Elementary Education: the state intervenes

Everyone was agreed that any education worth the name had a moral and therefore a religious core. But if religious, whose denomination? Anglicans, as members of the established church, argued that any school named in law and supported by government funds should be theirs. Nonconformists and Roman Catholics hotly disputed this. It was for this reason that there were two voluntary day school societies, joined by a third, the Catholic Poor School Committee, in 1849. This was the sectarian divide that dominated developments in elementary education up to 1870 and arguably 1902.

1. The Whig government in 1833 attempted to side step the issue by making a grant available to any voluntary school, of any or no denomination, that satisfied certain conditions of efficiency.
2. This was the beginning of a system of ‘giving to them that hath’. Government initiatives and funding were most needed in areas of ‘educational destitution’ where there were no middle class enthusiasts to start schools.
3. In 1839, therefore, the Whigs attempted to grasp the nettle of the ‘religious problem’ with a scheme that included grants to districts according to need and government training schools for teachers organised on a non-denominational basis. The Tories mobilised against it in both Commons and Lords and the opposition of almost the entire bench of bishops brought most of the scheme down to defeat.
4. In 1843 the Tories attempted to take the initiative in the education clauses of Graham’s Factory Bill creating Anglican-run factory schools. They faced a comparable storm from nonconformists and Catholics and likewise retreated.  Thereafter there was a stalemate with neither side strong enough to break through to a new system. The amount of grant continued to rise but still the money when only to localities already making an effort. This was only broken by the Education Act of 1870.

Public provision for elementary education began with a grant of £20,000 in 1833 in aid of school buildings. This was channelled inevitably through the two religious societies because these alone could show any degree of efficiency. 1833 also saw the Factory Act that banned children under eight from textile factories altogether and limited the hours of children between eight and thirteen to eight daily. This was continued in the Mines Act 1842 and Factory Act 1844. The idea behind this legislation was that if there were no work for children to do lawfully, they would go to school instead. Middle class enthusiasts broadly agreed that working class children should be in school, not at work. On the question of which school they should attend and whether government aid could be deployed to ensure that there were schools within the reach of all working class children, major divisions arose because of religion.  The debacle of 1839, where non-sectarian developments were effectively vetoed by the churches, did result in the creation of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education. Opposition continued from the Church of England resulting in the celebrated ‘Concordat’ of 1840 under which the church authorities secured control of the appointment of the inspectors of state-aided schools and the right to frame the instructions for religious education, though not over non-Anglican schools. The most positive result of the Concordat was the appointment as secretary to the new Committee of Education of James Kay Shuttleworth.[1]

Resistance to state elementary education and the sectarian conflict made it impossible to start a national system according to the Chadwickian technique of a Royal Commission followed by a governing statute. A step-by-step approach was adopted, from the small grant of 1833 to the Privy Council Minutes of 1846 that governed the mid-century expansion. However, in the 1830s and 1840s there were two other roots from which a national system of primary education might have grown: the new Poor Law and the Factory Acts.

Poor law education. Chadwick always had education on his agenda as a depauperizing influence sharing the assumption that universal education would in some unexplained way cure unemployment and render poor relief largely unnecessary. His enthusiasm was shared by several of the Poor Law Assistant Commissioners, who believed that pauperism as well as crime could be eradicated by early training.  The architect of poor law education was James Phillips Kay (Kay-Shuttleworth as he called himself after his marriage). Son of a Rochdale cotton manufacturer, trained as a physician in Edinburgh, founder-member of the Manchester Statistical Society and a writer on social questions, he was recruited as Assistant Commissioner for Norfolk and Suffolk in 1835. He found little or not education for pauper children: some were sent to local schools, but always the cheapest and worst and there was no industrial training.

Kay began by persuading the more intelligent guardians to employ young trainee teachers. He claimed in his autobiography, that this improved the workhouse schools up to a point where the Guardians would be persuaded to take more interest in pauper education, and perhaps consent to the creation of school districts.  When Kay was appointed Secretary to the new Committee of Council on Education in 1839 he selected he selected an establishment in Norwood for his experiment in pauper education. In three years he turned it into a model for the district school movement and a nursery of pupil teachers for elementary schools. After 1842, however, Peel’s government slowed down the plans for district schools as it was not prepared to coerce the Unions: the movement never achieved more than three Metropolitan School Districts and six small rural ones.

