History of Education Society

Educational History and Educational Change: The Past Decade of English Historiography
Author(s): Peter Cunningham
Source: History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 77-94
Published by: History of Education Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/368606 .
Accessed: 21/06/2014 23:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

History of Education Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History of
Education Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
EducationalHistory and EducationalChange:
The Past Decade of English Historiography

Peter Cunningham

Commenting primarily on American and German educational historiog-

raphy, Konrad H. Jarausch lamented that the "initial excitement" of the
"new history of education" had abated and that education was no longer
in the forefront of discussion in social or cultural history.' Was this
perception based upon an assumed coherence of the various trends which
he described? Characteristic of the "new history," according to Jarausch,
had been, first, a radical criticism of the prevailing Whig tradition; sec-
ondly, a shift of focus from pedagogical ideas to social context; and
thirdly, the adoption of social scientific techniques and quantification.
All three features have contributed significantly to the development of
research in British educational history, yet it would be artificial to pos-
tulate a unitary movement. Rather, various trends are visible, which
reflect the institutional infrastructure within which history of education
is produced in Britain. Changing priorities in and approaches to research
in the history of education cannot be understood apart from the ties
between the study of educational history and the institutional and re-
search environments in which British historians and educationists work,
as well as the wider context of contemporary educational politics.2

Characteristics of Research, and the Infrastructure

Compared to the United States and its population of 250 million, Britain
has a population one-fifth that size. Quantitatively there may be more
history to research in America-and more historians to research it. Such
a trite observation must have some relevance in comparing the output

Peter Cunningham is the author of Curriculum Change in the Primary School Since 1945:
Dissemination of the Progressive Ideal (London, 1988).
' Konrad H. Jarausch, "The Old 'New History of Education': A German Reconsider-
ation," History of Education Quarterly 26 (Summer 1986): 225-41.
2 The need to take account of the institutional context of research has been mentioned
in passing in Jurgen Herbst, "The New History of Education in Europe," History of
Education Quarterly 27 (Spring 1987): 55-61.

History of Educattion Quarterly Vol. 29 No. I Spring 1989

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
78 History of Education Quarterly

of the two countries in the research of educational history. On the other

hand, history has length as well as breadth; the archival sources for earlier
periods of education in England are extensive and are still being worked
(not exclusively by English historians).3 Though the medieval and early
modern periods have enjoyed their share of continuing vigorous histo-
riographical debates-over the significance of the Edwardian grammar
schools or the extent and contribution of the Charity School Movement
for example-the major shifts in methodology and interpretation are
most evident in fields where the quantity of research and writing has
been greatest, namely, the period since the Industrial Revolution. Other
factors affecting research output in the respective countries include eco-
nomic and political circumstances, the structure of higher education, and
in particular, that of teacher education. The account below sees reflected
in recent scholarship in the history of education the complexity of these
differentiating factors.
How does the agenda for history of education emerge? The over-
riding debate between progressives and revisionists, which has provided
the framework for so much American history of education (perhaps to
the point of stalemate?), is not pervasive in Britain; here the battle-lines
are not rigidly drawn.4 Many historians of English education have stood
aside from that particular debate. Jarausch acknowledged that the
"triumph of the 'new history of education' " was never as complete as
some had hoped, but in referring to "older scholars . . . who continued
to write only with somewhat changed terminology on their favorite sub-
jects," he was oversimplifying the fact, as common in historiography as
it is in history, that change is more often gradual than sudden, that
continuity is a characteristic of academic research as of other aspects of
human behavior.3 Educational history was not exceptional in responding
to the new challenges and adopting the new insights which seemingly

s Recent examples include the official History of the University of Oxford, a planned
series of eight volumes, which began publication in 1984; Sargent Bush, Jr., and Carl J.
Rasmussen, The Libraryof Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1584-1637 (Cambridge, 1986);
and for education beyond the formal institutions of learning, Nicholas Orme, From Child-
hood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066-1530 (Lon-
don, 1967); John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning,
and Education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge, 1986); and Edward Chaney, "Quo Vadis? Travel
as Education and the Impact of Italy in the Sixteenth Century," in International Currents
in Educational Ideas and Practices: History of Education Society Conference Papers, 1987
(Leicester, 1988).
4 Of course, John Best's excellent collection indicates the diversity of the American
enterprise in educational history, by no means all of which is geared to the progressivist/
revisionist debate. John H. Best, ed., Historical Enquiry in Education: A Research Agenda
(Washington, D.C., 1983).
i Jarausch, "The Old 'New History of Education,' " 226.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Educational History and Educational Change 79

