Towards a Theory of Schooling (Routledge Revivals)

David Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135090869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1989, Towards a Theory of Schooling explores and debates the relationship between school and society. It examines the form and function of one of humankind's most important social institutions, following the cutting edge of pedagogic innovation from mainland Europe through the British Isles to the USA. In the process, the book throws important light upon the origins and evolution of the school based notions of class, curriculum, classroom, recitation and class teaching.

Chapter 1

Setting the Agenda

Any description of classroom activities that cannot be related to the social structure and culture of the society is a conservative description.

(Walker (1970) The Social Setting of the Classroom)¹

To explain any educational process we must have a conceptual apparatus that relates the economic and social structure of society to the teaching process.

(Lundgren (1979) School Curricula: Content and Structure)²

Education is not simply shaped in a general way by the imperatives, arrangements and logic of the capitalist system. Education is specifically articulated with this system in certain very definite ways.

(Hall (1981) Schooling, State and Society)³

I

This book has its own history. Its origins lie in the study of a new open plan school that I conducted in 1975-76.⁴ At that time, the individualized methods proposed for such schools were repeatedly contrasted — sometimes unfavourably — with the class teaching methods deemed typical of older settings. Very often, too, such debates about educational innovation were conducted as if the status quo — classrooms, desks, blackboards etc. — had existed since time immemorial. In fact, the multi-teacher, multi-room school is of recent vintage — a monument to the educational reforms of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, if the history of school innovation is traced back to the end of the eighteenth century, an even more subversive claim can be made — that class teaching had, in its turn, grown from an earlier pedagogy that was just as ‘individualized’ and ‘open plan’ as anything offered in the 1970s.

Yet, on what basis could I claim a pedagogic similarity between eighteenth and twentieth century schooling? And why did classrooms and classroom methods emerge in the intervening years? Taken together, these two questions gave a new direction to my research interests: if one-to-one instruction is deemed to be the most ‘natural’ teaching method, then perhaps it is class teaching, not the individualization of open plan schooling, that is most in need of explanation.

Until the open plan study I had regarded myself as a classroom researcher. I had spent a number of years absorbing, recording and making sense of contemporary schoolroom life. But my glimpses into the pre-history of open plan schooling had an unnerving effect. They made me realize how little I knew about long-term pedagogic change. Clearly, I needed to make a more sustained examination of the historical record. At first, the task seemed relatively trivial. Surely, educational historians had already explored and documented the pedagogies of the past. My optimism, however, was unfounded: no one seemed to have looked in that direction, at least not in terms that I found congenial.⁵ Slowly, I began to appreciate that the weak sense of history shown by classroom researchers was matched only by the weak sense of the classroom shown by educational historians.

An opportunity to address this intellectual tension came within a few months of publishing the open plan study. In October 1977, I received a one-year grant to investigate ‘Classroom life and the evolution of the classroom system’. Using West of Scotland data, my intention was to focus on the educational changes that had brought about classrooms and class teaching. Already, my attention had been drawn to the seminal influence of local figures such as Robert Owen (1771-1858) of New Lanark and David Stow (1793-1864) of Glasgow. Moreover, I was equally aware that David Stow’s name had been linked to an early form of class teaching known as ‘simultaneous instruction’.

Besides investigating the work of these innovators and their Scottish contemporaries, the initial phase of my investigation was also steered by a chronological question: ‘When did the term “classroom” first appear in the educational record?’.⁶ This train of inquiry led me to Samuel Wilderspin’s On the Importance of Educating the Infant Children of the Poor (1823).⁷ Yet, along the way, my concentration was somewhat disrupted when a postgraduate student (Maria Gibbons) drew my attention to the fact that the term ‘classroom’ was still used within the University of Glasgow’s Department of Humanity (i.e. Latin).

I had not anticipated this datum. It seemed unlikely that such a high-status institution (and such a long-standing subject-area) would have adopted the terminology of nineteenth-century elementary schools. So where had the University of Glasgow’s usage come from? Turning from speculation to investigation, I searched the University’s records and found uses of ‘class room’ that stretched back more than sixty years beyond Wilderspin’s. And further investigation revealed no earlier uses in any of the other Scottish universities (Aberdeen, Edinburgh and St Andrews).

These unexpected findings gave my investigation a new edge. If Glasgow was, in fact, the ultimate English-language source of ‘classroom’, then its educational institutions deserved a more exhaustive examination than I had originally envisaged. I would have to extend my remit and grapple with an earlier set of educational innovations — those that occupied Scottish university teachers during the period of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In turn, of course, I would also need to explore the connection, if any, between the eighteenth-century Scottish universities and nineteenth-century elementary schools.

These were not easy questions to address, not least because they cut across a variety of disciplinary boundaries (for example, those that separate economic history from the history of ideas). Meantime, too, the boundedness of my case study was under revision in another direction — a chance remark (from Herbert Kliebard of the University of Wisconsin) drew my attention to the fact that the seventeenth-century records of the University of Glasgow provide the Oxford English Dictionary with its earliest source of the word ‘curriculum’ (1633). Should my case study also extend to this earlier educational innovation?

Within the timescale allowed by my research grant, there was no possibility of tackling all these questions — except, perhaps, in the same kind of hit-and-run manner that I had used with the open plan study.⁸ In the event I was able to prolong my investigations through other circumstances — I was appointed to a tenured lectureship at the University of Glasgow that was to commence immediately my research fellowship expired.

