STATE EDUCATION.

Colonist, Volume IV, Issue 425, 19 November 1861, Page 2

STATE EDUCATION.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

Voluntaryism in education has recently gained an honest and eminent convertno less a man than the former AssistantSecretary of the Committee of Council on Education. In a recent lecture on the •Proper Limits of the State's Interference in Education,' Mr. Harry Chester has dealt the expiring system of state instruction some blows for which many will thank him.

We have always maintained a system of state education to be unfavorable to the liberties of a people. Hear Mr. Chester:— ■

If we and our ancestors for a long period, for centuries, had lived under a Government which had held in its control the education of all classes of the people, our love of freedom and our independence would have fallen very far short of their present excellence. - If Oxford and Cambridge, Eton, Westminster, Rugby, our grammar schools, and other seminaries of sound learning and manly thought, had been managed, or guided,' inspected' it is called, from time immemorial, by the Officers of State, the Lord Keeper, Mister Secretary, or even a committee of the King's Council, do you think that our national spirit of freedom' would not have suffered ? That our national scholarship, intelligence and vigor, would not have been enfeebled and stunted ? - . a-.

We have always maintained that the Privy Council system has failed in securing any adequate educational result!. The following is Mr. Chester's testimony :—

We have established an elaborate and expensive system, which was intended to educate the people, but which has taken very little effect, except in reference to little children under eleven and twelve years of age.1 For some time we flattered ourselves that in this system we had the means of a national education, but we have lately awakened to perceive that this motion is not only flattering but fallacious.

We have always protested against this system as being based upon a false political economy by which voluntary teachers and schools were placed at a disadvantage as unjust in principle as it has been mischevous in effect. So says Mr. Chester:— " It is in effect Parliamentary protection; and, though 1 fear I am about to express an unpopular sentiment, I must honestly say that it is my deliberate conviction that the case of the teacher is no exception to\the general rule of political economy, that wherever there is such protection, whether it be in relation to agriculture, shipping, manufactures, or education, though the primary result may seem to be, and may really be, very beneficial to the protected, the ultimate result must inevitably be to them a cramping and dwarfing of power, an inability to rise to perfection.

We have always «*aid that Government would prove to be a bad educator, and that working with unsound rules and with an incorrect knowledge of the market she would only ' make a mess of it.' Now listen to Mr. Chester :—-.

I must express my fear that the time is at hand when, if the present system be maintained without modification, the market of elementary education will be found to be seriously overstocked with certificated masters and mistresses; and even now the shadow of this coining evil is cast on some of the training schools; while, on the other hand, the certificatees are restrained from giving, their services where they are wanted: tlie most^ and would be the most useful, ,ia the teaching; of adults, and are confined almost entirely to the teaching of children from three to twelve years of age. • • =

It is some time since many came to tho conclusion that the grants to the committee ot council might cease without much national loss. Mr. Chester has now come to this conviction :-—■

I conceive that the time has arrived when all the giants of the committee of council oil education should be made on a slowly expiring scale,:ra order that the promoters of schools might clearly understand that the aid of the Government was not to be permanently given, but was intended to enable them to grow up to independence.—Zaunceston Examiner. ■ ■