Keith Hudson wrote:
>
> The State take-over of private schools which catered for over 90% of the
> working population in the 1860-1890s in England was the beginning of the
> end for truly democratic education in which parents had some say what
> curricula they wanted and some choice of schools. Previously, there wasn't
> much choice and schools varied enormously in quality, but they were real
> choices and the real power was where it should be -- with the parents
I will present some evidence about the tragic situation for English
Education before 1890.
It is from http://aghistory.ucdavis.edu/wp104.htm
If there is a standout among the countries shown here, it is the lagging
education of English children before 1900. Figure 3 dramatizes this lag
by showing England-Wales advancing in the lower right-hand corner, with
strikingly little commitment to education for so rich a country. The
English lag did not go unnoticed at the time. In 1839 Dean Henry Alford
of the Church of England rightly complained that
"Prussia is before us; Switzerland is before us; France is
before us. There is no record of any people on earth so highly
civilized, so abounding in arts and comforts, and so grossly generally
ignorant as the English." (As quoted in Hammond and Hammond 1917, p.
55.)
England and Wales especially lagged behind in the period between
mid-century and 1891. Only thereafter did they begin to catch up
rapidly, catching the global leaders by 1910 in primary-school
enrollments, though not yet in expenditures per pupil.
*********************************************************************
WHY?
basic case against mass schooling was given a classic English
expression in Parliament in 1807, when a Parochial School Bill to
provide tax-based elementary schools was introduced by Samuel Whitbread.
Among those who successfully opposed it in the House of Commons was
Davies Giddy, who later became President of the Royal Society:
"[G]iving education to the labouring classes of the poor ...
would ... be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach
them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants
in agriculture, and other laborious employment to which their rank in
society had destined them; instead of teaching them subordination, it
would render them factious and refractory, as was evident in the
manufacturing counties; it would enable them to read seditious
pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity; it
would render them insolent to their superiors .... Beside, ... it would
go to burden the country with a most enormous expence, and to load the
industrious orders of society with still heavier imposts."
(Cobbett?s Parliamentary Debates [Hansard], 1807, vol. IX, pp.
798-799.)
Three premises behind this classic statement were all correct. Yes,
education would cause laborers to leave agriculture for better jobs.
Yes, education was seditious, in the sense that it would raise public
opposition to landed Tory supremacy. And yes, paying for mass education
would mean more taxes.
Such attitudes were not an invention of English Tories alone. Indeed,
the same could be found on the part of propertied conservatives in
practically any country and century. Carl Kaestle has plausibly argued
that the fruits of this view depended on the social terrain on which it
was cast. While landed conservatives in, say, Kansas might echo the same
arguments, they were compelled by their different social environment to
yield to that opposing argument, that mass schooling was needed to
keep the peace (Kaestle 1976, pp. 184-186). The theory that Tory
opposition determined the pace of progress in schooling thus makes a
conditional political prediction, namely that landed Tory opposition
would block education only where it had the power to do so. In what
follows, we relate its share of power inversely to the share of men who
voted.
'''''''''''''''''''''
DEMOCRACY
The rise of suffrage apparently accelerated the rise of primary
schooling. The solid line in Figure 4 traces out such a democratic
picture, based on Equation (1) in Appendix Table C1. Figure 4?s
electoral spectrum starts with non-democracies, in which nobody voted
effectively, at the origin. Prewar non-democracies from the
21-country sample include the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Japan, the
Mediterranean, and Latin America. Creating an elite democracy in which
fewer than 40 percent of adult men voted brought no more schooling than
the average non-democracy. Examples of such elite democracies in the
late nineteenth century were the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and
Sweden. But practically all countries where most men voted had
significantly more primary schooling than in the average non-democracy,
other things equal.
----------------------
In fact, the rise of primary
schooling came from public funding, which in turn came from critical
votes. In most cases those critical votes took place within a context of
widespread suffrage. The great rise of French enrollments in the 1870s
and 1880s was preceded by the jump to near-universal adult male suffrage
in 1848. England?s catch-up after 1891 was preceded not on by the Fees
Act of 1891 and the Forster Education Act of 1870, but by the extension
of suffrage in the first three Reform Acts. Nearly-universal white male
suffrage in the United States and Canada set the stage for local
tax-based funding of a heavily public school system, and similarly in
Australia and New Zealand. Only in Prussia might the sequence seem to
have been reversed, on which more in a moment.
***********************************************
B. The English Delay
England?s lag in primary and secondary education between the 1850s and
the 1890s is puzzling at first glance, but can be explained at least in
part. So can the speed with which England nearly caught up with the
leaders by World War I.
Aside from the delay in British democracy, what flow of history produced
that educational lag, and what changed the picture soon thereafter?
