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.