Education

Abstract

At the dawn of the century de Montmorency wrote the first historical study to examine the involvement of the state and education. He did so to criticise what he saw as the lack of a national education in the nineteenth century and to encourage ‘the work of reconstruction and organisation (which) has been taken up by statesmen’ in his own day (de Montmorency, 1902, p. vii). In truth the British, in contradistinction to the French and Germans, prefer to speak of ‘government’ rather than the ‘state’. We also have a greater belief in the importance of civil society and civic culture — the world of business, work, family, leisure, religion — than in the power or desirability of the state to change things (Harris, 1990a). Accordingly the intervention of the state in education is a relatively late development. The turning of England into a literate society for the first time in the first two thirds of the eighteenth century was achieved by charitable and church activity. The first government grant of 1833 and Factory Act of the same year was partly in response to the fall back in literacy in the industrial north. Even then the creation of modern mass literacy by the mid-Victorians was a triple joint enterprise. First, there were annual state grants for building and running schools and state inspectors, second the private money and organisation of Church societies and third, working-class schools run by self-employed teachers paid for by working-class parents themselves (Mitch, 1992). After 1870 the state began to take a more positive role. The local government School Boards (1870–1902) raised rates to build schools and enforce attendance which became nationally compulsory for the ages 5–10 from 1880 assisted by free education from 1891. At a higher level local government built technical colleges from 1889 and in the same year central government began making grants to universities. The state was becoming more involved with education and Paul Johnson reminds us that in a society in which most people had no personal contact with the state around 1900, children — through their teachers — were very unusual in having regular contact with public sector employees (Johnson, 1994b, p. 479).