Part 26

The Bishop’s case for a commission is broadly based on the impossibility of working the present constitution of the University for its efficient government; on the mischievous waste which spends the resources of fine minds and unique surroundings on boys, many of whom are capable of doing little more than play; on the folly of subsidizing with scholarships and fellowships one set of schools, and one or two types of knowledge; on the expensive habits which the system fostered. The case was not answered, and cannot be answered. The report of the committee is the first response to its call, and, as the Bishop said in a speech at Toynbee Hall, it has given him a hope for which he has long waited.

The next response ought to be an appeal from the University itself for a Commission which will enable it to order the resources of Oxford as a whole, and apply its powers so as to carry out fully the recommendations of the report.

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

JUSTICE TO YOUNG WORKERS.

BY CANON BARNETT.

8 November, 1909.

Thirty years ago the “bitter cry” of the poor disturbed the public mind. Housing has since been improved. Technical teaching has since been established. The expenditure on the Poor Law has been greatly increased. General Booth has raised the money for his social scheme. Philanthropy has redoubled its efforts, and taken new forms. But still the “bitter cry” is raised. The number of the unemployed is greater than ever. There is more vagrancy, which the Prison Commissioners complain is adding to the inmates of the prisons, and the amount spent on poor relief goes up by leaps and bounds. Royal Commissions, Departmental Committees, philanthropic conferences, scientific professors have been facing the problem which every year becomes more threatening to the national welfare. Their recommendations are many. The striking fact is that in one recommendation they all concur. The one thing which they agree to be necessary is further training for young people between the ages of thirteen and seventeen.

The report of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education, lately published, gives the final word on the subject. The reports begin by showing that out of the 2,000,000 children in England and Wales who have passed their fourteenth birthday, and are still under seventeen years of age, only one in four receives on week-days any continued education. “The result is a tragic waste of early promise.” The children go out of the elementary schools, which have been built up at immense expense, and before they reach the age of seventeen, when the technical schools may be entered, many have acquired desultory habits, and lost the power of study. Released from school, they become idle and lawless, or they enter “blind alley” employments, and for the sake of high immediate wages, miss the chance of ultimate responsible employment. The Committee agree with the Poor Law Commissioners, “that the results of the large employment of boys in occupations which offer no opportunity of employment as men are disastrous,” and go on to quote the Minority Report: “The nation cannot long persist in ignoring the fact that the unemployed, and particularly the under-employed, are thus being daily created under our eyes out of bright young things, for whose training we make no provision”.

The Committee having brought out this extravagant waste of money and effort and young life, sets itself to consider a remedy. It suggests improvements in the day schools by giving a larger place in the curriculum to subjects which train the hand and eye, and develop the constructive powers. It further suggests that steps should be taken to prolong the school life of children, and it will be a surprise to many readers that under the age of thirteen years 5,300 every year pass out of school, and that the extension of the age to fourteen would involve the addition of 150,000 children to the registers. These numbers do not include the scholars now partially exempted from school attendance by the wisdom or unwisdom of managers, who may be estimated as numbering some 48,000 children, between thirteen and fourteen years of age. The Committee add their opinion that the law which permits half-time in the textile districts should be materially changed, and it goes on to recommend that “no children under sixteen should be allowed to leave the day school unless they could show to the satisfaction of the local education authority that they were going to be suitably occupied, and that such exemptions should only continue so long as they remained in suitable employment”.

This recommendation follows on evidence of how large a proportion of boys and girls enter forms of employment “which discourage the habit of steady work, lessen the power of mental concentration, and are economically injurious to the community, and deteriorating in their effect on individual character”. Employment or apprenticeship Committees have been formed, whose members spare no pains in advising the older scholars, and the parents of such scholars, in the choice of an occupation. They have done enough to show how much more might be done could the advice be driven home with more system and authority. If the recommendation were made the law, no child under sixteen would be allowed to enter upon industrial life without sufficient guidance, both as to the choice of a place, and as to continued education.