II

During my fellowship year I gathered large amounts of data — enough possibly for a book entitled On the Changing Disciplines of Education: Schooling in Glasgow During the Industrial Revolution. But the prospect of writing such a book did not exactly fill me with excitement. Its style and content would have been too reminiscent of the antiquarian tomes I had been warned against.⁹ I did not want to produce a book simply about the past: I wanted, instead, to produce something that could illuminate the continuous present.

To this end, I needed something more than a chronological, one-thing-after-another framework. I had to find a way of talking about schooling that was as valid for the twentieth century as it was for the Industrial Revolution. In logical terms, the solution to my problem boiled down to the creation of two complementary theoretical frameworks. The first of these would help me to differentiate between schooling and other social institutions (for example, the Church, the family); while the second framework would help me to differentiate among forms of schooling (i.e. among different pedagogies). In effect, the first framework makes it possible to answer the question ‘What is schooling?’; while the second framework makes it possible to answer the question ‘What is a pedagogy?’. Armed with this double differentiation, it becomes possible to acknowledge the long-term persistence of schooling yet, at the same time, identify certain of its internal pedagogic discontinuities. Together, these frameworks began to act as the long- and short-focus lenses with which I repeatedly scanned the educational record.

Initially, I tackled the issue of pedagogic differentiation. I began to link the pedagogic variations I had noted during the open plan study to changes in the organization of economic production. Was the changeover from individualized to class teaching anything to do with the contemporaneous switch from ‘domestic’ to ‘factory’ production that had been discussed, for instance, in Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946)¹⁰ and in the introduction to George Unwin’s Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1904)?¹¹ Similarly, was the twentieth century changeover to forms of individualization anything to do with the introduction of ‘scientific management’ into industrial production (cf. the arguments of Clarence Karier, Paul Violas and Joel Spring’s Roots of Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century (1973)¹²; and David Tyack’s The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974)¹³). If so, how were the rationales that underpinned the organization of schooling connected to the rationales that underpinned the organization of manufacturing (cf. Sidney Pollard’s The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain (1965)¹⁴)?

In this last respect, it was particularly important to consider the work of those, like Robert Owen¹⁵, who figured both in the history of schooling and the history of management. Another such personage — of local as well as international significance — was Adam Smith. Indeed, Adam Smith’s educational credentials include the fact that, while a professor in Glasgow (1752-64), he was present on the occasion of the first recorded use of the term ‘class room’.

Although Smith’s most noted work is The Wealth of Nations (1st edn, 1776), it is the preparation of his earlier treatise — The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1st edn, 1759) — that most closely corresponds to his sojourn in Glasgow. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was Smith’s attempt to put the moral sciences on the same footing as the physical sciences. He claimed that civil society was held together by an ethical bonding agent analogous to the force of gravity that held together the material world. Further, Smith chose the terms ‘fellow feeling’ or ‘sympathy’ to label this universal moral sentiment.

Smith’s use of ‘sympathy’ caught my eye. Did it have any connection with the concept of ‘sympathy of numbers’ that, sixty years later, David Stow used to justify the grouping of pupils for ‘simulataneous’ instruction? Certainly, the circumstantial evidence was persuasive. Like Smith, Stow accepted that ‘sympathy’ was a ‘principle of our nature’. Similarly, Stow held that its bonding effects were ‘more or less powerful’ in proportion to the ‘proximity and concentration of numbers’. In pedagogic terms, then, Stow believed that the ‘power in numbers’ unobtainable through ‘individual teaching’ made possible a moral machinery adequate to the social problems created by the Industrial Revolution. With ‘proper management’ and the correct ‘moral atmosphere’, simultaneous instruction could promote the moral and intellectual ‘elevation’ of the ‘sunken masses’ that had accumulated in the manufacturing areas of Great Britain.¹⁶

Here, then, was a basis for linking the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment to nineteenth-century elementary schools. Gradually, I traced out an intellectual genealogy that linked Adam Smith, via Robert Owen, to David Stow. And, as important, I was able to cite Adam Smith’s moral philosophy in support of the idea that early class teaching had an integrity of its own — it was not just the insertion of factory methods into the organization of schooling. Exploration of the Smith-Stow connection also had another practical consequence: it gave me a better grasp of the connections between economic history and the history of ideas. The central feature of both schools and factories is that they are as much about the management of people as they are about the design of a technical ‘machinery’. Hence, the social philosophies that inform their respective management practices are just as important as the technological developments that govern their choice of material resources. Indeed, educational production, like its industrial counterpart, entails a fusion of both technical and social considerations. By 1979, this general idea — that educational practice lies at the intersection of economic history and the history of ideas — had become an important organizing principle in the conduct of my research programme.

Detailed analysis of the Smith-Stow connection also enabled me to strengthen my earlier ideas about the periodization of pedagogic change. I began to claim that modern (i.e. post-medieval) schooling can be divided into three broad pedagogic epochs: (i) a period when the dominant pedagogy comprised the ‘individualized’ (i.e. ‘in turn’) processing of learners; (ii) a period (commencing around 1840 in Great Britain) when the dominant pedagogy hinged upon the ‘batch’ processing of groups of learners: and (iii) a period (commencing around 1890) when pedagogic practices began to be re-ordered in t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Setting the Agenda
• Chapter 2 On the Origins of the Educational Terms Class and Curriculum
• Chapter 3 Schooling to Order: Jean Baptist de la Salle and the Pedagogy of Elementary Education
• Chapter 4 Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System
• Chapter 5 On Simultaneous Instruction and the Emergence of Class Teaching
• Chapter 6 The Recitation Revisited
• Chapter 7 Notes Towards a Theory of Schooling
• Bibliography
• Index