flooded into the world of arts and letters and social sciences in the late
1960s, and in that respect was part of a much wider social and cultural
phenomenon. Yet one cannot sweepingly dismiss some major contribu-
tions to educational history in the seventies and eighties, which may have
continued to focus on more traditional topics or to draw on older es-
tablished methodologies.
German historiography as described by Jarausch reinforces the pic-
ture drawn by Marc DePaepe of a significant discourse amongst historians
of education in that country about "scientific-theoretical points of de-
parture."6 While a review of major publications in Britain will produce
many examples of the trends that Jarausch described, there is evident a
considerable variety of foci and perspectives, and less preoccupation with
theoretical debate. This is not to deny the powerful influence of social
and political historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson,
and the subsequent vigorous confrontations in British social history be-
tween empiricists and theorists, but to understand precisely how those
debates are echoed within educational history requires some understand-
ing of the infrastructure with particular reference to the distinct insti-
tutional contexts of educational and social historians. Social historians
have increasingly concerned themselves with education as an agency of
cultural reproduction or of social control, but many educational histo-
rians are rooted intellectually and institutionally in pedagogical concerns
given their responsibilities toward teacher education and training. Here
are two parallel strands of research overlapping at many points. No tidy
pattern emerges, but the differences of theoretical preoccupation need to
be acknowledged, and within the professional formation of teachers,
current priorities in educational provision and practice frequently influ-
ence the agenda. The historiography of education in Britain over the last
ten years has to be understood not merely through competing historical
methodologies, but as responses to an agenda which has its roots in
contemporary institutional and political circumstances of education.7 It
is a picture of considerable variety, rather than one of "new" and "old"
interpretations. Yet the account below will give the lie to any idea of a
clear divide between social historians, on the one hand, and educational
historians, on the other.

6 Marc DePaepe, On the Relationship of Theory and History in Pedagogy: An Intro-

duction to the West German Dicussion on the Significance of the History of Education,
1950-1980, Studia Paedagogica New Series, no. 6 (Leuven, 1983).
7 A survey of developments to 1982 is provided by Brian Simon, "The History of
Education in the 1980s," British Journal of Educational Studies 30 (Feb. 1982): 85-96.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
80 Historyof EducationQuarterly

Educationists and Educational History

The "history and theory" of education had been considered a necessary
component of teacher training from the late nineteenth century. The
1960s saw a rapid expansion of the college sector of teacher training:
teacher-training places almost doubled from 1952 (25,000) to 1960
(48,000) and again by 1968 to 95,000. Combined with extended and
increasingly academic courses, this trend provided a strong institutional
base to history of education, which was regarded as one of the four
essential "disciplines" of educational theory. Reflecting this growth, in
1968 the History of Education Society was founded, holding annual
conferences and publishing a major journal, History of Education (now
quarterly) as well as a more informal Bulletin, which appears twice yearly
and contains shorter articles and accounts of research in progress.8 The
Society owed its foundation particularly to initiatives emerging from the
University Department of Education at Leicester. At about the same time,
the Journal of Educational Administration and History commenced pub-
lication at the University of Leeds Department of Education, where the
reputation for historical research was already long established through
the work of S. J. Curtis, and of W. E. Tate, who had founded there a
small Museum of the History of Education.
Closely linked to concerns of teacher training, current preoccupa-
tions in the educational world, notably the reorganization of secondary
schools into a nonselective system, were reflected in the research agenda
of the time, whilst the centenary of the 1870 Education Act (which had
led to free universal schooling) provided a focus for studies in the primary
sector. In both cases emphasis lay on the politics and administration of
educational provision. As sociology began to complement history as a
foundation discipline in the study of education, however, so its concerns
and methods began to influence historians of education.
Conference programs provide one index of contemporary foci in
research.The History of Education Society holds two annual conferences,
always linked to a specific theme; early examples included "The Gov-
ernment and Control of Education" in 1968, "History, Sociology and
Education" in 1969,9 "The Changing Curriculum" in 1970, and "Edu-
cation and the Professions" in 1972. The 1971 conference theme, "Local

NHistory of Education (1972- ), published by Taylor and Francis from volume 3

onwards. The Society also produces a series of Occasional Publications, collections of
essays devoted to a particular theme, a series of Guides to Sources in the History of
Education, and a regular List of Theses. Information on these publications is available
from Mrs. B. J. Starkey, 4 Marydene Drive, Leicester LE5 6HD, United Kingdom.
9 This conference attended to the relationship of a structural functionalist sociology

to history in the study of education, and the use of quantification and social science concepts
of class in educational history; later developments in sociological method have not received
a great deal of attention within the orbit of the History of Education Society.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
EducationalHistoryand EducationalChange 81

Studies and the History of Education," reflected the importance of local

research especially in the writing of theses for higher degrees, which
paralleled trends in social history research. More recent annual weekend
conferences have continued to respond to a variety of professional con-
cerns, reflecting, too, some issues current in the politics of education:
"Physical and Health Education" (1982), "The Churches and Education"
(1983), "Women's Education" (1984), "The Professional Teacher" (1985),
"Higher Education since Industrialization" (1986), "International Cur-
rents in Educational Ideas and Practices" (1987), and "Education and
Employment" (1988)."' The annual spring conferences (one-day events,
of which the proceedings are not published) reflect particularly in their
themes, topical concerns of educationists, so that in recent years they
have paid attention to "Mental Testing" (1985), "Education of Ethnic
Minorities" (1986), "Special Education"" (1987) and "The New Right
in Education" (1988).
Leading figures in the development of the History of Education
Society have been Brian Simon and Harold Silver. Both have their back-
ground in a concern for education and a commitment to teacher training
and to educational improvement. Though both have inspired and influ-
enced many younger scholars, neither could be deemed to have founded
a "school" of educational historians quite in the manner of Bernard
Bailyn, Lawrence Cremin, or Michael Katz.12 Their positions are well
represented in recent years by two collections of essays.
Simon posed the question directly in Does Education Matter?'3 His
active engagement in educational policy from the 1950s through the
1970s as a campaigner for nonselective secondary education, and latterly
in classroom-based research of teaching methods in the primary school,
has sustained the optimism to refute neo-Marxist critiques that educa-
tional reform served only as an instrument of social control. Simon reflects

