A letter to N.W. Senior, Esq., one of Her Majesty's Commissioners for inquiring into the state of public education, explanatory of communications and of evidence on half school time teaching; on the military drill, and physical training; and on the administration of funds applicable to popular education / by Edwin Chadwick.

  • Chadwick, Edwin, 1800-1890.
Date:
1861?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to N.W. Senior, Esq., one of Her Majesty's Commissioners for inquiring into the state of public education, explanatory of communications and of evidence on half school time teaching; on the military drill, and physical training; and on the administration of funds applicable to popular education / by Edwin Chadwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/140
    positive moral certainty ensure of the class that as a class they shall never be vagrants or paupers again. This I can undertake positively. I will not stay to reassert, after extended demonstration, the tremendous penalties to which society has been sub- jected, by the dereliction of the administrative principles of the subdivision of educational labour provided for as of general application in the report of 1834, and so earnestly supported. But I venture to assert, not on the authority of persons whose knowledge is by hearsay, casually collected, or whose practical observation has been bounded by the four walls of an office, but on the testimony of official persons who have observed the children themselves and dealt v^^ith them practically under varied conditions of administration and application of edu- cational power; on such authority I assert that the con- version of the children of hereditary paupers, mendicants, and delinquents into self-supporting and productive labourers and good subjects, may be effected with the utmost certainty. Nay, the late Mr. Aubin, of the Central London District School, who has had passed through his hands some thirty thousand children of this class, expressed a confident opinion to me, that upon the data already obtained, a contract might be made for the attainment of greatly advanced moral as well as intellectual results from the improved physical and short school time mental training, that is to say, if they were pure orphans who could be kept by themselves and not be reclaimed by vicious relations. These results of educational and training power, I submit as of the highest order of moral and commercial progress and importance; but with a higher class of pupils, and the highest class of public school teaching and train- ing, the results obtained are still greater. I cite the following examples of statements reported from time to time, in respect to pupil-teachers, by the Rev. Mr. Brook- field ; thus, in his report from the South-eastern district for 1848-49, he states that of the pupil-teachers, there were,— Disallowed stipend, and erased for incom- petency - - - - 1 0 Disallowed stipend, and erased for mis- conduct - - - - 2 1 Besides these, two girls have been allowed only half stipends, in consequence of defective attainments; one girl has voluntarily withdrawn from the apprenticeship;