The Development of the Secondary Curriculum

Michael H. Price

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429844850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1986. This book's focus is on English secondary schooling in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, during which the definition of a general 'secondary' education was itself negotiated and consolidated before the development of secondary modern and then comprehensive schools.

In each chapter, a specialist contributor considers the changing ideology, shape and status of one of the seven traditional academic subjects, namely Classics, Modern Languages, English, History, Geography, Mathematics and Science. These seven school subjects have dominated the academic school curriculum since the nineteenth century and continue to exert a powerful influence upon the contemporary school curriculum today despite the emergence of various rivals and the growing status of 'practical' subjects.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: CURRICULUM HISTORY AND ENGLISH SECONDARY SCHOOLS, 1870–1940

MICHAEL PRICE

Both in this country and America interest in the field of curriculum history has developed considerably since the mid-1970s and now attracts the diverse attentions of historians of education, sociologists and ethnographers of school knowledge, general curriculum theorists and school subject specialists. Although, as Marsden has shown,(1) and as the list of theses and dissertations provided by the History of Education Society exemplifies, (2) curriculum history has its own history and literature extending back over many decades, much of this early work is unpublished or the product of isolated individual initiatives in the field. What is striking about the developments in recent years is the growth of collaborative and more ambitious approaches to the history of the curriculum in general, and the growing specialisation and refinement in the historical study of particular curricular areas. School subjects such as science, mathematics and geography now possess bibliographical and methodological overviews of aspects of their histories, though such work may not be well known outside the respective specialist subject communities. However, such specialist interest is international in scope.(3) More generally, some notable collaborative work in curriculum history has recently been stimulated by Ivor Goodson and the ‘Sussex School’, and the published output to date is already impressive.(4) By comparison, the work of Gordon and Lawton, for example, though useful in basic contextual terms, now appears somewhat limited.(5)

Perhaps surprisingly, historians of education have typically tended to pay little attention to the details and complexities of curriculum history. As Whitbread has noted, in the context of the early twentieth century, ‘Educational historiography … has focused on administrative, sociological and political issues largely to the exclusion of the curriculum’ with the attention on ‘form to the neglect of content’.(6) And yet this was a particularly rich period in curricular as well as administrative terms, as Whitbread argues and the chapters of this book will clearly demonstrate. It should be added that the publications of the History of Education Society have not entirely neglected the curriculum field and a Curriculum Study Group of the Society has been in existence for some ten years. Furthermore, the fact that a recent editorial in the Society’s Bulletin was devoted to curriculum history (‘this fruitful area of study’), and recent developments in the field, may signify a growing interest among historians of education at the present time.(7)

By contrast, some general curriculum theorists and sociologists have enthusiastically adopted historical perspectives on the curriculum as a natural development of interests in the sociology of knowledge. Typical socio-historical foci of concern are the conflicts among school subjects regarding status and resources, the relationships between alternative paradigms within a school subject, explanations for major change at both instrumental and deeper structural levels, and the interests of and interactions among individuals and identifiable groups which impinge on curricula. (8) Such preoccupations and a desire to relate sometimes limited historical evidence to general theoretical frameworks may yield historiographical distortion. There is, of course, a fundamental and long-standing tension here between historical and social-scientific methodology. The historian. Marwick has put the matter simply:

it remains true that the social scientist far more regularly uses models and theoretical constructs than does the historian, and that the constructs are nearly always of a more abstract character than the historian would be prepared to accept.(9)

He goes on to point out: ‘the historian must always accommodate the unique and the contingent, the social scientist is essentially orientated towards the universal, towards the recurrent pattern’.(10) The general conflict will not be pursued here, but in relation to curriculum history the range of perspectives which are currently being applied has undoubtedly enriched the field. What then are the predispositions of the contributors to the present book and what is the character of its distinctive contribution at the present time?

Each of the seven contributors to this book is a school subject specialist with contemporary interests in his or her subject as well as a particular concern for the historical dimension, not only on account of the distinctive questions and methodological challenges involved, but also because of the potential light which such study can shed on contemporary issues and priorities in the curriculum. Of particular interest here are the processes and instruments of change and resistance to change in the curriculum and the relationships between the rhetoric and pedagogical thinking on the one hand and the reality of curricular life in schools on the other. Goodson has fairly judged that ‘The elucidation of the relationship between “rhetoric” and “reality” remains one of the most profound challenges to future curriculum historians.’(11) Where the focus is on school subjects the particular strength of specialist contributors lies in their capacity to understand and interpret internal subject developments. But, in addition, particular studies will also illuminate inter-subject relationships and probe the interface between the curriculum and the wider administrative, ideological, social and political contexts of the educational system. Perhaps it should be added that the focus on traditional school subjects in curriculum history is not a necessary but a natural one and has been adopted for this book.(12) Although it can be argued that subject categories are themselves problematic their dominance in the history of school curricular theory and practice is unquestionable. Thus the choice was an obvious one for a collaborative venture of the present kind. The basis for this collaboration warrants some further explanation, to place the subsequent chapters within a common context.

Hitherto much of the work in school subject history has been independently produced and not widely disseminated across and outside the subject boundaries involved. Thus, collaboration among school subject specialists, working within some common framework in curriculum history, raises some new and potentially exciting possibilities. Geographical location, time period and institutional context are three major variables in relation to curricula and the focus for this book is England and its secondary schools for boys and girls in the period 1870–1940. In these terms the general educational context for the various subject studies is fixed and comparative studies crossing national boundaries are deliberately excluded. As will become clear, the category ‘secondary’ was itself problematic, both ideologically and administratively, in the period under consideration. However, the principal concern is with schools of the ‘academic’ secondary type as opposed to infant, elementary and technical schools, technical colleges, teacher training institutions and the universities, though institutional boundaries will be crossed where relationships are judged to be significant for the subject under consideration. Also, the major though not exclusive focus is upon public and secondary ‘grammar’ as opposed to secondary ‘modern’ schools, which grew out of the arrangements for ‘senior’ elementary pupils and developed after 1944 under the tripartite system, before the comprehensive era.

