Education

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521257909.004

3 - Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Gillian Sutherland

Edited by

F. M. L. Thompson

Show author details

F. M. L. Thompson: Affiliation:
University of London

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Education is best defined as the ‘methodical socialisation of the young generation’. Thus family and kinship networks, apprenticeships, patterns of child employment all have a part to play in the educative process, alongside any provision of a formal or semi-formal kind for schooling. It would be impossible to treat all of these adequately in one chapter; and indeed family, kinship and work are all themselves subjects for separate extended treatment. This chapter will therefore focus primarily on the development of provision for formal schooling, but not to the exclusion of all other aspects of the process. For one of the chapter's most important themes is the rise of formal schooling. In 1750 this was a relatively insignificant and brief part of the educative process and one not necessarily encountered by all children. By 1950 it was central and it was what most people, adults and children alike, meant when they spoke of education.

1750–1850

In England in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the vast mass of the population did not see the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic as an integrated package – the 3Rs – and one to be acquired in a formal institutional setting, as a prelude to economic activity. These skills were seen as discrete, reading far outweighing the other two in importance. If acquired at all, they were acquired – and offered by teachers – in sequence: reading before writing, writing before arithmetic.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 , pp. 119 - 170

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521257909.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Anderson, R. D., Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar

Anderson, R. D., ‘Education and the State in Nineteenth-Century Scotland’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 36 (London, 1983)Google Scholar

Armytage, W. H. G., Civic Universities: Aspects of a British Tradition (London, 1955)Google Scholar

Arnold, Matthew, Complete Prose Works of, ed. Super, R. H., 11 vols. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960–77)Google Scholar

Aston, T. S., gen. ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5: The Eighteenth Century, ed. Sutherland, L. S. and Mitchell, L. G. (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar

Bamford, Samuel, Passages in the Life of a Radical, and Early Days, ed. Dunckley, Henry, 2 vols. (London, 1893)Google Scholar

Bamford, T. W., The Rise of the Public Schools (London, 1967)Google Scholar

Berdahl, R. O.British Universities and the State (Berkeley, 1959)Google Scholar

Bone, T. R., School Inspection in Scotland 1840–1966 (Scottish Council for Research in Education Publications, No. 57, Edinburgh, 1968)Google Scholar

Bryant, Margaret, The London Experience of Secondary Education (London, 1986)Google Scholar

Burnett, John, ed., Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London, 1982)Google Scholar

Cars well, John, Government and the Universities in Britain: Programme and Performance 1960–1980 (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar

Checkland, S. G., The Gladstones: A Family Biography 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971)Google Scholar

Davie, George, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1961)Google Scholar

Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘Printing and the People: Early Modern France’, in Graff, Harvey J., ed., Literacy and Social Development in the West (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar

Dunlop, Jocelyn, and Denman, R. D., English Apprenticeship and Child Labour: A History (London, 1912)Google Scholar

Durkheim, Emile, Education and Sociology, trans. Fox, Sherwood D. (Glencoe, Ill., 1956)Google Scholar

Ellis, E. L., The University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1872–1972 (Cardiff, 1972)Google Scholar

Engel, A. J., From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar

Fletcher, Sheila, Feminists and Bureaucrats: A Study in the Development of Girls' Education in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRef Google Scholar

Floud, J., ‘The Educational Experience of the Adult Population of England and Wales as at July 1949’, in Glass, D. V., ed., Mobility in Britain (London, 1954)Google Scholar

Gardner, Phil, The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England (London, 1984)Google Scholar

Garland, M. M., Cambridge before Darwin: The Ideal of a Liberal Education 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRef Google Scholar

Glass, D. V., ed., Social Mobility in Britain (London, 1954)Google Scholar

Godber, Joyce, The Harpur Trust 1551–1973 (Bedford, 1973)Google Scholar

Graff, Harvey J., ed., Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar

Harrison, J. F. C., Learning and Living, 1790–1960: A Study in the History of the English Adult Education Movement (London, 1961)Google Scholar

Harte, Negley, The University of London, 1836–1986 (London, 1986)Google Scholar

Heron, Liz, ed., Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (London, 1985)Google Scholar

Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957; paperback edn, 1968)Google Scholar

Hollis, Patricia, The Pauper Press (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar

Hope, Keith, As Others See Us: Schooling and Social Mobility in Scotland and the United States (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar

