The Evolution of the Nursery-Infant School

A History of Infant Education in Britiain, 1800-1970

Nanette Whitbread

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135030612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1972.This book considers the actual development of infant schools and education in Britain against the background of industrialization and social change, making clear how this development was influenced by the ideas of particular theorists from both the Continent and England.

Part One

The Nineteenth Century

1

Industrialization and philanthropy: 1800-40

In pre-industrial England, as in any rural society, children were gradually introduced to work as they grew up. Their parents and older brothers or sisters taught them useful skills at an early age, and in upper-class families the mother traditionally taught her children to read by the time they were four or five. Quite young children helped with farm work, household chores and domestic crafts in families of all social classes below the aristocracy. Folklore, Bible stories, proverbs, ballads, rustic rites and dances were learnt at home and through the seasonal pattern of village life. When their help was not required in the business of earning a living, children of all ages went to the local free grammar or village school that existed in many market towns and the larger villages, and attendance under eight was not uncommon. Since these were single classroom schools there was no special provision for the youngest.

Child labour

The economic and social changes of the agricultural and industrial revolutions from the middle years of the eighteenth century profoundly affected family life, particularly for the poorest families. Pauper children from the workhouses were the first victims as they were no longer the responsibility of their parents but of the Poor Law guardians. Child labour was introduced in the cotton mills by supplying employers with pauper ‘apprentices’, from London and other urban parishes, under contract from the age of five, six or seven. By the terms of the first Factory Act passed in 1802, these children were not supposed to work more than twelve hours a day and were to be given some instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic on weekdays, with religious instruction on Sundays. This Act aroused a storm of protest from employers and was not generally enforced: child apprentices continued to work a seventy-four hour week. By the early nineteenth century migration to the factory towns was making available local supplies of ‘free’ factory children who were the responsibility of their own parents, and who were not covered by even the ineffective 1802 Act.

This was a much harsher form of child labour than that which had prevailed under the domestic system of cottage industry, even when parents had been hard taskmasters. These children worked a six-day week from five or six in the morning till seven or eight at night, or longer at busy times of year, and brutal discipline was used to keep them from flagging. Their wages were essential to the family income. In the village they had worked under the surveillance of their parents, but in factories and mines this was not so.

As the new conditions of child labour began to be made known there was a gradual awakening of the public conscience. Two Parliamentary enquiries were undertaken and their Reports published: The Report of the Committee appointed to examine the Number and State of Parish Apprentices (1814-15) and The Report on Children Employed in Manufactories (1816). These revealed that, though some age between eight and ten was the more usual for children to begin work, there were many instances of much younger children as factory workers. Other contemporary accounts showed that young child labour was not confined to factories. ‘Climbing boys’ were taken by chimney sweeps as young as three or four, because only such small children could climb inside the narrow, angled chimneys. Others were employed at home on piecework put out by the local factory.

As child labour began to be seen as an inhuman outrage, efforts were directed towards restricting it and providing elementary day schools. At least with regard to young children there is some justice in the claim that ‘The rescue-motive lay at the root of popular instruction’ (Dobbs, 1919, 113). Equally important was the sense of religious or moral mission combined with the social purpose of training in disciplined obedience. As the Factory Commissioners recognized some years later, merely to prohibit child labour ‘might be productive of more evil from disorderly habits incident to idleness than of good by rescue from excessive labour’ unless a positive alternative was provided (P.P., 1834, xix, 273).

The two original organizations to found day schools for working-class children were the British and Foreign Schools Society and the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales. The former was formed in 1814 through the reorganization of the undenominational Society founded in 1808 by Joseph Lancaster's friends, and the National Society was formed by Dr Bell and his Church of England associates in 1811. Government action was confined to investigations into child labour and an enquiry ‘into the Education of the Lower Orders’ in London in 1816 and the rest of Britain in 1818. Whenever popular education was discussed in Parliament ‘school age’ was defined as six to twelve or seven to thirteen, usually the latter; and this was the age range for whom the voluntary societies aimed to provide schools.

