Education as History

Harold Silver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134534548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published 1983.This book explores the nature of the social history of education. It examines what aspects of the history of education have been neglected and why.

The themes explored include the relationship between education and the emergence of social science, the reputations of educationists, expectations of higher education in the twentieth century, the use of education against poverty and education as policy and case study.

Part One

Nineteenth-century studies

1 Aspects of neglect: the strange case of Victorian popular education

More has been researched and written about education in Victorian England than in any other period, and the majority of it has been about popular education. Yet we have neglected it. Most of what has been written has in fact disguised our neglect and ignorance of it. This is not just a question of ‘gaps’ that need to be filled, of historical inattention. It is a more basic question of the kind of historical enterprise in which we have been engaged. Judgements about historical ‘neglect’, of course, depend on assumptions about what is, could be, or should be known. They entail definitions of the area, purpose and value of study. Such judgements and definitions are ideological statements.

The themes that have attracted the most attention in Victorian popular education have been those of policy formation and legislation, commissions and committees, the provision, control and administration of education, and the changing shape of different ‘levels’ of education – elementary and technical, infant and adult, and ‘types’ of education – board and voluntary. Some attention has been paid to the broader ‘context’ of educational decisions and functions – notably that of the churches and the radical and labour movements, and the nature and extent of literacy. Studies have been national and (especially in the case of theses and dissertations) local – with a vast amount of (mainly unpublished) work on local school boards and local institutions. The most researched and discussed areas can be summarized as: the school boards, the voluntary school system, and the development of a national system of administration (focusing on Kay-Shuttleworth and the Committee of Council, Robert Lowe and the Revised Code, Forster and the 1870 Education Act, the politics of the school board era and the events leading up to the 1902 Education Act). Attention has also been paid (again, often in unpublished work) to pressure groups, from the Central Society of Education in the 1830s to the bodies campaigning for public education in the late 1840s and 1850s, the National Education League of the late 1860s, and the socialist organizations of the last decades of the century.¹ It seems a well-surveyed field, and it has produced such publication peaks as Brian Simon’s first two volumes of Studies in the History of Education which encompass the Victorian period (1960, 1965), John Harrison’s Learning and Living 1780-1960 (1961), Mabel Tylecote’s The Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire before 1851 (1957), David Rubinstein’s School Attendance in London 1870-1904 (1969), Richard Selleck’s The New Education 1870-1914 (1968), and above all – though only marginally concerned with the Victorian period – A.E. Dobbs’s pioneering Education and Social Movements 1700-1850 (1919). All of these successfully explored education in important relationships with social movements, social change, and related ideas and ideals. The period of major contributions stretches from the early wide-ranging histories by Charles Birchenough, J.W. Adamson and Frank Smith in the 1920s and 1930s, to such detailed studies since the 1950s as those of educational policy, politics and administration by Eric Eaglesham, Peter Gosden and Gillian Sutherland, of religion and education by Marjorie Cruickshank and James Murphy, and of school architecture by Malcolm Seaborne.² The bibliographies of work published and unpublished are substantial.³

