'A bit dodgy'
Perhaps the success or failure of our education system has continued to arouse such strong feelings because we have conflicting responses to these issues.
Speaking in January 2003, education secretary Charles Clarke said that education for its own sake is 'a bit dodgy'. This remark - which was criticised for showing 'pig ignorance' and 'blind prejudice' - echoes the 19th-century struggle between Utilitarians, who saw education as a function of the state geared towards the 'greatest happiness for the greatest number', and Progressives, who advocated a system based on the needs and potential of the child rather than those of society.
If there was a lack of consensus as to the purpose of education, rival factions could discern what they saw as undesirable trends. This uncertainty is reflected in the criticism made of a charity school as long ago as 1763:
?. nor is it easy to conceive or invent anything more destructive to the interests and very foundation of a nation entirely dependent on its trade and manufactures than the giving of an education to the children of the lowest class of her people that will make them condemn those drudgeries for which they were born.
In other words, giving children ideas can be dangerous!
'Lamentably deficient'
Educational reports in the mid-19th century, published with as much regularity as they are today, were often highly critical of schools, both their teaching methods and the content of their syllabuses. These reports coincided with the first action ever made by the state to involve itself in education. In 1833, a ?20,000 education grant was apportioned between religious rivals Anglicanism (via the National Society) and Non-conformity (via the British and Foreign School Society).
A Select Committee on the Education of the Poorer Classes (1837-8) reported:
1. The kind of education given to the children of the working classes is lamentably deficient.
2. That it extends (bad as it is) to but a small proportion of those who ought to receive it.
Result: the great increase of criminals and cost to the country.
A year later, little - perhaps unsurprising - had changed:
Her Majesty has observed with deep concern the want of instruction which is still observable among the poorer classes of Her subjects. All the enquiries which have been made show a deficiency in the general Education of the People which is not in accordance with the Character of a Civilised and Christian nation.
By 1861, the Newcastle Commission found that education provision was limited and standards low. Only one in seven poor children attended school, often on a casual basis. By the age of 10, most had left to find work. Teachers were generally only interested in the teaching of gifted children.
Horrified
Problems were highlighted in schools at opposite ends of the social spectrum. The Ragged Schools - a philanthropic movement that provided free basic education to the very poorest children - were supported by the evangelical reformer, Lord Shaftesbury, from 1844. On an unannounced visit to a newly opened school in London, he was horrified to find:
only one or two lamps burning, all the windows broken, two of the teachers covered in mud from head to foot, while in the school the master was lying on his back with six boys sitting on him, singing 'Pop goes the Weasel'.
Meanwhile, between 1861 and 1864, the Clarendon Commission investigated the condition of public schools, looking at issues such as the 'desirability of fagging' (when younger pupils act as servants to older ones) and questioning whether science should be taught to children.
Performance-related pay was introduced in 1862. By this time, trained teachers were growing in number and becoming influential in the debates over education. The abandonment of performance-related pay - the 'cult of the cash register' - in the 1890s was an indication of their new-found strength.
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