1st Edition
Schooling and Social Change Since 1760 Creating Inequalities through Education
Schooling and Social Change in England since 1760 offers a powerful critique of the situation of British education today and shows the historical processes that have helped generate the crisis confronting policymakers and practitioners at the present time.
The book identifies the key phases of economic and social change since 1760 and shows how the education system has played a central role in embedding, sustaining and deepening social distinctions in Britain. Covering the whole period since the first industrialization, it gives a detailed account of the development of a deeply divided education system that leads to quite separate lifestyles for those from differing backgrounds. The book develops arguments of inequalities through a much-needed account of the changes in education.
This book will be of great interest for academics, scholars and post-graduate students in the field of history of education and education politics. It will also appeal to administrators, teachers and policy makers, especially those interested in the historical development of schooling.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Education in England: intentions and outcomes
Industrialisation and education
The characteristics of English society
Chapter 1: An age of revolutions: 1760-1830
‘The ever-whirling wheel of Change’
Schooling in the Eighteenth Century
A new context for education
Planning for social stratification
Evangelicals and the Sunday school movement
The beginnings of systematisation: the monitorial schools
Socialists, utopians and education
The first stirrings of the State
Embedding inequalities
Chapter 2: The workshop of the world: 1830-1895
‘In a progressive country change is constant’
‘Governing as little as they could’: schooling the poor in Victorian England
Systematising superiority: the education of a new elite
Creating a new middle class: the reform of the endowed schools
Rebuilding the ivory tower
‘Places of moral rather than intellectual training’: the schooling of middle
class girls
Chapter 3: Embedding privilege: the charitable status of elite schools
A neglected issue
Charitable status: the realities
The origins of charitable status
The need for change
Moves towards reform
‘A great concession’: the establishment of the Charity Commission
The formative years of the Charity Commission
Long-term implications
Chapter 4: Schooling for a changing world: 1895-1914
The Victorian legacy
A new administration for education
Towards a new elementary education
Regulating secondary education
Educating the Edwardian elite
Chapter 5: 1914-1939: Schools fit for heroes?
War and its aftermath
Conflicting aspirations
Economising on education
Planning educational futures
Schooling the common people
Gradations of schooling: educating elites between the Wars
Chapter 6: ‘The safeguard of social stratification’: 1939-1979
Schooling during the Second World War
‘The search for freedom from want’: the post-War years
The primary concern: building a new sector of education
The false dawn of comprehensivisation: secondary schooling, 1945-79
‘For all those who are qualified by ability and attainment…and who wish to
do so’: the post-War expansion of higher education
A note of caution
Chapter 7: Neo-Liberalism and multi-nationalism: 1979 to the present
A novel context?
Implementing the new politics of education
The realities of change: the primary sector
The outsourcing of secondary education
The private sector
How higher education was marketized
Conclusion
Schooling and social class
Children as victims
Implications
Biography
Roy Lowe is one of Britain’s best-known historians of education, having published extensively over a long period on the history of schools and universities. He was for some years President of the UK History of Education Society and was awarded an OBE for services to education in 2002.
'This book performs the important civic service of showing the ways in which the English education system has worked consistently for over two centuries to sustain and reinforce those inequalities which continue to be such a marked feature of contemporary English society. Clearly written and well-organised, the detailed narrative shows fully how the careful and critical study of education over the long term is such a valuable perspective from which to study British society.'
Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Policy, University of Cambridge.
''An essential guide to the troubling history of educational inequalities in the UK and how they explain our contemporary social problems.''
Gary McCulloch, Brian Simon Professor of History of Education, UCL Institute of Education.
