ABSTRACT
In the half-century beginning in the 1780s education became one of the main areas of conflict in a profoundly changing society. The provision of mass education, and to a much lesser extent the reform of the endowed schools and ancient universities, became persistent public issues. Sustained social change sharpens questions about the adequacy of existing social institutions, and from the late eighteenth century, in fact, sustained change became, to an extent unparalleled in previous centuries, the major characteristic of English society. This was not the first time, as we have seen, that schools, ideas about education, and systems of education, responded to larger changes in society, or were seen as instruments of such change. From the late eighteenth century, however, social change was continuous and pervasive. Although Britain was still predominantly rural, social relationships and assumptions about the organization of society were no longer what they had been. A growing population, agricultural change, the growth of towns and the dissemination of new ideas had given rise to deeper uncertainties and a sense of precariousness in the social structure.
