Hi Tor,
Nice to hear from you again. Thank you for writing so much about the
origins of English mass education and for the URL you pointed me, too. All
this was most interesting but doesn't really meet the point I was making.
This is that the State education system is failing to match youngsters with
jobs. And it has now had over 100 years with increasing expenditures for it
to try and do so. It is not only failing to match many youngsters with the
more traditional dead-end jobs, it is palpably failing to supply enough
youngsters to fill the tens of thousands of high-skill jobs which the
country needs. And this, of course, also applies to most of the western
European countries, too. All of them have now have hundreds of housing
estates of deep despair and high unemployment among the youth who live there.
I was prompted to write about this when hearing of new riots taking place
in the last two days between unemployed black and white young people in
Oldham, and between them and the police.
I will grant you this: I cannot be certain that had fee-paying education of
the 1880/90s continued without State interference, then there would have
been better educational standards today. However, what I am certain about
is that, for something like a quarter of our children today the State
education system is badly failing. At the age of 11 over a quarter of our
children cannot read, and cannot do simple arithmetic like subtraction and
multiplication. Even a quarter of our newly-qualified teachers cannot pass
tests in mathematics of the level that all schoolchildren are supposed to
reach by the age of 16. In about a quarter of our secondary schools about
75% of the children play truant to a greater or lesser extent, and at any
one time about 20% of the children will be missing. (They'll have nothing
to do and will hang around shops and make themselves a nuisance but even
this is more exciting than being at school to them.) In about a quarter of
our schools only a handful of parents turn up at Parents Days when they are
supposed to be talking to teachers about their children's performance.
A century of State education has produced a huge divide between about 35%
of secondary schoolchildren who enjoy school and are well-motivated by
their parents, about 35-40% of children who are indifferently motivated but
have just about enough stamina to see it through (and about half of these
will now go to university and see that through even though they will emerge
with mediocre, not to say, worthless, degrees that are not fit for any
particular job), and about 30% (mainly males) who, at 16 years of age, are
hardly educated at all and will either be infrequently employed for the
rest of their lives or will spend many years in prison before sttling down
at the age of 35 or so. Nine out of ten State schools are short of
teachers, and almost all schools in sink estates and inner city areas have
substantial shortages of staff (of the order of 10-25%) which can only be
patched up on a day-to-day basis by supply-teachers sent by employment
agencies.
There is a massive tragedy taking place among our children and young
people. The State system has been taking away power from parents for a
century, so it's no wonder that at least 25% of parents now have no
responsibility or interest in the future of their own children. I cannot
imagine that a fee-paying educational system could be any worse. I am far
from suggesting that the whole existing apparatus be scrapped forthwith. A
de-registering of teacher qualifications (subject to basic curriculum
safeguards for funding) plus a voluntary voucher system plus funding for
parent and community-sponsored schools. I am afraid, however, that none of
this will happen until things get a good deal worse. Which they will. But
many more years will have been wasted.
Keith H
At 19:14 28/05/01 +0200, you wrote:
>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]
>
>
___________________________________________________________________
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]
________________________________________________________________________
