ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, education finally became a mass phenomenon in England. At the same time, liberal education underwent a renewal and rediscovered its humanist spirit. Together, these advances provided the material basis for what became the State system and set up philosophical tensions that are still being played out in education policy and practice today. The expansion of liberal education throughout society, including working-class people and women, was not initially the result of any deliberate planning. The intentions behind eighteenth- and nineteenth-century charity schools, for example, were strictly limited to a wish that working-class people should be able to read the Bible and be sufficiently employable to keep out of trouble. Intellectual liberation was not the plan, but it was the result, because even limited education gave people the basic tools – such as literacy – to go on and educate themselves. The state involved itself in education, in Richardson’s view, in order to head off the perceived threat to the social order posed by an educated working class. Needless to say, that raises uncomfortable questions about the nature and purposes of state education.
