Robert Lowe

“ I confess, for myself, that, whenever I talk with an intelligent workman, so far from being able to assert any such superiority, I am always tormented with the conception, "What a fool the man must think me when he finds me, upon whose education thousands of pounds have been spent, utterly ignorant of the matters which experience teaches him, and which he naturally thinks every educated man ought to know." ”

“ Permission can only make a general system, what we want is an universal one. We must go further than permitting—we must compel. We must insist that there shall be some means or other by which education shall completely pervade in this country. We must carry out in some way or other the great work of the Reformers in Scotland when they placed a school in every parish. ”

“ Then we are dosed with the antiquities of the ancients. Every man is expected to know how many Archons there were at Athens, though he does not know how many Lords of the Treasury there are in London; he must know all the forms of their courts, though he knows hardly the names of our own. ”

“ Now it is no small fault of the modern system of education that it withholds that conception, the key of modern society—that is, not to look at things as stationary, but to look at the human race as, like a glacier, always advancing, always going on from good to better, from better to worse, as the case may be—an endless change and development that never ceases, although we may not be able to mark it every day. ”

“ It is a thing which must be done, and done immediately. We cannot suffer any large number of our citizens, now that they have obtained the right of influencing the destinies of the country, to remain uneducated. ”

“ If we must choose in the matter, we should lean to the practical side. One more rule I will venture to submit—they are four in all—if we must choose in these matters, the present is more important to us than the past. ”

“ I think it will be admitted by all who hear me that as we live in a universe of things, and not of words, the knowledge of things is more important to us than the knowledge of words. The first few months and the first few years of a child's existence are employed in learning both, but a great deal more in making itself acquainted with the world than with the knowledge of language. What is the order of Nature? ”

“ Then, and not till then, it will be right to talk about compulsory education, because I can imagine nothing more unjust, nothing more unfair upon a child, than to say that a man shall not be allowed to employ the child because he has never been educated, when the State has not placed within the reach of that child the means of education. ”

“ Well, gentlemen, I am afraid I have detained you at very great length, and you will be happy to hear that I have come to an end to what I propose to say to you. There is one more proposal that I wish to make. I have said I am most anxious to educate the lower classes of this country, in order to qualify them for the power that has passed, and perhaps will pass in a still greater degree, into their hands. I am also anxious to educate, in a manner very different from the present, the higher classes of this country, and also for a political reason. ”

“ That conception is entirely wanting in the antique world; and therefore it is not too much to ask that that idea should be imparted to youth before we give so much time to study the state of society in which it is wholly wanting. I won't detain you with any discussion in this place on the morals and metaphysics of the ancients. ”

“ It depends upon what you mean to make men. If you want to make them a race of sophists, poetasters, and schoolmasters, we are going about it in the right way; but for the business of life we have a little too much Latin and Greek, and if we are to have them taught, they ought to be taught on a very different system. ”

“ He may be in a state of utter ignorance of the antiquities or the law of England; he knows the laws and antiquities of Greece and Rome. The English laws and antiquities are bound up with our freedom and history, and are important to every day's business; but he knows about them nothing whatever. We have, I here say boldly, a literature unparalleled in the world. Which of our great classical authors is a young man required to read in order to attain the highest honours our educational institutions can give him? He studies in the most minute manner the ancient writings of Rome or Greece. ”

“ Now, I say something of that kind should be done if we are to reform endowments so as to place all studies on a level, and then let the best study win. I won't pretend to influence the decision of parents, but I should give to them no bribe, no inducement, to choose one study more than another, but allow them to take whatever they like best. ”

“ Is it not better that gentlemen should know the things which the working men know, only know them infinitely better in their principles and in their details, so that they may be able, in their intercourse and their commerce with them, to assert the superiority over them which greater intelligence and leisure is sure to give, and to conquer back by means of a wider and more enlightened cultivation some of the influence which they have lost by political change? ”

“ The fourth principle is that it is the duty of the State, above all things, to test and ascertain the nature of the education given; that it is not right to leave to the persons who give the instruction the power of testing their own work, but that the instruction, having been given by one set of persons, should have its value set on it by another set of persons. ”

“ All knowledge is valuable, and there is nothing that it is not worth while to know; but it is a question of relative importance—not of decrying this branch of knowledge, and praising and puffing that—but of taking as far as possible the whole scale of human knowledge, and deciding what should have priority, which should be taught first, and to which our attention should be most urgently directed. ”

“ I am not going to enter on political matters, but we are all aware that the Government of the country, the voice potential in the Government, is placed in the hands of persons in a lower position of life than has hitherto been the case. ”

“ I thought, 'Are we little mortals afflicted when one of us perishes, whose life must at any rate be brief, when in one place lie the corpses of so many towns?'" Well, that is one way of looking at the question. ”

“ The consequence is that money is generally forthcoming in those places where education is most abundant; and, therefore, Government money is spent in giving assistance where it is least wanted, and withheld where it is most required. That is the cardinal defect of the system, and that is a defect that is not collateral to or extraneous, but inherent in its very nature ”

