English Primary Education and the Progressives, 1914-1939

R J W Selleck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134534265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Originally published 1972.This book concerns the progressive movement, its prominent thinkers and its achievements, at a period of vital change in English primary education. The role of progressive educationists, such as Lane, Neill and Montessori is considered. The author asserts that these pioneers gradually made themselves the intellectual orthodoxy in the years between the wars.

1

The state, the school and war, 1914-1918

Bertrand Russell was upset by the outbreak of war in 1914. ‘And all this madness,’ he wrote,¹

all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.

Of course, others were upset too :²

Already we have suffered in a greater or less degree, and we schoolmasters not least. Business and professional men have some choice as to when they will take their yearly outing, but for teachers August is par excellence the holiday month, and for many an overworked man and woman it has been worse than a disappointment or inconvenience to find long-laid plans upset and holiday courses cancelled; to be turned back from the station, or, still worse, from a foreign frontier, or, as in the case of elementary teachers, to be docked altogether of half their holiday.

Not for them the ‘flaming death’; business as usual’, even though the business was holidays, could hardly have received a more emphatic endorsement. In the years that followed many teachers passed the frontiers of foreign lands, although, as they were pawns in the not so long-laid plans of official gentlemen, their sight-seeing was often confined to examining the mud of trenches. Others were never to have a holiday again but to crowd back into the schools they had left as entries on honour boards, where in shining gold letters they admonished the future generations not to forget. Others again returned determined to create a new world so that the future generations should be able to forget; while some, who could not forget, found that a loss of faith in the old world prevented them from hoping for a new.

But in the beginning it was different. England might not have gone willingly to war but some were almost relieved that the long-threatened storm had finally broken and a few, who saw in war a means of redeeming the Empire, rejoiced. In any case, as the lamps went out all over Europe on a bank holiday weekend, cheering crowds sang patriotic songs in Trafalgar Square and Whitehall. It would be, most believed (but not Kitchener), a swift and brief encounter, a ‘war of tradition’ where ‘cavalary charged at the foe’ and where, ‘when death came, it was a heroic death brought about by heroes on the other side.’ After a brief panic business continued and Lloyd George noticed that ‘something infinitely greater and more enduring’ was emerging—‘a new patriotism, richer, nobler, and more exalted than the old.’ Volunteers flocked to the colours, 750,000 of them by the end of September, though there were not enough qualified men to train them nor enough barracks to house them. As the battalions of war gathered the once vociferous anti-war and pacifist groups dissolved, leaving a few resolute souls to face the wrath of the righteous. The government put through the Defence of the Realm Act on 8 August and took such emergency measures as it considered necessary, believing apparently that nothing more far-reaching was required. The fourteen Territorial divisions were left to protect the country against invasion and the British Expeditionary Force dispatched to France from where its commander-in-chief, Sir John French, began sending optimistic reports.

Then everything went wrong. Despite the assistance of the angels of Mons the British forces were retreating before the end of August and when, on 5 September under Joffre’s orders, they began to counter-attack, they could find no Germans. After they found them, there followed the first battle of Ypres which, according to A. J. P. Taylor, marked the end of the old British army. It also marked the end of the old type of war for by November the trenches had already been dug. ‘I don’t know what is to be done,’ Kitchener said; ‘this isn’t war.’³

The next four years were to show that it was war and that, like Kitchener, few knew what to do, ‘Open’ warfare did not come; instead of brilliant victories in the dusty field there was the protracted frustration of trench warfare, desperate sallies through mud and barbed wire and gas to gain more trenches (which might be lost next day), and a growing sense of bitterness and futility. At the start of the war Rupert Brooke wrote of a soldier who, when he died, would be ‘a pulse in the eternal mind’ giving back the thoughts ‘by England given’ :

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The soldier of whom Wilfred Owen wrote at the end of the war had no vision of an English heaven.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I know you in this dark: for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now . . .

