ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the form of elementary educational provision in two mining villages in the Northumberland coalfield in the late Victorian period. It is intended as a contribution to an explicitly historical sociology of education, seeking to trace in a very local study of two schools the much larger moments of social change in society itself, expressed as the rise of industrial paternalism and the formation of an urban working class. The aim of the chapter is to clarify the structural linkages between schooling and society in this period. Elementary education in the late Victorian period massively embodied the social and political dominance of an industrial and commercial bourgeoisie. The chapter shows how that dominance was both institutionalized in the practice of schooling and how it was resisted and challenged by working people themselves.