l The conference proceedings are published annually by the Society. For details of
availability and cost, write to: Mrs. B. J. Starkey, 4 Marydene Drive, Leicester LES 6HD,
United Kingdom.
"The term most commonly used in Britain to mean education of physically and
mentally handicapped, or "exceptional children." A substantial study recently produced
by a historian of considerable repute is: John Hurt, Outside the Mainstream: A History
of Special Education (Batsford, 1988).
I2A fact that may in part reflect the differences between America and Britain of scale
and structure in the organization of research.
"}Brian Simon, Does Education Matter? (London, 1985). Simon's three-volume history
of British education from 1780 to 1940, Studies in the History of Education (London,
1960-74) has served as a standard text and point of reference, though its interpretations
have not gone unchallenged, and a fourth volume covering the years after 1940 is awaited
soon. His most recent engagement in contemporary political debate is Bending the Rules:
The Baker 'Reform' of Education (London, 1988).

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
82 Historyof EducationQuarterly

Gramsci's more positive evaluation of the achievements of public ele-

mentary schooling, and finds in Marxist theory support for the "pro-
gressive" view that a humanistic curriculum, adapted to take account of
the interests of contemporary social groups, constitutes an appropriate
agenda for the schooling of all.
Harold Silver's perspectives derive not only from substantial histor-
ical research but also from active engagement with educational devel-
opment at many levels in Britain over the last three decades. His collection
of essays, Education as History, published in 1983, pleaded the case for
a greater complexity of approach in the problems of historical recon-
struction, suggesting closer investigation of the social history of ideas-
"how people, groups of people, people in action, have interpreted and
reinterpreted their world"-and as one salient example of this, the re-
lationship between social sciences and educational reform. He advocated,
too, cross-national studies not simply of large-scale movements, but of
"the varieties as well as the uniformities of experience," "the biographical
reconstruction of schooling as well as its relationship to the social or-
der."'4

Quality and Experience of Schooling: Regional Variations

Reflecting, if not dictated by current political concerns, is William Mars-
den's study of regional and local disparities in the quality of educational
provision.'5 A geographer as well as a historian, he places educational
change in three contexts-those of time, place, and society-employing
the analytic tools of urban history, historical geography, and the eco-
logical school of urban sociology. In focusing on factors like territorial
segregation, perceptions and stereotyping of particular neighborhoods,
and personally perceived status and aspirations, he deliberately abandons
the broader political and ideological analyses. Through his "detailed
grassroots studies" of the complexity, variability, and idiosyncrasy of
human decision-making, he downplays determinism in historical inter-
pretation. Marsden responds to the demand for a historical ecology of
education that is not deterministic and that embodies concepts of personal
space.
Taking first the process of diffusion and regional disparity on a
national scale, Marsden studies the provision of elementary schooling in
relation to the diffusion of the monitorial system. Some characteristic

'4 Harold Silver, Education as History: Interpreting Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
Education (London, 1983). Quotations on page 12.
15W. E. Marsden, Unequal Educational Provision in England and Wales: The Nine-
teenth Century Roots (London, 1987).

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
EducationalHistoryand EducationalChange 83

disparities are drawn in graphic detail using contemporary opinion to

reinforce statistical data. The wealth of this book emerges as the focus
closes in on local communities, mainly in Lancashire, but also in London,
with two chapters devoted to late-nineteenth-century Bootle, a working-
class area of Liverpool, where fascinating local detail appears in the
context of the social ecology. Newspaper reports of the responses of the
poor to compulsory schooling, and a reconstruction of the journey to
school laced with incidents of affray and vandalism, richly illustrate his
account, as does a collective biography of the members of Bootle school
boards. Such material may be susceptible to political and ideological
interpretation, but Marsden effectively interprets the evidence in terms
of personal decisions made within a socially highly stratified and terri-
torially segregated community.
Where Marsden explicitly rejects interpretations based on crude ide-
ological schemata of social conflict, another substantial recent study of
geographical diversity ignores interpretive issues of human motivation.
W. B. Stephens'smagisterialvolume combines the presentation of a wealth
of well-ordered statistical data with an explanatory text characterized by
careful and cautious argument.'6 Concluding that the significance of lit-
eracy and popular schooling is still only seen "through a glass darkly,"
he modestly enumerates the many questions still to be asked: "How
significant was reading literacy as opposed to writing literacy?"; "What
use was literacy put to-in work and in other aspects of life?"; "How
did it affect social, political, gender, and family relationships?"; and so
on. Nationally, in the second half of the nineteenth century, England had
a relatively high level of literacy by comparison with other European
countries; the illiteracy rate at marriage (indicated by signing) declined
from 41 percent in 1841, to 24 percent in 1870, and further to 12 percent
by 1885. Yet this national average conceals a regional variation between
the least literate counties, such as Cornwall (46 percent in circa 1840
declining to 17 percent in 1885), and the most literate, such as Cum-
berland, where the statistic declined from 26 percent to 11 percent over
the same period.
Stephens begins with a general survey, which deals discursively with
the relationship of literacy to schooling and with literacy's social signif-

