ABSTRACT
Education is an anxiety-ridden enterprise as any child, parent, teacher or student knows. We worry about starting or choosing a school, changing school, leaving school, taking examinations, facing a class of pupils, having to teach a subject we do not know well enough or, at almost any age, talking to the head. Fears about whether teachers will be too strict, whether there will be too much homework and too many bullies, whether we will make friends, blight the transition to secondary school for almost all children and are exceedingly familiar. What is possibly more surprising is that education is also an anxiety-driven enterprise. Famously, the Education Act of 1870, which established a universal system of education for the working classes, is widely ‘explained’ as a response to the Franchise Act of 1867 and to the fears of the landed aristocracy that they would be overthrown. ‘We must educate our masters’ is one of the most quoted remarks of the nineteenth century and expresses the fear of what might happen once the labouring classes were enfranchised. The establishment of education for the poor was thus as much a measure to assuage a bourgeoisie frightened of revolution as it was a benefit for the poor themselves. Today it is fears about the superior academic performance of German or Japanese children, especially in science and mathematics, that has levered a rather static education system into change. So it is perhaps not surprising that collective, or sectional, anxieties lie at the heart of many educational arrangements.
