Abstract
Two basic questions are pursued in this chapter. Firstly, what were the purposes of schooling for working-class boys and girls? And secondly, because it cannot be assumed that intentions translated directly into practices, how were these reflected in schooling provision and enrolment? Neither question is singular in its focus; each contains a number of dimensions to include a whole variety of views on the merits (or otherwise) and purposes of schooling for girls and for boys of this class, and a whole variety of determinants, both ideological and pragmatic, that informed school provision and attendance. Stephens has warned that ‘the nature and experience of elementary (working-class) education varied so much from place to place that to talk of a national condition is to distort reality’,1 and for that reason the focus on industrial Lancashire and rural Norfolk and Suffolk is continued, with comparisons between the two regions allowing commonalities of purpose and practice to be clarified, whilst also enabling the provision and operation of schooling directly to be linked to conditions of women and girls’ family, community and work-place experiences discussed in Chapters 1 and 2.
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Notes
Stephens, W. B., Education, Literacy and Society 1830–1870: the geography of diversity in provincial England, Manchester, 1987, p. 2.
Sanderson, M., ‘Social Change and Elementary Education in Industrial Lancashire 1780–1840’, Northern History, University of Leeds, vol. 3, 1968, 136;
Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 321.
Also see Johnson, R., ‘Really Useful Knowledge: radical education and working-class culture 1790–1845’, in Dale et al., Education and the State volume II: Politics, Patriarchy and Practice, Lewes, 1981, pp. 12–13.
Sanderson, M., ‘Literacy and Social Mobility in the Industrial Revolution in England’, Past and Present, 56, 1972; Sanderson, M., ‘Social Change’, p. 136.
Letter to James Martin MP quoted in Perkin, H., The Origins of Modern Society, London, 1969, 1972 edn., p. 195.
Hannah More, in a letter to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1801, in Digby, A., and Searby, P., Children, Schools and Society in Nineteenth-Century England, Basingstoke, 1981, p. 75.
Johnson, R., ‘Notes on the Schooling of the English Working Class’, in Dale, R., et al., Schooling and Capitalism, London, 1976, p. 49.
The Co-operative Magazine, 1826, quoted by Taylor, B., Eve and the New Jerusalem, 1983, p. 233.
Quoted in Laqueur, T. W., Religion and Respectability: Sunday schools and working-class culture, New Haven, 1976, p. 90.
Quoted in Purvis , Hard Lessons: the lives and education of working-class women in nineteenth-century England, Cambridge, 1989, p. 101.
Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 183; Johnson, ‘Really Useful Knowledge’, p. 96.
Purvis, J., ‘The Double Burden of Class and Gender in the Schooling of Working-class Girls in Nineteenth-century England, 1800–1870’, in Barton, L., and Walkes, S., Schools, Teachers and Teaching, Lewes, 1981, p. 108.
Bryant, M., review of Purvis, ‘Hard Lessons’, History of Education Quarterly, 31, 1, 1991, 136–7.
Over half the school population of Norfolk and Suffolk attended school without payment in 1820. Marsden, W. E., Unequal Educational Provision in England and Wales- the Nineteenth-Century Roots, London, 1987, p. 46.
Stephens, op. cit., p. 37. Also see Stephens, W. B., Regional Variations in Education During the Industrial Revolution: The Task of the Local Historian, Leeds, 1973, p. 4.
Sanderson, M. ‘The National and British School Societies in Lancashire: the roots of Anglican supremacy’, in Cook, T. (ed.), Local Studies and the History of Education, London, 1972, 12–13.
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© 1997 Meg Gomersall
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Gomersall, M. (1997). Schooling for Social Control? The Early Nineteenth Century. In: Working-class Girls in Nineteenth-century England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375376_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375376_4
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