tW. B. Stephens, Education, Literacy, and Society, 1830-1870: The Geography of

Diversity in Provincial England (Manchester, 1987). Anticipating this work was W. B.
Stephens, ed., Studies in the History of Literacy, England and North America, Educational
Administration and History Monograph, no. 13 (Leeds, 1983); this was a collection of
local studies of literacy in relation to factors such as schooling, industrialization, and sex,
prefaced by Stephen's account of the achievement of literacy studies to date. Such studies
have contributed significantly to modifying received opinions such as the inadequacy of
private schools in the nineteenth century.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
84 Historyof EducationQuarterly

icance. For a consideration of the quality of schooling, he draws on a

wide range of recent historical work, especially local studies, as well as
on a wide variety of primary source material. The demand for literacy
"from below" is related to the growth of commercial and service em-
ployment from 1840, which increased the functional benefits of school-
ing, and also to the vast growth at the same period of evangelical and
utilitarian publications, and political and commercial literature; these
factors provided incentives to literacy, but differed among occupational
groups and were subject to geographical variation. Though not quanti-
fiable, they must be seen as contributing to the statistical manifestations
of schooling and literacy levels. Stephens's overview of the national state
of literacy provides a preface to detailed regional studies, dealing with
the midland counties, the south midlands, and the western counties, in
turn. In each case, economic and social structure, child labor, attitudes
to education and schooling, and literacy are the topics considered. These
detailed studies draw on the statistical data collated in almost fifty pages
of appendices, which stand alone as a most useful and clearly presented
work of reference.
Stephens's literacy studies have much in common with the work of
social historians elsewhere; Marsden's contribution is highly individual
but, nevertheless, shares the techniques of historical and urban geogra-
phers.'7 Marsden, while seeking to reconstruct the experience of edu-
cational consumers, at least from the point of view of decisions on
schooling, is centrally concerned in his study with the Victorian admin-
istration's dilemma-that of providing school places-and thus maintains
the administrator's "overview." Stephens's view of diversity is first and
foremost statistically based, yet still avoids any monolithic interpretion.
Both Marsden and Stephens have pursued their studies within university
departments of education; both reveal an intimate concern for educa-
tional outcomes, yet both resist any substantial engagement with the
classic methodological and ideological controversies of revisionism.
The consideration of educational experience and diversity of pro-
vision have been tackled, however, from alternative perspectives in the
work of Stephen Humphries and Phil Gardner, scholars whose work
originates outside institutions concerned with pedagogy and educational
training. The decade of expansion in teacher education saw exponential
growth in higher education generally. The establishment of departments

17 See, for example, M. Sanderson, "Literacy and Social Mobility in the Industrial
Revolution in England," Past and Present 56 (1972): 75-104; and R. S. Schofield, "The
Measurement of Literacy in Pre-Industrial England," in Literacy in Traditional Societies,
ed. J. Goody (Cambridge, 1968).

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
EducationalHistoryand EducationalChange 85

of history in the new universities and polytechnics facilitated a shift of

traditional trends in historical research, with a growing emphasis on
social history. Many historians working in these institutions had been
inspired by scholars such as E. P. Thompson and his classic study of
English working-class culture, published in 1963.18
New societies and journals burgeoned in response to this trend, but
of particular interest for historians of education was the growth of the
History Workshop movement from 1966. An initiative emanating from
Ruskin College, a trades union college in Oxford, the movement set out
to encourage the active engagement of as many people as possible in
doing history on a collective and community basis, as distinct from many
people consuming history produced by a few professionals. Though re-
ality did not always live up to the ideal, the annual workshops provided
a forum in which socialist historians debated and communicated their
research, much of which was published in the History Workshop Journal
from 1975 onwards.'9 The interest in working people's lives and expe-
riences, as well as the development of theoretical critiques, such as the-
ories of social control, gave prominence to education and schooling as
a topic for research. Reflecting the impact of sociolinguistics on the study
of history over the previous decade, a History Workshop of some sig-
nificance for educational historians was that on "Language and History"
held in Brighton in 1980.2) Structural linguistics, which had already in-
fluenced the study of popular culture and of literary criticism, was seen
to have implications for social historians: words, rather than things, were
considered the material force which structured thought, and social phe-
nomena were therefore seen as a system of meanings and signs, consti-
tuted and constrained by linguistic systems. Structural linguistics affected
historical practice in a variety of ways; for example, historians began to
look beyond economic and social relationships for evidence of transfor-
mations in ideology and consciousness. Attention was also focused on

