most influential and the most removable.

First, the want of a well-defined aim. The master of a classical school, on the one hand, or of a National School on the other, knows exactly what he is expected to teach, and what his boys will have occasion for on leaving him. The University Curriculum guides the one, the rules of the National Board or of the Patron instruct the other : but the middle-class schoolmaster is left to his own judgment or convenience as to what he will teach, and what omit, and that in a case really more difficult and more in need of the best guidance to be had than either of the other two: for his pupils are to be prepared, not for a University where there will be time and opportunities to correct many of the defects of their school education, but for practical life, and not for a low position in life either, but for one which often gives considerable social influence, and commensurate responsibilities.

The second circumstance which operates prejudicially against our middle-class school, is the want of an improved method of instruction. This question of method is one which has of late years received particular attention from the officers of the National Systems of Education both in England and Ireland, and probably the methods now in use in training and model schools, and even in well-managed parish schools, are better than those followed in the best classical and commercial schools. But whatever room there may be for improvement in classical schools as respects method of instruction, there is not that utter absence of system or plan which characterizes the teaching of our middle-class schools. Thucydides is never read before Xenophon; nor Tacitus before Cæsar. Attention is not confined by one master to parsing, by another to translation, by a third to historical or critical explanation. The definiteness of aim enjoyed by classical schools produces a corresponding exactness and harmony of method; and the teaching instituted at the Universities is copied at the great schools, and repeated through all the classical seminaries of the kingdom. But is anything like this unanimity of plan perceivable in our middle-class schools? In their teaching of English composition, of History, of French, nay, of such well-established subjects as Arithmetic or Spelling, or the art of Reading aloud, does one school resemble another; or is there in the majority of schools anything worthy of being called a method? Or consider, for example, the use made of Dictation as an educational process; a process so potent, in the hands of an able master, for cultivating the power of

attention, memory, and judgment, for exhibiting the structure of sentences, for teaching the genesis, and history, and subtle distinctions of words. In most middle-class schools this engine is scarcely used at all; where it is used, it is commonly committed to the hands of the writing-master, or some junior usher, who regards it merely as an exercise in calligraphy, or, at most, in that and spelling. Now, whenever middle-class education begins to overhaul its method, Dictation will be always assigned to the most accomplished master in the school, and will be, not an occasional, but probably a daily task.

The third and most fundamental defect in our middle-class schools is the absence of any easy and certain test by which parents may distinguish the good school from the bad, the really efficient master from the plausible pretender. In the case of classical schools, this test is supplied by the Entrance Examinations of the University; and the character of the school rises or sinks with the places obtained by the pupils entering from it. In the case of national and other primary schools the pupil's acquirements are tested by official inspectors, and on the reports of these depends the advancement of the master. But the middle-class school is submitted neither to official inspection nor to University examination. The master has little stimulus to carry him through the drudgery of his profession, over and above his sense of duty; the parent has no guarantee of the master's merit beyond the fallacious one of high price and pompous references. We cannot be surprised that the results are the same as in other kinds of business where the purchaser is obliged to take the dealer's word for the value of the article he buys. Indeed, considering that there is no article which takes so long to manifest its defects as education does, the wonder is, not that middle-class schools are so indifferent as they are, but rather, that they are not worse.

In what precedes, we have for distinctness' sake spoken of classical education and middle-class education as if they were never united in the same establishment; but always given apart each from the other. This, of course, is not the case, and in Ireland mixed schools are the rule, not the exception. Our statements, however, are equally applicable to schools of this kind, the inferiority complained of being, in their case, that of the teaching of commercial classes to that of the University classes in the same school. And there are certain circumstances observable in these mixed schools, which exhibit in the strongest light the power of the causes to which we have attributed the existing backwardness of middle-class education. One of these circumstances is the well-known fact that while classical students, as a