ABSTRACT
In the Introduction to the Education Code of 1904 and 1905, it was stated that: ‘The purpose of the public elementary school is to form and strengthen the character and to develop the intelligence of the children entrusted to it.’ The handbook emphasised that the corporate life of the school should avoid anything that undermines character formation and listed the habits of industry, self-control, duty, good manners, fair play and loyalty as the kind of virtues that should be cultivated. The most important educational theorist writing in the 20th century was John Dewey. Liberal Protestantism sought the reduction of religion to morality in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century; in this mission it was more effective than the small number of vocal secularists in Victorian society. The progressives at the beginning of the 20th century were reacting against educational practices such as rote learning and the enforcement in schools of patterns of traditional formal behaviour.
