Pauper Education

Abstract

To provide an appropriate if rudimentary education for pauper children was a major concern of the Poor Law throughout the nineteenth century. Pauperism was held to be an hereditary disease, endemic among a substantial section of the labouring class. A sound basic education, preparing them for their future station in life, was the most effective way of breaking this chain of hereditary pauperism, at least among the children resident in workhouses. The much larger number of pauper children whose families received relief outside the workhouse were more difficult to accommodate and tended in practice to be left out of serious account. For orphaned and deserted children who would spend their entire childhood in a Poor Law institution education needed to encompass all aspects of a child’s upbringing. A curriculum which centred upon oakum picking, the economically worthless task-work imposed on the adults, might inculcate habits of industry and docility, useful virtues for a well-conducted working class, but in all other respects it was defective. It provided no kind of skill or useful information, and it was considered by Poor Law reformers to be bad moral and social training, for it made work seem distasteful and punitive, rather than useful and satisfying. To teach genuine industrial skills, diligent habits and an appreciation of the circumstances and duties of their future social role was a very different matter, to which much attention was devoted by the Poor Law authorities after 1834.

‘Well! You have come here to be educated and taught a useful trade …’

’so you’ll begin to pick oakum tomorrow morning at six o’clock.’

Oliver Twist