Education for Democracy in England in World War II

Hsiao-Yuh Ku

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138955615
• eBook ISBN: 9781317354468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education for Democracy in England in World War II examines the educational discourse and involvement in wartime educational reforms of five important figures: Fred Clarke, R. H. Tawney, Shena Simon, H. C. Dent and Ernest Simon. These figures campaigned for educational reforms through their books, publishing articles in newspapers, delivering speeches at schools and conferences and by organizing pressure groups. Going beyond the literature in this key period, the book focuses on exploring the relationship between democratic ideals and reform proposals in each figure's arguments. Displaying a variety of democratic forums for debates about education beyond parliament, the book re-interprets wartime educational reforms from a different perspective and illustrates the agreements and contradictions in the educational discourse itself.

1 Introduction

This chapter addresses some basic issues of this book, including its main goal and scope, its rationale and importance and its methodology, along with a general outline of the whole work. This book’s main goal is to explore the educational discourse in England during the Second World War. Five influential figures – Fred Clarke, R. H. Tawney, Shena Simon, H. C. Dent and Ernest Simon – have been chosen to show the close connection between democracy and educational reform in this period. The research raises the following questions: What is ‘democracy’ for each figure? What kind of issues concerned each figure most during wartime? What reform proposals did each figure campaign for? To what extent were each figure’s arguments for various educational reforms based on his/her ideals of democracy? In order to answer these questions, primary sources examined in this work include the five figures’ published works, personal archives, official documents and institutional records. In analysing and interpreting the five figures’ democratic ideals and arguments for reforms, the infiltrations and permeations between personal documents and public records have been emphasized and their ideals and arguments are also located in their intellectual and historical contexts.

This book explores the educational discourse in England during the Second World War. What I mean by ‘discourse’ in this book differs from the definition of the term according to Michel Foucault, who analyses discourses as manifestations of a power/knowledge regime or a regime of truth.¹ Since this book is not so much concerned with how power is embedded in the process of formation of truth as with the public debates around various educational reforms in war years, I mainly draw upon Jürgen Habermas’s discussions of discourse. For Habermas, discourse is a communicative action, which is a rational process of proffering reasons for our actions, recommendations or commands, and in discourse, participants believe that they can convince each other with their reasons.² Moreover, a consensus, or a common understanding, is the end result of discourse.³ To this end, Habermas formulates ‘discourse ethics’, suggesting certain conditions of discourse. A key rule of discourse is that only the force of the better argument should have the power to sway participants in discourse.⁴ In other words, in discourse, individuals must listen to each other, respond to each other and justify their positions to each other. Habermas does not deny the possibility of disagreement among participants. After all, he assumes that people enter into discourse with their own interests and needs that they wish to see satisfied. However, he emphasizes that through discourse, at a minimum level, participants can understand the real issues that divide one from another and, above all, reach an agreement to disagree.⁵

The discursive process described by Habermas was manifest in the war years. In the wartime reform leading to the 1944 Education Act, which had a huge impact on the development of secondary education after the war, there was a wide range of debates over educational issues like the selection, organization, duration, fees and curriculum of secondary education; the form and content of part-time continued education; the relationship between the public schools and state education system; and the objectives and methods of citizenship education. Many contemporaries were vigorously engaged in the debates, and, more importantly, they critically and rationally responded to each other through their speeches, writings and discussions with other reformers, in order to seek a common ground for the new legislation. Therefore, this book aims to explore the educational discourse itself. Through analysing participants’ arguments for their reform proposals and examining their similarities and differences, a better understanding of the wartime reforms can be achieved.

‘Democracy’ was a key theme of this reform. Reformers of the time primarily promoted reforms of educational system in pursuit of a democratic society, which is different from ‘democratic schooling’, embodying a spirit of democracy in pedagogic practices in schools, such as A. S. Neill’s ideas of self-government. Gary McCulloch suggests that the reform based itself on the protection of democratic rights against the threat of the fascist dictators.⁶ Moreover, within British society, a strong drive for a democratic and just social order also arose from war experiences. As Brian Simon indicates, ‘the destruction and waste of war sharpens the demands of people for a better life after the war, for a real democracy and equal opportunity’. After all, he adds, ‘All are equal in the face of death; class differences are hard to justify.’⁷ In view of this, equality of educational opportunity was a generally acknowledged ideal of this reform. Despite this, it would be a mistake to conclude that this reform was only centred around the ideal of equality. The ideal of freedom also played a crucial role in the educational discourse. In the following chapter of this book, two theories of democracy – liberal democracy and social democracy – will be elaborated more thoroughly, but it is useful to point out here that whereas liberal democracy maintains freedom in education, social democracy prioritizes equality over freedom. The major distinction between the two theories of democracy helps explain the tensions and contradictions in the debates.

Nevertheless, the discursive characteristic and the democratic spirit of this reform have not been elaborated fully in classic works like Peter Gosden’s Education in the Second World War⁸ and Brian Simon’s Education and the Social Order 1940–1990.⁹ They tend to put more emphasis on the politics of the reform, that is the policy-making processes within official quarters and the organization of all kinds of activities by pressure groups, than on the educational discourse itself, which was the core of the reform. In view of this, like Martin’s and Goodman’s use of individual life histories to re-map understanding of women’s participation in changing philosophy, policy and practice in education between 1800 and 1980,¹⁰ the current work adopts a biographical approach, choosing five influential figures – Fred Clarke (1880–1952), R. H. Tawney (1880–1962), Shena Simon (1883–1972), H. C. Dent (1894–1995) and Ernest Simon (1879–1960). These figures were all vigorously involved in the educational discourse of wartime. Moreover, their arguments often referred to each other’s ideas and reform proposals, and therefore should be brought together in order to re-establish the educational discourse during the Second World War.

