XII. PAYMENT BY RESULTS.' HE suggestion that the principle of "payment by results' should be adopted as the best method of solving the question of religious instruction in the public schools of the United States, makes timely a discussion of that feature of the English system of public education. A brief account of its development is essential. 2 Previous to 1832 the English government had never done anything for the education of the people. Not one penny had ever been voted by Parliament, or by any local public authority, to pay a school-teacher or to build a schoolhouse. The existing means of education were the few hundred endowed grammar schools scattered over the country; the parish or charity schools, which were the peculiar educational product of the eighteenth century; the schools founded after 1808 and 1811, respectively, by the two educational societies, the British and Foreign School Society and the National Society; and the Sunday schools, which still followed the example set by Raikes, at Gloucester, of teaching the simplest elements of learning as well as religion. For the most part, tuition in the grammar schools was gratuitous; still 1 The Educational Review, September, 1892. 2 An address by Archbishop Ireland delivered before the National Educational Association at St. Paul, July, 1890. See the Proceedings of the Association for that year, p. 179. the expense of attendance excluded the lower classes. They were strictly middle-class schools, as they are to-day. Moreover, the majority of these schools had fallen into decay, some because the tide of population had turned away from them, and some because they had been badly managed. Instruction in the charity schools, which was commonly poor, was not only free, but clothing was often provided for the children as well. But these schools were altogether insufficient in number and in equipment. Both the grammar schools and the charity schools were mainly under the control and management of the Established Church. The British and Foreign Society aimed, in its schools, to teach secular studies and the Bible; the National Society, to teach the doctrines of the Established Church and secular studies. There was absolutely nothing answering to public schools as that expression is now understood in most of the well-educated countries of the world. No one who understands the magnitude of national education need be told that this was a miserable educational provision for such a country as England. Of the whole population, only 1 in 11.25 was at school; whereas in Prussia the ratio was 1 in 6.27; in Holland, 1 in 8.11; and in France, 1 in 9. In 1832 the government took its first step toward promoting popular education. Parliament voted £20,000 to supplement local enterprise in building schoolhouses. It was a small beginning; but Parliament repeated the grant for several years, and then it began to increase the sum voted. About the same time that the increase began, Parliament included normal schools and teachers' salaries in the grants. To trace minutely the successive steps that led up to the present system of elementary schools is here impossible and unnecessary, but a summary of four or five points will assist in understanding the present status. When a good beginning had once been made, the government rapidly expanded its operations. The grants voted for schools at intervals of five years will make this plain: 1835, £20,000; 1840, £30,000; 1845, £75,000; 1850, £125,000; 1855, £397,000; 1860, £798,000; 1865, £637,000; 1869, £415,000. At first the grants voted by Parliament were apportioned by the lords of the treasury on the recommendation of the two educational societies. But in time there began to develop, in the characteristic English manner, a department of education. In 1839 the Privy Council passed an order constituting four persons named "a committee to superintend the application of any sums voted by Parliament for the purpose of promoting public education." The committee that had at first to administer but £30,000 a year, gradually grew into a great department of State, dealing with an annual grant from the exchequer of nearly £2,000,000, and exercising a very wide and important discretion. Finally, Parliament passed an act creating a vice-president of the council, and making him the head of the committee on education; but with this exception, the whole mechanism of administration stood simply upon usage. The secretary of this committee, however, was and is its real head. The department established an inspectorship. At first this extended only to the buildings that the government helped to build; but when grants came to be made for schools also, the inspection was extended to the secular teaching, leaving religious instruction wholly to the local managers. This inspectorship was to see that the government got the value of its money. The first rules of administration adopted by the lords of the treasury, and afterward by the committee on education, were called "minutes." But as these minutes multiplied, they were finally gathered into a document called "Code of Regulations by the Lords of the Committee of Privy Council on Education;" or simply "The Code." Pursuant to the ninety-seventh section of the act of 1870, the department annually lays the code, revised from time to time, on the table of the Houses of Parliament. If it is not amended by the Houses, or rejected by either of them, within thirty days, it goes into effect. The code in operation at any time contains the conditions that public elementary schools and training colleges for teachers must comply with, in order to obtain an annual grant from the treasury in aid of their main tenance. It was in the Revised Code of 1861 that the principle of payments by results first appeared. Mr. Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, was then the head of the educational committee. The annual grant by Parliament had grown to more than three-quarters of a million sterling. The government, under the peculiar system, had no assurance that it was expending its money wisely. Repeated investigation, on the other hand, proved very clearly that much of it was little better than thrown away. Hitherto the government had made its payments to teachers personally, according to a prescribed schedule. Many of them were worse than incompetent. To remedy these evils, it was proposed to make payments to the managers rather than to the teachers, and to graduate them to the results of individual examination of pupils, or to withhold them altogether. More definitely, the new propositions were these: "The school must be held in approved premises, and must be under the charge of a certificated teacher; The children must have made a certain number of attendances; They must pass an individual examination in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and according to results in each individual case a grant was to be made." This last clause contains the principle of payment by results that is now brought forward as a solution of one of our difficult educational problems. Mr. Lowe took the idea from the recommendations of the Duke of Newcastle's Commission, which had investigated the state of public education in the years 1858-1860. Mr. Lowe said the government must have proof that the teachers were doing their duty; class examinations were not adequate; such expressions as "general efficiency" and "moral atmosphere" in the reports of inspectors were "impalpable essences." Nothing would do but individual examinations. Mr. Lowe declared: "If the new system is costly, it shall at least be efficient; if it is inefficient, it shall be cheap." Hence, payment by results was merely a mode of guarding the treasury. An American might think that the proper precaution for the government to have taken would have been to look after the examination, selection, and supervision of the teachers. But this the character of the system that had grown up prevented. The government did not examine, employ, or supervise the teachers. There were no school officers other than the committee at Whitehall and the inspectors and clerks whom it appointed. There were thousands of government-assisted schools, but there was not in England one State school, as we understand that expression. The government had formed a great number of educational partnerships with local managers scattered over the kingdom, furnishing a part of the money, and a general inspection to see that it received its money's worth. The local managers provided the re |