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?]
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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.

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    4i Why sent in late,—to supply on the physical and psychological limits of children's capacity of attention. Inasmuch as the application of the principles involved depended on local administrative arrangements on an ade- quately large scale, as in the Poor Law district schools, I have thought it necessary to examine one example at least of a voluntary adoption for national school children and other children of the independent classes, of the administra- tive principle displayed in those district, orphan, or pauper schools ; and for that purpose I have visited and examined the voluntary school union of the chief educational means in eleven parishes, including the town of Faversham in Kent, and its immediate neighbourhood, to which my attention has been directed by Mr. E. C. Tufnell and the Rev. Mr. Grant, Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools. I was led to entertain the expectation that I might have assistance, as for a very special inquiry, and I began and proceeded on that presumption. 1 obtained the information in an approved form, as I was accustomed to collect it, and submit it to you, with our colleagues of old, viz., of deliberatively framed questions read to the in- formants for their best attention, and answers delibera- tively dictated, and afterwards, in the more important instances, maturely reconsidered and corrected by them. I have sent to you for the Commission most of the infor- mation as my opportunities enabled me to collect it. I regret that the earliest portions sent in should be late for your purposes, and should only arrive as your report was in progress towards completion; but I may remind you that when applied to at the outset of the Commission I gave particular suggestions that the Half School-time system involved a primary organic principle, which the educational conference held under the auspices of H.R.H. the Prince Consort by resolution agreed with me in considering re- quired a very special examination, and you. included the topic with others in your instructions to your Assistant Commissioners. I endeavoured to ascertain, through you, the character and extent of the information which had been already sent in to the Commission on the Half-time question, with other elementary topics; because if that information had- been to any fair extent correct or complete, I should have been glad to have saved my own labour, for which I have demands, and am in arrear, for other public objects. But I could not learn that those topics had been touched