Fred Clarke was an English educationist and educational reformer. He was born in August 1880 at High Cogges farm near Witney, Oxfordshire and died in January 1952. He was the third son of William Clarke, who was a working man. Around 1886, the family moved to Oxford and he attended St. Ebbe’s Boys’ School where he also served as a pupil teacher from 1894 to 1898. In 1899, he obtained the Queen’s Scholarship and entered the Oxford University Day Training College as a non-collegiate student. In 1903, he graduated with a first-class honours degree in modern history and a first-class teacher’s certificate. After a few weeks of teaching at Sandford, a village east of Oxford, in September 1903, he arrived in York and was appointed as Master of Method at the Diocesan Training College. In March 1906, at the age of only 25, he became Professor of Education at Hartley University College, Southampton. In March 1911, he left England and spent the following 18 years in Cape Town, South Africa and another five years in Montreal, Canada. In 1935, he finally returned to England and succeeded Percy Nunn as the Director of the Institute of Education, University of London from 1936 to 1945.¹¹ During the Second World War, he considered his ideals of liberal democracy to be criteria for wartime educational reform and committed himself to them. He was involved in various educational debates, mainly through his connection with policy-makers like R. A. Butler, the president of the Board of Education, his participation in discussion groups like the Moot and the All Souls Group,¹² his engagement with interest groups like the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and his writings and public addresses. As Michael Barber vividly comments, ‘educationalists like Fred Clarke spent many hours of their lives travelling through the blackout to speak’ at ‘a bewildering array of local, regional, and national meetings on the subject of reform’.¹³

R. H. Tawney was a leading economic historian and prominent socialist. He was born in November 1880 in Calcutta and died in January 1962. His father was a notable Sanskrit scholar in the Indian education service and head of Presidency College in Calcutta. The family returned to England when Tawney was young and settled in Weybridge, Surrey. Tawney was educated at Rugby School between 1894 and 1899, and Balliol College, Oxford between 1899 and 1903. In 1905, he joined the executive committee of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), and after two years’ teaching as assistant lecturer in economics at Glasgow University between 1906 and 1908, he began teaching the first adult tutorial classes at Rochdale in Lancashire and Longton in the Potteries of north Staffordshire between 1908 and 1914. From the 1920s, he worked closely with the Labour Party and other left-wing pressure groups to campaign for educational reform in England, specifically in relation to secondary education during the Second World War, which led to the 1944 Education Act.¹⁴ During wartime, Tawney’s ideals of social democracy also laid a foundation for his positions and viewpoints in various educational debates.

Shena Simon was a British politician and educational reformer. She also devoted herself to educational reform in an attempt to build a democratic and just society. She was born in Croydon, Surrey, in October 1883 and died in July 1972. She was educated at home and after passing the local higher education examination, she read economics at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1904 to 1907. In 1907, she began postgraduate study at the London School of Economics, but failed to complete her thesis mainly because she undertook the role of honorary secretary to the legislative committee of the National Union of Women Workers. In 1912, she married Ernest Simon, an industrialist and social reformer in Manchester. After her marriage, she became gradually involved in Liberal politics. She was elected in 1924 as a Liberal city councillor for the Chorlton ward of Manchester, quickly established a reputation as a leading radical in pursuing education reform, and became the first female chairman of the education committee in 1932.¹⁵ Compared to Ernest, who was doubtful of such socialist measures as nationalization and remained a Liberal until 1947, Shena was convinced that the Liberal Party was declining after the First World War and could no longer be relied on to achieve a redistribution of wealth.¹⁶ Hence, in 1935, after being defeated in the 1933 council elections, Shena joined the Labour Party in protest at the economies in education imposed by the national government.¹⁷ Moreover, she converted to social democracy developed by previous socialists. Based on her ideals of social democracy, Shena also actively participated in a wide range of policy debates to argue for educational reforms, with an approach distinctive and independent from that of Clarke and Tawney.

Harold Collett Dent, an English journalist and educationist, was born in November 1894 and died in January 1995. His father was a Wesleyan minister. After leaving school in 1910, he began teaching in secondary schools as an assistant master between 1911 and 1925, and became head of Junior Department in Brighton and Hove Grammar School between 1925 and 1928. In 1928, the education committee in Leicester made him head of Gateway School, which was to provide a new alternative for 11-plus failures. However, since the director of education found his educational approach too radical, he was sacked after three years. From 1931 until the Second World War, Dent made his living through publishing and freelance journalism, especially for the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and in July 1940, he was appointed its acting editor.¹⁸ According to an article by Joan Simon, the only editorial assistant of the TES of the time, in the early 1940s, Dent had transformed the TES from ‘a house journal for “Public School” and grammar school staffrooms’ to ‘an informative weekly intent on amending the national system of education’.¹⁹ Brian Simon also indicated that, because of Dent, ‘The Supplement beca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Two theories of democracy: liberal and social democracy
• 3. Setting the scene: historical context and educational traditions
• 4. Fred Clarke: educational reconstruction for ‘English democracy’
• 5. R. H. Tawney: relentless fight for social democracy
• 6. Shena Simon: radical agenda for social democracy
• 7. H. C. Dent: a new educational order for liberal democracy
• 8. Ernest Simon: education for democratic citizenship
• 9. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index