“Continued education,” whatever be the improvements in the day school or the laudation of exemption from attendance, comes thus to be regarded as the one thing necessary. “It is clear to the Committee that the lack of continued educational care during the years of adolescence is one of the deeper causes of national unemployment.”

Continuation schools have greatly developed during late years. They are more frequent, they offer teaching which is more attractive and more adapted to the social needs of the neighbourhoods in which they have been opened. Educational authorities and private organizations have taken pains to commend the schools and make them known. Employers have in some cases required attendance at continuation schools as a condition of employment, and in other cases have encouraged attendance by giving off-time, by payment of fees, and by the offer of prizes. Workpeople have taken pleasure in visiting the schools, and when they are represented on the management, get rid of some suspicions, often to become enthusiastic supporters.

Continuation schools may thus be said to have passed the period of experiment, and it is now recognized that the curriculum should neither be that of the old night-school, nor of the modern recreation evening. It should aim rather at providing a good general education, to equip men and women for intelligent citizenship, as well as to supply workers with technical knowledge, and with that adaptability which is one of the most valuable possessions of workpeople under modern conditions. It cannot too often be repeated that the aim of education is not to make machines, but to make men and women. People who know how to think and to reason, who have capacities for enjoyment which do not need the stimulus of excitement, will be more valuable citizens, and when they lose one form of work, will more readily take to another.

The right sort of continuation school is now known. Such schools increase yearly in number, and the attendances also increase, but the Committee has been led to the conclusion that voluntary methods alone will not solve the problem. There must be recourse to compulsory powers. In many districts the authorities are apathetic, in other districts voluntary methods are powerless against the ignorance and indifference of the people. The majority of employers, moreover, are indifferent, failing to recognize that closer care for the educational interest of their young employés would enhance their own profit, and the pupils are often too tired to attend any school. The law at present says, “Children are compelled to attend school till the age of thirteen,” it therefore creates the impression that at the age of thirteen the obligation ceases. The law alone can remove this impression, and it must in the future say: “Young people are compelled to attend continuation schools till the age of seventeen”.

The Committee, in coming to the conclusion that a compulsory system is necessary, has been confirmed in the conclusion by the elaborate organization of day and evening schools (continuation) in Germany and Switzerland, and by the movement in France for the extension of educational opportunities during the years following the conclusion of the day-school course. The Committee has also discovered signs of the growth of opinion in England in favour of such a course, and this Government has already adopted it in the Scotch Act of 1908. Out of eighty-nine witnesses examined on this question sixty declared themselves in favour of this compulsion, and of the twenty-nine who objected, many modified their objections. The Committee felt themselves justified in recommending that the example of the Scotch Act be followed, and that every local education authority should be required to establish suitable continuation classes, and that attendance should be made compulsory for all young persons under seventeen, when the local education authority make by-laws to that effect.

The obligation for the satisfactory working of the compulsion would be thrown primarily on the employer. Every employer would be bound to supply the officer of the education authority with the names of young people in his employ; to arrange the hours of work so as to make it possible for them to attend classes on certain days or nights without causing the overstrain of their bodies; it would be his duty to inspect the attendance cards of pupils at the classes; and he would be forbidden under penalties to keep in his employment anyone not in regular attendance.

The local authority would be called on to draw up its by-laws with due regard to the character of the employment in various districts, so as to cause as little inconvenience as possible to trade, and avoid any physical overstrain to pupils. All street selling by boys and girls under seventeen would be prohibited, except in the case of those who were formerly licensed, and this licence would be forfeited unless the holders’ attendance card proved the necessary attendance at the continuation school.

The Committee make special suggestions as to girls in urban districts, and generally as regards rural districts. Various needs demand various provisions. The point, however, which stands out most clearly is that after all needs have been weighed, and after all objections have been considered, a system of compulsory continuation classes is recommended both in the interests of the young people, who, for want of such classes, miss the fruit of their education, and in the interest of the community, who have to bear the burden of the unemployed.