Houston, R. A., Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRef Google Scholar

Howarth, Janet, and Curthoys, Mark, ‘The Political Economy of Women's Higher Education in Late–Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Britain’, Historical Research, 60 (London, 1987)Google Scholar

Hurt, J. S., ‘Professor West on Early Nineteenth-Century Education’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 24 (London, 1971)Google Scholar

Johnson, Richard, ‘Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England’, Past & Present, 49 (London, 1970)Google Scholar

Johnson, Richard, ‘“Really Useful Knowledge”: Radical Education and Working-Class Culture, 1790–1848’, in Clarke, John, Critcher, Chris and Johnson, Richard, eds., Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London, 1979)Google Scholar

Jones, M. G., The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge, 1938)Google Scholar

Kamm, Josephine, Indicative Past: A Hundred Years of the Girls' Public Day School Trust (London, 1971)Google Scholar

Kiesling, H. J., ‘Nineteenth-Century Education According to West: A Comment’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 36 (London, 1983)Google Scholar

Laqueur, T. W., Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture 1780–1850 (New Haven, 1976)Google Scholar

Mueller, Detlef K., Ringer, Fritz, and Simon, Brian (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Educational System (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar

Murphy, James, Church, State and Schools in Britain, 1800–1970 (London, 1971)Google Scholar

Newson, John and Elizabeth, , Seven Years Old in the Home Environment (London, 1976)Google Scholar

Newson, John and Elizabeth, , and Barnes, Peter, Perspectives on School at Seven Years Old (London, 1977)Google Scholar

O'Day, Rosemary, Education and Society 1500–1800 (London, 1982)Google Scholar

Philpott, Hugh B., London at School: The Story of the London School Board 1870–1904 (London, 1904)Google Scholar

Prest, John, Lord John Russell (London, 1972)Google Scholar

Roach, John, A History of Secondary Education in England 1800–1870 (London, 1986)Google Scholar

Robinson, Eric, ed., John Clare's Autobiographical Writings (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar

Sanderson, Michael, The Universities and British Industry 1850–1970 (London, 1972)Google Scholar

Sanderson, Michael, Educational Opportunity and Social Change in England (London, 1987)Google Scholar

Scotland, James, A History of Scottish Education, 2 vols. (London, 1969)Google Scholar

Sheldon, Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London, 1968)Google Scholar

Sherington, Geoffrey, English Education, Social Change and War 1911–20 (Manchester, 1981)Google Scholar

Silver, Harold, The Concept of Popular Education (London, 1965)Google Scholar

Slee, P. R. H., Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester 1800–1914 (Manchester, 1986)Google Scholar

Springhall, John, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883–1940 (London, 1977)Google Scholar

Spufford, Margaret, ‘First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Autobiographers’, Social History, 4 (London, 1979)Google Scholar

Steedman, H., ‘Denning Institutions: The Endowed Grammar Schools and the Systematisation of English Secondary Education’, in Mueller, D. K., Ringer, F. and Simon, B., eds., The Rise of the Modern Educational System (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar

Stone, Lawrence, ed., The University in Society, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar

Sutherland, Gillian, Policy-Making in Elementary Education 1870–1895 (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar

Sutherland, Gillian, Ability, Merit and Measurement: Mental Testing and English Education 1880–1940 (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar

Sutherland, Gillian, ed., Government and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Commentaries on British Parliamentary Papers: Education (Shannon, 1977)Google Scholar

Thompson, Flora, Lark Rise (London, 1939; World Classics edn, 1954)Google Scholar

Thomson, Thea, ed., Edwardian Childhoods (London, 1981)Google Scholar

Tompson, Richard S., Classics or Charity? The Dilemma of the Eighteenth-Century Grammar School (Manchester, 1971)Google Scholar

Tropp, A., The School Teachers (London, 1957)Google Scholar

Vincent, David, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London, 1981)Google Scholar

Vincent, David, Literacy and Popular Culture in England 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar

West, E. G., ‘Resource Allocation and Growth in Early Nineteenth-Century British Education’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 23 (London, 1970)Google Scholar

West, E. G., ‘The Interpretation of Early Nineteenth-Century Education Statistics’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 24 (London, 1971)Google Scholar

West, E. G., ‘Nineteenth-Century Educational History: The Kiesling Critique’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 36 (London, 1983)Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.