Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
Emigration is in itself not a panacea. Is Education? In one sense it
may be, for Education, the developing in a man of all his latent
capacities for improvement, may cure anything and everything. But the
Education of which men speak when they use the term, is mere schooling.
No one but a fool would say a word against school teaching. By all
means let us have our children educated. But when we have passed them
through the Board School Mill we have enough experience to see that
they do not emerge the renovated and regenerated beings whose advent
was expected by those who passed the Education Act. The "scuttlers"
who knife inoffensive persons in Lancashire, the fighting gangs of the
West of London, belong to the generation that has enjoyed the advantage
of Compulsory Education. Education, book-learning and schooling will
not solve the difficulty. It helps, no doubt. But in some ways it
aggravates it. The common school to which the children of thieves and
harlots and drunkards are driven, to sit side by side with our little
ones, is often by no means a temple of all the virtues.
It is sometimes a university of all the vices. The bad infect the
good, and your boy and girl come back reeking with the contamination of
bad associates, and familiar with the coarsest obscenity of the slum.
Another great evil is the extent to which our Education tends to
overstock the labour market with material for quill-drivers and
shopmen, and gives our youth a distaste for sturdy labour. Many of the
most hopeless cases in our Shelters are men of considerable education.
Our schools help to enable a starving man to tell his story in more
grammatical language than that which his father could have employed,
but they do not feed him, or teach him where to go to get fed. So far
from doing this they increase the tendency to drift into those channels
where food is least secure, because employment is most uncertain, and
the market most overstocked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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