ABSTRACT
We have seen how throughout the century the three main motives, the religious, the intellectual and the utilitarian, were interwoven into an intricate pattern, which as a result produced a great variety of schools and institutions. They all endeavoured to break through the rigidity of the established tradition and to introduce new subjects and new methods. There is no doubt that on the whole they succeeded and started modern education in England. All the movements of educational reform in the beginning of the nineteenth century can be traced to the men and institutions of the eighteenth cetury. The Mechanics’ Institutes were started by men who themselves were educated at, or conducted, the evening mathematical schools in the eighteenth century. The attention drawn to early childhood and the psychological approach of the Infant School movement had its pioneers in David Williams, and R. L. and Maria Edgeworlh. The reform of the Public Schools by Arnold had its counterpart in the private classical schools and the pioneering activity of William Gilpin of Cheam. The work of the Benthamites and Brougham and their idea of the ‘diffusion of useful knowledge’ was no innovation, it belonged to the eighteenth century. The modernisation of the curriculum in the old Grammar Schools and at Oxford and Cambridge, in spite of all criticism, was started in the eighteenth century. The education of girls, in some institutions at any rate, became scientific and modern and in no way inferior to the education of boys. The idea of religious tolerance was actually realised towards the end of the century and the nineteenth century added only the legal emancipation of the Catholics and the official abolition of tests in the two old Universities. Even the movement for mass education, which has not been included in our survey, was started in the eighteenth century with the religious revival. Some of the ideas of the twentieth century, teaching through ‘life situations’, active methods, individual progress, all that is called now ‘new education’ as well as multilateral schools and technical-vocational training, are not so ‘new’ as they seem and can find their roots in the private Academies of the eighteenth century. How it then happened that in the middle of the nineteenth century all the achievements and pioneering ideas of the eighteenth century were forgotten is a problem worthy of deeper investigation. We have evidence that many modern Academies continued their existence during the first decades of the nineteenth century. To investigate the causes of their gradual disappearance is beyond the purpose of this book, but it seems strange that it required Spencer and Huxley to awaken interest in scientific education as if it never existed before. Certainly the advance of science since the eighteenth century is enormous and we may smile condescendingly at Priestley, who discovered oxygen without understanding his own discovery. The eighteenth century had its limitations and the comparatively low standard of scientific methods and facilities of research was one of them. The other limitation was the aristocratic structure of society and the social-economic stratification. In that respect, however, the gulf between the wealthy employers of labour and the proletarian factory hands and miners of the Victorian Era was deeper than the ha-ha ditch which separated the squire from the farmer and wider than the distance between the merchant and the craftsman of the eighteenth century. We have seen thousands of craftsmen and farmers sending their sons to Universities, we have seen the sons of agricultural labourers climbing to the top of the social ladder—evidence of the fact that social mobility in the eighteenth century was greater than in the middle of the nineteenth. It was only in the field of State politics and government, with the ‘rotten borough’system, that the privileged position of the aristocracy and squirearchy was preserved. The Church, the teaching profession and to a great extent the academic and medical professions were conquered by the sons or grandsons of farmers or craftsmen. Only the legal profession recruited its members from the upper middle class.