The failure of the district-school movement was partly compensated by the growth of separate schools in the more enlightened Unions. By 1857, 57 of these were listed. Some smaller workhouses had detached schools on the workhouse site. School standards greatly improved after 1846 with the beginnings of poor law school inspection and the decline in the use of untrained pauper teachers.  Poor Law education never aspired to becoming a basis or a model for state elementary education. It was on too small a scale even to fulfil its own task. It was intended for workhouse children but there were, in 1855, some 277,000 children in families on outdoor relief not provided with any education except in refuges or mission or ‘ragged’ schools. Poor Law schools were the top grade in a hierarchy catering for the very lowest levels of society.

Factory schools. The factory school was not new in 1833. It can be traced back to the 1780s and was pioneered by enlightened manufacturers like Henry Ashton at Turton Mill, the Peel family and Robert Owen. The factory master was traditionally responsible for the education of his apprentices.  The Factory Act 1833 made millowners responsible for the education of children who were not their apprentices but lived with their own parents and this annoyed them. The Act did not require employers to provide education themselves, but only to obtain a certificate of school attendance for the previous week. Many progressive millowners were alienated by the education clauses: W.R.Greg, an enthusiastic organiser of factory schools, became a leading opponent of the Act.

After 1833 much of the enthusiasm for the voluntary provision of factory schooling was lost. Millowners unable or unwilling to provide their own schools tried to obey the law by sending their children to the local day schools. These arrangements were often unsuccessful. The section of factory education in the Newcastle Commission Report was largely an indictment of their inadequacies.  Factory education might have improved, at least in small mills, if the millowners had co-operated in setting up shared schools. Factory education became embroiled in the sectarian debate over Graham’s Factory Bill of 1843 and the act eventually passed in 1844 was shorn of its education clauses.  The failures of factory education, especially its involvement in sectarian disputes, certainly delayed the spread of elementary education. Disgusted Nonconformists turned to the voluntarist movement and Anglicans too patently preferred the perpetuation of ignorance to giving up their own control of education. Faced with such attitudes, the government contribution to the development of education in the mid-century had to be made largely by stealth.

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[1] R.J.W. Selleck James Kay-Shuttleworth. Journey of an Outsider, Woburn Press, 1994 is now the standard biography of this seminal figure.

Elementary Education: Social control and sectarianism

No socially conscious person of influence could leave education to chance. As a result it became enmeshed in conflicting social and political aims. When economic conflict gave rise to class consciousness, people of one class saw a means of controlling other classes by offering them education on their own terms. When there was religious and sectarian conflict, education became involved there as well[1].

Religion and social control: a rationale for education

English elementary education grew in the face of constant fear and opposition from sections of the upper and middle classes. Education, it was believed, would teach the working classes to despise their lot in life, enable them to read seditious literature and make them less deferential to their social superiors. This attitude persisted, especially among rural farmers and gentry, throughout the nineteenth century. In 1847 the Rev. John Allen, Inspector for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire wrote the following that he maintained reflected rural opinion: ‘We cannot help having a school, but we think it advisable that as little as possible be taught therein.’

Overt hostility to any education may have retreated into the backwoods of rural England but it was followed more slowly by those who wished to give the working classes just enough education so that they could read the Bible, learn their duty to God and Man, and the place in life to which Providence had been pleased to assign them.William Lovett, the Chartist leader, denounced these educationalists as[2] ‘favourable to the securing of their prey, another portion, with more cunning, were for admitting a sufficient amount of mental glimmer to cause the multitude to walk quietly and contentedly in the paths they in their wisdom had prescribed for them.’

In time this attitude also weakened, partly through the actions of Lord Ashley who, though an enemy of secular state schools, was an enthusiastic champion of working class education. Its successor was the ‘Morals before Intellect’ line of those who demanded that working class education should be primarily religious, because its primary purpose was to inculcate good morals and obedience. This was often found among High Churchmen who believed that[3] ‘no secular knowledge really desirable for the bulk of the population could be fitly taught apart from a constant reference to religion.’  Among conservative landed gentry[4] ‘I consider those schools to be the most promising where The Commandments and the Duty of God and Man are regularly taught, because without moral and practical religious training there can be no real education.’ Secular educationalists were, until the 1860s, a small, noisy group advocating moral without religious training.

