Social Equity and Industrial Need: A Dilemma of English Education since 1945

Abstract

In 1933 a senior civil servant of the Board of Education after an acrimonious discussion with two Chief Education Officers wrote an aide memoire. He reflected and deplored that ‘what was quite clear was that they regard the matter almost entirely from the point of view of the right of the individual boy or girl to rise and very little, if at all, from the point of view of the organisation and needs of industry’.¹ The civil servant in recording this highlighted an essential dilemma of attitudes to the educational system which underlies contemporary English development, particularly since 1945. This was the dilemma of the ‘right to rise’ versus the ‘needs of industry’ as the 1930s official put it. It is not inevitable that there should be a conflict between the social justice and industrial efficiency motives in education. For the Edwardians it was not so. Indeed the advocates of education as the ‘ladder of opportunity’ through which able children of modest background could rise were also propagandists for the ‘national efficiency’ movement of the pre-1914 years. For Sydney Webb, Sir Robert Morant, Viscount Bryce, Lord Haldane and the rest the one set of attitudes was an essential part of the other since rising talent of whatever social origins would renourish all elites including those of science and industry.²