THE RAMBLER.

VOL. IV. New Series.

AUGUST 1855.

PART XX.

THE POOR-SCHOOL QUESTION.

"PRAY, sir, can you play the fiddle?" said a man one day to his friend. "I'm sure I don't know," answered the other; "I never tried." We are reminded of the exquisite ignorance displayed by the ingenuous personage who made the above notable reply, by the last-issued number of that valuable publication, The Catholic School.

From certain facts therein stated and urged on our attention, it is quite clear that the delusion of our friend the possible fiddle-player is not without its parallel on a subject of greater importance than skill upon the violin. The Catholic public-and, we suspect, the Protestant public also will gather with considerable surprise, from the contents of the periodical before us, the fact that hitherto we Catholics have possessed no establishment whatever for the making of ordinary schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. Knowing that nuns of some sort or other exist in rather largish numbers, devoted to the education of the poor; and having heard a good deal of talk, and perhaps seen something, of the working of the Christian Brothers, the Catholic body in general has slumbered on in the blissful conviction that a man who would give fifty or sixty pounds a-year could "get a schoolmaster," by ordering one in the proper market, as easily as he could get a coat from his tailor's, or a quire of paper from a stationer's. Schoolmasters and mistresses have been supposed to be a sort of natural production, or providential institution, provided in unlimited numbers for the behoof of all who may be at any time disposed to engage their services.

And when it has not been imagined that pedagogues, male and female, are a distinct variety of the human race, nevertheless a delusion very nearly as unfortunate, though not equally irrational, has prevailed to an extraordinary extent amongst us. People imagine, like the hypothetical violinist, that in order

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to ascertain whether one is a perfect schoolmaster or schoolmistress, one has but to try. Even worse still, they fancy that every body can teach and govern a school, who is only willing. If the popular notion went no further than the supposition that the capacity for educating is a natural gift, possessed in full maturity by certain individuals, and that all they have to do is to take up the fiddle and essay a sonata, or an air with variations, in order to know whether or not they are thus endowed, the theory would practically be less hurtful. As it is, it seems to be an almost universally-received opinion, that nearly every body is capable of teaching children, by the mere force of natural capacity. Give a man strong health, a tolerable temper, a loud voice, and a decent knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and you have the complete schoolmaster, according to popular opinion. Put him in a schoolroom with a crowd of boys, and he will speedily set them all to rights, correct his own early blunders by a little experience, and eventually turn out a succession of very fair scholars and very good Catholics.

Now we venture to say, even in this age of blundering and spoiling good things by employing the wrong men to do the work wanted, there are few more unquestionable absurdities perpetrated than this, which imagines that teaching, like eating, comes by nature. Because one child is smaller and younger than one man, and knows much less than he does, and can be put in the corner, or be caned, when he is rebellious, we jump to the conclusion that twenty, fifty, one hundred, or two hundred children are in such a relative position of inferiority to the genius of their adult master, that he can discipline and teach them all up to the full standard of his own acquirements. We might add, that the said master is supposed to be capable of teaching them a great deal more than he knows himself, and of forming their minds on a model very much higher than that which he himself presents for their imitation. But let that pass. We are content with the lower degree of unfounded assumption. Even this is totally unwarranted by the facts of experience. We may rest assured that, as a general rule, men and women can no more teach boys and girls, without being themselves taught how to teach, than a maid of all-work in a dingy lodging-house can prepare a dinner up to the aldermanic or ducal standard of delicacy. Teaching is one of the most difficult things in the world. Of course, we mean teaching well, or teaching tolerably well; and with teaching we include government and discipline. For such teaching, setting aside a few rare instances of natural genius for the work, a complete and definite course

of training is as necessary, as it is to enable a man to command a man-of-war.

Those who know nothing about schools or children sometimes doubt this. Their notions of a child, especially a Catholic child, are something between those of an angel and a doll. They cannot reconcile the ideas of a young Christian and a little pickle. The smiling face, bright eyes, and ringing laugh of a group of children at play seem to them quite irreconcilable with the harsh unpleasantnesses and unwearying toils which in reality attach to all schools. Their ideal of a school is made up of modest curtseys, clean pinafores, pretty voices, and handsome rewards. They imagine the teacher always enlightened, always parental, or at times administering sadly a bland reproof; and they are confident that the young minds thus benignantly cultured respond with sweet readiness to their teacher's wishes, and never fail to realise all his fondest hopes.

What a delusion! If these amiable speculators would but frequent the nurseries or schoolrooms of some half-dozen of their own private friends, they would get a faint glimmering of the work that it is to train the young mind as it requires. The dear little creatures that appear in the drawing-room dressed in the newest fashions, or present themselves after dinner with cake-expectant smiles upon their happy faces, would oftentimes furnish a most unpoetical contrast when seen in the apartments dedicated to sleep, to dressing, or to books. And, moreover, many and many a time would the observer mourn over the parents much more than over the children, and wonder that people so good and so clever could make such extraordinary mistakes in bringing up their own children. Except in those occasional instances where children seem scarcely to have any faults, or are endowed with an unusual quickness of apprehension and warmth of affectionate sympathy, they would find that a peculiar art and skill are necessary for the training of children, even under the most favourable circumstances.

