āThe ever-whirling wheel of changeā1
In England the 60 years following 1760 witnessed sweeping social changes which posed new and unprecedented challenges for educators. The key developments of this era have been categorized by a generation of historians as āthe industrial revolutionā although, in reality, it might be better to think in terms of a wider āsocial revolutionā taking place. It is only possible to understand why schooling developed as it did at this time in England if one has some understanding of this social revolution and its implications.2
There were multiple factors at work, which, in combination, generated nothing less than the reconstruction of English society. Prominent among them was the transformation of agriculture.3 The pre-existing methods of arable farming, involving the open field system (effectively little more than subsistence farming) necessitated leaving fields fallow for long periods, were very labour intensive and produced a limited range of cereal crops destined for local consumption. During the eighteenth century, novel crop rotation systems, involving turnips and new nitrogen-fixing crops such as clover, peas and beans, made possible winter sowing and generated much heavier yields. At the same time, the new and improved breeds of cattle introduced by pioneers such as Robert Bakewell and Coke of Holkham transformed both the quantity and quality of edible meat. It suddenly became possible to feed a far greater number of people.
These developments coincided with the enclosure movement, which transformed the face of lowland Britain. Between 1760 and 1850 the vast majority of English villages were made subject to their own enclosure acts, which threw the labouring poor off the land, set up working farms with much smaller field boundaries and tenant farmers who took their produce to market instead of simply getting the best price in the local economy. The General Enclosure Act of 1801 marked the high point of this process and made further enclosures much easier to carry through.
This transformation of agriculture not only facilitated population growth but also posed new challenges for educators. First, thousands of people were forced off the land and obliged to migrate into the towns. Their growth was phenomenal: Manchesterās population rose from 24,000 in 1773 to 108,000 50 years later and there were similar transformations in other urban centres. This provided a source of cheap labour for the new industries that were appearing. One of the needs of this labour force was appropriate and affordable educational facilities for those of their children who were not put to work, even if that added up to little more than child minding.
Secondly, the new type of yeoman farmer that developed became the backbone of a developing rural middle class. They found themselves running businesses that generated demand for a range of professional services in the rural areas. This meant that they sought an improved secondary schooling for their sons, especially across the lowland English counties. They made demands of the education system that differed completely from those of the new urban poor and their needs became one of the motors of the ongoing growth of rural secondary schooling during the nineteenth century.
Alongside this, a number of developments in medical knowledge and practice, most notably Jennerās work on vaccination4 and the reduction of scurvy following the work of pioneers such as James Lind5 and the explorer James Cook,6 resulted in an improvement in survival rates. This was another catalyst of population growth, which, once triggered, became self-perpetuating, with further increments that went on well into the twentieth century. So, whereas in 1700 there had been five million inhabitants of the United Kingdom, a century later this had become nine million and by the close of the nineteenth century the figure had almost quadrupled to 32 million.
Also underpinning these social transformations was a transport revolution.7 Engineers such as Blind Jack of Knaresborough, James Brindley and Thomas Telford not only established a greatly improved road system but developed a nationwide system of canals, which facilitated the secure transportation of fragile and weighty goods over long distances. When the Birmingham Canal opened in 1772, the price of coal fell in the city by a half. National markets for a wide range of goods were beginning to open up. This meant that individuals could travel more conveniently over longer distances. For the first time it became possible for a school to think in terms of a regional, rather than simply a local, clientele.
It was possible for these developments to occur at the same time because they fed off each other, and in combination they facilitated the Industrial Revolution. Across the country the small-scale domestic production of goods gave way to factories, each with its specialist product; notably, during the first phase, silk in Derby, cotton in Lancashire, wool in Yorkshire, ceramics in North Staffordshire, iron in Coalbrookdale, locomotives in Darlington, saddles in Walsall, carpets in Kidderminster, felt hats in Stockport, straw hats in Luton and chains in Cradley. The list is endless and it is a mistake to confine it to the production of textiles and metal goods, even though these were central. Many of these, such as the textile mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire, required in the main an unskilled labour force and this was to have a severely limiting effect on the extent of the schooling that was seen as necessary in these areas. Elsewhere the factory owners themselves went to considerable pains to set up their own specialist schools to teach the skills needed by some of their workers. So, in Stoke-on-Trent, Josiah Wedgwood founded a school of art for his employees and in Birmingham a jewellery school appeared. But, overwhelmingly, industrialization meant a low-skilled labour force that needed only a minimal education. For them the focus was far more on sobriety, subordination, orderliness and indoctrination. These were to become the overriding themes of popular education for much of the nineteenth century.
