The Experience of Schooling for Working-Class Boys and Girls in Nineteenth-Century England

It is fitting in a collection of papers concerned with histories and ethnographies of school subjects that we give some consideration to the nineteenth-century classroom. After all, some of our present-day ideas about, and practices within, education reflect the past. Yet curiously enough, most books within the sociology of education, especially those on ethnography, are ahistorical. Ethnographers, as Hammersley (1982) notes, largely regard history as ‘some-one else's territory’.