The English Higher Grade Schools

A Lost Opportunity

Meriel Vlaeminke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136225789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The English higher grade schools formed a key part of an expanding 19th-century education system, but they threatened the vested interests of a powerful Establishment bent on reaffirming the status quo. The author analyzes the 1902 Education Act as a retrogressive move by which much was lost.

1

EDUCATION IN THE 1890s: TENSIONS AND POTENTIAL

THE BROAD DEBATE

It is a common characteristic of historical writing to suggest recurring features, persistent strands, evolutionary tendencies, comparative dimensions, and even sometimes surprising discontinuities or contrasts. The importance of something in the past can only be evaluated in relation to what preceded and followed and what was happening elsewhere. But in considering British education at the end of the twentieth century, the parallels with developments 100 years ago are unusually striking. As the broad educational consensus which had held for much of the twentieth century began to break down from the 1970s onwards, education has been constantly in the spotlight: the focus of high expectations, bitter recriminations and unprecedented legislative attention. Much the same can be said of the 1880s and 1890s.

The British educational experience-then as now-is obstinately unique, despite the increased knowledge and, in some quarters, admiration of other nations’ achievements. In the late nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold wrote enthusiastically about Germany and Robert Morant about Switzerland; a century on, the countries of the Pacific Rim have attracted favourable comment. The underlying analysis is much the same: that nations wishing to assert themselves need to develop both a cohesiveness of spirit and a level of economic competence which enable them to establish and safeguard genuine independence. Education is the ideal, perhaps the only, tool for achieving both those goals, and so, typically, governments have taken a strong lead in directing the national education systems for which they are responsible.

The British, it seems, have always done it differently; indeed, if a national system of education is a set of coherently inter-related institutions provided mainly by the state for the education of its people, Britain has never had one. It must be stressed from the outset that the educational experiences of Scotland, Wales and Ireland have been very different from those in England, with the latter periodically asserting its values and priorities over its constituent parts with varying degrees of determination and success. The continuing divergence of Scottish, Welsh and Irish education from key aspects of the central model is a reminder that the tensions between ‘English’ and ‘British’ have never been fully resolved. Furthermore, the economic and imperial dominance which Britain achieved in the nineteenth century directly militated against the development of a coherent national system. Not only was a systematic approach to education regarded as unnecessary, but it was seen as likely to inhibit individual endeavour and damage the voluntarist principle which enabled innovatory industrialists and entrepreneurs to thrive. The fact that those economic pioneers were largely placed outside the mainstream of political and cultural life contributed to another enduring handicap which has bedevilled English education: the role of education in the perpetuation of social class differences. England’s industrial transformation owed nothing to either the universities or the schools of the governing class, whose members treasured the distance-geographical as well as intellectual and emotional-they were able to maintain from the world of factories, mills, mines, cities, sanitation, poverty and disease. For them, education meant two entirely different things: on the one hand, the elitist, stylised, classical humanism of the public schools and Oxbridge; on the other, the limited, cheap utilitarianism of the publicly provided education system. They were equally important instruments of socialisation.

A further distinctive feature of the British educational experience is the role of religion. Religion and education almost invariably have a close association in their early evolution, and the relation between them has to be confronted at some point. In most countries, where the dominant faith is international-Roman Catholicism or Islam, for example-allegiances outside the country challenge developing notions of nationhood. In England, the Tudor legacy was crucially important in determining that the dominant religious orthodoxy was created by the monarch and, as the established church, closely identified with the ruling elite and with the social and administrative fabric of English life ever since. The Church of England has always, in consequence, been perceived as a safe and supportive locus for the education of the nation’s children. The philanthropic/evangelical bent which Anglicanism developed during the nineteenth century ensured that it was actively involved in the provision of differentiated forms of education which matched the preconceptions of the ruling class. In England, then, religion has successfully maintained an important presence in education, which in the secular late twentieth century is enjoying something of a revival.

The role of government in managing these various strands-economic, social, religious-has been an interesting one. Green has argued persuasively that education is one of the key features in the formation of the modem state, possessing as it does unique functions to disseminate national priorities from the top down, and thereby transmit a cohesive national culture along with implicit social and political training. Many countries, he argues, demonstrate a close correlation between periods of intense state formation and spells of dynamic educational change.¹ England, having asserted its dominance over Wales, Scotland and Ireland by the beginning of the eighteenth century, achieved an effective form of national unification earlier than most. Consequently, it was the least interested in education as a tool of nationalism which, as well as promoting an enduring affection for tradition and antiquity, has enabled it to be sanguine in the sharing of power with local and regional bodies. It has also encouraged the evolutionary, piecemeal approach to legislation which, until recently, has characterised governmental endeavour in education as in other fields. With local authorities actively involved in education and often creative in their policy-making, central government has tended to follow rather than direct, to permit or legitimate rather than initiate.