IxE. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963). J. F.
C. Harrison, Learning and Living, 1790-1960: A Study in the History of the English Adult
Education Movement (London, 1961) was also a seminal text.
19 Other examples of journals commencing publication in this decade include the Bul-
letin of the Society for the Study of Labour History (1960- ) and Urban History News-
letter (1963- ). The journal Social History began publication as late as 1976 (its American
equivalent, the Journal of Social History, dating from 1967). Regional history began to
receive serious academic coverage in journals such as Northern History (1966- ), followed
at a discreet distance by Midland History (1971- ) and Southern History (1979- ). It
is reasonable to argue that many local history societies and publications turned their
attention to social aspects and community history, including education, from this time,
although the evidence is too diverse and extensive to be documented here.
"2"Languageand History: History Workshop 14, Brighton, 14-15 Nov. 1980" (Printed
but not published).

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
86 Historyof EducationQuarterly

the contingentcharacterof historicalrepresentation,on the unargued

assumptionsthat so often underpinhistoricalinterpretation.
StephenHumphriesand Phil Gardnerwere two participantsin the
1980 HistoryWorkshopwho subsequentlypublishedimportantbooks
on working-classexperienceof schooling.21In Hooligans or Rebels?,
Humphriesmakesa bold attemptto revisesome of the interpretivetheory
which had informedearlierhistoriesof childhood and education.22Re-
jecting concepts of "mass culture"and "culturaldeprivation,"which
have seeminglyreducedworking-classbehaviorto a depersonalizedand
deprivedculturalexpression,he prefersto seek the social meaningof
children'sresponseto coercion and formal schooling in termsof delib-
erate class resistanceto political and economic repressionduring the
period 1889-1939. He points out the implicationsof "social Darwin-
ism," which underlaythe liberalideology of educationalreformin the
later nineteenthand early twentieth centuries and which interpreted
working-classexperiencein middle-classterms; furthermore,he shows
the continuityof such defects in the sociology of cultural deprivation
which motivatededucationalpolicy in the 1950s and 1960s. Evenrecent
radicalcritiquesof legislatorsand administratorshave tended to adopt
uncriticallythe terminologyof those groupswith its implicitpathological
view of working-classactivity. Humphriesprefersto adopt the role of
anthropologist,searchingfor evidenceof the directexperienceof recip-
ients of state education,and seekingthe actual(or symbolic)meaningof
theirresponses.So "hooliganism"becomesan expressionof class-based
politicalresistance,and "larkingabout"(a particularand consistentphe-
nomenon which his researcheshave identifiedas worthy of separate
consideration)is seenas a devioustechniqueof resistanceto authoritarian
control. Chapterson "Subvertingthe School Syllabus,""Challengesto
ClassroomCoercion,"and "SchoolStrikes:Parentsand PupilsProtest'
providea wealthof new oral evidencenowhereto be foundin traditional
accountsof educationaldevelopment.Selectivityof evidenceis apparent,
since almost all of the chapters quoted refer to resistance;yet other
reminiscencesof working-classeducationalexperiencehave testifiedto

7t

Other contributors to the conference whose work has been much concerned with
the history of education included Keith Hoskin, "Reading Aloud in Nineteenth Century
Elementary Education"; David Hamilton, "The Grouping of Children in Nineteenth Cen-
tury Elementary Schools"; Clive Griggs, "Conservatism and Its Application to Education";
and RichardJohnson, "From Nineteenth Century Official Education Reports to the UNESCO
Discourse." Other educationists and linguistic theorists included Harold Rosen, "A Study
of Language in Schools, 1944-1980"; and Jacqueline Rose, "Peter Pan as Written for the
Child."
22Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Chil-
dren and Youth, 1889-1939 (Oxford, 1981).

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Educational History and Educational Change 87

relative quiescence, to a respect for strict teachers and for the values of
the schools, and these not always from respondents who later "suc-
ceeded." And what of the teachers and their motives? They remain de-
personalized in these chapters implicitly mere pawns of the system, with
only a passing suggestion of status conflict.
Phil Gardner's aim in his study of the "lost elementary schools of
Victorian England" is "to restore something of the working-class voice-
so massively and centrally absent-to the familiar chorus of educational
history."23 He defines the problem in terms already identified by other
recent historians of nineteenth-century elementary education: the rela-
tionship between educational formation and wider social and political
structures;the gap between legislative and administrative intent and prac-
tical reality; the nature of the working-class response in the context of
working-class cultural experience; and the existence of a distinctive in-
dependently generated educational enterprise in working-class culture as
an alternative to officially prescribed schooling. The problem of sources
for such an undertaking is that most derive from the middle classes and
are consequently biased, often revealing an open hostility toward work-
ing-class responses to "public" provision and a denigration of private
endeavors. Autobiographical sources are sparse, and oral sources apply
only to a later period. Gardner's methodological response to these prob-
lems is first to analyze the middle-class documents precisely for their
omissions and inconsistencies as well as their findings and opinions, thus
allowing the sources to reveal far more than has previously been per-
mitted. Drawing partly on discourse theory, Gardner sees that in the
somewhat random application of terms such as "dame school" and "com-
mon day school," the inadequacy of nomenclature and subjective care-
lessness of classification were as much a feature of nineteenth-century
investigations of elementary schooling as were "their routine bias and
distortion." When labelling of private working-class schools became
slightly more methodical after midcentury, it tended to embody the judg-
ments of inspectors, with such terms as "private adventure school" con-
taining imputations as to the motives and characters of the teachers.
Care and flexibility are needed by historians in comprehending the
complex cultural phenomenon which was the reality of the working-class
private school. Gardner argues that in considering the working-class
response to schooling, linguistic sensitivity is again needed. Notions of
"apathy" and "ignorance" explaining reluctance to take up publicly pro-
vided schooling were common among middle-class reformers. "Apathy"

