ABSTRACT
Much of the commissioners' work was dominated by the administrative, political, and religious issues which were examined in the last chapter. But schools are primarily teaching institutions, and the Endowed Schools Commissioners had very clear views about the curriculum and the ways in which it should be developed. Basic to all their thinking was the concept of the three grades, each with a programme appropriate to the ages at which the pupil was to leave school. In the later decades of the century the Charity Commissioners tended to think in terms of two grades rather than of three—a first grade up to the age of 18 or 19, a second grade to 15 or 16 (PP 1886 IX:112:1118 (J.G.Fitch)). The third-grade work had in many cases been taken over by the higher-grade schools managed by the school boards. Traditionally, the curriculum of the first-grade schools had been classical, because both Latin and Greek were essential for university entrance. In second- and third-grade schools Latin formed an important element in the curriculum because it was regarded both as a valuable discipline in itself and as a basic introduction to the study of language. Greek was much less prominent or even disappeared entirely, and more time was given to mathematics and English subjects. By the 1860s more attention was being paid to the claims of the natural sciences, though, as yet, they had not been incorporated into the curriculum of the endowed or the public schools (HSE: 275–6).
