Middle-class schools 1840–70

The great resurgence of interest in elementary-school-building during the first thirty years of Victoria’s reign had an important, though indirect, influence on the provision for what was now coming to be called ‘secondary’ education. Social-class divisions were apparent from the outset, since the new elementary schools were invariably seen as providing only for the poor, and were certainly not of the kind to which their usually middle-class promoters would have considered sending their own children: the distinction commonly made was, in fact, between middle-and lower-class rather than elementary and secondary education in the modem sense. Nevertheless, the widespread provision of elementary schools for the poor stimulated interest in middle-class education, and it was now becoming usual for writers on education to chide middle-class parents for giving an education to their own children only marginally better than that available to the working classes in the National and other voluntary schools. ¹