The end of the twentieth century has broken emphatically with that tradition. The systematic diminution of the powers of local education authorities has been accompanied by a claimed devolution of responsibilities to individual institutions’ governing bodies (hybrids of unpaid amateurs, professionals and assorted interested parties) which is belied by the multiplication of non-elected centralised bodies such as the Office for Standards in Education, the Funding Agency for Schools and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority among others. Such a pattern resonates with ‘reforms’ at the very beginning of the century, when democratic school boards were replaced with local education authorities, which were then forced to adopt individual governing bodies for their secondary schools along with close moulding from a revitalised inspectorate following centrally produced guidance not included in any legislation. The overt intention then-to safeguard any post-elementary education as a scarce and specialised privilege for advantaged groups within society-has become unfashionable now, but the socially segregated ‘system’ created at the beginning of the century should have alerted us to the dangers of a divided system, now reinforced by other means. The peculiar British circumstance, that state education provision has been largely determined by people who do not participate in it and who adhere to quite different educational priorities for their own class, militates against educational egalitarianism. Institutions do not enjoy parity of esteem, nor do certain styles of education; and the promotion of educational orthodoxy by curriculum and inspection from above does little to change that.

It seems that a complex web of values and priorities underlies the British approach to education, which resists comparisons with other nations. Efforts to understand what is distinctive about the British experience help to generate a remarkably diffuse debate, in which almost every academic discipline has a point of view. Contributions, of necessity, deal primarily in generalisations and broad abstractions, and tend to neglect the actual mechanisms by which values are transmitted. The most important of those mechanisms must be education in its widest sense, and the second half of the nineteenth century has commonly been identified as the period when, it is alleged, Britain should have been modernising its attitudes to cope with the new economic challenges and safeguard its preeminence. In a number of respects, education was indeed changing in response to new pressures, the most conspicuous trend being the move towards institutionalisation at all levels. There is thus no substitute for examining closely the late nineteenth-century schools and colleges which transmitted the all-important values, since ‘no other set of institutions has been so centrally concerned... with the transmission of the cultural heritage’.²

Some schools and colleges have received due attention. Oxford and Cambridge Universities figure prominently in discussions about philosophical, intellectual and religious change, and the leading English public schools offer unique sociological evidence about the nature of ruling elites and the perpetuation of class distinctions. But, as institutions catering specifically for a small minority of the population, they can tell only part of the story. Despite their deliberate development as institutions neither geographically nor philosophically tied to a particular locality, they can scarcely be viewed as expressing a genuinely national statement about education. The attachment to ‘laissez-faire’ liberalism, which had restrained state intervention in favour of the voluntary initiative, meant that an overall strategy for education had never been formulated. There was no general view of its purpose, no nationwide ‘system’ relating to a demographic logic, and no proper articulation of its component parts. Some institutions resembled each other or, finding that they had interests in common, consciously grew more alike, but, provided they could maintain financial independence of the state, they had a virtually free hand in defining their own objectives. Clearly, they had to develop in a way that was roughly in accord with a consensus of opinion, but they were not merely reflective of that consensus; rather, then as now, ‘an institution like the public school does not simply transmit values; it selects them and reinforces them’.³

Those values came to form a package which has been variously labelled ‘the humanistic tradition’, ‘the liberal-romantic tradition’, and ‘the cult of the gentleman’. By the late nineteenth century it was characterised⁴ by an exclusive devotion to literary studies, especially the classical texts; a consequent disdain for science; a persistent anti-intellectualism and dislike of expertise; a sense of high moral purpose, leading to an emphasis on the importance of character-formation, and to a belief in class superiority and elitism; and, embracing all these, a growing attachment to stability and conformity. Its furtherance involved developing a form of education which was specialised in content and stylised in process, since affective and cultural goals were more important than cognitive ones. Amongst other things, this meant that the educational institutions of the elite could afford-and in fact worked hard-to remain largely aloof from a whole range of pressing educational controversies. Indeed, an increasingly important part of their prestige lay in their assumed capacity to safeguard traditional values and to induce conformity to familiar patterns of behaviour. Class interests cannot therefore be divorced from what members of the elite term the ‘national interest’, and the survival of certain institutions or styles of education at the expense of others may have little to do with their intrinsic worth for the educational advancement of the whole population.

This book is based on the assumption that institutions which have been less favoured by history can tell us at least as much about the values of Britain’s rulers as the schools and universities in which they were themselves educated. It is an assumption supported by what seems to be a persistent inclination in the world of education to glorify antiquity and tradition, as evidenced by the competition among institutions for proof of an early foundation date, the lengthy detailing of old covenants in weighty publications s...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Woburn Education Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Legislation Relating to Education
• 1 Education in the 1890s: Tensions and Potential
• 2 The Higher Grade School Phenomenon: An Analysis
• 3 Bristol: School Board and Higher Grade Schools, 1894-1903
• 4 Bristol: Education Committee and Secondary Schools, 1903-10
• 5 The Nationwide Fate of the Higher Grade Schools after 1902
• 6 Education after 1902: Tensions Resolved, Potential Stunted
• 7 A Lost Opportunity
• References
• Further Reading
• Index