on the Bill delivered to members of the Executive by Lord Haldane has been followed with close attention by members of the Union, particularly that section of his exposition which stated the case relating to provincial associations. There is undoubtedly a strong feeling in the profession that the opposition to Clause V is largely influenced by the opinions of officials concerned with the local administration of Education; and that the type of officialism promoted by the wider basis of the provincial association would be far more tolerable than the narrower view of the Local Administration officer. The value of the opposition to Clause V is illustrated by the fact that the Lancashire Education Committee, after endorsing a most vigorous resolution of protest against the burden of officialism threatened by the clauses of the new Bill, passed a resolution proposing the appointment of three organizing inspectors, without the slightest consultation with the constituent local areas of the county! But while, from the merely selfish standpoint, many teachers would welcome the proposal to establish provincial associations, the fact that this course would limit the control of the rate-payer will induce more to endorse the qualified support given by Mr. C. W. Crook, the Ex-President of the Union.

**

MANY of the large provincial associations of the Union have now completed their discussions on the proposal to associate with the Labour party, the course usually adopted including the position as presented from opposing points of view. The debates have been conducted quite impartially, and the result of the referendum will be the more decisive in view of the period for full deliberation which is being allowed. Many members of the Union have felt that the case for teaching, being a branch of the Civil Service, might have been more comprehensively drawn up as an alternative policy, for there is a growing feeling that some real form of security of tenure must be devised for teachers in view of the multiplication of officials threatened by the new Bill.

ORTHODOXY IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

address delivered last month in the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields by the Bishop of London. Dr. Winnington Ingram was himself educated at Marlborough, and (so he tells us) he has preached in the chapel of every public school in England. From a divine with such experience we look for light and guidance, but the opening sentence of the lecturer damped our expectations. How, he asked, could one who reflected on the glorious conduct of public-school boys during the past three years join in the attack on the religious teaching which had made them what they were? But he proceeded to point out how the good might be made better.

In the first place, a true conception of what the Church is was lacking. There was no enthusiasm for the Church, and no conception of the difference between the Church and Nonconformity. His remedies were simple. The public-school boy, in spite of his religion, was defective in his attitude towards moral questions, but this blot on the scutcheon would be remedied if there were more clerics instead of laymen in our public schools, and if these, the house-masters, had straight talks with boys and saw to it that they were prepared for Confirmation before the age of sixteen.

A proselyte of the gate who came prepared, not to mock, but to profit by the admonitions of a great spiritual leader, left the church depressed and sorrowful. He had come for living waters and been offered nothing but the drainings of a stagnant pool. There was little in common between the school world in which he moved and the school world as imagined by the Bishop, and the tonic prescribed seemed to him no better than pills against the earthquake. At the best it was

an attempt to restore the Heptarchy.

Such are the generalizations of an individual and, it may be, a prejudiced hearer; but we may without presumption put to the Bishop the questions that must have occurred to any who read attentively the address as reported in the daily press.

The Bishop boasts that he has preached in all the public schools in England. What does he signify by a public school? The Royal Commission on Public Schools recognized nine, but the Public School Yearbook of this year admits some 120, and of these 41 have classical head masters and presum

ably chapels in which the Bishop might preach. Will the Bishop tell us how many of these he has addressed? The question goes to the root of the matter and is put in no carping spirit. If we were ourselves asked what is a public school, we should hesitate to answer. But, when the Bishop is paying a merited tribute to the virtues of public-school men that the War has revealed, ours is not an impertinent question.

It would be tedious to pursue our interrogatory. The context shows conclusively what meaning the Bishop attaches to "the Church." It is the Established Church of England, and his main complaint is that boys are not clearly taught from the first the radical difference between the creeds of Churchmen and Dissenters. He wholly ignores the changes of the last century in the constitution and growth of our public schools. In all, without exception, Dissenters are freely admitted, and in some of the most famous, such as Harrow and Clifton, special arrangements have been made for the housing and religious instruction of Jews.

Church reformers, including bishops and deans, have been exhorting us to widen our borders, to obliterate obsolete landmarks, and so embrace Free Churchmen and those Dissenters whose creed is fundamentally the same as their own. Does the Bishop still support the medieval maxim, "Nulla salus extra ecclesiam "?