Modern historians often maintain that the purpose of early Victorian educationalists was the social control of one class by another or as Harold Silver puts it ‘Rescuing the poor for religion and a concomitant stable society’. But the concept of social control, though incontestably valid in any examination of education, is oversimplified:

1. As a label ‘social control’ is a crude one. It covered a multitude of stances from the crudely manipulative and instrumental attitude of a man like Lord Londonderry building schools in his mining villages after the Chartist disturbances to the wholly sincere attempt to remake the working class child in the middle class image. Among middle and upper class philanthropists it was an argument for enlightened self-preservation; to Ashley and Kay Shuttleworth education would rescue the working classes from crime and sedition.
2. The means varied. Churchmen sought to inculcate religion and morals to buttress duty and obedience while liberals attacked sedition and socialism by developing popularised versions of classical political economy.
3. Rescue meant conversion to the moral and social imperatives of the rescuers, who represented the spectrum of attitudes and motives in contemporary society.
4. Motives and means might have varied but there was a good deal of common ground among all educationalists. Lovett and Owen no less than Ashley and Kay Shuttleworth looked to education to rescue the working classes from vice and crime accepting the relationship between ignorance and criminality. Education as a means of ‘improvement’, embodied in the idea of the ‘march of mind’ with its roots in a very old liberal tradition, provided a counter-force to the Law and High Church preoccupation with faith, duty and obedience. The interesting question is not whether a given educational scheme was designed as social control but what sort of society it was intended to produce?

One reason why education in the 1830s appeared to be an instrument of class control was the decline of the parallel conception of education as a means of social mobility. It had declined as the professional and industrial middle classes turned to defensive measures against the working classes forming below them. Education, as a result, became involved in the class struggle. Education became politicised. By the 1830s there were Church schools teaching the Anglican catechism, Nonconformist schools teaching private morality from the Bible and public morality from readers of classical economics and Owenite schools propagating socialism. It was the dominance of the rescue motif, as interpreted by middle class enthusiasts, prevented education from permanently dividing into forms of propaganda serving conflicting social and political aims.

A sectarian divide: the emergence of the elementary day school

From the 1780s working class enthusiasts and middle class reformers alike were much concerned with what might be done to extend working class children’s encounters with schooling. Among the most successful enterprises was Sunday schools. They originated in the eighteenth century[5] and by the early 1830s it has been estimated that over a million children and adolescents were attending them. Sunday schools fitted into the interstices of working class struggles for economic survival very well:

• Sunday was the one day when schooling did not compete with work
• Chapel or church could be used as schoolroom; and teachers gave their services free, so that if fees were charged at all, they were very low
• All Sunday schools taught reading and a minority writing and even arithmetic. From 1807 controversies ranged, especially among Methodists, as to the appropriateness of activities other than reading on a Sunday and the teaching of writing was usually a good guide to those schools under local and lay control rather than under religious domination

Sunday schools differed from most day schools. Regular weekday school required some sort of building and paid teachers, that in turn required an initial capital outlay, either from endowment or charitable subscription or both, as well as a reasonably regular and sizeable fee income. The promotion of day schools resulted, in the early nineteenth century, is the formation of two Religious Societies. They were designed to co-ordinate effort and spread best practice nationally. The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in England and Wales was formed in 1811 and three years later the British and Foreign School Society [it replaced the Lancastrian Society formed in 1808]. The sectarian divide had been established: the Anglican National Society and the broadly Nonconformist British and Foreign School Society. The attractiveness of these voluntary schools was not enhanced wither by their teaching methods:

1. Both favoured the monitorial or mutual system of teaching, by which a teacher taught the older children [or monitors] who then passed on what they had learnt to groups of younger children[6]
2. It was designed to enable a single teacher to cope with very large groups of children
3. It was mechanical in its approach relying on rote learning and memorisation but it was economical and this appealed to many contemporary adult observers. The reaction of the children who endured this approach was far less positive[7]
4. At the same time, many monitorial schools were more ambitious trying to teach reading, writing and arithmetic as an integrated package

