of the standard jokes of our jest-books. We would, however, place the religious teaching of the school on an entirely different footing from its religious services. We would assign to it its separate class and its separate time, just as we would assign a separate class and time to the teaching of English grammar, or history, or the dead languages. And whether the remuneration was specified or merely understood, we would deem it but reasonable that this branch of teaching, like all the other branches which occupied the time and tasked the exertions of the teacher, should be remunerated by a fee: in this department of tuition, as in the others, we would deem the labourer worthy of his hire. We need scarce add, however, that we would recognise no power in the majority of any locality, or in the schoolmaster whom they had chosen, to render attendance at even the devotional services of the seminary compulsory on the children of parents who, on religious or other grounds, willed that they should not join in the general worship. And, of course, attendance on the religion-teaching class would be altogether as much a matter of arrangement between the parent and the schoolmaster, as attendance on the Latin or English classes, or on arithmetic, algebra, or the mathematics.
While, however, we can see no proper grounds for difference between Voluntaries and Free Churchmen, on even these details of school management, and see, further, that they never differ regarding the way in which the adventure schools of the country are conducted, we must remind the reader that all on which they have really to agree on this question, as Scotchmen and franchise-holders, is simply 86 whether their country ought not, in the first place, to possess an efficient system of national schools, open to all the Christian denominations; whether, in the second, the parents ought not to be permitted to exercise, on their own responsibility, the natural right of determining what their children should be taught; and whether, in the third, the householders of a district ought not to be vested in the power, now possessed by the heritors and parish minister, of choosing the teacher. Agreement on these heads is really all that is necessary towards either the preliminary agitation of the question, or in order to secure its ultimate success. The minor points would all come to be settled, not on the legislative platform, but in the parishes, by the householders. Voluntaryism, wise and foolish, does not reckon up more than a third of the population of Scotland; and foolish, i.e. extreme Voluntaries––for the sensible ones would be all with us––would find themselves, when they came to record their votes, a very small minority indeed. And so, though their extreme views may now be represented as lions in the path, it would be found ultimately that, like the lions which affrighted Pilgrim in the avenue, and made the poor man run back, they are lions well chained up––lions, in short, in a minority, like the agricultural lion in Punch. Let us remark, further, that if some of our friends deem the scheme proposed for Scotland too little religious, it is as certain that the assertors of the scheme now proposed for England, and advocated in Parliament by Mr. Fox, very decidedly object to it on the opposite score. Like the grace said by the Rev. Reuben Butler, which was censured by the Captain of Knockdunder as too long, and by douce Davie Deans as too short, it is condemned for faults so decidedly antagonistic in their character, that they cannot co-exist together. One class of persons look exclusively at that lack of a statutory recognition of religion which the scheme involves, 87 and denounce it as infidel; another, at the religious character of the people of Scotland, and at the consequent certainty, also involved in the scheme, that they will render their schools transcripts of themselves, and so they condemn it as orthodox. And hence the opposite views entertained by Mr. Combe of Edinburgh on the one hand, and Mr. Gibson of Glasgow on the other.[15]
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CHAPTER SEVENTH.
General Outline of an Educational Scheme adequate to the demands of the Age––Remuneration of Teachers––Mode of their Election––Responsibility––Influence of the Church in such a Scheme––Apparent Errors of the Church––The Circumstances of Scotland very different now from what they were in the days of Knox.
Scotland will never have an efficient educational system at once worthy of her ancient fame, and adequate to the demands of the age, until in every parish there be at least one central school, known emphatically as the Parish or Grammar School, and taught by a superior university-bred teacher, qualified to instruct his pupils in the higher departments of learning, and fit them for college. And with this central institute every parish must also possess its supplementary English schools, efficient of their kind, though of 89 a lower standing, and sufficiently numerous to receive all the youthful population of the district which fails to be accommodated in the other. In these, the child of the labourer or mechanic––if, possessed of but ordinary powers, he looked no higher than the profession of his father––could be taught to read, write, and figure. If, however, there awakened within him during the process, the stirrings of those impulses which characterize the superior mind, he could remove to his proper place––the central school––mayhap, in country districts, some two or three miles away; but when the intellectual impulses are genuine, two or three miles in such cases are easily got over.
We would fix for the teachers, in the first instance, on no very extravagant rate of remuneration; for it might prove bad policy in this, as in other departments, to set a man above his work. The salaries attached at present to our parish schools vary from a minimum of £25 to a maximum of about £34. Let us suppose that they varied, 90 instead, from a minimum of £60 to a maximum of £80––not large sums, certainly, but which, with the fees and a free house, would render every parochial schoolmaster in Scotland worth about from £80 to £100 per annum, and in some cases––dependent, of course, on professional efficiency and the population of the locality––worth considerably more. The supplementary English schools we would place on the average level maintained at present by our parish schools, by providing the teachers with free houses, and yearly salaries of a minimum of £30 and a maximum of £40. And as it is of great importance that men should not fall asleep at their posts, and as tutors never teach more efficiently than when straining to keep ahead of their pupils, we would fain have provision made that, by a permitted use of occasional substitutes, this lower order of schoolmasters should be enabled to prepare themselves, by attendance at college, for competing, as vacancies occurred, for the higher schools. It would be an arrangement worth £20 additional salary to every school in Scotland, that the channels of preferment should be ever kept open to useful talent and honest diligence, so that the humblest English teacher in the land might rise, in the course of years, to be at the head of its highest school; nay, that, like that James Beattie who taught at one time the parish school of Fordoun, he might, if native faculty had been given and wisely improved, become one of the country’s most distinguished professors. In fixing our permanent castes of schools, Grammar and English, we would strongly urge that there should be no permanent castes of teachers fixed––no men condemned to the humbler walks of the profession if qualified for the higher. The life-giving sap would thus have free course, from the earth’s level to the topmost boughs of our national scheme; and low as an Englishman might deem our proposed rates of remuneration for university-taught men, we have no fear that they would prove insufficient, 91 coupled with such a provision, for the right education of the country.
We are not sure that we quite comprehend the sort of machinery meant to be included under the term Local or Parochial Boards. It seems necessary that there should exist Local Committees of the educational franchise-holders, chosen by themselves, from among their own number, for terms either definite or indefinite, and recognised by statute as vested in certain powers of examination and inquiry. But though a mere name be but a small matter, we are inclined to regard the term Board as somewhat too formidable and stiff. Let us, at least for the present, substitute the term Committee; and as large committees are apt to degenerate into little mobs, and, as such, to conduct their business noisily and ill, let us suppose educational committees to consist, in at least country districts or the smaller towns, of some eight or ten individuals, selected by the householders for their intelligence, integrity, and business habits, and with a chairman at their head, chosen from among their number
