dark learning by rote; more conversation at lessons, and less yawning; more bodily exercise in school-hours, and less fatigue when school is over,—these indications must operate for the good of middle-class children all over the country. It is not only factory children or farm labourers’ boys who actually learn more in three hours than in six over their books. The conditions of brain-action are the same for the prince and the peasant; three or four hours per day is as long as a child in either rank can profitably attend to study; and if it so happen that the discovery has been made first in the case of factory workers and agricultural labourers, it will soon be applied to children of all ranks. In a little while we shall hear, all over the country, of private schools where the pupils are carefully restrained from over-work, and trained in drill, gardening, and perhaps farming, and in the manipulation of Common Things.
Events are, however, marching too fast for the old-fashioned boarding-schools which we all know so well. In two or three, or more, of the counties of England, the farmers and their town friends have set about providing for their children’s education in a sensible way. They are opening joint -stock, self-supporting boarding and day schools, where their boys will be congregated in sufficient numbers to give the main advantages of a public school, while provided with a more various and practical course of instruction, fitting them for their proper business in life. We may fully expect that these county or district schools will extend largely; and one may confidently predict that, other things being equal, those will flourish most in which a sound industrial training is most effectually carried out. It is as good for the sons of the country surgeon, or solicitor, or banker, as for those of the shopkeeper and small farmer, to know how to till the ground, build a house, grind corn, fell wood, keep stock, or make furniture. The Princes of Germany, and, I believe, of some other countries, are taught a trade, by which they might support themselves in case of need. Our own young princes and princesses have built and can serve a dairy with their own hands. On the whole, it seems that Mr. Frederick Hill was not so romantic as he was once thought, when he said in 1836, in his work on “National Education,” that industrial training would probably spread through all ranks. “Singular as the speculation may appear,” he said, “to some of our readers, we cannot but hope to see the day when, instead of being confined to a very few schools, and these, without exception, of the humbler kind, the use of productive labour as a means of education will be generally adopted in schools for all classes, the highest as well as the lowest.” Mr. F. Hill is not an old man yet; and the prospect is becoming very distinct in regard to the larger classes of the community.
Such a scheme was proposed by the Rev. Henry Moule above five years ago, on behalf of the children of rural labourers; and he has recently delivered a most interesting address on the subject, which is reported in the “Gardener’s Chronicle” of October 26th. As I am on the subject of middle-class education alone, I will only say, that Mr. Moule shows how the labour of a few lads may support a large school of a high order; and how this method is the right one for meeting the great evil of the early removal of children from school. The plan would answer just as well for a middle-class country school; and I wish the whole country would take it to heart.
Wherever a superior education of any kind is given, the pupils so trained are in eager demand from some quarter or other. See what Mr. Coode tells us of the good berths for the voyage of life obtained by lads brought up at Orme’s Free School, at Newcastle-under-Lyne, where the pupils are expressly prepared for the business of their after years. Parents do not clutch at children’s earnings there, nor grudge the cost of schooling, because they perceive the value of the training; and their self-denial is justified by the event. The evening classes at Mechanics’ Institutes, and at the Working Men’s College, yield students of French and German and Spanish, who are seized upon for commercial clerkships as soon as they can be had. On the one hand, we have the demand for a more effective middle-class education; and, on the other, we are beginning to see how to supply the need. In many directions efforts are making which must discredit the weary old ways, and teach us to judge of Education as of other processes, by the results.
HIGH DAYS IN THE TEMPLE.
Silent and sombre as is the Temple now-a-days, it is as difficult to realise its ancient character for shows and revels as to imagine some demure old square-toes sowing the wild oats which scandal attributes to his hot youth. It requires some incident like the recent visit of the Prince of Wales, and the appearance of the quaint old place in gala dress, to bring home to one the days when the Inns of Court were the nurseries of fashion as well as of legal lore, and when the feasts and pageants of the lawyers were the talk and wonder of the metropolis. If the shade of any departed Templar of the Tudor or even Stuart period chanced to be present at the late ceremonial in the Temple, he must have thought it a very tame affair, and could not have failed to deduce the degeneracy of his countrymen from the substitution of a conversazione with tea and microscopes for the old “post revels,” when flagons of hippocras were handed round and the Lord of Misrule held absolute sway. It is long since that disorderly potentate went the way of the Dodo, and hippocras has become almost as mythical as ambrosia; but, once upon a time, they played a prominent part in legal education. Accordingly we need not be surprised to find that several accomplishments[1] were then deemed essential in a member of the bar which find no place in the modern examination papers.
Public exhibition of these acquirements was frequently demanded by the potent, grave, and- ↑ “The Scholars of the Inns of Court,” writes Fortescue, “did not only study the laws to serve the courts of justice and profit their country, but did further learn to dance, to sing, to play upon instruments on the ferial days, and to study divinity on the festival, using such exercises as those did who were brought up in the King’s Court.”
