ABSTRACT
In May 1859 the English poet and critic, Matthew Arnold, set off to visit schools in France, Holland and Switzerland. Britain's economic supremacy, celebrated at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, was already in discernible decline and Arnold was despatched by a Royal Commission to see if the education systems of continental Europe offered any solutions. In what he later described as his finest essay (Arnold, 1864), he reported that he had seen the ‘…spreading ferment of mind…liberalised by an ampler culture, admitted to a wider sphere of thought, living by larger ideas, with its provincialism dissipated, its intolerance cured, its pettiness purged away. The truth is’, wrote Arnold, ‘the English spirit has to accomplish an immense evolution’.