Monitorial schools

The need to run schools as cheaply as possible caused the societies to adopt the mutual or monitorial system for instruction. In one large schoolroom hundreds of children of various ages and standards of attainment were taught with only one master in charge, as child monitors taught ten to twenty children each. These monitors were the older children of nine or above, and only they were taught by the master. Children sat in serried rows on wooden benches, learning by heart what their monitors taught them. This was the factory system of mass production applied to instruction.

The method was intended for children over seven, but some monitorial schools later included children from as young as four (P.P., 1834, ix, 7). Lancaster had seen the need for ‘initiatory’ schools for children under seven who could there be trained in good social and moral habits in preparation for the monitorial school, and be kept in safety off the streets. But such schools were not founded by either society. The Secretary of the British and Foreign Schools Society said that children came to school ‘at all ages between six and twelve’ (P.P., 1834, ix, 24), but the National Society for long resisted admission under seven. The societies aimed to provide instruction not nurseries.

Dame schools

Supporters of the voluntary societies had little knowledge of the circumstances in which children under seven were being brought up in working-class districts. Growing up in the overcrowded and insanitary conditions of slum dwellings, their working mothers away from home for perhaps two-thirds of each twenty-four hours, these children were inevitably victims of neglect. Most working-class children of that time can have experienced little of a mother's care during their formative early years. Moreover, there was a marked increase in the number of children under five years of age as the high rate of infant mortality fell around 1800.

A working mother with young children had to make such arrangements as she could. She could leave them in the slum tenement, alone or in the care of a slightly older child. She might find a neighbour, ‘some little girl or aged woman, who is hired for a trifle and whose services are equivalent to the reward’ (P.P., 1933, xx). Not to work herself was seldom a viable economic alternative, though she might in some districts be able to do piece-work at home. The most common solution was a dame school.

A neighbour, as a paid child-minder, would take as many small children as could be crowded into her tenement or cellar. These premises were likely to be unhealthy, dirty and ill-ventilated. The woman in charge might be a homely, kindly person who was too crippled or otherwise ailing for factory work; if she had had any formal education herself she tried to give some instruction in the alphabet and reading during part of the long day when the children were in her care. Others were unscrupulous and uncaring, concerned only to collect the fees of 2d to 7d a week. Such were the varied circumstances of the urban dame schools, of which there were over 3,000 by 1819 (P.P., 1820, xii, 343).

The dame school can be classified as mutual self-help arising within working-class culture in the early industrial era. In this respect it may be compared with the wide-spread development of unregistered childminding of pre-school children in the mid-twentieth century. The laissez-faire philosophy of the nineteenth century did not allow for government intervention in such domestic matters.

An infant school movement

From the 1820s an infant school movement began to provide an alternative to these ad hoc arrangements for children between about two and seven years of age. As already noted, Joseph Lancaster had envisaged ‘Initiatory’ schools. Throughout the nineteenth century the Nonconformist conscience was more readily awakened to the plight of infants in the slums than was the Anglican, perhaps because at this age children were susceptible to moral training but not to doctrinal teaching. The Evangelical wing of the Church of England proved willing to cooperate with Nonconformists in the founding of infant schools ‘because of their belief in child conversion’ (Burgess, 1958).

In England the promoters’ motives were moral and social rescue, reduction of petty crime against property, and early training and discipline. Lord Brougham declared that he considered ‘the establishment of infant schools one of the most important improvements—I was going to say in education, but I ought rather to say in the civil polity of this country’. In Scotland, where the influence of Robert Owen and David Stow worked within an older and more democratic tradition of popular education, there was more concern for broad educational aims appropriate to very young children.

New Lanark Infant School

The first infant school in Britain was opened in 1816 at the New Lanark cotton mills by the Welsh manager, Robert Owen. Under the previous management ‘between 400 and 500 pauper children, procured from parishes, whose ages appeared to be from five to ten’ (Owen, 1857, see Silver, 1969) had been employed as ‘apprentices’; but Owen ended this system, so that by the time he opened his infant school the children were those of New Lanark mill workers.

Education and social reform were inextricably linked for Robert Owen. His educational theory was influenced by John Locke (1632-1704), and he had visited the schools of the Swiss pioneers Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and von Fellenberg (1771-1844). Unlike the Radicals, who supported him without accepting his philosophy, he wanted to use education as an instrument for social change whereby a new form of socialist society would replace the existing competitive, class-structured one (Owen, 1813):

This experiment at New Lanark was the first commencement of practical measures with a view to change the fundamental principle on which society has theretofore been based from the beginning; and no experiment could be more successful in proving the truth of the principle that the character is formed for and not by the individual (Owen, 1857).

Essentially an environmentalist, his fundamental educational theory was summarized in The New Moral World (1836) under ‘Five Fundamental Facts’, of which the following two were crucial:

1. Man is a compound being, whose character is formed of his constitution or organization at birth, and of the effects of external circumstances acting upon that organization, which effects continue to operate upon and to influence him from birth to death.

5. Nevertheless, the constitution of every infant, except in the case of organic disease, is capable of being formed or matured, either into a very inferior, or a very superior being, according to the qualities of the external circumstances allowed to influence that constitution from birth.

He tried to provide social training in an educationally stimulating environment suited to the age and interests of the children in his infant school at New Lanark. By contemporary standards his school was child-centred, and it can be justly described as the first in the developmental tradition of primary education. This account is taken from his autobiography by A. L. Morton (1962, p. 103), where Owen explained the instructions he gave to the two untrained teachers, James Buchanan and Molly Young:

they were on no account ever to beat any one of the children, or to threaten them in any manner of word or action, or to use abusive terms; but were always to speak to them with a pleasant countenance, and in a kind manner and tone of voice. That they should tell the infants and children (for they had all from one to six years old under their charge) that they must on all occasions do all they could to make their play-fellows happy ... The schoolroom ... was furnished with paintings, chiefly of animals, with maps, and often supplied with natural objects from the gardens, fields and woods—the examination and explanation of which always excited their curiosity and created an animated conversation between the children and their instructors ...

Singing, dancing, marching to music, fife-playing and geography featured in this infant school curriculum from which books were excluded, and the children spent three hours in the open playground. In effect, it was a combined nursery-infant school, but later the four- to six-year-olds were given a separate room from the two- to four-year-olds. At six or seven children moved to the schoolroom. They left school for the mill when they were ten. The school was part of Owen's model factory settlement with workers’ flats, canteen, recreational facilities and an evening institute.

Infant school societies

The New Lanark Infant School attracted many visitors. Among them was the Radical Member of Parliament, Henry Brougham. As a result, he and other Radicals sponsored the first English infant school, opened in 1818 at Brewer's Green in Westminster, with James Buchanan as master. In 1820 Samuel Wilderspin was appointed master of the second opened at Spitalfields by Brougham's friend Joseph Wilson; his brother, the vicar of Walthamstow, was responsible for the third in 1824. Unlike Owen's at New Lanark, these London infant schools were in the poorest urban environment: this may partly account for the transformation of the English model into a much more rigid instrument for instruction and discipline, where Owen's methods were divorced from his concept of education and community welfare. Moreover, the Walthamstow school was intended to prepare children for the National Society school at seven.

By 1824 enough interest had been aroused in infant schools for the London Infant School Society to be formed, with the object of training infant teachers. A site was never found for the proposed modern school where students were to practise teaching, and the lack of any infant teacher training in England remained a major problem. The Society did much to promote the founding of further infant schools and continued to advertise till 1828, but had ceased its activities by 1835.

Local infant school societies were formed in several industrial towns, as in Leicester in 1828. There the project nearly foundered on the denominational issue, one High Tory clergyman ‘objecting to children being taken from their parents’ care at so early an age’ (Patterson, 1954, 161). Dissenters were usually more prominent than members of the Established Church in promoting infant schools, but the religious issue was seldom a serious obstacle and many local societies were interdenominational. The London adaptations of the infant school were the models which local societies copied, for they were described in manuals written in the 1820s for the guidance of infant teachers by Samuel Wilderspin of Spitalfi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables
• Preface
• Part One : The Nineteenth Century
• Part Two: The Twentieth Century
• Further reading
• Bibliography