The Education of the People

A History of Primary Education in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century

Mary Sturt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135030650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Originally published in 1967.This book illustrates how, during the nineteenth century, the idea grew up that the provision of universal education was one of the functions of the state. The volume is also a history of that period of education, discussing the main events and describing the actual conditions of the schools.

Chapter One

The importance of subordination

The education of the people, which began in the early 19th century, was, for England, a new idea. The extent of literacy had varied at different periods ; but there had never been any suggestion that universal literacy was either possible or desirable, or that there should not be at least part of the nation cut off from the pleasures and dangers of the written word. A traditional culture, a craftsman’s skill, a dogmatic religion provided all that was necessary for the greater part of the nation.

The Reformation did not bring the idea of universal literacy to England. In Scotland the 17th century saw the spread of parochial schools drawing their energy partly from the need of each man to study the Bible for himself. England, less concerned with individual conscience, felt that the Church could still supply the guidance that was needed; and that salvation was not dependent on the power to read. Nor did the English feel that education was necessary for a man’s advancement. Theory and social feeling were united in the belief that ‘the Poor’ should remain in the condition in which God had placed them, and that the stratification of society could not be disturbed without impiety and political danger. Samuel Johnson’s table talk is full of the importance of due subordination in society.

This feeling was the stronger because, in the conditions of the times, the Poor must often have appeared as a different type of human being. The country labourer, perhaps stripped of his common land by the enclosures, or of his garden by the demand for arable land stimulated by the Corn Laws, was beset by the regulations of the Poor Law and the rigours of the Game Laws. The powers of the magistrates and the demands of the farmers gave little chance of physical health or moral dignity. In the towns the overwhelming hours of work, the conditions in the factories and the appalling housing left those that did not die permanently enfeebled. The children caught into factories at five or seven had their bodies deformed and their minds stunted. These people were excluded from central or local government, the Church did not reach them : they were nobody’s concern. Moreover, it was only necessary to consider what had happened in France to realize the importance of discipline at home.

This view of the Poor fitted very well with the facts of economic life. In an unmechanized age, when industry and domestic life were almost inconceivably inconvenient and laborious, a large part of the population inevitably spent their lives in simple and heavy work in order that things might be made, food grown and a minority live in comfort. The canals and railways of England were built with equipment hardly more developed than that used in constructing the pyramids; agriculture depended on the horse and the hoe; domestic life was a long round of carrying water or wood. If all this work was to go on, someone must be willing to do it, or be forced to do it by the impossibility of any other living. The Poor (and their status was so well defined that in the books of the period they almost always have a capital letter) were the necessary base of the whole social system. Without them and their work nothing could happen. It is comprehensible, then, that any attempt to take them out of their class, to make them too grand for their work, was regarded as dangerous in the extreme. Those whose minds did not go beyond the convenience of their own order, felt a hostility to the very suggestion of education. ‘If a horse’, says Mandeville in his treatise against Charity schools, ‘knew as much as a man, I should not like to be his rider.’¹ This pamphlet and Archbishop Whately’s rejoinder nearly a hundred years later show the strength and the persistence of the opposition to the education of the Poor. When work was so unpleasant, how could it be done except by people who were unable to imagine any other way of life?

When the matter was thought about philosophically there were two lines of approach, the economic and the religious. Adam Smith, who had written in the 18th century, became the gospel of the 19th. He explained that trade was a system of mutual service and exchange, and did good under the ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty’. This liberty was interpreted as freedom from any legal regulation of wages and conditions, and the absence of any protection for the Poor. By that convenient mental mechanism which prevents awkward facts from being brought into effective association, this doctrine of ‘freedom’ was not applied to such things as the Corn Laws or duties on various articles. Pitt could say that ‘trade, industry and barter would always find their own level, and be impeded by regulations which violated their material operation and deranged their proper effect’. This meant that wages must be allowed to sink to their lowest levels; and the old laws which had regulated wages, and which were discovered still to exist in 1813, were immediately repealed as ‘pernicious’.

Brougham stated the principle perfectly clearly:

Men should be employed and paid according to the demand for their labour, and its value to the employer. No doctrine is more monstrous than that all accumulation of capital is a grievance to them ; that every man has a title to that which he renders valuable by his labour ; that the amount of remuneration for his work must be ascertained, not by the competition in the market of labourers and employers, but by the personal wants and wishes of the former.

