Ideology and the factory child: attitudes to half–time education

The half-time system, foreshadowed in the early Factory Acts and effective from 1845, began as a strategy for combating excessive child labour and became, in the 1850s and 1860s, an educational theory. Its basis was described by one of the first factory inspectors as ‘combining school education with an industrial education in a wages-yielding employment’. ¹ It began as an instrument of the state for the protection of children in certain kinds of employment. The half-time system was attacked as an industrial measure when, especially in the last quarter of the century, opinion turned in favour of achieving compulsory education for all by other means. Discussion of the half-time system has been previously concerned primarily with the tactics of its early introduction and with the politics of its later decline and defeat. ² Between the two, however, considerable interest was shown in the educational implications of the half-time process: evidence was accumulated, educational theories were elaborated, ideological positions were adopted. It is with these, and with the effects of the system on the children, that we are mainly concerned.