ABSTRACT
The development of modern schooling was not just a series of administrative decisions made nationally and locally nor was it just a series of contingent steps in which crises were avoided and control established. The idea of indirect rule might have shaped a strategy for managing schools and local authorities but it was a necessity created out of the rise of modern schooling, its inadequate structures and cumbersome curriculum controls. Local education authorities operated with local aims, often related to ratepayer power, when national government was increasingly concerned about economic competition, efficiency, controls on the expansion of secondary education and the purposes of elementary education. As part of the reconstruction of controls over the school system, indirect controls operated alongside new shared government bodies, like the Burnham panel advising on teacher salaries across the country. A modern schooling system emerged, moulded by the need to create new forms of sophisticated controls, to manage the direction of a local/ national elementary education service and to manufacture a new secure and stable teacher. A powerful discourse of modernization included within it the idea of the professional with defined responsibilities and freedoms. This discourse was partially created by teachers themselves and in reaction to them and their actions. Modernizing education depended upon the creation, control and domestication of teachers. At the same time it gave an opportunity and a language to teachers operating within progressive social movements to develop their own agendas for change. The language of modernizing allowed some teachers to create spaces for change within their own groupings and within their schools.
