Teacher Training at Cambridge

The Initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes

Pam Hirsch, Mark McBeth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135783037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book focuses on two educationalists, Oscar Browning (1837-1923) and Elizabeth Hughes (1852-1925) who were the principals of the two separate day training colleges for men and women at Cambridge. The early initiatives of these two leaders began the development of education studies at Cambridge University and, therefore, serve as test cases to examine the relationship between teacher training and the university. As their early programmes foreshadowed the work of the present-day Faculty of Education, a historical review of these Victorian educational experiments uncovers how the unstable relationship between teacher trainers, the university and the government of the day has affected the status of the Education Department within the university.
Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes were extraordinary, larger-than-life characters, who have not yet been well-served in the historical accounts. Their ideals about what teaching should be about is one well worthy of re-visiting. The colleges they set up at Cambridge acted as models for training colleges all over the country so they were an influence on the national scene. In so far as they visited and lectured in Europe, America and Japan, they also had international influence.

ELIZABETH HUGHES

Pam Hirsch

7
THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY

When studying the history of women’s education several things become immediately apparent. As early as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft had pointed out that women’s exclusion from education was no accident, but part of a deliberate construction of women’s dependency. Once educational inequalities were removed, other gender inequalities would disappear. This argument was believed not only by the Victorian middle-class women who were struggling for educational equality, but also by the men who offered entrenched resistance. Indeed, the fear that women, when given the same education as men, would prove more-than-equal was precisely the fear which fed conservative resistance.

However, men of a more liberal persuasion, helped with a variety of educational initiatives to benefit women. For example, in 1848 with the support of some of the lecturers at King’s College, London, Queen’s College, an Anglican establishment under the aegis of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution (GBI) was founded. In similar fashion, in 1849, Bedford College was founded by Unitarian women, and was loosely attached to the non-denominational University College. Despite the name ‘college’, these were to all intents and purposes secondary schools, taking girls from 12 years old and attempting to educate them so that they could make careers as governesses or as teachers for girls’ academies.¹ Elizabeth Jesser Reid, a stalwart of the British Anti-Slavery campaign, echoes its rhetoric when she wrote of the founding of Bedford College: ‘my dearest wish is that the whole proceeding may be an Underground Railway, differing in this from the American U.R. that no-one shall ever know of its existence’.² Several of the women who went to Bedford and Queen’s went on to be significant figures in the education of girls and women and in the suffrage movement. Barbara Bodichon, the co-founder of Girton College, Cambridge had attended Bedford College; from Queen’s emerged some remarkable headmistresses: Dorothea Beale, the founder of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Frances Buss, the founder of North London Collegiate School. Bedford and Queen’s planted the seeds of ambition for higher education of women, as well as began the impetus of a movement that would eventually change the mindset of society concerning women’s ability.

However, to achieve such a societal shift, women leaders would need to arise to challenge such embedded ideologies. The women who emerged as leaders were intellectually able and they also tended to come from families with a history of entrepreneurial acuity. If the women had fathers or grandfathers who had been successful in business, these women would often ‘inherit’, by observation of a successful model, the instinct for identifying a niche in the (educational) market, and moving into it. They were also skilful, as good leaders are, at recognizing leadership potential in others, and promoting it.³ To understand how and why Cambridge Training College for Women came into being (and Elizabeth Hughes was chosen to take on the role of first principal), it is necessary to look at other women working in the field, ‘to see what kind of collective social and intellectual profile might be constructed of the women—and the men—who wrote and spoke, organized and raised money, and created and served institutions for the secondary and higher education of women in nineteenth-century England’.⁴

The three decades before the establishment of the Cambridge Training College (CTC) in 1885 was a period of intense activity on many fronts including a series of commissions on education for all classes, Education in the nineteenth century was stratified not as it is now, primarily by age, but by social class. Thus elementary education was the education provided for the working class and included children as old as 14.⁵ The Newcastle Commission on Popular Education published in 1861 for the first time invited women to give their expert evidence in a written circular. Barbara Bodichon, who had founded a progressive coeducational elementary school in London, where, unusually, social classes were mixed, took the opportunity to deplore the lack of properly trained women teachers for girls’ schools, and (thinking of middle-class girls) blamed fathers for not investing money to educate their girls because they assumed first that their daughters would get married, and, second, that education was no use to a married woman. As usual she placed the ‘problem’ of girls’ education within a wider feminist analysis:

I believe the laws and social arrangements affecting the conditions of wives in England, to be one of the causes why good teachers cannot be found for girls’ schools, and why girls’ schools deserve the bad character the Rev. J.P. Norris [HMI] so truly gives them. I believe that, until the law gives a married woman a right to her own wages, and an independent legal existence, some control over her children, and social arrangements admit a woman’s right to more liberty of action, that the education of girls will be miserably neglected.⁶

In the early nineteenth century both day and boarding schools for girls existed of widely varying standards, but they were private ventures which came and disappeared according to the fortunes of the people running them. Nevertheless, the 1851 census counted 67,551 women teachers of all types and many of them sought such forms of training as they could achieve.⁷ By 1864 there were 18 government-funded colleges open to women in England for elementary teachers, and a small section of women intending to become secondary teachers trained there. But these colleges were not seen as ideal for training secondary teachers.⁸