Germany and Switzerland have established compulsory continuation schools; Scotland has now followed their example. The Consultative Committee has now shown that England is ready, and has suggested a practicable scheme. Will the men and women whose hearts are torn, and whose national pride is wounded by the sight of so many workers unable to earn a living wage, and whose reason tells them that their unemployed are often incompetent, because their training stopped and licence began at thirteen years of age, and whose minds have now been informed by figures that it is for want of care during the most critical period of their lives that loafers and vagrants are made--will the men and women who thus feel and know make the Government understand that this one thing it is necessary shall be taken in hand without further delay?

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

A RACE BETWEEN EDUCATION AND RUIN.[1]

BY CANON BARNETT.

March, 1912.

[1] From “The Westminster Gazette”. By permission of the Editor.

I.

“Twenty years too late” is the reflection suggested by the report of the success of the Universities’ Experiment of Tutorial Classes for Working People. The present industrial situation needs, it may be agreed, a working-class able to take large and generous views, capable of shaping not only a class but a national policy, trained to separate the essential from the unessential, and to act consistently on principles tried and proved in the history of the past. The old Universities have the resources for giving the people this equipment. They have wealth; they have teachers penetrated by the traditions accumulated in Oxford and Cambridge; they exist, we are told, to give liberal culture a broader outlook, a historical perspective. The Universities, roused by the Workers’ Education Association, have, by means of the Tutorial Classes, achieved notable success. They have offered to groups of twenty or thirty working people in the great towns means by which they might enter a larger life, feel the years which are behind, and get a grasp of eternal principles. The means have been seized with surprising eagerness. Men after a hard day’s work have been found week after week at the tutors’ tables for the study of economics, political philosophy, or history; they have kept up attendance for three years, and they have learnt, to quote the words of some who attended a summer meeting in Balliol College, “the wonderful development which has taken place in my mind” now “that my prejudices have been dispelled and mental horizon widened”--that “study is a pleasure rather than a task”.

The students, in a word, receive a share of that larger education which the Universities exist to give. But success over so small an area, affecting only a few thousand men, but serves to show what might have been if the movement had commenced twenty years earlier.

The working people have now come into power, and they have many wrongs to put right. The anxious question is, Will they use their power more wisely and more generously than the capitalist class? There is not much sign of a wide and generous outlook in a policy which assumes that war is the necessary attitude of employed and employers. There is not much evidence of an inspiring vision of society when there is so little recognition of the interdependence of all sorts and conditions of men. There is not much grasp of principle among those who begin a strike, which must involve untold suffering, as if it were a holiday. The working people may have wrongs to bear, they may have splendid qualities of faithfulness to comrades and endurance under hardships, but they can hardly be said to have that knowledge of humanity which makes them humble before the best, with a capacity for judgment and a standard by which to apply it.

The race in all nations seems to be one between Education and Ruin. The Universities who are especially responsible for national education have too late begun to share their resources with working people, and the success of their long-delayed start has only served to encourage the formation of the rival Central Labour College. This College is thus described by Mr. Rowland Kenney: “It makes no pretence of giving a ‘broad’ education.... Its teaching is frankly partisan. History is dealt with as a record of the struggles which have taken place in social groups, because of the conflicting interests of the various classes that have from time to time divided society.... Its key to the interpretation of Sociology is class interest; dividing the social groups into the owners and non-owners of property, it points out the common interest of all those who work for wages.... It absolutely cuts out any idea of conciliation as a final solution of labour problems.” The College, in the name of education, appears to be using its forces to block the way to peace and goodwill which it is largely the object of education to keep open. It preaches a class war, treats every member of the middle class as “suspect,” and bitterly opposes the Workers’ Education Association because its Council includes University men. This College is said to supply the brains behind the labour revolt.

The Universities, hating to be reformed, and allowing the misuse of their resources by undergraduates, sometimes described by Rhodes scholars as “British babes,” have been unable to do their part for the nation. They have stood aside from elementary education, only coldly tolerating the establishment of training colleges in their neighbourhood, and only timidly following a few of their members when they have led the way in the extension of University teaching. It may almost be said that they have lost influence over public opinion, and that their mission of raising the tone of democracy, of clarifying human sympathies and elevating human preferences have passed to other hands. A recent visitor to India remarked on his return that many of its difficulties seemed due to its government by “unreformed Oxford,” and reflecting on the strike, one is led to say that some of its most disturbing features are due to unreformed Universities.

