An Education of Principle: the Later Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The theme of education as a vehicle for social control continued to be central to educational debates in the 1830s and 1840s, though with a less repressive, more creative concept of the sort of education most likely to create the harmonious social and political relations between the working classes and their social superiors that were seen to be so sorely needed. Against the arguments that educating the working classes had actually increased crime and sedition by enabling working people to read inflammatory literature, educational ‘experts’ from the ranks of Whig and Radical politicians and professional reformers such as the new factory inspectors put forward theories which saw the goal of mass education as primarily that of changing and reforming the people.¹ If attempts to train the children of working people in habits of obedience had proved unsuccessful — and the development of mass movements such as Chartism demonstrated that they had — then perhaps educating them in a ‘corrrect’ understanding of the economic and political ordering of society would lead them to abandon the ‘perverted’ and ‘irrational’ beliefs that underlay protest.