In terms of influencing the urban gentry of the need for improvement in girls’ secondary schools, a significant forum for debate was the Social Science Association established in 1857 by Lord Brougham for progressive middle-class ideas. The association formed pressure groups interested in reforming five areas of government, one of which was education. The leader of the Langham Place Group of feminists, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, persuaded Lord Brougham to make it open to women.⁹ Bodichon, for example, sent a paper on ‘Middle Class Schools for Girls’ which Bessie Parkes read at the 1860 Glasgow conference in which she bemoaned the abysmally low standards of girls’ schools. All the papers were printed in the Transactions of the Social Science Association, but the papers specifically relating to women’s affairs were also printed in the English Woman’s Journal, the periodical run by the Langham Place Circle. Although its circulation never exceeded 7,000, it nevertheless went into the homes of the liberal intelligentsia, and thereby had at least the possibility of influencing women with talent and time to spare, plus parents wondering about where to send their bright girls to school. Bodichon begins by arguing that there should be schools founded for girls supported by charity just as there had been for generations of higher-and middle-class boys, commenting that:

neither Christ Church, Eton, nor Oxford are supposed to degrade those who are educated by them, yet they are in a great measure charities… I believe that educated ladies who have the will, the intellect and the money wherewith to help their fellow-creatures, cannot begin a better work than by interesting themselves in the education of the girls of the middle class; girls who certainly ought to be sensibly and practically brought up, as they are destined to as hard trials as either their richer or poorer sisters; if these girls could see that ladies above them had solid knowledge, as well as superficial accomplishments, it would do them an immense good—example is always better than precept… Good schools for 6d a week will not pay, but 1s a week from 150 children can be made to pay expenses without profit. Probably schools charging £1 a quarter could be made to pay a profit. It is very desirable that a society should be formed for the establishment of such schools [and that] every effort should be made by the friends of education to raise the standard of the mistresses and to give them opportunities of steady improvement, and some public recognition of their efficiency.¹⁰

The 1865 women’s memorial, of which Anne Jemima Clough was a signatory, to the Schools’ Inquiry Commission, persuaded Lord Taunton to investigate the state of girls’ schools. The commission castigated the inadequacy of traditional provision for girls, and recommended that some ancient endowments should be made over to the creation of girls’ schools. This was a supremely important formal acknowledgement of the predicament to which Anne Jemima Clough, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and many other women educationists had been excoriating at meetings of the Social Science Association, the North of England Council, and also by articles in a variety of journals. The Taunton Commission’s Report, published in 1868, paid special tribute to the work of Frances Mary Buss (1827–94). It recommended the provision of secondary education for girls to be set up in large towns along the lines of Buss’s North London Collegiate School for Ladies in Camden Town, the school she had opened in 1850 with the support of her family. The Endowed Schools Act of 1869, permitting ancient foundations to remodel endowments to meet the needs of the present day, opened up the possibility of getting funding to establish girls’ schools. The Endowed Schools’ Commission (1869–74), was headed by Joshua Fitch, a significant supporter of women’s education. As he toured the country encouraging schools to remodel their endowments, be pressed them, even in the face of governors’ reluctance, to use some of their endowment to create good solid secondary schools. The 1870s thus saw an expansion of schools for girls, potentially creating a new generation of young women capable of taking full advantage of the newly available university education.¹¹

Getting the girls and young women admitted to generally recognized examinations was an important strand of the move forward. Following the institution of local examinations for boys and girls in 1858 by the University of Durham, the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women was formed in 1867, of which Anne Jemima Clough (later to be the first principal of Newnham College, Cambridge) was an active member.¹² This was a highly effective pressure-group, working with methodical purpose to secure academic qualifications for women. The council, of which Josephine Butler was president and Anne Jemima Clough was secretary, also devised what they called a University Extension Scheme, a series of local lectures for young women, given by a peripatetic university lecturer. The idea was to improve the poor training and lack of recognized status of women teachers and governesses, and it was hoped that ultimately a regular course of lectures might lead to a special, certificated, examination which would serve as a teaching qualification. The demand—at its height the council had representatives in 12 towns and cities from Glasgow to Cheltenham—indicates that the demand for knowledge from prospective middle-class women who either were, or aspired to be, teachers, was there.¹³

But, to start with higher education, in Cambridge two university-level colleges for women had been set up in the 1870s, Girton and Newnham, as the result of long campaigns by individual women and highly effective pressure-groups.¹⁴ Initially there was a difference of emphasis in the two institutions. At Newnham College, Anne Jemima Clough, acknowledging the inadequacy of much girls’ secondary education, allowed the early students to follow the studies of their choice, whether or not their work led to university examinations. For example, the Latin, Greek and logic required for the ‘Little-go’, the Cambridge qualifying examination, was a tremendous strain on young women whose secondary education had inevitably been inadequate. This was in sharp contrast to Emily Davies, the first mistress of Girton, who would allow no compromise. Driven by the need to prove women’s intellectual equality, she insisted that Girton students should commit themselves to full Cambridge degree courses and to sit the examinations like the men after the statutory ten terms. It seems that at first Newnham students were less affluent and socially secure than Girton students; an oral tradition has it that ‘Newnh...