ABSTRACT
There has been a long tradition of associating Britain’s supposed economic failure or falling behind new competitors with defects in education. From the Paris Exhibitions beginning in 1867, the Victorian investigations of Bernhard Samuelson and the Duke of Devonshire to the reports of S.J.Prais and the NIESC in our own day it has been a recurrent theme. Indeed a symposium on ‘decline’ is, to cite a well-known cinematic phrase, something of ‘a round up of the usual suspects’ with education being regarded as more shiftily suspicious than most. Yet we should be cautious because the issues of the past have become merged with contemporary political attitudes. Criticisms aimed at the Conservative governments about the economy or education in the 1980s or 1990s would be deflected by the reply that such problems are deep seated, long lasting, and go back over 100 or 120 years.1 Accordingly, such reasoning suggests that the responsibility of present day decision makers, politicians and businessmen is limited because it is shared with an historical tradition of culpable predecessors. The emphasis on education as a factor in decline is also convenient in another way because criticism and blame can thereby be shuffled off not only on to the past but from politicians and businessmen on to (leftwing) school teachers, (trendy) training colleges and (ivory tower) universities and their supposed anti-business ethos. The very purpose of a symposium seeking the roots of decline before 1914 has political overtones possibly clearer to English than to French scholars. The problem is a tangled one with several areas of conflicting debate.