Reluctantly the military authorities faced the fact that they were fighting a new kind of war and the civil leaders came to realize that, if victory were to be theirs, English social and political life would need profound alterations. Apart from the passing of the Defence of the Realm Act their first measures were essentially ad hoc, emergency steps. The espousal of ‘business as usual’, the first two budgets and the enthusiastic but indiscriminate recruiting which filled the army but crippled industrial life showed that (understandably enough) they had not seen that this war was, in a sense that no other had been, a national affair, that the country as a whole and not just the front-line soldier was required to play a part. Gradually, even if haphazardly, the hand of government reached out until it had brought the country within its control and attuned it to the purposes of war. English drinking habits and financial practices, prices, rents, manpower, shipping, the purchase, supply and distribution of the raw materials for industry and much else were organized (not always efficiently) so that they contributed to the war effort. The Englishman’s news was censored, his food rationed, his sons conscripted. Ministries (for the blockade, for labour, shipping, food and pensions) appeared, and day-to-day living came under the direction of officials and boards with strange names: the Coal Controller, the Cotton Control Board, the Royal Commission on Sugar Supply, the Fat and Meats Executive, the Oil and Seed Executive. If men were to be transported to the trenches, their bodies fed, the guns kept loaded and their dead replaced, the old amateurish ways had to go. Success depended upon the organization of all the nation’s activities. Once a civilian had contributed adequately to the war effort if he sent his son to fight and his daughter to attend the wounded; he could then be left to worry with a clear conscience. Now he too had to be organized—war had attained the dignity of a full-time activity.

Schools and the war effort

Many teachers immediately volunteered for service and what happened in schools in the next four and a half years was not of much interest to them. When they returned, if they did, the most important change could not be seen; it was the absence of the dead and disabled. But the schools to which the soldiers came back, no less than the soldiers themselves, had been profoundly altered.

The first reaction of educational administrators mirrored that of the other civil authorities—business as usual. It was very undesirable, in the Board of Education’s opinion,⁴

that the unrest, to which the present crisis in the affairs of the Nation naturally gives rise, should be intensified by any avoidable interruption or dislocation of the public educational service of the Country.

J. A. Pease, then President of the Board, addressed an open letter to ‘my colleagues in the national service of education’ which received wide publicity. Drawing on his words the Journal of Education argued, The first duty of teachers . . . is to keep the system of education going; to fill up the gaps in our ranks; to contrive makeshifts; and be ready to work double spells when called upon.’⁵ Of course, business could not go on as usual. Expenditure on school buildings was frozen; schools and training colleges were taken over for military purposes despite the Board’s successful protest against the over-enthusiastic requisitioning that marked the early days of the war; teachers volunteered in large numbers (over twenty thousand had served in the forces by the end of the war) thus making staffing problems critical; specialists, such as doctors in the School Medical Service and physical education instructors, were withdrawn from the schools.⁶ The Board was forced to admit that ‘the system, as a whole, undoubtedly has suffered . . . the war has . . . imposed on educational resources a continual and increasing strain as regards both personal and material conditions, and has entailed many sacrifices.’⁷

However important they were for the war effort, these sacrifices do not represent a specifically educational contribution, that is, a contribution made by an education system which could not, or could not so easily, have been made by other parts of society. Stopping expenditure on schools, handing buildings over to the military or allowing teachers to enlist was evidence of a willingness to co-operate with the national policies; but, important though this co-operation might have been and gladly given though it was, it did not involve the use of professional skills or exploit the teacher’s greatest asset, influence over children. But this influence was put to work when teachers and the Board encouraged children to participate in the home front’s voluntary war effort. Children knitted, made socks and mufflers, sent parcels to prisoners of war, collected eggs (the Board spoke with pride of the thirty children in one small village school who collected 2,542 eggs in ‘a short period’), dispatched candles and food to the trenches, made sandbags, bed-tables and crutches, bed-rests and clinical chart carriers.⁸ These and the many similar activities were not confined to the classroom but they were often organized there and sometimes, as the produce of the manual training rooms testifies, actually carried out there. Their importance was not their contribution to the improvement of conditions in the trenches—sandbags, food and clothes would have come in any case and the voluntary activities were often as inefficient as they were enthusiastic. They were important because they involved children and the community at large in the war effort and, by giving them the opportunity to contribute, assisted national solidarity and assured everyone that the cause was just.

