ABSTRACT
Even before the 1870 Education Act many working-class parents, as we have seen, were prepared to pay to see their children receive some rudimentary utilitarian instruction. For a good many parents the discipline of school was the prime appeal, rather than its instruction. One son of a farm labourer in the 1860s was allowed to work as a farmhand ‘if he was a good boy’, but ‘if he was naughty he was sent to school’.1 But generally parents did not like the idea of compulsion to come from the schools themselves. For many, British and and National schools were objectionable for their insistence upon standards of dress and regularity of attendance, so dame schools and other ‘private adventure’ schools filled the gap, for however inefficient they were they did not impose on their working-class patrons; in 1851 it appears that 30 per cent of the 2 million children at school were taught in such classes, where the regime was more lax and they were not punished for absenteeism.2
