ABSTRACT
The 'Sixth form', as an institutional category, has, from its origins, exhibited moral and social, as well as academic and propedeutic aspects. The sixth form is a difficult conception for strangers to the English educational scene to grasp. The fact that the public schools were, essentially, boarding schools enhanced the possibilities for the embodiment in them of a conception of educational role with this dual yet unified character: learning was to be pursued because of its association with virtue, and virtue was to be acquired through learning. The creation and institutionalization of public schools and the public school sixth form took place in a span of not more that thirty years from the 1830s to the 1860s. In that time the sixth achieved not only a real existence, it terms of organizational forms, but also an ideal one, in terms of its connections with the dreams and ambitions of a spectrum of publics.
