Social Change in the History of British Education

Joyce Goodman, Gary McCulloch, WILLIAM RICHARDSON, Joyce Goodman, Gary McCulloch, WILLIAM RICHARDSON

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317991465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This work provides an overall review and analysis of the history of education and of its key research priorities in the British context. It investigates the extent to which education has contributed historically to social change in Britain, how it has itself been moulded by society, and the needs and opportunities that remain for further research in this general area. Contributors review the strengths and limitations of the historical literature on social change in British education over the past forty years, ascertain what this literature tells us about the relationship between education and social change, and map areas and themes for future historical research. They consider both formal and informal education, different levels and stages of the education system, the process and experience of education, and regional and national perspectives. They also engage with broader discussions about theory and methodology. The collection covers a large amount of historical territory, from the sixteenth century to the present, including the emergence of the learned professions, the relationship between society and the economy, the role of higher technological education, the historical experiences of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the social significance of teaching and learning, and the importance of social class, gender, ethnicity, and disability. It involves personal biography no less than broad national and international movements in its considerations. This book will be a major contribution to research as well as a general resource in the history and historiography of education in Britain.

Introduction: Social Change in the History of Education

Gary McCulloch, Joyce Goodman and William Richardson

DOI: 10.4324/9781315876696-1

‘Fortunately in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square’. Lady Bracknell’s famous assertion, in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), has long been challenged for its view of the ineffectiveness of education. Historians of education have been to the fore in exploring the relationships that have developed over time between education and the wider society. For over four decades, the most frequently stated objective of research in the history of education in Britain and around the world has been to examine these relationships, and there is now a very large and diverse literature on this topic.¹ This literature requires systematic and critical investigation for how much it explains about the extent to which education has contributed historically to social change, how it, in turn, has been moulded by society, and the needs and opportunities that remain for further research in this area. Such an overall review and analysis of the history of education and of its key research priorities has not been attempted before in the British context. It has now been possible to make a start through a series of six seminars funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on ‘Social change in the history of education’.²

¹ See e.g. McCulloch, Gary, and William Richardson. Historical Research in Educational Settings. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000. ² The ESRC seminar series ‘Social change in the history of education’ (award RES-451-26-0169) ran from 2004 to 2006, based at the Institute of Education London, the University of Exeter and the University of Winchester. See also McCulloch, Gary, Joyce Goodman, and William Richardson. “Social Change in the History of Education: An ESRC Seminar Series.” History of Education Researcher 75 (2005): 1–13, for further details.

In the United States, there have been a number of initiatives put in place to review the field and to investigate areas ripe for future development. The most significant of these developed in the 1950s under the auspices of the Ford Foundation.³ A key outcome of that initiative was the highly influential study produced by Bernard Bailyn in 1960, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities forStudy. In this work, Bailyn postulated a straightforward and potent approach to understanding the historical relationships between education and society. He argued that this set of relationships was not simply one-way, reflecting the influence of society on educational configurations, values and processes, but was interactive in its character: ‘education not only reflects and adjusts to society; once formed, it turns back upon it and acts upon it’.⁴ According to Bailyn, education had ‘proved in itself to be an agency of rapid social change, a powerful internal accelerator’, which, in its sensitive responses to the immediate pressures of society, had ‘released rather than impeded the restless energies and ambitions of groups and individuals’.⁵ Moreover, Bailyn continued, education had also ‘distinctively shaped the American personality’, and thus ‘contributed much to the forming of national character’.⁶

³ See Storr, R.J. “The Role of Education in American History: a Memorandum for the Committee Advising the Fund for the advancement of education in Regard to this Subject.” Harvard Educational Review 46, no. 3 (1976): 331–54. ⁴ Bailyn, Bernard. Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Williamsburg: University of North Carolina Press, 1960: 48. ⁵ Ibid. ⁶ Ibid.

A more recent attempt in the United States to mount an overall review of the field took place in March 2000, with a conference funded by the Spencer Foundation to examine new directions in American educational history. This conference revealed an acute awareness of the diversity of research in the history of education, although specific contextual issues in terms of the relationship between education and a wide range of social concerns appeared to be uppermost. A number of contributions emphasized limitations and gaps in previous research, and the need for further consideration of the educational histories of African-American and other ethnic groups, the relationship between history and educational policy, the history of higher education, and the history of women’s educational experiences.⁷

⁷ Donato, Ruben, and Marvin Lazerson. “New Directions in American Educational History: Problems and Prospects.” Educational Researcher 29, no. 8 (2000): 4–15.

Significant initiatives to review the historical relationship between education and the broader society have also been established from time to time in other parts of the world. One such was a collaborative venture that stemmed from an international seminar held in 1979 at the Ruhr-University Bochum, under the auspices of a wider research project on knowledge and society in the nineteenth century. Two additional conferences were held at Leicester in England and again at Bochum that led eventually to the publication of a major edited collection on European secondary and higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁸ This study was concerned to develop a systematic interpretation of structural change over this period that would take account of underlying similarities or patterns across nations, rather than concentrating on descriptions of specific institutions and particular national accounts. It was found that despite significant differences between the educational structures of England, France and Germany, in each case the processes involved led to hierarchical systems of education that reproduced and reinforced the class and status structures of society. Clear patterns of interaction were identified between the educational system and the occupational structure, and between established educational traditions and novel social pressures. The leaders of this project came to the conclusion that the educational changes of the period were not only relatively autonomous of, but also partly responsible for, elements in the larger process of social change. Moreover, they added, the outcomes for education and society were often inconsistent with the intentions of many of the agents who helped to bring them about.⁹ This set of insights was something of a landmark for the field internationally and highly suggestive as a contribution towards an understanding of the historical relationships between education and society in modern Europe.

