The efforts of Sir Cyril Norwood on behalf of the public schools were only one aspect of his endeavour to develop an approach to ‘education for leadership’ that might be successful in a changing society. The key problem as he saw it was to infuse the values of the public schools, which he associated with a long-established ‘English tradition’ in education, into the new state secondary schools. It was this aim that above all informed his major report to the Board of Education in 1943, on the curriculum and examinations in secondary schools.

NORWOOD AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION

Cyril Norwood, born in 1875, was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and St John's College, Oxford. An outstanding student, he gained a first class degree in classical moderations and literae humaniores, before heading the list for entry to the civil service and being posted to the Admiralty in 1899. Within two years he resigned from this post to become sixth form classics master at Leeds Grammar School. This major shift in his prospective career was apparently made because of the scant scope for initiative that the Admiralty allowed; the new opportunities offered by the imminent introduction of state secondary education were probably another important factor in his decision. Such was his impact that in 1906 he was appointed Headmaster of Bristol Grammar School, whose academic fortunes he quickly helped to restore. In 1916 he left the state sector to become Master of Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and then in 1926 took over as Head of Harrow School.

Norwood, James and many other twentieth-century adherents of ‘education for leadership’ saw the Labour Party as a natural enemy of the values and priorities that they cherished. Such hostility tended to be mutual, as Labour's educational policy generally advocated greater equality and the abolition of structures that resisted or restricted this growth. Public schools were subjected to trenchant criticisms, as were the grammar schools after 1945. Less noticed, and certainly less successful, than the dominant Labour emphasis upon equality has been a tendency in socialist thought that has sought effective leadership of the working class based on new kinds of training and education. This latter kind of approach attempted to develop in various ways the ‘popular leaders’ envisaged by J.A. Hobson.

THE LABOUR TRADITION OF EQUALITY

Throughout the present century, the Labour Party and the organised labour movement in general have usually insisted upon ‘equality’ and ‘democracy’ in education. Key figures in this regard were the historian R.H. Tawney, especially in the interwar period, and Anthony Crosland in the 1950s and 1960s. In his major work Equality, published in 1931, Tawney fiercely denounced what he called the ‘religion of inequality’. He was especially critical of the character and effects of education in England. The public schools, he noted, were ‘traditionally connected with the middle and upper classes’: ‘Drawing their pupils mainly, not from the public primary schools, but from the so-called preparatory schools, and catering for the requirements of the wealthier sections of the community, they form virtually a closed educational system of their own, side by side with the system of public education which has as its foundation the elementary school.’

Despite his failure to prevent the demise of the grammar schools, and the general unpopularity of the notion of education for leadership in the 1950s, Eric James enjoyed considerable success and influence in one area: science education. Several initiatives of the time sought to promote the formation of an industrial, social and political elite, based on the public and grammar schools; novel only in the sense that it was to be grounded in science and technology, suitably adapted to this purpose, rather than simply in the classics. At the same time that James's general approach was in decline, a potent technocratic vision of English society visibly gained ground.

SCIENCE AND EDUCATION

The lack of interest exhibited by most public schools in science education had long been cause for reproach. The Clarendon report of 1864 complained that ‘Natural science … is practically excluded from the education of the higher classes in England.’ Indeed, it continued, ‘Education with us is, in this respect, narrower than it was three centuries ago, whilst science has prodigiously extended her empire, has explored immense tracts, divided them into provinces, introduced into them order and method, and made them accessible to all. This exclusion is, in our view, a plain defect and a great practical evil.’ While this situation existed, the claims on behalf of the public schools that they produced appropriate leaders of society were highly vulnerable. As Martin Wiener remarks, the ‘virtual absence of science of any sort from their curricula’ seemed to exemplify their ‘detachment from the modern world’.

‘Therefore we must elect as ruler and guardian of the city him who as boy and youth and man has been tested and has come out without strain, and render him honours in life and after death, giving him the highest rewards of public burial and other memorials. The others we must reject.’ In this way Plato began to elaborate his thesis of ‘education for leadership’ in the fourth century bc. It was to become a key theme in the humanist scholarship of the sixteenth century, and later, in the nineteenth century, assumed the status and trappings of an English tradition. To a large extent it has fallen from favour in twentieth-century Britain. Nevertheless, there have been several attempts during the present century to adapt the notion to meet changing social, political and cultural demands and opportunities. This book is chiefly concerned with the characteristics, implications and ultimate fate of these more recent efforts.

The historiography of nineteenth-century English education has rightly emphasised the theme of leadership and its social and political implications, especially in relation to the public schools. Historians such as Rupert Wilkinson, J.A. Mangan and Mark Girouard have vividly depicted an ideology that asserted the necessity to train a cohesive, enlightened elite to rule nation and Empire. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the development of the ideal since 1914.