These voluntary religious day schools offered an experience significantly different from the pattern of schooling familiar to the working class and one that many of them chose to avoid. The number and persistence of what middle class contemporaries disparagingly called dame or private adventure schools is striking. Their flexibility and informality, willingness to accept attendance on an intermittent basis, parents paying when they could, fetching their child out to do an errand or job, were part of their attraction. It is difficult to generalise about them but:

• They were small in size, seldom more than thirty children and often as few as ten.
• They met often in the teacher’s home, in a back kitchen, basement or living room.
• They might simply be reading schools, taught indeed by an elderly woman or dame; but writing and arithmetic could be tackled for an additional fee.
• They did not have the resources of the monitorial schools but they lacked the noise, numbers and barrack-room discipline. They functioned often as an extension of the child’s familiar domestic environment rather than places separated from and often alien to it.

In competing for the custom of working class parents and their children, the voluntary societies and the schools affiliated to them had one resource that the working class private day schools lacked: access to central government and thus the possibility of mobilising its power and resources in their support.

In 1833 Lord Kerry’s Returns on elementary education concluded that about 1.2 million or about a third of all children in England and Wales aged 4 to 14 were attending day schools; 1.549 million or under half were attending Sunday schools, of whom a third went to day school as well. Day schools could not copy the mushroom growth of Sunday schools. They were more expensive to run, an expense reflected in fees ranging typically from twopence to five pence per week. They also competed directly with work and work almost always won. This competition made it difficult to get a child into a day school at all and even more so to keep him or her there.

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[1] The most straight-forward study of education between 1830 and 1914 is the relevant chapters of John Lawson and Harold Silver A Social History of Education in England, Methuen, 1973. The focus of much study has been on the education of the working population.  Central to the period 1830-70 are the contrasting views of E.G.West Education and the State, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965 and Education and the Industrial Revolution, Batsford, 1975 and J.S.Hurt Education in Evolution 1800-1870, London, 1971.  The work of Harold Silver is also important especially his The Concept of Popular Education, Methuen, 1965, republished with editorial introduction in 1985 and his collection of essays Education as History, Methuen,  1983.  B.Simon The Two Nations and the Educational Structure 1780-1870, Lawrence and Wishart, 1974 and G.Sutherland Elementary Education in the Nineteenth Century, The Historical Association, 1971 are essential reading.

J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds) Working Class Culture: Studies in history and theory, Hutchinson, 1979 is valuable for the two essays by Richard Johnson especially 'Really useful knowledge: radical education and working class culture 1790-1848'.  J. Burns 'From Polite Learning to Useful Knowledge 1750-1850', History Today, April 1986 and B.Harrison 'Kindness and  Reason:  William Lovett and Education', History Today, March 1987 are interesting.  T.W. Laqueur Religion  and Respectability:  Sunday  Schools and Working Class Culture  1780-1850, Yale, 1976 is the seminal work on a major educational movement. D.G. Paz The Politics of Working Class Education 1830-1850, Manchester, 1980 is the best new analysis of state  intervention.

[2] William Lovett Life and Struggles of William Lovett, 1876, 1967 edition, page 111. This autobiography is an excellent source on the nature of working class education and the need for its reform.

[3] Rev. Alexander Watson, curate of St John's, Cheltenham in 1846.

[4] Sir Charles Anderson of Lea, near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire in evidence to the Newcastle Commission in June 1859.

[5] Robert Raikes of Gloucester has traditionally featured as pioneering Sunday schools in the 1780s but in fact teaching Bible reading and basic skills on a Sunday was already an established activity in some nonconformist and evangelical congregations.

[6] It was sometimes known as the 'Madras system' as that was where the Anglican clergyman Andrew Bell first developed it or the 'Lancastrian system' after the nonconformist Joseph Lancaster who independently developed the same system in England.

[7] Charles Dickens Hard Times, published in 1854, contains the best satirical account of the monitorial system in action under the teacher Mr McChoakumchild while in Nicholas Nickleby he caricatures the 'practical' nature of education at Mr Squeer's Dotheboys Academy.