ABSTRACT
IN endeavouring to understand the attitude adopted by the Poor Law to the children intrusted to its care, we must remember that the term education at different times and to different persons has borne a yery varying interpretation. In common parlance it has now come to mean not the drawing out of the human faculties generally, but the drawing out of the mental faculties through a curriculum which, even when confined to reading, writing, and arithmetic, is more or less literary in its character. For the richer classes a certain tincture of letters has always been thought necessary, but during the first half of this century the public conscience valued very lightly this form of education for the poor. Many voluntary efforts were, of course, made on a limited scale to put education, as now understood, within the reach of such members of the poorer classes as were anxious to acquire it; but public opinion, in the main, acquiesced in the view that scholastic education was not a very essential requisite to the children of the poor, and parents of the poorer class were more interested in their children's training in the crafts which they intended to follow in after
life than in the education which is imparted by books. The influence of the old Poor Law on this situation was probably altogether baneful. There was, as we have seen, no adequate classification made by the parish authorities, and only the most perfunctory attempts were made to provide schools for the children whose misfortune it was to become dependent on the Poor Law.