The period 1870–1940 was not intended to be either rigidly applied or exhaustively treated in its extent by each contributor, but it does provide broad time limits within which the various subject studies are principally located. The choice of this period was based on a belief that in relation to English conditions and secondary education in particular, it is potentially very rich in curricular terms, and particularly the sub-period 1890–1920. These three decades have been well explored in relation to various major developments in the political and administrative context of English secondary education: the wide-ranging investigations of the Bryce Commission in the 1890s; the establishment of a single central authority for English education, the Board of Education from 1899; the Education Act of 1902 and the involvement of the new LEAs in the provision of secondary schooling; the development of grant-aided secondary schools under the various annual Regulations of the Board of Education from 1904 and the scrutiny of a new Secondary Branch of HMI; and the protracted struggle to establish a coordinated secondary examination system, culminating in the School Certificate arrangements from 1917. But, in parallel with these developments, there was much specifically curriculum-orientated activity. Such activity includes some of the work of the Consultative Committees of the Board of Education, and their reports;(13) some of the published Circulars and Pamphlets of the Board of Education and Special Reports of its Office of Special Inquiries and Reports; the Reports of the Prime Minister’s Committees on education and modern languages (1918), natural science (1918), and classics (1921), and of the Departmental Committee of the Board on the teaching of English (1921); growing specialisation and refinement in teachers’ professional organisation and the educational literature;(14) and the establishment of school subject associations for modern languages (1892), geography (1893), mathematics (1897), science (1901), classics (1903), history (1906) and English (1907) in particular.(15) As Lawson and Silver have concluded, the professional concern for teaching and learning specifically developed on many fronts from the late nineteenth century:

A range of new departures was becoming evident in English education in the 1890s. There were new schools and new interests in child study and child development … The constraints imposed by payment by results were being removed from the elementary schools, and new approaches in the infant school were beginning to have an influence on the higher classes. Technical subjects and science were not only finding a place in school, but were also the focus of new thinking about methods and objectives in teaching. For most of the nineteenth century the major changes in education had been in terms of supply and structure. Under new pressures, changes in the final decades also began to focus on content and method, and on children. The search for a new understanding of children and of educational processes was closely related to the wider changes of emphasis in discussions of the individual, society and social policy.(16)

By around 1920, it had become appropriate to refer in the pedagogical literature not just to the ‘new education’(17) but to the ‘new teaching’(18) of the ‘modern teacher’.(19) Exploring the penetration of this developing educational ‘climate’ and its effects within specific school subjects will be a major feature of the chapters which follow. However, not all the subjects of the secondary curriculum are here included; the restriction is to ‘academic’ school subjects.

The Bryce Commission’s categories for the analysis of secondary school timetables in the 1890s are of some interest. Under ‘English Subjects’ are grouped religious instruction, English, history, geography and arithmetic: these might well be termed ‘basic subjects’, given also their close association with elementary education; under ‘Languages’ are grouped Greek, Latin, French and German; under ‘Sciences’ we find mathematics and physical science; ‘Art Subjects’ include drawing, manual instruction, music and singing; ‘Commercial Subjects’ comprise book-keeping and shorthand; and, finally, physical exercises and an ‘others’ category are included.(20) The subjects chosen for this book are located within the first three of Bryce’s categories i.e. they are broadly ‘academic’ as opposed to ‘practical’. These subjects are the ones which featured prominently in the examinations for the School Certificate after the First World War. In 1926, in decreasing order of popularity, measured by the number of entries, the following subjects head the list: English, French, mathematics, history, geography, art, Latin and chemistry. In 1937 the only difference in the above order is the interchange of art and Latin.(21)

Thus, the seven subjects of this book, classics, English, modern languages, mathematics, science, geography and history are those which have dominated the academic secondary school curriculum from the late nineteenth century and, with the exception of classics, they still hold a strong place within comprehensive schools.(22) The label ‘academic’ here implies an important association with the universities, in terms of study of the subject at this level, teacher supply and education, and the provision of school examinations in the subject; also, this link was strengthened and refined in the two decades around 1900, by the development of academic subject associations with a major concern for secondary education in each case. Thus the studies which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. INTRODUCTION: CURRICULUM HISTORY AND ENGLISH SECONDARY SCHOOLS, 1870-1940: Michael Price
• 2. CULTURE OR DISCIPLINE? THE REDEFINITION OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION: Christopher Stray
• 3. ENGLISH TEACHING: CLASSICS IN THE VERNACULAR: Eleanor Wright
• 4. MODERN LANGUAGES: THE RETREAT FROM REFORM: William Rowlinson
• 5. THE PERRY MOVEMENT IN SCHOOL MATHEMATICS: Michael Price
• 6. SCIENCE FOR PROFESSIONALS: SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND SECONDARY EDUCATION: Edgar Jenkins
• 7. THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY AND GEOGRAPHY IN SECONDARY EDUCATION: William Marsden
• 8. FROM A TEST OF MEMORY TO A TRAINING FOR LIFE: THE TEACHING OF HISTORY: Gordon Batho
• 9. CONCLUSION: Michael Price
• Contributors
• Index