In the case of the children of the poor, all the difficulties of education are aggravated tenfold. If we would understand the qualifications needed in a poor-school teacher, we must follow his pupils to their own homes. We must learn what the daily life of the poor is, and estimate the immense effect of those counteracting influences in the cottage, the lodginghouse, the street, the public-house, and the gin-shop, which are ever tending to thwart the efforts of the master and the mistress in the school-room. We who are in another rank of life have our children always under our control. There is

scarcely an hour in the day in which we cannot regulate their work, their play, and their companions. We have servants to attend upon them, and can arrange all their little affairs so as to fall in harmoniously with our general plans for their education. Or if we do not bring them up at home, we can send them to schools and convents, where every instant of the day is laid out with a special view to the furthering their progress and the guidance of their minds.

But when we take in hand the poor man's children, we are undertaking to control those who are only in our hands for a portion of each day, and who, as a matter of fact, are frequently subjected during the rest of it to influences of the most questionable and even the most pernicious tendency. No doubt there are some households of working men in which the parents are not only willing but able to keep their children under the same habitual control in which every sensible parent of the better classes wishes to keep his own family. There are cottages, and there are rooms in lodging-houses, where the boys and girls see nothing but what edifies them in their parents; where the father does not swear and beat the mother, and the mother does not drink, and they themselves are disciplined by gentle and reasonable means, and not by passionate words and angry blows; where they are kept from intercourse with bad companions, and do not hear indecency and profanity uttered every day in their lives; where they can find some little entertainment in their poor home, and where the parents enter cordially into the views of the clergy, the schoolmaster or the schoolmistress, and send them punctually and regularly to school. But let us ask those who know the poor, in how many instances these advantages are in fact found combined? Not one half, not one quarter, of the boys and girls whom we gather into our schools have the happiness of living in such homes as these. And often, very often, sometimes in a large majority of cases, the whole time not spent in school is occupied in ways directly subversive of every good influence brought to bear upon the young mind in school-hours. Two systems, two modes of life, are in mortal combat for the possession of the child's body and soul; and out of the whole four-and-twenty, the good system has command of him for some five or six hours alone.

Who can be surprised, then, at the difficulty of organising a new school, and of the utter impossibility of bringing a school into a satisfactory condition, when the master or mistress is not thoroughly up to the mark required? Happy would it be for us, if it were a difficult matter to test the truth of what we are saying. Happy would it be if our Catholic schools

were generally in such a condition that the severely disposed critic had to wander far and wide before he could light upon any thing sufficiently bad to satisfy his worst anticipations. As it is, the number of schools in an unsatisfactory state is so large, that any one may soon learn by observation how hard it is to be a good schoolmaster or schoolmistress. Of course a school is not to be judged by its appearance to a casual visitor, who enters for a few minutes, and who sees nothing of what goes on at ordinary times. Nor is it to be judged by what it appears at show-times, when even the worst schools can be doctored up to an apparent state of health, so as to deceive the unwary. Let our schools be inspected for a whole week together, as they go on in their ordinary routine; and a pretty result would there be, in so many cases, that we shall not venture even to guess at their proportion to those which are really what they ought to be. Want of system, want of regularity, want of punctuality, want of liveliness, want of proper books, want of recreating occupations, want of temper, or of zeal, or of brains, in the master or mistress, and above all a want of sufficient religious instruction, would be discovered, to an extent of which most Catholics of the richer classes have not the faintest idea.

The fault no doubt lies in most respects with the teachers; but it only lies with them in a secondary degree. The fault lies in the first place with us who have neglected first of all to teach them. We have committed the flagrant absurdity of supposing that the only essential elements in a school are a building, and a salary for the master. The master himself, in himself, has most unaccountably been forgotten! We have been supposing that the Poor-School Committee (since it has existed, and before that, somebody or other unknown) has kept a dépôt of masters and mistresses in the neighbourhood of the Adelphi; and that all we had to do was to write to the secretary to send us one of them, at such and such a price, by the next day's train, and down would come an admirable personage, respectably dressed, speaking good English, knowing a little Latin, modest in deportment, pious in character, amiable in disposition, fond of children, well up in all the modern aids to learning, writing a beautiful hand, punctual as a clock, possessing a good tenor voice, patient as a saint, and practical as a railway-contractor. Alack-a-day, we might as well go to the Horse-Guards and order a brace of Napoleons and Wellingtons, or to the Court of Chancery and beg to have our lawsuit settled in the course of the same morning! The truth is, that Catholic schoolmasters and mistresses as yet do not, as a class, exist among us at all. There are a few good ones