ABSTRACT
In England, opinion favourable to the idea of State intervention in education was slow to develop. It had to combat the eighteenth-century notion that the poor should never be trained to anything but honest toil; but it was encouraged by the conditions which prevailed as a result of the Industrial Revolution-the migration of large numbers of working men to the towns where they began to demand their political rights and privileges. Indigence and malnutrition, the virtual slavery of children in industry, all were part of the price paid for industrialization; but they also led to the creation of a system of social services, of which popular education was one.