21Phil Gardner,The Lost ElementarySchools of VictorianEngland:The People's

Education(London,1984), 2.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
88 History of Education Quarterly

is clearly discounted by the extent of private schooling, amply illustrated

here in the Census Enumerators' Returns for the city of Bristol. "Igno-
rance" suggested a failure by middle-class observers to understand, first,
the conformity of the independent school with the needs of family life
and work by tolerating erratic or spasmodic attendance and, second, the
trust placed in a teacher whose values harmonized with working-class
domestic culture.
Gardner also makes imaginative use of oral sources in the personal
memoirs about those working-class private schools that survived into the
interwar years, having a vestigial relation to the nineteenth-century tra-
dition accessible otherwise only through documentary sources. Such an
attempt to recapture the experience of education has also influenced
writing on other periods than the postindustrial. In 1984, Nicholas Orme
produced the first monograph on medieval education to concentrate on
the largely informal and oral educative environment of home and court,
taking into consideration the gamut of skills, attitudes, beliefs, and be-
havior patterns and adopting a broad definition of the concept of
"teacher."24

Contemporary Issues
The implication of the argument so far has been that recent approaches
to educational history tend to be influenced less by positions taken for
or against particular methodologies or ideologies than by the institutions
in which the research is generated. Research and publication emerging
from the university departments and colleges of education have been
marked primarily by concern with educational or pedagogical issues,
whereas work produced by mainstream social historians has been more
innovative regarding the relationship of education to society, and in its
method.
Hard and fast lines cannot be drawn, however, and it may be ap-
propriate to consider how the direction of recent work has responded
less to debates on historical method and more to current issues in politics
and pedagogics. Although Britain does not share the volume of literature
generated in the United States by contemporary polemicists of educational
politics, such as Diane Ravitch and Allan Bloom, a number of historical
works might be seen as a response to contemporary political circum-
stances. Unpopular Education was the starkly titled critique by the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies of the social democratic policies
through the postwar years, a disillusionment provoked initially by the

24 Orme,FromChildhoodto Chivalry.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Educational History and Educational Change 89

creation of a new state educational agency, the Manpower Services Com-

mission, under the aegis, not of the traditional ministry-the Department
of Education and Science-but of the Department of Trade and Indus-
try.25This was the culmination of a process seen as an alliance between
"social democratic" educational reformers and capitalist interests. The
urgent need today for a more popular politics of education was the
starting point for this historical study, and the group authorship was
explicit that "histories are informed by contemporary needs. It is these
that set the agenda, consciously or not, even if the history is quite distant."
One significant contribution of this group's multifaceted work was to
consider the role of the media as a powerful agency in the determination
of national educational debate. The Centre's work has colored the think-
ing of other historians of education who do not necessarily share its
ideological stance, for instance Roy Lowe's study of postwar educational
change with its emphasis on the impact of suburbanizationand the growth
of a new property-owning middle class on the rhetoric as well as the
structure of education.26
A study by Clive Griggs of the trade union movement and education
may also be symptomatic of current political circumstances insofar as
this traditional form of labor organization has faced considerable chal-
lenge over the past decade.27Griggs is less radical than the CCCS group
in his approach, however, charting the "positive achievements" of the
pre-1930 labor movement in securing educational reforms of a palliative
kind, as well as its maintenance of the socialist ideal of alternative edu-
cational modes, such as labor colleges.
A new focus of interest in the Thatcherite politics of the 1980s has
been the political centrality of a property-owning middle class, and a
parallel historiographical trend might be seen as a return to the "neglected
middle classes."28The idealist philosopher and educational reformer T.
H. Green might have been commenting on historians of the 1960s rather
than his contemporaries of the 1860s when he noted that "for a single

2-5Education Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (University of Bir-

mingham), Unpopular Education: Schooling and Social Democracy in England since 1944
(London, 1981). A leading figure in the group was Richard Johnson, whose earlier work
on the politics of nineteenth-century education provided an important critique of the "Whig
tradition" and who has contributed significantly to the History Workshop.
26 Roy Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years: A Social History (London, 1988).
27 Clive Griggs, The Trades Union Congress and the Struggle for Education, 1868-
1925 (Sussex, Eng., 1983).
25 A substantial recent contribution to this field, representative, too, of the way in
which social historians concerned with childhood and family have made their contribution
to history of education in the widest sense, is: Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family
Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago, 1987).

