ABSTRACT
Matthew Arnold wanted to compound the innovation by securing 'middle class' schooling through state involvement in education. Arnold, like Mill, felt that the key to the question of how to handle the growth of democracy lay in education, and especially in the education of the 'middle class'. What was at issue was not just a question of how education should be developed to accommodate a move towards greater democracy, but what kind of assumptions educational provision should be based upon, and how these assumptions should be institutionalized. On the first point, there was widespread agreement that the immediate problem was how to bring the middle class within the compass of secondary education. Though the new schools like Wellington both reproduced and became a source of the stereotype of the public school and the sixth form, they were, in the terminology of the time 'middle class schools'.