Parliament debated education bills over the entire century, so that
there was no one defining moment of Britain?s conversion to universal
tax-financed public education (Sturt 1967, West 1970, Sutherland 1973,
Wardle 1976, Jones 1977, Mitch 1992). The opposition included an strong
defense of private "voluntary" education, along with the usual
established-church fears that public education meant secular education.
The core problem was what to do about educating the poorest children.
The Church felt it had the sole right to educate them, yet delivered
little education. Legislating small grants to the voluntary societies
for the purpose of teaching poor children caused more controversy than
education. Similarly, local authorities delivered little schooling.
Education bills and commissions came and went.
There was at least some relationship of the rise of schooling to the
rise of electoral democracy in nineteenth-century Britain, as Figure 4
would have predicted. In particular, the extension of voting rights
under the Second Reform Act (1867/8), the passage of the secret ballot
(1872), and the Third Reform Act (1884/5) were followed by the greatest
educational breakthroughs of the century. After the Second Reform Act
had extended voting rights from 19 percent of men to about 31 percent,
touching the upper artisan occupations, Forster?s Elementary Education
Act finally passed in 1870 (Jones 1977, pp. 48-67). The 1870 Act ,
however, was a convoluted compromise, moving in steps toward compulsory
education without having solved the basic problem of public school
finance. After the Third Reform Act extended the franchise from about 31
percent up to about 63 percent of men in the United Kingdom,
Tory and Church opposition began to retreat. After further complicated
maneuvers, the Fees Act of 1891 finally produced the momentum needed for
universal free primary education (Sutherland 1973, pp. 263-347). At that
time British educational progress still lagged behind the French by
about a decade, but the gap was closed over the next two decades.
Another source of the British lag is suggested by the decentralization
motif already introduced. If the delay in electoral reform held back
universal education at the national level, why didn?t education-minded
local governments step forward and supply their own schools based on
local taxes? That worked moderately well for education-minded communes
in France, and even better for Prussian and North American school
districts. Here is the curious episode of the dog that did not bark in
English educational history.
Parliament had quietly erected barriers to local government initiative
that effectively blocked the creation of local tax-based schools. True,
in the early nineteenth century Parliament had set up templates for
local organizations to petition Parliament at low expense, in the form
of permissive legislation and model-clause acts. But there were still
high hurdles in the way of a locality that wanted to set up a new
institution. First, a locality would still have to get a Parliament
stacked in favor of landed and church interests to approve new local
taxes for schools. Second, the initiative had to come from a local group
according to a weighted-voting scheme. Even at the local level, voting
rights on bills to be submitted to Parliament were in proportion to
property held, with a high minimum property ownership for having any
local vote at all, in imitation of the property-biased requirements of
the Sturges-Bourne Acts of 1818. Third, this weighted-voting provision
was re-formalized in the new poor law unions set up by the Poor Law
Reform of 1834. Fourth, the unions, a potential fresh departure in local
government, were not allowed to deal with education and health (Prest
1990, 1-17). Thus did Parliament keep hold of the reins of local
government.
Britain?s dependence on central government and wholly private sources
for school funding departed from the typical practice of the nations
that led in early mass schooling. As Table 8 shows, central government
played less role, and local taxes a greater role, in the nations that
led in primary schooling and in Italy, a nation that provided higher
support per child than its low per-capita income would have suggested.
Table 8 also leaves another clue to the role of local autonomy in the
growth of schooling within the United Kingdom. Scotland, which was
allowed to rely more on local taxation, surpassed England in schooling
enrollments. As of the 1870s Scotland resembled France, both in its
sources of school finance and in its enrollment rates.
>
> The State take-over of private schools which catered for over 90% of the
> working population in the 1860-1890s in England was the beginning of the
> end for truly democratic education in which parents had some say what
> curricula they wanted and some choice of schools. Previously, there wasn't
> much choice and schools varied enormously in quality, but they were real
> choices and the real power was where it should be -- with the parents and
> the local teachers and not the State. Since then parents have become
> steadily demotivated from taking an interest in their childrens' education;
> increasingly, post-puberty children now regard schools as dreary and boring
> places with little relevance either to their own interests or the world
> outside.
>
> For most parents and children in western countries, education is no longer
> something to be desirable in itself and to be strived for; it has become a
> "right". Also, it is regarded as something that can be poured from the
> school bottle into every recipient child so that he or she will
> automatically be able to have a job. But the job market doesn't obey the
> curricula of State schools. It has a life of its own and sometimes, as in
> the last decade or so as we leave the industrial age, it is very lively and
> changeable. China now has a chance of a whole new generation of highly
> motivated parents and children and, as a byproduct, being able to match its
> education system much more closely to the real world going on outside.
>
> Keith Hudson
> ___________________________________________________________________
>
> Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
> 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.online.no/~torforde/
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