A key element of this indoctrination, one that came to define the contest that developed to educate the lower orders, was the attempt to evangelize, and with it to dispense a set of values and behaviours that would mould children towards the roles they were meant to play in adult life.8 During the seventeenth century older dissenting religious sects had appeared, most notably the Baptists and the Quakers, and these went on to become churches in their own right. But the situation was complicated by a popular new āMethodistā movement originating within the Church of England, which quickly became the largest dissenting church with congregations in rural areas and in many of the growing towns. Meanwhile, the proscribed Roman Catholic Church was given a new lease of life in England by successive Relief Acts in 1778 and 1791, which gave it the right to open its own schools. In an authoritative account of the survival of Jesuit education during this period, Maurice Whitehead has shown how the establishment of Stonyhurst in 1795 was, in reality, the repatriation of a school first founded at St. Omer in Flanders in 1593.9 There were similar foundations at this time at Ampleforth, Downside, Heythrop and St. Edmundās Ware, all originating in schools in mainland Europe. Whitehead has shown how this was depicted by one Anglican bishop as āa development which needs to be watched with the utmost vigilanceā. What was emerging was little short of a war between these rival denominations for the allegiance of the English poor, both in rural areas and in the growing towns. Their battlefield was to be the schoolroom.
It must be added, though, that this account of industrialization and its consequences has been shown to be, at best, partial. Ground-breaking studies of economic transformation by Cain and Hopkins10 have shown that it was the growth of the financial and service sectors of the economy, focused far more on London and the Home Counties, which did as much, if not more, than industrial innovation to define Britainās world role and to mould its social structure. The āgentlemanly capitalismā that they describe generated its own ānew aristocracyā of the south-east of England, a class of comfortably off town dwellers and suburbanites who were, by and large, disdainful of industrial wealth, and who sought an education for their sons, in particular, which would prepare them for their roles within this sector of the economy. Here was born the growing demand for a āpublic schoolā education that was to become a dominant feature of nineteenth century English society. This factor alone provides a large part of the explanation as to why the public schools developed, almost exclusively, in the Home Counties of England.
Underlying all these developments was the slave trade, which reached its peak during the eighteenth century and generated enormous wealth for those involved.11 In our context, what was really significant was the extent to which the profits of this trade sustained the Anglican Church, either directly or indirectly, reinforcing its power and influence. Many of those who were made wealthy by the sugar and cotton trades became major financial supporters of their local churches. In 1833 the compensation that was paid out by Parliament to slave owners to cover their losses after abolition included nearly Ā£9,000 directly to the Church of England and Ā£13,000 to the Bishop of Exeter, enormous sums at that time. The confused attitude of the Anglican Church towards slavery during the late eighteenth century was summed up in the career of George Whitefield, an evangelical Anglican clergyman, who campaigned and preached against the abuse of slaves by their masters, but who kept slaves himself at plantations in South Carolina and Georgia and became one of the leading proponents of the legalization of slavery in Georgia. Slavery provided much of the capital for the acceleration of industrialization in England. It also funded education. Both the Kingston and Southport National Schools were founded by patrons made rich from slavery (Charles Nicholas Pallmer and Ralph Peters).12 They were but two among many who applied wealth gained from the slave trade to sponsor schools or colleges.
But, more importantly, in our context, the phenomenon of slavery provided the backdrop for the attitudes to ethnicity and race relations that were to underpin schooling in England for the next two centuries. It is fair to say, too, that without the profits it made through the slave trade, the Anglican Church would have been far less capable of dominating the educational provision in England in the ways it did throughout the nineteenth century and even more recently.