A second line of thought which appears frequently was that ‘individual interest, properly understood, was also public interest’. The important words were ‘properly understood’; and they were almost always omitted. Burke might argue that the interests of farmers and labourers were one. The farmer wanted his work well done and this was only possible with a well-fed, intelligent and happy labourer:

It is plainly more to the farmer’s interest that his men should thrive, that his horses should be well fed, sleek, plump and fit for use, or that his waggon and ploughs should be strong, in good repair and fit for service.²

Unfortunately, while the country districts were ‘overpopulated’ and the influx of Irish labour continued in the towns, private interest saw no reason for preserving the labourer in the same comfort as a horse.

There was, moreover, a conviction that poverty, the abject, destructive poverty of the time, was necessary. Without ‘vice and misery’ the Poor would breed too fast. There was only a certain amount of food, only a certain fund to pay wages. The Poor would breed till they were on subsistence level. If numbers increased beyond that point, the surplus would die of starvation; if the workman grew comfortable, and his children survived, he would once more, by numbers, force himself back to starvation. It was a simple creed; and had a beautiful biological inevitability about it.

Besides political economy there was religion. The Church was a vast property-owning corporation, and found its very essence involved in the maintenance of the present system. The duty of submitting to the Will of God was stressed on every occasion. A meek contentment was the chief virtue. Lowliness, humility, and a willingness to remain patiently in that state of life to which God had called you.

Kay-Shuttleworth sums up this whole philosophy:

There are men who believe that the labouring classes are condemned for ever, by an inexorable fate, to the unmitigated curse of toil, scarcely rewarded by the bare necessities of existence, and often visited by the horrors of hunger and disease—that the heritage of ignorance, labour and misery is entailed upon them as an eternal doom. Such an opinion might appear to receive a gloomy confirmation were we content with the evidence of fact.³

Obviously education had to be very carefully given if it was to fit into this scheme of things. As late as 1832 it could be said, ‘Ministers and men in power, with nearly the whole body of those who are rich, dread the consequences of teaching the people more than they dread the effects of their ignorance’.

In the debate on the desirability of Education, which went on from about 1750 to 1833, when some, at least, of the ‘ministers and men in power’ had decided that education was inevitable and desirable, it is remarkable how little education was offered to the Poor, and how concerned everyone was with its effect on others rather than on the recipient. There is much talk about the way that education will improve morals, prevent social disturbance, and make servants better workers; but hardly anything about the greater happiness that it will bring to the scholar. It needed a revolutionary like Tom Paine to demand education as a simple function of government : ‘A nation under a well-regulated government would permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.’⁴

In England there were many who saw dangers everywhere.

Industry [said a writer in the Gentlemen’s Magazine in 1797] is the duty to impress on the lower classes. A little learning makes a man ambitious to rise, if he can’t by fair means then he uses foul. . . . His ignorance is a balm that soothes his mind into stupidity and repose, and excludes every motion of discontent, pride and ambition. A man of no literature will seldom attempt to form insurrections, or form idle schemes for the reformation of the state.

Or, with more show of humanity, Mr Giddy in parliament opposed Whitbread’s bill of 1807 for instructing pauper children:

The scheme would be found to be prejudicial to the morals and happiness of the labouring classes ; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching them subordination it would render them factious and refractory, as was evident in the manufacturing counties; it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors.⁵

On the other hand there were those who hoped that some good would follow. Adam Smith thought that education might give a certain political stability:

Though the state was to derive no advantage from the instruction of the inferior ranks of the people, it would still deserve its attention that they should not be altogether uninstructed. The state, however, derives no inconsiderable advantage from their instruction. The more they are instructed the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations, frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders.⁶

Just occasionally there is a hint that the pupil might have gained something from his instruction :

If we speak of education here it will naturally carry our Ideas to the Spade, the Plough or the Team. As early and constant Labour is the Province of this Class, there is but a small Share either of Time or Abilities for Instruction; still as they are by Nature susceptible of it, those who have Power cannot employ it better than bestowing it; so far as least as may open their Minds to distinguish Truth from Falsehood, Right from Wrong, Innocence from Guilt. If to this were added at least the Power of reading their Mother-tongue, it would at times be an Entertainment and a Consolation to them; and it would remove, in some Degree, that total Darkness and Ignorance they must otherwise remain in.⁷

Even Pestalozzi who has been hailed as the prophet of Education saw clearly the relation between learning and the child’s way of life :

The child of the soil and the whole class of landless agricultural labourers must learn in their language lessons to express themselves accurately about everything that has to do with their calling. . . . But laborious toil is their lot in life, and their language lessons must not set up interests which would undermine the bases of their happiness and well being. . . ...