ABSTRACT
Though the defenders of the private school praised their readiness to take up new ideas, they showed, in fact, much less keenness to innovate in the final third of the nineteenth century than in earlier decades. The only real exception to that statement is the small group of progressive schools, beginning with Cecil Reddie's foundation of Abbotsholme in 1889 (see pp. 189–90). Where new ideas like the kindergarten method or the Swedish ‘slÖjd’ method of manual training came in, they influenced the work of younger rather than of older children. As the endowed schools were gradually reformed, they took up the subjects like mathematics and modern languages which had earlier been left to the private schools, and all the secondary schools approximated more and more closely to a single model. This was an important process because it was only in this way that a common secondary school curriculum, which hardly existed in 1850, could come into existence. However, as it developed, the former distinctiveness of the private schools was reduced.