Children were involved more completely with the war than these peripheral activities indicate. In July 1915, for example, the Board sent a circular to local education authorities asking for their support in the war savings campaign. Later they sent a leaflet which gave details of the activities of the National War Savings Committee and throughout the war they stressed the importance of this kind of saving.⁹ Their efforts were most successful: the schools formed more than one-third of the 36,316 War Saving Associations which were set up and the Board pointed out that ‘a very large number of teachers are secretaries of local committees and have done most valuable work on “propaganda” ’.¹⁰ Thrift had always been encouraged by the public elementary school and penny banks were a long-established institution; but the savings campaign aimed to make thrift contribute to the war effort. The teacher, it was claimed,

can easily lead the older scholars to see that great expenditure of money is necessary for the successful prosecution of the War and that in order to defray it, the State must rely on the savings of individuals. There is no need for him to go into details which are beyond the comprehension of children; but he should give them some account of the War Loan and the advantages which it offers.

Saving, the child should know, was ‘a service due to his country’.¹¹

There were other services he could render. In December 1916 a worsening in the food situation led to the appointment of a Food Controller. In May 1917 Lord Devonport, who then held the office, made it known through the Board that he ‘would be glad if Local Education Authorities and Teachers in all schools would take special steps to impress upon children the urgent need for the prevention of waste’.¹² Special lessons were given to all children, the instruction in Domestic Economy Centres was to emphasize economy, mothers and ‘other adults’ could attend the classes in which children were taught cooking, and special classes in cookery for adults were run by the women inspectors of the Board. Exhibitions were arranged to demonstrate the best and most economical methods of cookery and housecraft. A pamphlet, Economy in Food, was printed, discussed with children and distributed to their parents by school nurses and other suitable people. School gardens (which, like penny banks, had been introduced before the war) were encouraged and flourished; teachers were specially trained to give instruction to their colleagues in school gardening and in some cases the supreme sacrifice was made of turning playing-fields into school gardens.¹³ Horse-chestnuts were gathered by children and delivered to the Director of Propellant Supplies at the Ministry of Munitions because, as the Board explained, ‘The experiments prove that for every ton of horse-chestnuts which are harvested, half a ton of grain can be saved for human consumption.’ When increasing the supply of jam became a matter of ‘urgent national importance’ children were asked to help in the ‘systematic picking and collection of blackberries’.¹⁴

It is not important to decide how much this campaign assisted the war effort. In any case it would be difficult as the Board contributed to the war economy by cutting back on the statistics it gathered and as a result the number of school gardens or the value of their produce is not known. But even if grossly inefficient, the school gardens illustrate (as does the whole food economy campaign) how the education system was used to further governmental policy. The teacher was in a favourable position to assist the Food Control Committee, and by helping them he contributed to the cause of national solidarity. ‘Scholars, teachers, and parents,’ wrote The Times Educational Supplement when discussing the problem of food supply,¹⁵

must be made to feel that each and everyone is concerned in this vital matter. It is not that our armies are waging war; we are at war—we, scholars and teachers, students and professors, country folk and city people! ‘Every sack of food is worth a gun.’ The words are not mere rhetoric, but a forcible statement of fact.

Less rhetoric was needed to justify another of the school’s contributions, its assistance in meeting the labour shortage. Some technical schools trained pupils in the making of munitions and the Board asked the local authorities to arrange for school holidays to fall at a time which would least interfere with the work of parents in munition factories.¹⁶ Of more value for the war effort was the willingness of local authorities to allow use of the exemption clauses which permitted children to leave school, either permanently or on a part-time basis, before they had reached the leaving age. The system of exemptions was complicated but broadly speaking it meant that children could get ‘time off’ or be excused school altogether (usually at thirteen, but often at twelve and, in agricultural districts, sometimes at eleven) if they had made a required number of attendances or reached a certain standard of work. The Board, while recognizing the need to supplement the labour force (children’s time, a Departmental committee said in 1917, ‘was worth its weight, not in gold but in blood’), endeavoured to control exemptions. It met with little success and by January 1918, The Times calculated, six hundred thousand children had been w...