Lastly, we would ask whether a Prelate, by occasionally visiting and preaching in some scores of selected school chapels, is a competent judge of the religious teaching now given in our public schools, and of the effects of this teaching on the temper and morals of the pupils. By their fruits ye shall know them.

We have read innumerable records of the youthful heroes who have given their lives for the country. A few of these, like Mr. Strachey's Student in Arms, have been published. More have formed the groundwork for fiction often truer than. fact, and still more are privately circulated memoirs, reminiscences, and letters. Most of these were of public-school men, but we may say without hesitation that there was hardly one in which the direct influence of the doctrinal instruction imparted in a public school could be traced. The attempt to sit in judgment on a nation in arms, and distinguish as sheep and goats the Churchman and the Dissenters, is on the face of it absurd, and the Bishop has only darkened counsel.

One personal question we may put in conclusion. Does he consider that his own public school has risen or fallen since the days when it was ruled by a clerical head master and nearly all the staff were clergymen ? Now the head is a layman, and so are all the eight house-masters in college. Would Bishop Ingram restore, not the Heptarchy, but the reign of Keate and the Long Chamber at Eton?

It was Mark Pattison who wrote, "the schools will never be better as long as the schoolmasters are theologians by profession"; and another clerical dignitary, a former head master and still living, who confessed that if he were to name the twelve best living schoolmasters whom he knew, two only were in Holy Orders.

I'

A PLEA FOR ENGLISH.

By S. P. B. MAIS.

N the midst of the turmoil of term it is hard indeed for a public-school master to find time to sit down and inform the public of a few points in our educational system on which they are being grossly misinformed. Novels are written about us by clever youngsters with whom we have only lately parted, articles penned by journalists in abysmal ignorance of everything that goes on in our midst, letters subscribed to the Press by irate parents who have paid us heavy fees to perform the Herculean task of effacing all the evil impressions made upon a boy's character in a slack home and a pernicious preparatory school, parents who are dissatisfied because the Augean stables still show traces of pristine dirt.

For the most part we are content to sit tight and do our job- underpaid, undervalued, overworked, misunderstood. We know that in a rational education lies the salvation of the

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race, and we are not to be diverted from our labour by the captious criticism of the ignorant. But there arise occasions when it becomes impossible to refrain from speech, and such an occasion An Englishman" has caused to arise by his illconsidered article on " Boys and Burdens" in the Daily Mail. When a journalist, who is allowed to sign his name by the proudest title that any man in the world can boast, is guilty of a sentiment like the following:

The young heroes of the middle school will be asked to pronounce their judgment on the respective merits of English history and English literature-a foolish enterprise, since, while the study of history may afford some discipline for the mind, the study of literature, pursued at school, is but a thing of false signposts and borrowed appreciation;—

when, I say, "An Englishman" is guilty of perpetrating such an amazing statement as that, it is time some patriot took up the cudgels in defence of our native tongue. It is our very peculiar characteristic that we as a race enjoy nothing so much as severe castigation-we take a malicious delight in belittling ourselves on every occasion. This is by no means an evil trait in many ways, but it may lead, and in the past frequently has led, to disaster. An Englishman " is of that party which believes that no good can come out of any country except Greece and Rome.

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I am about to prove to him that there is a type of intellect, much commoner than he supposes, which is totally incapable of benefiting in any degree from a classical education, which can yet rise to a perception of the heights reached by the geniuses of his own nation, and can derive from them a very thorough working knowledge of how to live, which is, I take it, the aim and end of education. I am myself a classic, with ten years' experience of teaching English, and I can assure 66 An Englishman" that in no case has the learning of our ⚫ tongue been "but a thing of false signposts and borrowed appreciations." Doubtless he imagines that English literature means learning by heart copious notes on a very few plays of Shakespeare, and retailing opinions of opinions of opinions. Nothing could be further from the truth. "If there be," he says, a wiser training of the mind [than Latin and Greek] it has not yet been discovered." Well, I can assure him that for the majority of English boys a wiser training than either Latin or Greek can be found in English. We live in an age when we wish more than at any other time in our history to raise a breed of men

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Whose love of motherland

Is like a dog's for one dear hand, Sole, selfless, boundless, blind.