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
90 History of Education Quarterly

man to be found having views about better education for the middle-
class, a hundred may be found having views about education of the
poor."29 On the subject of middle-class education there is creditable
researchwhich may not have adopted innovative methodologies but which
neverthelessprovides new insights, deepening our understandingof events
for which we have frequently relied on superficial received interpretations.
Much administrative documentation has still been inadequately
worked, and a case in point is the Schools Inquiry Commission (or "Taun-
ton Commission") which investigated the state of middle-class education
in the 1860s and made recommendations leading to an act of 1869 for
the reform of the Endowed Schools. Sheila Fletcher made an adminis-
trative study of its work in relation to girls' education.3"In reevaluating
the background to and work of the Commission, David Allsobrook has
provided the insight that a much more immediate general response to
the need for middle-class educational improvement emerged in the "de-
clining" sector of the landed interest around 1870 than in the reputedly
more dynamic urban industrial communities.3' There is admittedly little
speculation or interpretation of the motives, nor is there investigation of
the way in which their work affected the lives of middle-class children.
But he clearly delineates how the "rural, not to say Georgic" metaphors
and models inherited from late eighteenth-century thought adumbrated
provision on a three-tiered model of middle-class social structure, how
the National Society of the Established Church (whose work has been
far more often cited than studied in any detail) provided early on an
effective administrative framework locally for the provision of middle-
class education, and how the county aristocracy as late as 1870 still had
a role to play in urban politics. Urban middle-class effort seems to have
been largely dissipated in the provision of private and proprietary school-
ing, while mainstream reform remained in the hands of an autocratic, if
liberal, upper class.
A series of books by J. A. Mangan has served to revive attention to
the public schools, with a focus on the ideology of athleticism and the
impact of "muscular Christianity" on imperialism in the later nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.32 Once more, methodology has turned

29 R. L. Nettleship, ed., Works of Thomas Hill Green, 3 vols. (London, 1906):

475;
for a more recent period: C. Heward, Making a Man of Him: Parents and Their Sons'
Education at an English Public School 1929-50 (London, 1988).
10Sheila Fletcher, Feminists and Bureaucrats: A Study in the Development of Girls'
Education in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1980).
31David Allsobrook, Schools for the Shires: The Reform of Middle-Class Education
in Mid-Victorian England (Manchester, 1986).
l2J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge,
1981); idem, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (New
York, 1986). The work of Christine Heward applies social class and gender analysis to
the study of public school education.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Educational History and Educational Change 91

somewhat toward the reconstruction of experience, insofar as Mangan

makes use of epistolary and autobiographical sources, school magazines,
and other school records as the documentation of daily life in those
institutions.
While the politics of feminism from the later 1960s onwards have
undoubtedly inspired much of the prolific research into women's edu-
cation, this research has been conducted from a multiplicity of political
positions. One recent collection of essays which reveals the working of
ideology in the construction of social practices within the family and the
school is the product of a group of social historians, and another pub-
lished by the History of Education Society explores in more detail the
operation of gender discrimination within education and the profes-
sions.33 Ethnic minority experience of education has received some at-
tention in the former of these two works, as in other local projects
particularly using the techniques of oral history, but is underrepresented
in the literature to date. Some response to the importance of this as both
a political and educational issue was reflected in a one-day conference
organized by the History of Education Society.34
A newly contested area of educational politics is that of the curric-
ulum. Nineteen seventy-six is often taken as the watershed year in which
the government in Britain finally grasped the nettle which had been over-
growing the "secret garden of the curriculum." In a relatively short space
of time it became clear that the degree of "autonomy" which teachers
had hitherto enjoyed in curriculum matters was about to be substantially
changed. Reacting again more or less consciously to a contemporary
agenda, the study of educational history began to make considerable
strides in the study of curriculum change. Again diverse methodologies
were applied, and it would be false to suggest that one particular approach
predominated, although some influence of sociological method may be
identified.35Political developments may well have been precipitated in
part by disillusionment with the rage for curriculum innovation in the
preceding fifteen years, characterized, as Ivor Goodson has noted, by a
messianic belief that the curriculum of the past could be transcended; by
contrast, curriculum study now requires "strategies which allow us to