II.

There is something more needed, if not demanded, than a rise of wages. A few more shillings a week would soon be absorbed by men whose first use of leisure is in the enjoyment of somewhat sordid forms of sport. The men are hardly to be blamed for what are condemned as low tastes and brutal pleasures. They are what their environment has made them, and a mining village is not likely to develop a love of home-making, a taste for beauty, or any joy in the use of the higher faculties of admiration, hope, and love. The long, grimy rows of houses, without any distinctive features by which a man might recognize and become proud of his home. The absence of gardens which would call him to enjoy nature and be its fellow-worker; the want of a bathroom other than a tub in the sitting-room, by which to feel clean from the dirt of the day; the meanness of such public buildings as are provided--the church, the library, or the meeting-hall--do not provoke his soul to admiration or stir up a thirst for knowledge; such surroundings are likely to make the miner content with his pigeons, his dogs, and his football matches. Why, it may be asked, have not more owners done what some owners have done, and make a Bournville or a Port Sunlight for the workpeople. If out of the average 10 per cent profits, it is impossible to provide an appreciable addition to the men’s weekly wages, it is not impossible to provide better and pleasanter housing. Why is it that owners and managers, who by many acts have shown themselves to be people of goodwill, have been content that workmen should live under conditions which unfit them to enjoy the best things: why is it that with all their charity they miss their opportunity? The fault lies, I believe, largely with the Church--Established and Free. The Church has too often gone on preaching a mediæval system, it has not moved with the times, and does not recognize that goodwill to-day must find other ways of charity than those trodden by our fathers, when they built almshouses and provided food or clothing. It has allowed a business man to be hard in his business, if he is easy in response to charitable appeals. But times have changed, and we no longer hope for a society in which rich people are kind to poor people; we rather think of a society where employers and employed share justly the profits of work; where there is no dependent class, and all find pleasure in the gifts of character which follow the full growth of manhood in rich and poor. If the Church recognized some such conception of society it would aim to humanize business relations and teach investors to ask, as Bishop Stubbs (whose “Social Creed,” lately published in the “Times,” well repays study) suggests, “Not only whether a business is _safe_ to pay, but whether the business _deserves_ to pay”. Coal-owners, under the Church’s influence, might substitute for such villages as Tonypandy, villages such as Earswick, and then every increase of wages would mean that widening of human interests which helps to satisfy the individual and to increase the stability of the nation.

The strike is doing vast mischief, as it dislocates trade, spreads poverty, and embitters class relationships. But all its mischief may be outweighed if it forces people to think. Our prosperity, the triumphs of machinery, the daily provision of opinions by an ubiquitous Press, have encouraged a self-satisfied and easy-going spirit. We do not take pains to make up our minds; we do not try to think our rivals’ thoughts; employers do not put themselves in the men’s place, and the men do not put themselves in the employers’ place; none of us put ourselves in the Germans’ place when they are angry at our policy. The greatest danger of the time is the forgetfulness of danger, the light-heartedness of the people, and the want of seriousness which prefers enjoyment to study, and the carelessness which, for example, goes on refusing to consider the Insurance Act, saying, “It will never come into force”. People will not think. The Tariff Reform agitation has done untold good in making, at any rate, a few people think out the meaning of Free Trade. The strike will do good if it makes people--masters and men--think out the interdependence of trade--whence it is that profits come--what is the relation between home and foreign trade--what is the duty which a trade bears to the State--what is the justification for a strike or a lock-out which cripples the State--and what are the calls for State interference. Professor William James declares that the secret and glory of our English-speaking race “consists in nothing but two common habits carried into public life--habits more precious, perhaps, than any that the human race has gained.... One of them is the habit of trained and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings. The other is that of fierce and merciless resentment towards every man or set of men who break the public peace.” The strike and its sufferings will not be in vain if by making us think it strengthens our hold on those heirlooms.

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, ABERDEEN

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

The following changes have been made to the text as printed: