Abstract
Secondary education in England in the second half of the nineteenth century was highly diverse and differentiated, but it broadly maintained a social position between the elite education of the great independent or public schools, and the new forms of mass elementary education provided under the auspices of the State. This was the heartland of English middle-class education, provided through a large number of locally endowed grammar schools. However, although it could boast fine traditions and ideals, local provision of grammar schools tended increasingly to suffer from a lack of organization and resources. The potential for the State to provide support for secondary education on a national basis attracted many, but others were resistant. In spite of the recommendations of the Taunton commission of the 1860s and the clarion calls of Matthew Arnold to organize secondary education under the auspices of the State, it was not until the Education Act of 1902 that this major step was achieved.
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Notes
Fred Clarke, Education and Social Change: An English Interpretation (London, Sheldon Books, 1940), p. 10.
For examples of a massive literature in this area, see Rupert Wilkinson, The Prefects: British Leadership and the Public School Tradition (London, Oxford University Press, 1964);
J.R. de S. Honey, Tom Browns Universe: The Development of the Public School Community in the 19th Century (London, Millington Books, 1977);
J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (London, Falmer, 1986);
Brian Simon, The Two Nations and the Educational Structure, 1780–1870 (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1960);
Brian Simon, The Politics of Educational Reform, 1920–1940 (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1974). Two of my earlier works, Philosophers and Kings: Education for Leadership in Modern England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Failing the Ordinary Child? The Theory and Practice of Working Class Secondary Education (Buckingham, Open University Press, 1998) explored these “elite” and “mass” traditions respectively.
Peter Searby, “Foreword,” in P. Searby (ed.), Educating the Victorian Middle Class (Leicester, History of Education Society, 1982), p. vi.
See esp. W.E. Marsden, Unequal Educational Provision in England and Wales: The Nineteenth-Century Roots (London, Woburn, 1987);
W.E. Marsden, Educating the Respectable: A Study of Fleet Road School, Hampstead, 1879–1903 (London, Woburn, 1991);
David Reeder, “The Reconstruction of Secondary Education in England, 1869–1920,” in D. Muller, F. Ringer, and B. Simon (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction 1870–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 133–50.
Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London, Virago, 2005), p. 27.
Burton J. Bledstein, “Introduction: Storytellers to the Middle Class,” in B.J. Bledstein and R.D. Johnston (eds.), The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the America Middle Class (London, Routledge, 2001), p. 5.
Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003), p. 34.
Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, vol. 1, Education of the Senses (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 17, 67.
A.H. Halsey, “The Relation between Education and Social Mobility with Reference to the Grammar School since 1944” (PhD thesis, University of London, 1954).
Felicity Hunt, “Social Class and the Grading of Schools: Realities in Girls’ Secondary Education, 1880–1940,” in June Purvis (ed.), The Education of Girls and Women (Leicester, History of Education Society, 1985), pp. 27–46.
Barry Blades, “Deacon’s School, Peterborough, 1902–1926: A study of the Social and Economic Function of Secondary Schooling” (PhD thesis, University of London, 2003).
F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London, Fontana, 1988)
Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England1918–1951 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 104.
See, e.g., Alan Kidd and David Nicholls (eds.), The Making of the British Middle Class? Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1998);
and Alan Kidd and David Nicholls (eds.), Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle Class Identity in Britain 1800–1940 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999).
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1950 (London, Hutchinson, 1987), pp. 28, 35.
See also, e.g., R.J. Morris, “A Year in the Public Life of the British Bourgeoisie,” in Colls and Rodger (eds.), Cities of Ideas, pp. 121–43
Geoffrey Crossick, “From Gentlemen to the Residuum: Languages of Social Description in Victorian Britain,” in Penelope Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (London, Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 173.
For example, Richard Trainor, “The Middle Class,” in Martin Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. III, 1840–1950 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 673–713.
Fiona Devine and Mike Savage, “The Cultural Turn: Sociology and Class Analysis,” in Fiona Devine, Mike Savage, John Scott, and Rosemary Crompton (eds.), Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyles (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 1–23;
Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London, Routledge, 2004).
See also Diane Reay, “Thinking Class, Making Class,” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26/1 (2005), pp. 139–45.
For example, Fiona Devine, Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children to Good Good Jobs (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004).
See also Andy Furlong, “Making Middle Class Advantage,” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26/5 (2005), pp. 683–85.
See, e.g., Michael Grenfell, Bourdieu and Education: Acts of Practical Theory (London, Falmer, 1998);
and Nicholas Brown and Jane Szeman (eds.), Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture (Lenham, MA; Renman and Littlefield, 2000).
Sally Power et al, Education and the Middle Class (Buckingham, Open University Press, 2003).
Stephen Ball, Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage (London, Routledge Falmer, 2003), p. 2.
Sally Tomlinson, Education in a Post-Welfare Society (2nd edition, Maidenhead, Open University Press, 2005), p. 173.
See, e.g., Felicity Hunt, “Divided Aims: The Educational Implications of Opposing Ideologies in Girls’ Secondary Schooling, 1850–1940,” in Felicity Hunt (ed.), Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850–1950 (London, Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 3–21; and A.M. Wolpe, “The Official Ideology of Education for Girls,” in M. Flude and J. Ahier (eds.), Educability, Schools and Ideology (London, Croom Helm), pp. 138–59.
Joyce Senders Pedersen, The Reform of Girls Secondary and Higher Education in Victorian England: A Study of Elites and Educational Change (London, Garland, 1987), chapter 9.
John Roach, Secondary Education in England 1870–1902: Public Activity and Private Enterprise (London, Routledge, 1991), p. 229.
Matthew Arnold, “Schools and Universities on the Continent,” in R.H. Super (ed.), Schools and Universities on the Continent (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1964); first written as a report to the Taunton Commission, p. 35.
Matthew Arnold, “A French Eton, or Middle-Class Education and the State,” in Peter Smith and Geoffrey Summerfield (eds.), Matthew Arnold and the Education of a New Order (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 98.
Matthew Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” in J. Dover Wilson (ed.), Culture and Anarchy (1869) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 27.
See, e.g., Frank M. Turner, “Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?,” in G.W. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 61–81; and James Bowen, “Education, Ideology and the Ruling Class: Hellenism and English Public Schools in the Nineteenth Century,” Ibid., pp. 161–86.
John Roach, A History of Secondary Education in England, 1800–1870 (London, Longman, 1986), p. 261.
See also, e.g., T.W. Bamford, Thomas Arnold (London, The Cresset Press, 1960),
and Michael McCrum, Thomas Arnold, Head Master: A Reassessment (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989), for further details.
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857 / London, Dent, 1949), p. 51.
J.R. de S. Honey, Tom Browns Universe: The Development of the Public School in the 19th Century (London, Millington Books, 1977);
see also, e.g., Rupert Wilkinson, The Prefects: British Leadership and the Public School Tradition (London, Oxford University Press, 1964).
W.E. Marsden, “Schools for the Urban Lower Middle Class: Third Grade or Higher Grade?,” in Peter Searby (ed.), Educating the Victorian Middle Class (Leicester, History of Education Society, 1982), p. 55.
See David Reeder, “The Reconstruction of Secondary Education in England, 1869–1920,” in D. Muller, F. Ringer, and B. Simon (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 135–50;
and Brian Simon, “David Reeders Alternative System’: The School Boards in the 1890s,” in R. Colls and R. Rodger (eds.), Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain, 1800–2000 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004), pp. 178–206.
Charles Dickens, The Personal History of David Copperfield (1850/1948, Oxford, Oxford University Press), p. 77.
See also, e.g., Gary McCulloch, Documentary Research in Education, History and the Social Sciences (London, RoutledgeFalmer, 2004).
F.G. Walcott, The Origins of Culture and Anarchy: Matthew Arnold and Popular Education in England (Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1970), p. 113.
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© 2007 Gary McCulloch
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McCulloch, G. (2007). Middle Class Education and the State. In: Cyril Norwood and the Ideal of Secondary Education. Secondary Education in a Changing World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603523_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603523_2
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