Are we more likely to do that by feeding them on snippets (few boys can ever digest more) of the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome, or by letting them browse in the pastures which contain the combined grandeur and glory that not only was, but is, England?

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An Englishman " will reply," Ah, but think of the discipline contained in grammar grind, in Latin prose, in Greek verses, in translation even." Is there no effort required in achieving the historical sense, in perceiving quite what sort of men our forefathers were who sang of Chevy Chase, of Havelok the Dane and Sir Patrick Spens? Is there no effort required in understanding the point of view of those thirty pilgrims who united forces in Chaucer's inimitable work to journey to the tomb of Thomas à Becket?

Does "An Englishman" seriously maintain that the close study of Shakespeare is "but a thing of false signposts and borrowed appreciation"? To my poor but patriotic mind he seems but little of an Englishman who is not prepared to maintain before all the world, “You can keep your Aeschylus, your Sophocles, your Euripides; give me Shakespeare our one great dramatist is worth all the other playwrights of the world. He outshines and overleaps them all." It is time to have done with cant; it is time that some one should have the courage not only to believe (many people secretly do that), but also to assert in public that we are capable of holding our own, not only in arms against Germany, but in philosophy, poetry, the drama, and every branch of literature against any race that has yet existed.

From the plays of Shakespeare alone, from the actual text, not from the annotator's dull notes and explanations, it is possible to derive perennial delights, not the less beneficial because such delights come only to those who discipline themselves severely and labour diligently to soar a high enough pitch to follow the master-spirit's imaginative flights. After following the fortunes of hundreds of men and women, good and bad, all human, all interesting, most of whom we get to know far better than we ever know our dearest friends or relatives, it is not unlikely that we shall ourselves learn to become more efficient citizens, more sociable, more capable and shrewd in our business relationships.

By a close study of the lives and works of Milton, Swift, Dr. Johnson, Fielding, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Dickens, Thackeray, Lamb, Hazlitt, Tennyson, Browning, and fifty other geniuses only less great, we shall understand, if one can trust the logic of a simple syllogism, a great deal better our national traits, our weaknesses and excellences, than if we spend the same amount of time over Homer, Ovid, Virgil, and Tacitus.

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An Englishman " would have us believe that a man cannot write English unless he has had a classical education. In the teeth of this I would say that a man is much more likely to be unable to express himself forcibly, clearly, sincerely, and simply if he has taken no pains to study Swift, Stevenson, Pater, and Macaulay, but concentrated his attention on stylists in languages of long ago. Both Greek philosophy and Roman law permeates the writings of our great authors: we can saturate ourselves with all that is most valuable in their contribution to the world's progress with this superadded advantage. The moderns are wiser than the ancients, because they know through experience what to reject, what to assimilate, not only of classical lore, but of Chinese, Scandinavian, Teutonic, French, and Slavonic as well.

Of all the nonsensical ideas now current the most dangerous, because it is the most untrue, is that "through the classics alone shall we arrive at an economical and accurate use of words through them alone shall we learn the wisest lessons of patriotism and policy”—which amounts to saying that England has contributed nothing to the world's progress. English is not a subject for the slack hour of the week. It is the one essential feature of all sane modern education. Through analysis, composition, versifying, précis, paraphrase, lecturing, debating, acting, reading, and, most of all, through an intense and close study of our literature, we shall at last arrive at a point when we can turn out boys who, on leaving school, will be able to write a letter that will interest the recipient; to describe exactly what they see, feel, and know; to understand and sympathize with a few of the myriad problems that threaten to obsess the world when peace is declared; to show to all the world exactly in what particulars it is essential, in the interest of all humanity, that English ideals should not be suffered to be eclipsed.

Do we attain this ideal at present? I trow not. Boys leave us ignorant of how to spell the commonest words; unable to express themselves coherently or adequately on any subject; with a vocabulary as meagre as that of a bricklayer; with little sense of citizenship, and a vague sort of patriotism that makes of that most precious possession only too often a resounding, empty name; lamentably deficient in breadth of view, and without any sense of vision.

And the root of the evil? A distorted, effete idea that a classical education is the only fit system for the training of young England. You might as well expect to bring up a Scandinavian solely on a diet of Chinese because Confucius was a great philosopher.

For heaven's sake let us try a little common sense.

