ABSTRACT
Phil Gardner reveals the insurmountable difficulties in discovering just how many children attended these private schools, but he himself is convinced that ‘working-class private schooling was a numerically strong, ubiquitous and resilient feature of an independent working-class culture’. Some deep currents of working-class culture flowed into its own networks of practical educational activities: the well-established tradition of working-class private schooling. Edwin West’s review of the history of schooling since the nineteenth century, amplified by Gardner, makes a persuasive case for challenging State control of education, and with some positive ideas for change. The State could perhaps use the idea of a school having to prove that it was ‘efficient’ as a means of attack, but this raised the problem of what exactly constituted a school, for the State had earlier insisted that the so-called dame schools were not really schools in the first place.
