ABSTRACT

In a series of essays written for leading Victorian journals from 1854 to 1859, Herbert Spencer addressed the relationship between education and society.1 Debates had been brewing around a national education system as well as the quality of classroom practice, and Spencer underscored how a nation’s educational system could reflect the nature of that culture. He wrote:

There cannot fail to be a relationship between the successive systems of education, and the successive social state with which they have coexisted. Having a common origin in the national mind, the institutions of each epoch, whatever be their special functions, must have a family likeness. When men received their creed and its interpretations from an infallible authority deigning no explanations, it was natural that the teaching of children should be purely dogmatic.2