ABSTRACT
The idealist reformers contributed more, as one might have expected, to educational practice than to educational theory. They preferred for the most part to do something directly to improve the extent and quality of education, rather than write about it from a theoretical standpoint. Not that they did not write on educational matters at all. On the contrary, many of them were prolific in this field. One only has to think of R.H.Tawney's innumerable leaders in the Manchester Guardian and his other educational books and articles. But then it was Tawney, too, who wrote, 'Books on education...belong to a type of literature which, I am 'sorry to say, I cannot read' (Terrill, 1974. p. 182). Tawney's writings were not the products of reflection about education in the abstract, but weapons forged for particular campaigns in a continuing political battle for educational improvements, powerful in impact but discardable once they found their target.
