ABSTRACT
One salutary effect of the current ‘deschooling’ debate has been the reminder that ‘schooling’ – the rational organization of children in an institution based on teachers and a formal curriculum – is only one method of education. I think it is especially easy for historians of nineteenth-century education to take for granted in their investigations of educational growth, industrialization and social control, that they are dealing with the development of schooling, a particular form of socialization. The general relationships between education and the labour market, between education and class struggle, meant, in local terms, the creation of institutions that faced immediate problems – problems revolving around the central reality of the school as an institution: the power of the educators over the educated. The schooling of working-class children in nineteenth-century England, whether by charitable individuals, by religious organizations, or by the State, involved the exercise of authority. And that raises questions not just about the educators’ motives, not just about the content of the education they provided, but also about their rights as educators. How was their educational power legitimated? Why did working-class children accept it (and how did they resist it)? What rights did their parents claim?