3HC. Steedman, C. Urwin, and V. Walkerdine, eds., Language, Gender, and Childhood
(London, 1984); P. Summerfield, ed., Women, Education, and the Professions, History of
Education Society Occasional Publications, no. 8 (Leicester, 1987).
'4 One of the papers delivered was published: lan Grosvenor, "A Different Reality:
Education and the Racialization of the Black Child," History of Education 16 (Dec. 1987):
299-308.
H5 Barry Cooper, Renegotiating Secondary School Mathematics: A Study of Curriculum
Change and Stability (London, 1985), for example, makes substantial use of the model of
R. Bucher and A. L. Strauss in interpreting the role of teachers in curriculum change.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
92 History of Education Quarterly

examine the emergence and survival of the 'traditional' as well as the

failure to generalise, institutionalise and sustain the 'innovative.' "36
Ivor Goodson and Stephen Ball brought together a collection of
ethnographic and historical studies of the school curriculum in an attempt
to direct historians' attention more to the reality of the curriculum as
delivered in the classroom and received by the pupils, phenomena for
which the historical evidence is notoriously elusive.37Questions of vested
interests and political pressures in curriculum change and development
may also be better understood by combining the insights of contemporary
ethnographers and historians of education. Contributors to another col-
lection employed a variety of methodologies which attempted to identify
"social histories of curriculum subjects" again in terms of the realities
of schools and classrooms, examining the rhetoric and the vested interests
involved in the evolution and institutionalization of school subjects.38
Here the histories contribute significantly to an understanding of curric-
ulum in the present, especially with the formulation of concepts such as
William Reid's "educational constituencies"-interest groups comprising
individuals both internal and external to the school, supporting certain
policies and sharing rhetoric backed by a variety of actions to effect
change.
Two contrasting contributions to the history of mathematics reveal,
however, that the field does not belong exclusively to innovative meth-
odology or conceptual apparatus. Barry Cooper did not set out to write
a detailed historical account of the School Mathematics Project of the
1960s; he addressed concerns of the sociology of knowledge to emphasize
that "cognitive and technical norms" of school subjects are historically
relative, dependent on such factors as the institutional order and social
class relationships.39Alan Howson, on the other hand, adopted a bio-
graphical approach for the first book-length study of the history of math-
ematics education in England.40However, in dealing with nine selected
mathematics educators from the sixteenth century to the present, Howson

16 Ivor Goodson, "Towards a History of Curriculum," History of Education Society

Bulletin 35 (Spring 1985): 48.

37Ivor Goodson and Stephen Ball, eds., Defining the Curriculum: Histories and Eth-
nographies (London, 1984). Goodson had broached this treatment of curriculum history
earlier in School Subjects and Curriculum Change (London, 1983), in which differentiated
curricula and social structure were shown to be closely matched, and teachers' material
self-interest was a significant factor in curriculum determination.
11 Ivor Goodson, ed. Social Histories of the Secondary School Curriculum: Subjects

for Study (London, 1985).

9 Cooper, Renegotiating Secondary School Mathematics.
40 Alan Geoffrey Howson, A History of Mathematics Education in England (Cam-
bridge, 1982).

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Educational History and Educational Change 93

reinforced the sense of historical process by concentrating on the edu-

cators' own childhood and schooling as a key feature in their mathe-
matical development.
Again, reinforcing the point that the best work does not emerge
exclusively from an innovative methodological stance is a study by David
Layton of a professional association of science teachers.4' On past record,
such institutional histories do not make good educational history. Yet
here a highly respected historian of science education has taken on the
job in a scholarly manner, and divided his account into three parallel
strands: the evolution of the organization through its precursor societies
from 1902, the social history of the science teaching profession, and
finally the political history of the professional association's involvement
in curriculum change. The reader would look in vain to this volume for
innovation in historical analysis, yet here is an informative account of a
significant aspect of curriculum history related to key developments in
the teaching profession.
With the almost complete disappearance of formal selection for sec-
ondary education, the issue of IQ testing has ceased to be of immediate
political concern. Its profound influence on the British educational system
has become just sufficiently remote for historical analysis, and exposures
of fraudulence in the later work of Cyril Burt gave impetus to such
research. Recent works exploring this phenomenon embrace a broad
range of approaches, from Evans's and Waites's polemical account of
the social history of mental testing, to Gillian Sutherland's meticulous
account of administrative responses to the phenomenon of IQ.42Where
the former broadly considered the ideological implications an "immature
science," subject to a system of contemporary social relations, Sutherland
dismissed the association of intelligence testing with eugenics, analyzing
its application at central and local government levels, and concluding
from the documentary evidence that intelligence testing was not as dom-
inant before 1940 as had been popularly thought. Careful and thorough
though the research is, it might be argued that Sutherland's account
reveals the limitations of treating educational policy-making and admin-
istration somewhat in isolation from social and cultural change.

Conclusion
The last decade of historiography is, therefore, not easily explicable in
terms of a two-way contest between "new" and "old" interpretations

4i David Layton, Interpreters of Science: A History of the Association for Science

Education (London, 1984).
42 B. Evans and B. Waites, IQ and Mental Testing: An Unnatural Science and Its Social
History (London, 1980); G. Sutherland, Ability, Merit and Measurement: Mental Testing
and English Education, 1880-1940 (Oxford, 1984).

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
94 History of Education Quarterly

but presents a variegated picture of reponse to political and educational

change. As the traditional history of education courses cease to be an
accepted part of the teacher education curriculum, that particular insti-
tutional base is diminishing. As one index of this development, the num-
ber of university chairs occupied by historians of education has declined
rapidly over the past decade. On the other hand, the centrality of edu-
cational issues in political debate and the concern of social historians for
the life experience of individuals are two factors that promise to keep
research in this field very much alive.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:56:07 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions