Keith Hudson wrote:
> My last paragraph to Tom Walker really summarises the point I was really
> trying to make -- that the English educational system, fee-paying though it
> was, was already comprehensive enough in the 1870s that it didn't need
> rescuing by the State (for the sake of economic productivity and national
> pride more than anything else).
>
According to Roy Strong did the government not do too much but not
enough to develop the educational system.
Roy Strong: "The Story of Britain" page 483:
"Nor did governments respond to what these new industries called for, a
far better educated workforce. Instead there were twenty years of
official inertia following the raising of the school leaving age to
fourteen in 1918. There it was to remain, in spite of a major report
recommending that it should be raised to fifteen in 1926. That was to be
implemented in 1939, but the war intervened. This failure in educational
policy sprang from a fear that if the working classes were educated they
would not want to work hard at long boring jobs. Indeed, it was believed
that it would erode their will to work at all. And, again looking
backwards, their education would only exacerbate the servant problem for
the upper classes."
The educational system that England had about 1870 closed down the
country. People were taught how to keep their places. The working class
children learnt to obey, they learnt passivity, the learnt to read,
because the ought to be able to read orders and instructions and the
Bible, but it was not considered important to teach the working class
children to write, because they ought not communicate, their voice was
best not heard. They should obey and not discuss.
And the upper classes learnt to be gentlemen: "The melting pot was the
public school in which the young of both the old and the new elite were
educated side by side to a common code of behavior and attitudes. The
attributes which had made up the Victorian entrepreneur, hard work,
moneymaking, inventiveness and a driving zeal for production, had to be
discarded in favour of those seen as appropriate to the gentleman, the
cultivation of style and the pursuits of leisure, along with those of
political service. This meant turning away the reality of a massively
urbanised society in favour of a cultural ideal which was rural,
epitomised in the country house, the shoot and hunt, the garden, and a
devotion to the past and its preservation as somehow embodying the true
spirit of England. This was to have fatal consequences in the new
century, contributing to the erosion of the country's economic dominance
which depended precisely on the virtues which had been rejected.
Technology, the new, and change, were all to be distrusted. The genius
of Britain was held to lie in innate conservatism and caution. Instead,
these attitudes were to contribute dramatically to its slide downhill."
(Page 461)
The conservative attitude seems to be embodied in Keith Hudson. And to
England this attitude was "to contribute dramatically to its slide
downhill."
The "Good old Days" is not the future, I hope.
--
All the best
Tor F�rde
http://home.sol.no/~torforde/
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