“ But it's not medicine— Lowe is the only doctor's dared to say so— It's rest I want—there, I have said it out— From cooking meals for hungry hired men And washing dishes after them—from doing Things over and over that just won't stay done. By good rights I ought not to have so much Put on me, but there seems no other way. Len says one steady pull more ought to do it. He says the best way out is always through. And I agree to that, or in so far As that I can see no way out but through— Leastways for me—and then they'll be convinced. ”

“ The notion of a large community existing by virtue of the principle of representation—of a popular government extended beyond the limits of a single town—is a thing that never entered into the minds of the ancients, so that the best years of our lives are spent in studying history in which that which makes the difference between modern history and ancient—the leading characteristic of our society—that principle of representation which has made it possible in some degree to reconcile the existence of a large country with the existence of a certain amount of freedom—was utterly unknown. ”

“ The study of the dead languages precludes the inquiring habit of mind which measures probability, which is one of the most important that a man can acquire.
I will now give you a catalogue of things which a highly-educated man—one who may have received the best education at the highest public schools, or at Oxford—may be in total ignorance of. ”

“ It is as much as most men can do to find it on the map, and very few know a single town in it. I have amused myself trying to see how few men know where Gondar, the capital of this country, is situated on the map; and as the prisoners we are going to attempt to rescue can probably only be reached by going there, and so to Magdala, it is nearly as important to know where it is as to know that Halicarnassus was the capital city of Caria, or that there were twenty-three cities of the Volscians in the Campagna of Rome. ”

“ I have spoken only of modern history, of modern languages; but what are modern history and languages compared with the boundless field that nature opens out—with the new world which chemistry is expanding before us—with the old world that geology has called again into existence—with the wonderful generalisation with regard to plants and animals, and all those noble studies and speculations which are the glory and distinction and lifeblood of the time in which we live, and of which our youth remain, almost without exception, totally ignorant? ”

“ Oh, may all boys who read this seek earnestly to believe that Jesus is their very best Friend, and He only can remove their self-will and blindness of heart!
"In crossing the ferry early in the summer, we had spoken faithfully to this ferryman, and had sent him the 'Life of Robert Annan' by post. They had been schoolfellows together, and after reading the book, he got many others to read it also. This small sixpenny gift, accompanied by prayer, had done a work. Robert was willing to become a co-worker with us, and is now trying to train to honest industry our little self-willed runaway. ”

“ The discipline of the mind is quite as good, and it has this advantage, that when he goes to Paris he will be able to go to a hotel and make known his wants without becoming a laughing-stock to everybody; but this would be too useful, and therefore this must be put aside for some discipline in the Greek language, which he is sure to forget before he is thirty. ”

“ The notion of the ancients was that knowledge was a sort of permanent fixed quantity—that it could not be increased—that it was to be sought for; and if a man wanted to seek for knowledge he did not sit down and interrogate Nature, and study her phenomena, and also analyse and inquire, but he put on his seven-leagued boots and travelled to Egypt or Persia, or as far as he possibly could, in the expectation of finding some wise man there who could tell him all about it. That was the case with Plato, and almost all the great men of antiquity. ”

“ After all, gentlemen, education is a preparation for actual life, and I ask you—though no doubt the memory is exercised and the faculties are sharpened by these studies in some degree—whether they really in any degree fulfill that condition. I say there is nothing so valuable for a man as to avoid credulity. If he discounts a man's bill, he should inquire before he does it. But what we are taught by this kind of study, our attention being so much placed upon words, is to take everything for granted. ”

“ The time has gone past evidently when the higher classes can hope by any indirect influence, either of property or coercion of any kind, to direct the course of public affairs. Power has passed out of their hands, and what they do must be done by the influence of superior education and superior cultivation; by the influence of mind over mind—"the sign and signet of the Almighty to command," which never fails being recognised wherever it is truly tested. Well, then, gentlemen, how is this likely to be done? ”

“ In order to solve the problem of education, I, with the assistance of Lord Macaulay and other eminent men, prepared a scale which has since, with very little change, been the scale upon which these offices have been distributed; that is, we took everything that we could think of that a well-educated man could learn. ”

“ It is very desirable; no one can object to it, that persons in easy circumstances should send their children to the parish schools in Scotland. It is a happy symptom, where such a thing can take place; but I must say, with great deference to the Commissioners, that if people are able to pay for the education of their children they ought to pay, and not take from the public funds. This is a matter on which they lay great stress; but I cannot say we do right in taxing the heritors of the parish indiscriminately for the education of children of rich parents who are able to educate them themselves ”

“ There is no doubt that Greek is a language of wonderful felicity of expression; but what is more beautiful, more refined, what will exercise taste better than the study of the best modern French prose to be found in M. Prevost Paradol, Sainte Beuve, and other French writers? There is nothing that can approach it in the English language. If a man wishes to exercise himself in these things he cannot possibly have a better subject than French prose. ”

“ Therefore it follows, from the essence of the system, that we must have Government placed in an unworthy position, merely following the will of private persons, obliged to stand looking on with folded arms and see masses of the population of the country growing up in vice and ignorance, while its assistance is lavished on places where there are sufficient resources to found schools and maintain them without Government aid at all. ”