Hi Keith,
I think that historians disagree with you about the development of
primary education in England.
If you do not like "Ruling Britannia" by Glyn Williams & John Ramsden I
can take another book, without any statistics: "The Story of Britain" by
Roy Strong ISBN 0-7126-6546-3
>From page 413: "Until the Industrial Revolution the state had played no
part in education. Indeed any form of for the lower orders was
considered potentially dangerous, giving them ideas above their station.
By the 1830s that view had shifted, in the face of ghettoes of
brutalised and irreligious working class hordes in the new industrial
towns. Education began to be seen as a means of taming them, ensuring
that they understood their place in society and thus averting any
revolutionary potetial. The ideal whereby to achieve this objective were
seen to be church schools, and the church naturally responded to what
seemed a means to extend their sway within the new industrial cities. I
1833 government for the first time assigned a grant of �20,000 on a
pound for pound basis to religious bodies who would build schools.
(.......)
Every decision about education by government worked from the outset on
the basis of class division. As state aid for education had arrived as a
means of ensuring people kept their place in the scheme of things, it
was never seen, as it was to be seen in the following century, as an
instrument of social mobility, whereby the lower classes could ascend.
Instead the schools were catergorised in a descending hierarchy
according to social status.
(.....)
(Page 415) In the 1850s teachers training colleges emerged and the
funding of elementary education rose rapidly. By 1862 it had reached
�840,000. School still, however, came second to either helping in the
home or casual work, and many children had little more than three or
four years' of schooling. But litteracy was steadily rising. The great
watershed came in 1870. Forster's Education Act laid down that the state
had a duty to provide schools in enough locations so that no child
should be denied an education. It went on to say that in certain
circumstances the building and operational costs of a school could fall
on the public purse. Out of this rose the Board Schools which gradually
outstripped in quality those run by voluntary church organisations. In
1880 school attendance was made compulsory, in 1891 elementary education
was to be free, and eight years later the leaving age was laid down as
twelve."
I do not think that the educational situation in England was good, with
only few tears of education to a considerable part of the children.
Keith Hudson wrote:
>
> Hi Tor,
>
> Among old-timers on FW, I think we can speak bluntly, so please don't take
> offence at the following.
>
> At 04:27 11/08/00 +0200, you wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I think that Keith Hudson wrote that the educational standard of England
> >was better about 1870 than today.
> >I looked up some numbers about this in a history book called "Ruling
> >Britannia" written by Glyn Williams & John Ramsden, published by Longman
> >in 1990.
> >>From page 280: "In 1869 about 30 per cent of children were at schools
> >receiving government grants and inspected by government officers to
> >ensure efficiency, about 23 per cent were at schools without grants and
> >inspection, and the rest were not at school at all - mainly in the
> >expanding cities. Most schools were run by voluntary bodies, mainly
> >those associated with the Church of England."
>
> I don't know where the above authors get their dubious statistics from but
> there are all sorts of ways of manipulating figures using school-leaving
> ages and this is what they've done in my opinion. Indeed, it was by
> manipulating these in Parliament that the civil service and some members of
> the Government brought in State education in the first place.
>
> But let me quote figures which are unequivocal. They are not statistics so
> much as statements of fact. The Royal Commission on Popular Education
> reported that, in 1861, there were 2,535,462 children at school out of a
> school-age population of 2,655,767. On my calculator that works out at
> 95.47% -- as opposed to the 53% for 1869 implied by Williams and Ramsden.
> The Registrar General at the time wrote the following:
>
> " . . . the number of children under tuition at the present time [1869] . .
> . is not far short of the highest proportion practicable." (quoted in E. G.
> West, "Education and the Industrial Revolution", 1975)
The ordinary school for the lower orders in England in the eighteenth
century was the sunday school. Were they included in the Royal
Commission's number?
Roy Porter writes about that time in "English Society in the Eighteenth
Century": "Literacy rates were gently rising (though they slumped again
among the masses in the years of rampant population increase and social
disruption during the industrial revolution). Almost all males from the
middle class and above were literate, but little more than half the
population of labouring men (women were proportionally less literate).
(page 167).
>
>
> >In the long run it was the secularised board schools, paid by the
> >government, which gave all English children the opportunity to attend
> >school.
>
> I'm sorry, it was absolutely not the case. As I've already shown above, all
> English schoolchildren already had an opportunity to attend school (except
> for brief periods during harvest-times in the countryside when parents
> drafted their children into the local farms for a few days) and were doing
> so at the 95% level. Indeed, even half a century earlier, the
> Parliamentary enquiry into the education of children "Report on the
> Education of the Lower Orders" (1816) found that:
>
> "Your Committee are happy in being able to state, that in all returns, and
> in all other information laid before them, there is the most unquestionable
> evidence that the anxiety of the poor for education continues not only
> unabated, but daily increasing; that it extends to all parts of the country."
>
> And, as a reminder, all of this was schooling was fee-paying, except for
> the very poorest parents who were subsidised by the rest.
>
> >"Overall educational provision improved and illiteracy which had been a
> >major problem now declined." (page 281)
>
> It did not and the literacy rate didn't change when the State schools came
> in. By 1882, despite large and growing expenditures by the government, the
> 3,200 government schools were half-empty with well over 1,000,000 excess
> places. Why? Because the standard of education in the fee-paying church
> schools and the charity schools was so much higher.
According to Roy Strong did the Board Schools outstrip in quality those
run by the voluntary church organisations. What the last ones taught was
obedience and religion.
>
> >TABLE 15.1 Growth in Educational Provisions
> >
> >Year Government Expenditure Numbers in Inspected Schools
> >1870 �1.6 m. 1.7 m.
> >1880 �4.0 m. 3.6 m.
> >1890 �5.8 m. 4.7 m.
> >1900 �12.2 m. 5.7 m.
> >
> >It is evident that it was the state which built an educational system in
> >England which reached the whole population.
>
> The above chart should be headed "TABLE 15.1 Growth in Educational
> EXPENDITURE" which is an entirely different kettle of fish.. I think I've
> already explained why government expenditures went up -- because the
> nation-state ideologists of their day* spent public funds like a man with
> no arms to encourage children into State education. This didn't succeed so
> the Government spent even more money in the years following 1891 by making
> education free. This finally swamped the church and charity schools.
>
> >And it is really bad if it
> >is breaking down. But I guess that the situation today is still better
> >than back in 1870, when illiteracy was a major problem.
>
> I'm glad you're guessing now, Tor, but you're still wrong. Not only was the
> literacy rate higher in 1870 than it is now, it was almost the same as now
> (as regards boys) 145 years earlier! (This was at a time when mostly boys
> went to school because, as future mothers, girls were considered not to
> need education) In 1725, the literacy rate among men was 63% and 38% among
> women. (R. S. Schofield, "Dimensions of Illiteracy: Explorations in
> Economic History, 1973, Vol 10)
>
> >Teachers' wages have rather low in Norway for some years now, and few
> >students have gone to the Teachers Training Colleges, but this year the
> >government began a four year escalating plan to improve the wages of
> >primary school teachers, and this year the wages grew by 30.000
> >Norwegian kroner, that is about 4.000 US dollars.
>
> I don't doubt your information about Norway, Tor! It's interesting that the
> Norwegian gvoernment are having exactly the same difficulties as ours.
> They'll buy their way out of trouble for a while but at the end of the day
> the situation will become worse and graduates won't enter State education
> at almost any price.
>
> Keith
>
> * These were nation-state ideologists, not educational ones. (We've
> suffered both sorts since then!) They were on a State education jag because
> they were frightened of the economic strength of France and Prussia where
> State education had been started since about 1830. Curiously (or perhaps
> not so curiously), Britain's relative economic strength began to decline
> from 1891 onwards!
>
> >
> >
> >--
> >All the best
> >Tor F�rde
> >http://home.sol.no/~torforde/
> >email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> >
> ________________________________________________________________________
>
> Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
> 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
> Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ________________________________________________________________________
--
All the best
Tor F�rde
http://home.sol.no/~torforde/
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