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England for the English" is no bad cry; but the English tongue for English-speaking people is the motto of all true educationists, and to that flag we, who know from inside knowledge, pin our faith. If we go down, we go down in the certainty that in the end salvation will be attained by adherence to that principle and to no other, in spite of assurances to the contrary on the part of a thousand miscalled "Englishmen."

JOTTINGS.

ROLL OF HONOUR.-Second-Lieutenant O. G. F. J. Breul, R.E., son of Prof. Breul, of Cambridge, died in hospital at St. Omer on October 16. He was a student of medicine when the War broke out, but enlisted at once in the R.E. as a motor cyclist despatch rider. He went out with the original Expeditionary Force, was present during the retreat from Mons and at the first battle of Ypres, and received a commission in January 1916. He is understood to have been recommended for promotion and for the Military Cross. Others who have fallen are: Lieutenant Herbert King, Head of the Chemistry Department, Cockburn High School, Leeds; Lieutenant G. A. T. Jones, R.G.A., Assistant Master at the King Edward VII Girls' School, Chelmsford; and Second-Lieutenant R. A. Waller, Royal Fusiliers, Assistant Master at Mr. Rendall's, Copthorne, Sussex.

THE Teachers' Christian Union has arranged a Conference which will be held at the Central Y.M.C.A., Tottenham Court Road, W., on January 1-4. The subjects for discussion are "The Spiritual Basis and Social Ideals of Education" and "The Spirit of Discipline." Tickets (2s. 6d. for the whole Conference, 1s. for a single session) can be obtained from the Secretary, 24 Great Russell Street, W.C. 1.

THE Annual Conference of Educational Associations will be held this year at University College, as the University of London is in the possession of the military authorities. The following Associations will take part:-Head Mistresses' Association, Training College Association, Private Schools Association, Assistant Mistresses, University Women Teachers, Science Teachers, Teachers' Guild, Modern Language Association, Royal Drawing Society, Art Teachers' Guild, Simplified Spelling Society, Parents' National Educational Union, Child Study Association, Montessori Society, Schools Personal Service Association, Educational Handwork Association, Civic and Moral Education League, Dalcroze Society, Friends' Guild of Teachers, King Alfred School Society, National HomeReading Union, Froebel Society, School and Nature Study Union. On January 4, at 2.30 p.m., there will be a Joint Conference, the subject for discussion being "The Development of Individuality through Education." Persons who do not belong to any of the participating Associations can obtain tickets (5s. for the whole Conference, 1s. for a single meeting) from the Secretary, Mr. F. Fairman, 9 Brunswick Square, W.C. 1.

THE Head Masters' Association will meet at the Guildhall on January 1 and 2.

FROM the Report of the German Language Examinations Committee we learn that, though the number of candidates has fallen by nine, 21 schools have entered, as against 16 for 1916. The first and second prizes in the Higher Grade are awarded to Hettie Burne and Espérance Vernon. It is, however, to be regretted that all save one appear to have been girls' schools.

LEICESTERSHIRE Education Committee have increased the salaries of the head masters of the six Council Grammar Schools by 10 per cent., and those of the assistant masters and mistresses by 15 per cent., as a temporary arrangement. A permanent scale of salaries is promised when the report of the Departmental Committee on Salaries has been received. The Sunderland Borough Council has raised all the salaries at the Bede Collegiate School.

THE following resolution has been passed by the Education Committee of the British Science Guild and approved by the Executive Committee:-"That, in the opinion of the Education Committee of the British Science Guild, national reconstruction, in order to be efficient, urgently demands as a primary condition that the Education Bill introduced by Mr. Fisher in the House of Commons on August 10, 1917, should be proceeded with in the House without delay, and that, after due consideration and such amendment as may be found necessary, it should be passed into law during the present Session."

MR. H. G. ABEL, M.A., Head Master of Barnstaple Grammar School, has been appointed Head Master of the Central Foundation School, Cowper Street; E.C. 2.

THE Government have appointed a Committee to consider the provision for and possibilities of adult education (other than technical and vocational education) in Great Britain. Among the members are the Master of Balliol, Sir Graham Balfour, Prof. Sir Henry Jones, Mr. A. Mansbridge, and Sir Henry Miers.