My dissatisfaction with the mass of books, articles, theses and dissertations began to take shape during my co-authorship of A Social History of Education in England⁴ but became explicit after the completion of another book of which I was co-author, The Education of the Poor, a history of a Church school for the children of the poor in Kennington, South London.⁵ The work on this book eventually raised some awkward questions about this perhaps ‘atypical’ monitorial school – as it was when it was created in 1824. The school sources revealed a more imaginative and humane approach to children and to school affairs, and stronger school-community links than we had expected, or could explain. The school was as concerned in its early decades with the children’s health as it was with their souls, and the school and its managers were the focal point for Lambeth’s fight against cholera, bad sanitation and other environmental nuisances. The teachers were competent and the school efficient. From the 1880s boys were winning a stream of scholarships to London’s grammar and other schools. A record of humanity, efficiency and – in a variety of ways – innovation seemed to stretch from the 1820s to the twentieth century. There could be reason for thinking that this school, in the 1820s and 1830s, or in the 1880s, was atypical, but if so what was typical? There was no answer to this question (and when the book was completed it became clear that we had ourselves shied away from it) because historians had surprisingly done no research on the monitorial system as it was operated in practice. Only one British historical thesis had been written at the time on monitorial schools (and we had not seen it when we wrote our Education of the Poor). J.R. Carr’s thesis on certain Lancasterian schools in London, Middlesex and Surrey investigates some of the subtle differences between the financing, management and operation of these schools and concludes that judgements based on local schools are at variance with those derived from a study of the parent body or of its Borough Road school. Many of the schoolteachers (unlike the ones in Kennington) had no local support, but others did. There were differences between Lancaster’s claims and the realities. The Lancasterian schools ‘were not units of a nationally planned system of providing education for the poor’.⁶ The possibilities of this kind of investigation – and the importance of its findings – have gone largely ignored. There have continued to be abundant statements about the intentions of the founders of the monitorial system, about its stated methods, about its defects, its critics and its demise – but nothing about the detailed operation of monitorial schools, no sustained attempts to match theory with reality. Yet the monitorial system dominated English popular education for half a century. It is arguable that it was the most influential innovation in the history of English education, but the books on the history of educational innovation have used definitions of the term which exclude any consideration of the monitorial system, refuse to handle it with more ‘progressive’ innovations.⁷ The very terms, like ‘innovation’ and ‘progressive’ and ‘reform’, that historians have used have ensured certain kinds of neglect. The historians of nineteenth-century education have presented the monitorial system as a wraith, and discussed it as if it were flesh.

A project on which I had also been working for some time involved an investigation of the concept of ‘social science’ in the nineteenth century, and particularly the organizations created in Britain and the United States in the second half of the century for the ‘promotion of social science’. The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS) and its American counterparts had Education Departments which discussed a range of educational issues and campaigned on some of them. No serious attention has been paid to the educational content of these bodies, either in the published or in the thesis literature.⁸ The point of central interest that emerged from this and related studies was that little historical attention had been paid to precisely those themes that were of most interest to the NAPSS and people active in it – including, from the mid-1850s to the mid-1880s, the education of factory and workhouse children, ragged and reformatory schools.⁹ During this period at least 50,000 children a year were being educated under the poor law. Between the creation of the ragged school movement in the 1840s and 1881, it was estimated, the London schools alone had ‘rescued’ some 300,000 children.¹⁰ The number of factory children attending school part-time (in factory schools or elsewhere) was something of the order of 40,000 in 1851.¹¹ The numbers are not inconsiderable. The question is not, however, just one of quantities. When my collaborator and I began work on the history of one workhouse school, for example, we found beyond doubt that in 1838 it was educationally more ‘progressive’ than we had expected. It had a Glasgow-trained teacher who made it a condition of acceptance of the appointment that the Guardians should purchase various series of reading books, maps, slates, coloured pictures of animals, battledores and shuttlecocks, and gymnastic poles. For this and other reasons we found the standard stereotype of the workhouse school unhelpful. We were faced with questions about what was ‘typical’ similar to those raised by the monitorial study. Again, almost nothing in the published literature helped to disentangle statements of intention, motive and policy, on the one hand, from the reality on the other hand – though one unpublished thesis, by Alec Ross, had extremely skilfully handled questions of quality and variety in poor law schooling.¹²

Related questions, unanswered and unexplored, abounded – for example about major nineteenth-century controversies and about the work of crucial figures engaged in these neglected areas – for instance Edwin Chadwick as educationist, Leonard Horner and other factory inspectors prominent in educational discussions, Mary Carpenter, and others.¹³ Vital areas of the history of educational ideas, it became clear, had been ignored – especially where such ideas could be understood only in relation to deeper currents of social thought – Darwinism, and Marx’s views on education, for example. Historians of education have in general taken superficial account of the complexities of the history of social ideas of which education is a part, but it should be added that historians of sociology have been equally unable to recognize and assess the role of educational thought. Poor Herbert Spencer. From the standard histories of education it would be difficult to deduce the extent (or even the existence) of his impact on social thought, and from the books on Spencer’s sociology it would be difficult to deduce that he wrote anything at all about education!¹⁴

The conclusion, therefore, was that the great majority of what had been written about popular education in the Victorian period offered few or no real clues as to relationships in schools, their role in the community, or as to the social structures and processes, controversies and changing ideas and assumptions, in which education was intricately involved. The canon of published literature and the majority of unpublished research seemed (a) top heavy, in that it was concerned (and even then selectively) with the provision and administration of education; (b) empty, in that it made few serious attempts to look at the content of schooling or other educational processes; (c) one-dimensional, in that it made no attempt to consider the impact of schooling, and responses to it (or even the range of resistances to it); (d) isolated, in that it made no convincing attempt to explore links between school and family, school and work, school and recreation, school and politics, school and community (though some formal relationships, notably that between school and church, have, of course, been widely studied); (e) purblind, in that it recognized only limited areas of ‘education’ as being suitable for investigation.

