May 31, 1872. THE BUILDING NEWS. 429
THE BUILDING NEWS.
—>—_—_
LONDON, FRIDAY, MAY 31, 1872.
THE ERA OF SCHOOL BUILDING.
T is one of the characteristics of the pre-
sent age to do everything in a hurry.
Whether work is done well or done badly is
of little consequence, as long as it is done
fast. It is enough for a man’s reputation that
he has pulled down a great deal or built up a
great deal; it detracts little from the popular
estimate of him that he pulled down what was
precious and built up what was useless. As
it is with individuals soit is with the mass.
We all want to be doing something, and will
not take time to consider what to do or how
it should be done. Energy counts for every-
thing and brains for nothing, and so half our
labour goes to raise obstacles for the next age
to pull down. It is grievous to think of the
waste which this singular characteristic has
produced in all quarters ; but one instance is
enough ; look at our railway system, at the
haphazard way in which it arose, the millions
that were squandered on it, and the wide-
spread ruin which followed. The country
might have been better served at half the
cost, but it would not take time to consider.
The era of railway-making is over, the share-
holders of 1845 enjoyed their hurry, and paid
for it, and, at the sacrifice of their own
fortunes, bequeathed us a system which we
are always patching up and grumbling at.
The era of school building is now passing
over us; and the public, which feels that its
amusementis being neglectedif somethingfresh
is not done every day, is beginning to grumble
that school building does not go on fast
enough. We saw the London School Board
blamed the other day for having been in
existence so long and having done so little:
so little, that is, in the actual erection of
buildings. The public, as usual, want to
have something visible and tangible without
loss of time. What the Board may happen
to build, or where they may build it, interests
them comparatively little. To us, however,
these are the vital points of the subject. We
do not want another illustration of the
proverb about more haste andless speed. We
do not want the blunders of the railway era
repeated in the era of schools. We do not
want to set about doing, with great energy,
what, with equal energy, we shall soon have
to set about undoing again. Still more, we
do not want to set up that which, however
bad it may be, will not easily be pulled down;
and if bad schoolhouses are once built at the
public expense, it will assuredly be no easy
matter to get better ones substituted. There-
fore, to save ruinous blunders and avoid an
ultimately extravagant outlay, to make public
education a reality, and to prevent its inter-
ference with public health, we feel that the
plans of our elementary schools can hardly
have too careful consideration. Once built,
let them be never so inconvenient and never
so unhealthy, there they will remain, and
generation after generation of children will
be the sufferers. We are not building for
to-day alone, but for centuries to come ; and
the work that has to last so long had need
be wisely considered.
We are building for future generations :
let us, at least, look forward to the next, and
make quite sure that it will not have to do
our work over again. In thirty years more
will the nation be satisfied with teaching the
mere rudiments of instruction ? We doubt
it; it is only ignorance that is satisfied, and
every man who has learned a little in
the schools we are now commencing will
wish his children to learn more. Our
mechanical industry, again, is, perhaps, near-
ing its highest point, and will have its decline ;
our coal and iron will not last for ever, and
England will haye to rely, as it used to do,
not on its minerals, but its men. When we
have to keep our place in the world by mental | and moral power, rather than by physical wealth, education will be a different thing from what it has been yet. The working classes, again, are far from content with their position, and are making persistent efforts to improve it. They may, in part, be striving after things that are not possible, and that would not be worth gaining if they were ; but in the matter of education they are seek- ing what they can assuredly attain, and what is well worth attaining. It is true there will always be a large amount of manual labour to do in the world ; butitis hard to see any per- manent reason why the class who do it should be looked upon as a ‘lower class,” or why a mason or a carpenter should not be as well educated as any middle-class man of business. To set about our school building, then, on the assumption that the ‘three R’s” will always form the staple of the education, or even to provide for such a standard as that of the National and British Schools of recent days, will be to make our present work an ultimate hindrance to the cause it is meant to aid. Our buildings ought to be fitted for the future as well as the present ; to this end they need special adaptation to the teaching of both science and art. Science, just rising out of its infancy to be the master of the world, will doubtless take care of itself. In less than a hundred years it will not be a disputed point whether science should be taught ; the dispute will perhaps rather be whether there is much else worth teaching in comparison. If we do not provide for it, our work will be cast aside, and we shall be despised and for- gotten. In less than a hundred years, it may be, art, awakening from the trance in which, like the Wandering Jew, it renews its youth afterevery cycle of zrowthand decay, will once more have a world to worship it. If we are not to be stigmatised as the barbarians of Europe, we shall then have to cultivate the arts in earnest; and, perhaps, having done our drudgery and burnt our coal, shall find this cultivation part of our most promising business. In