Medical and middle-class education : an address delivered at the Chatham-Street School of Medicine, Manchester, on Monday, January 21st, 1856 / by Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth.

  • Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, 1st Baronet
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical and middle-class education : an address delivered at the Chatham-Street School of Medicine, Manchester, on Monday, January 21st, 1856 / by Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    should enter upon their course in this School with an earnest deter- mination to make themselves familiar with all the great models in classical literature. But you have also an absolute need, that, as students of nature, your pupils should at a very early period have cultivated habits of observation. They should have so far mastered the rudiments of the exact sciences, as to relieve your professors, or those of any college with which you might be incorporated, from aU elementary instruction. Now this at present the Grammar Schools do not pretend to accomplish. Even were their course of studies more complete, the revenues of these Grammar Schools are often quite inadequate to the task of educating the children of the middle class, in the great towns in which they are situated. When the trustees have the command of sufficient resources, they are often prevented by the restrictions of the trust, by the consequences of previous mismanagement, and by the general apathy as to every thing relating to a foundation, buried in the dis- credit of its own inefficiency, from making a wise and bold effort at reconstruction. Two recent Acts of Pai'liament confide powers to commissioners to aid trustees in remodelling these institutions; but it is greatly to be regretted that the commissioners have little or no opportunity of beginning reform, and also, that when their aid is invoked, their power to remedy abuse is jealously restricted. What might be accomplished by such institutions, adequately endowed, and under the guidance of intelligent trustees, is sufficiently demonstrated by the remarkable success of the King Edward's Schools at Birmingham, in which the present Bishop of Manchester labom-ed as an administrator, with an ability almost as great as that which his learning and experience enabled him to put forth as the head of that school.. In cities like Manchester and Birmingham, it is important that the middle classes should have an opportimity of combining domestic training with public instruction. This would not only render such instruction accessible to a much larger portion of that class than can at present afford to send their children to private boarding schools, but would combine the advantage of the moral discipline of the family with that of the school. The private boarding schools have generally been founded on the model of the Grammar School, and their course of studies is equally restricted, and generally much less efficient. They combine all the disadvantages of an expense approaching that even of Eton or Harrow, often with a very imperfect instruction in classics, and almost an exclusion of science and art. In Manchester you have « Grammar School which has been governed with more
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