LORD DERBY ON SUPERIOR EDUCATION.

Westport Times, Volume VI, Issue 925, 10 February 1872, Page 3

LORD DERBY ON SUPERIOR EDUCATION.

(From tho " Bullionist.")

The Earl of Derby, when he speaks in the provinces, generally giv«-.s his views to the country on social and educational questions. On these he is a consummate master of common sense. As a statesman ho is seen in the House of Lords, where his political wisdom, practical, calm, and removed equally from imperiousness and obsequiousness, has placed him in the first rank of peers, many of whom are hi many aspects able as himself. But of this it is not our purpose here to speak. His lordship has delivered a speech at a meeting of the Manchester Grammar School, in which he gives sound advice, and offers some pregnant observations. It need not be said that Lord Derby cordially concurs in the measures now stirring the land, whether through the instrumentality of the Legislature and public grants of money, or by the munificent voluntary efforts of private individuals, of which the Manchester School affords an illustration, the object being to offer to who has an aptitude to profit by it, a first-rate education. Lord Derby, however, descries a possible danger which may have lurked as a single grain of truth in those obscurantist theories of Cobbett's days —theories which would deny any education to the children of peasants and working men, for fear, as was said, it would unfit them for the allotted labor of their lives. Something of this may be, indeed, now witnessed in the lower ranks, and in some of tho upper, too, of the professions which demand intellectual labor, not manual, and which are comparatively open, since they are crowded with young men who have acquired a smattering of knowledge, but have never been in reality educated. This is an evil. The class in question, usually drawn from the humbler section of the community, have for the most part struggled and pinched themselves individually to gain what acquisitions they do possess • and, unable to advance to the higher education, have crowded into all the avenues of employment whence they might obtain a moderate subsistence and a genteel position. By a better organisation of our public schools, and an extension of their benefits, such as in the case of the Manchester Grammar School, that tendency may be changed for the better ; and it is much to be desired it should. Education wants levelling up ; higher and still higher qualifications will be demanded for the superior and secondary positions in the banking and commercial worlds, and in all branches comprised under the head of science and engineering. Young men to obtain a good opening to the superior ranks of the Army and Navy will not find cramming to be, by-and-by, of any use ; and for the half or imperfectly educated, they will not be able to aspire beyond the lower grades in any of those professions.

The noble Earl, alluding to the danger of men of high education being thereby unfitted for the rough, practical, and profitable work of the world, says there is a country in southern Europe in winch every peasant's son gets tolerahly well educated, and every peasant so on acquires a conviction that he is destined to be, if not a minister of state, at least a lawver, a doctor, or proiessional man of some sort, and that it is entirely unworthy of his abilities to keep a shop or manage a farm. That is a feeling, adds his lordship, which is likely to grow up, and the growth of which, whenever it does exist, is a danger. No doubt it is so ; yet it is not likely to grow up to any dangerous extent in this country. Commerce, agriculture, all the useful arts and professions, and the sciences on which they are founded, are assuming every day more, powerful attractions for properly educated young men who possess energy. If parents and teachers encournge the notion that these associations are " low," those people have outlived their time. We have seen a Duke, closely allied to royalty, place one of his sons into the wdne trade. One of ahe most cultivated of scientific men in England is a banker at this moment in the city ; another gentlemen of the same profession, recently passed away, stood in the very foremost ranks of classical scholars and great historians. The superstition, itself springiug from ignorance, of frade being vulgar, is disappearing, and with it the perverted education termed superior, in which young men of promise were carefully taught to eschew every walk in life pave the church; the bar, aud, as a pis aller, the medical profession, Eof this reason we are of opinion that the danger, only indeed obliquely glanced at by Lord Derby, will be averted. " "We here are tolerably well taught," says his lordship, speaking in Manchester, " how to make money: this is a lesson learnt. What wo want is to learn how to make high culture and intellectual tastes compatible with moderate means." This would be a golden lesson which also now claims its turn.