truth, it is so now, if the nation at large only had eyes to see it. Every year foreigners are becoming more dangerous rivals to us in all that is purely mechanical. Wherever machinery is concerned they are corstantly pulling up closer and closer to usin the race; and wherever taste and skill and refinement are needed they have always beea far before us. If we do not mean to be beaten at all points, we must give our workmen such a training as they once had in England, and still have abroad. We must give them tech- nical education and art education, and the preparation for both must go on in these elementary schools which we are now about to build. To build them on the supposition that reading, writing, and arithmetic will be nearly all the accomplishments ever needed, will be to act on an exceedingly mistaken notion of the direction in which the world is moving. We do not forget that the schools now in question are elementary ones: we merely claim that amongst other elements they should teach the elements of science and art. In the recent competition for London schools, we observed that careful provision had been made in several cases for instruction in drawing. For instruction in rudimentary science we observed no special provision in any design: the time is not yet come when its importance is generally felt. When all our neighbours have left us in the rear, and have gained the markets which were once our own; when the value of science has become, to the meanest intellect, expressible in pounds, shillings, and pence; and when, for want of it, we shall have lost a sufficient quantity of those coveted articles; then, doubtless, at a rather late hour in the day, we shall set about its acquirement. At present it is, of course, in vain to speak about it; but, all the same, our school buildings might as well admit of an addition which will some day be a vital necessity.
There is one thing more important, perhaps, than even knowledge, and that is health. To gain the one, there is no need to lose the other, and yet, without care, there is a risk of doing so. Here, if not on our last head, we may hope for public attention. The talk about sanitary precautions, about drainage, warming, and ventilation, has, of late years, been endless. ‘The results have been small enough in proportion to the noise, for talking, as it often is, seems to have been made a substitute for action. We have little faith in the complicated schemes for ventilation that are constantly being put forward, but ventilation is one of the first necessities of life. It is almost a miracle that children can live at all in the crowded streets and allies of our towns. Could we stand above the atmosphere, and looking down, see its different shades of impurity as we canthose in ariver or a lake, the sight of London, not to speak of worse localities, would assuredly be a disgusting one. The air for miles round would be clouded with smoke and dirt, and the cloud would thicken as the houses become closer. In average purity, probably, it would be a pretty good match for the Thames water as we see it between Battersea and Barking. This is not a pleasant thought, even for thosein the clearest part of the stream; but what are weto say about those in the muddy stratum below ? The residents in a Whitechapel court or a Southwark alley are plunged in the very sewage of the atmosphere. Their schools must, we suppose, be near them; planted, by a sort of necessity, in some of the most un- healthy spots of the metropolis. In each of them there will be hundreds of children, not over-clean in their dresses, whatever they may be intheir persons. They will be shut up in rooms where the purest air that can be had is already too foul for safety, and, unless the most vigorous precautions are taken, they will rapidly increase its badness till disease must follow. If we do our best, we may just make their position tolerable: that is, from a sanitary point of view; but even this will be no easy matter. If we take things quietly, they will die of consumption a good deal faster than when they played about the streets, and at favourable opportunities will, by way of change, infect whole neighbour- hoods with epidemic fever. We must not count, either, on any love for fresh air on the part of the pupils; they will have to be saved in spite of themselyes. Their homes, if homes they can be called, the single rooms which their parents occupy both by day and night, are commonly so foul and filthy in their odour that a stranger cannot endure to enter them for a moment. ‘The windows are never opened, winter or summer, and as soon as fires are left off, the chimney is care- fully stuffed with rags to prevent a draught. The surveyor whose duties have once com- pelled him to go over houses let out in the way we are speaking of will agree with us that the atmosphere of a stable or a pigstye is fragrant in comparison with that to which many of our new school-children are accus- tomed. But, if they have passed one-half their time in these pestilential abodes, they have hitherto spent the other half out-of- doors amidst such breezes as London streets can furnish; and to this, more than anything else, their lives are owing. Now that they are no longer to have the run of the pavement, it is an absolute necessity, if they are not to be killed outright, that the schools where they pass their time should be fresh and airy enough to revive them from the semi-suffoca- tion to which they are doomed at nights. When they are once accustomed, moreover, to the startling idea of sitting ina room with the windows open, they may, by persever- ance, convert their relatives to the same prac- tice. In any case, it is a most essential requirement that every school-room and class- room we build should be so planned that a strong current of fresh air can be carried through it from end to end whenever desired.