The underlying pattern that begins to emerge from these judgements is one of neglect of questions relating to educational realities, to the impact of education, to its role in cultural and social processes. The easier route of describing the structure of educational systems, the motives of providers, the intricacies of policies, has been followed. Although it is an easier route, and one which describes changes and developments, it is not one that often arrives at rounded explanations of change – or even at a felt need to offer any. The ‘bits’ of neglect therefore fit together to form a picture of widespread historical ignorance, ‘disguised’, I have suggested, by the very bulk of what has been written. Some of these items of neglect can be clustered into groups, for example:

The impact and ‘use’ of schooling. There is an absence of work on reactions to school experience, on the use of basic schooling by largely self-educated working men, and on the important area of:

The relationship between schooling and literacy. Although useful statistical work has been done in this area, there is little systematic analysis (at least for the period after the 1830s) of literacy and reading matter,¹⁵ literacy and participation in social and political movements (e.g. the co-operative movement), literacy and the commercial press from the mid-1840s.

The quality of educational experience. There are no published studies of possible varieties of educational experience in monitorial schools, workhouse schools, factory schools, dame schools¹⁶ – indeed all schools.

The role of the school in total social relationships. The half-time system produced tensions between the child’s role in the school, as employee and as an important part of the family economy. Teachers had varying roles and statuses in the community. Ragged schools produced controversy about the undermining of the family. Elementary schools often attracted former pupils and others to evening classes (for example, organized science schools), and served as a focus for other ‘community’ activities. These and other ways in which schools, pupils, teachers, educational activities in general, related to wider areas of social experience have been largely ignored, and what little research has been done on these areas is mainly unpublished.¹⁷

Educational ideologies. Preoccupation with the provision and administration of the educational system in the narrowest sense has led to a high degree of selectivity in discussions of ‘influential’ nineteenth-century educationists. Men and women considered central to educational debates in their own time have been omitted from the twentieth-century records partly because they have not left educational ‘monuments’ in the shape of recognizable twentieth-century institutions. George Combe and James Simpson, important figures in the controversies and campaigns of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, have vanished with their phrenology or their secularism; Edwin Chadwick, Mary Carpenter, Louisa Twining, have vanished with their interest in other vanished objects like poor law schools, workhouse schools and ragged schools; William Ellis and William Ballantyne Hodgson have vanished with the Birkbeck schools and the teaching of social science. The Transactions of the NAPSS are occasionally raided for bits of data, but the relationships between educational and social ideas and ideologies have been ignored. (In this connection also it should be added that historians of ideas in Victorian England have tended to ignore education.)¹⁸

This is neither an exhaustive nor a sophisticated categorization. It is enough, however, to suggest a need to examine the prevalent directions of historical attention, and the assumptions they reveal.

In some respects this is a situation similar to that which obtained in American educational historiography at the end of the 1950s. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by David B. Tyack
• Introduction
• Part One: Nineteenth-century studies
• 1 Aspects of neglect: the strange case of Victorian popular education
• 2 Ideology and the factory child: attitudes to half-time education
• 3 Reputation and the educational system: the case of Robert Owen
• 4 Education, opinion and the 1870s
• 5 Social science and educational reform: Britain and America in the late nineteenth century
• 6 From social science to the social sciences: reordering higher education
• Part Two: Twentieth-century studies
• 7 The liberal and the vocational
• 8 Expectations of higher education: some historical pointers
• 9 Policy as history and as theory
• 10 Education against poverty: interpreting British and American policies in the 1960s and 1970s
• Part Three: Research and the history of education
• 11 Comparative and cross-cultural history of education
• 12 Case study and historical research
• Index