⁸ Muller, Detlef K., Fritz Ringer, and Brian Simon (eds). The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction 1870–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ⁹ Ibid., xii.

Many other instances of work of this type could no doubt be added in different parts of the world. A more modest initiative in New Zealand, sponsored by the New Zealand Association for Research in Education, rallied support for the ideas of Bernard Bailyn applied to the very different context of the Antipodes, with the aim of building and strengthening bridges between education and all other areas of life: leisure, the family, industry, the economy, welfare, health, sport, religion and politics.¹⁰ A special issue of the journal Paedagogica Historica, published in 1998, concerned itself with historical and comparative perspectives on schooling in changing societies, including an emphasis on the use of education by governments as the vehicle for the reform of society.¹¹ In Britain, by contrast, this kind of activity has been conspicuous by its absence. Collaborative, formalized evaluation of the development of the field, as distinct from the historiographical contributions of individual researchers, has not previously been attempted on a national scale in this country. It is vital, as well as somewhat overdue, for those actively involved in the field to appraise its past development in a systematic and focused manner. Yet this is also a highly challenging and even intimidating task in view of the huge output of research in this field within this country over the past 40 years, to say nothing of the diversity of the areas studied during that time.

¹⁰ McCulloch, Gary. Education in the Forming of New Zealand Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Wellington: NZARE, 1986: 28. ¹¹ Paedagogica Historica supplementary series vol. IV (1998). “Schooling in Changing Societies: Historical and Comparative Perspectives.” Edited by Czeslaw Majorek, Erwin V. Johanningmaier and Frank Simon. Gent: C.S.H.P., 1998.

Sociological treatments of this theme in Britain have developed under the influence of A. H. Halsey, who has expressed scepticism as to the role of education in promoting social change. Halsey has emphasized rather the importance of education in maintaining continuities from the past: ‘Education prepares children for society, transforming biological organisms into social personalities. Its capacity is essentially not to create but to recreate society, not to form structures of social life but to maintain the people and the skills that inform these structures. Education as a means of social change is secondary.’¹² Empirical work has been largely preoccupied with the conservative social effects of education and the processes of ‘social reproduction’ by which patterns of inequality are reproduced across the generations. According to Richard Breen, such research has demonstrated that social class differentials in educational attainment have remained largely unchanged during much of the last century, although he also notes that sociologists have been more successful in establishing this empirical regularity than explaining it.¹³ John Gray too reports that despite a series of efforts to tackle social disadvantage through education, social class remains ‘a good (although by no means perfect) predictor of secondary school life-chances’.¹⁴

¹² Halsey, A. H. Change in British Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978: 133–34. ¹³ Breen, Richard. “Why did Class Inequalities in Educational Attainment Remain Unchanged over Much of the Twentieth Century?” In Understanding Social Change, edited by Anthony Heath, John Ermisch and Duncan Gallie. Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2005: 68. ¹⁴ Gray, John. “Is Failure Inevitable? The Recent Fate of Secondary School Reforms Intended to Alleviate Social Disadvantage.” In Understanding Social Change, edited by Heath et al.: 89.

Issues of continuity have also figured prominently in the more explicitly historical investigations of the relationships between education and social change in the British context. A starting point in this respect was Fred Clarke’s short work Education and Social Change: An English Interpretation, published in 1940. This book set out to examine how the English educational tradition, so secure in its general features for many years, should adapt to the challenge of world war and to the changing circumstances of the future. This led him to develop what he described as ‘an interpretation, conscious and deliberate, in terms of social economic history, and then, in the light of that interpretation, to estimate the capacity of the English educational tradition to adapt itself without undue friction or shattering to the demands of a changed order’.¹⁵ Clarke was especially concerned to encourage new work that would explore the connections between education and other social institutions and the social structure as a whole.

¹⁵ Clarke, Fred. Education and Social Change: An English Interpretation. London: Sheldon Books, 1940: 1.

Brian Simon, the leading historian of education in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, was strongly influenced by these ideas as well as by a Marxist perspective on social class conflicts.¹⁶ According to Simon, historical studies should be concerned with education as a ‘social function’, which was of primary importance in every society. He argued in the 1960s that ‘It should be one of the main tasks of historical study to trace the development of education in this sense, to try to assess the function it has fulfilled at different stages of social development and so to reach a deeper understanding of the function it fulfils today’.¹⁷ Nearly 30 years later, Simon could still insist that ‘A crucial issue to which historical study can and should make a direct contribution, is that of the relation between educational and social change’.¹⁸He argued that education had effected social change on a massive scale, despite the efforts of the authorities to maintain control over the mass of the population through the development of schooling. According to Simon, the working class had contested the conservative nature of the educational structures imposed upon them, often with unexpected outcomes. As Simon concluded, modern education systems are ‘an area where the interests and objectives of different classes, strata and even groups meet and very often clash’. In this situation, he proposed, ‘as the historical record surely makes clear, there is scope for a variety of solutions; which of these will be successful depending on the balance of forces at any particular time’.¹⁹ Many other histories have also been produced over the past 30 years that focus on particular aspects of these relationships, ranging from Geoffrey Sherington’s work on education, social change and the First World War to Jonathan Rose’s study of the intellectual life of the British working classes.²⁰

¹⁶ See e.g. McCulloch, Gary. Education, History and Social Change: the Legacy of Brian Simon (professorial lecture, Institute of Education, University of London, 2004); and History of Education 33, no. 5 (2004). Special issue on Brian Simon, edited by Peter Cunningham and Jane Martin. ¹⁷ Simon, Brian. “The History of Education.” In The Study of Education, edited by J....