ABSTRACT
What of the working-class private schools themselves? What sort of places were they? The question requires two types of answer. The first needs to concentrate on physical descriptions of locations, interiors and equipment; the second on a consideration of internal organisation and method, and on an assessment of educational activity. The authors’ first answer is likely to be more straightforward than their second. In the latter case the problems of analysis and evaluation impinge in a very direct way on description. Attacks on the physical setting of the working-class private school were as much concerned with what it was not as with what it actually was. In rooms where the teacher lives wholly in the room, a bed is seldom met with, the teacher sleeping on an old sofa, in a wardrobe, or on the floor, as convenience suggests. Away from the crowded pressures of the industrial city, conditions were likely to have been better, on the whole.