The failure of the public school dominated Establishment to avoid the drift to global conflict, and the clear risks involved in producing dynamic leaders like the fascist dictators, produced a decisive reaction in the decades after 1945 against both old and new doctrines of ‘education for leadership’. Eric James's vision of the grammar schools, dubbed ‘meritocratic’ by Michael Young at the end of the 1950s, represented an important but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to adapt to this new situation while retaining key elements of the classic public school purpose.

THE NEW SCHOOL TIE

The dangers of education for leadership, associated on the one hand with Nazism and on the other hand with the ‘old school tie’, appeared one of the most important lessons to be learned from the experience of the second world war. It was symptomatic of this that the educational theories of Plato came under increasing attack in the immediate postwar years as being at least in part responsible for Hitler's notions of the ‘master race’. Even before the beginning of the war there had been important indications of this new mood – Richard Crossman's Plato Today, in 1937, was an uncompromising assault upon the social implications of Plato's thought. After 1945, this kind of rejection of Plato became much more common although, naturally enough, such denunciations remained fiercely contested. Articles by Otto Neurath and J.A. Lauwerys on the resemblance between Plato's Republic and Nazi propaganda met with a mixed reception that included ripostes from philosophers including G.C. Field and C.E.M. Joad.

In the darkest days of the second world war, the public schools faced a crisis of their own. Declining enrolments and growing financial problems were not the sole source of anxiety: even more perturbing were strong criticisms of their general social purposes that threatened to lead to their destruction or emasculation. That they survived to prosper once again was due in no small measure to the Fleming report on public schools and the general educational system, published in 1944. The ‘old school tie’ continued to exert a strong influence on English society. Even so, the public schools of the postwar period were in some respects significantly different from those of the classic phase half a century earlier, and this adaptation to changing circumstances affected their role and rationale as the main producers of future leaders.

DEMOCRACY AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

It has become conventional wisdom that the first world war marked a decisive period in the decline of the public schools and the values associated with them. According to Mark Girouard, for instance, the Great War ‘both brought Victorian chivalry to its climax and helped to destroy it’. He explains: ‘As a dominant code of conduct it never recovered from the Great War partly because the war itself was such a shatterer of illusions, partly because it helped produce a world in which the necessary conditions for chivalry were increasingly absent.’

Of all books relating to education, the most frequently discussed must surely be Plato's Republic. Of all educational institutions, the nineteenth-century English public school has a strong claim to be considered the most widely known, admired and attacked. This book examines the impact and influence of these two great sources of darkness and light in twentieth-century England. It does so by focusing upon the theme that was central to both: education for leadership. It shows how the classic ‘English tradition’ of the nineteenth century has been revised and adapted in various ways in twentieth-century secondary education. And it argues that the decline of this tradition especially in the last thirty years has given way not to social equality, but to an individualistic, competitive materialism – a trend that is the antithesis of what the public schools and indeed the modern comprehensives were meant to stand for.

This book is essentially a study in the social history of education. As should be the case with all educational history, it is about the relationships between education and the many other dimensions of social change; ideas, ideology, culture, religion, science, technology, industry, labour. It stresses continuity, but seeks to illuminate change, novelty, and decay. The book is designed to be suitable for students of education, history and contemporary society, and also offers new research perspectives for advanced students and researchers.

The current work is the second in what I like to see as a trilogy of books concerned with the ‘tripartite’ dimensions of English secondary education in the twentieth century.

To what extent was education for leadership really an ‘English tradition’? Although it was appropriated, indeed colonised in the nineteenth century and was often to be celebrated as quintessentially English, many aspects of this ideal had of course originated and developed elsewhere. Chivalry had attained its zenith in medieval France, and it was Renaissance Italy that was largely responsible for giving sixteenth-century England its idea of the proper manners and training of a gentleman. The English manifestation of education for leadership was an instance of a tradition being, if not exactly invented, then certainly shaped to suit a particular configuration of social and political interests.

There were many other examples of societies in which a variant of the Platonic vision of leadership exerted potent influence. The common Greek heritage and Renaissance ideal stimulated in the American colonies, just as in England, grammar schools which sought to promote civic character and leadership qualities. In the new Republic educational institutions were often regarded as a means of selecting and educating future leaders, a perception that gave education a central place in politics and society. Thomas Jefferson was especially concerned with the education of the future leaders of the United States, seeking to identify a ‘natural aristocracy’. The galaxy of strong political leaders in eighteenth-century America has been attributed in part to the quality and character of education, with its emphasis on the classics and on history intended to inspire a sense of duty and of civic virtue.

Such have been the continuing, and the changing, characteristics of education for leadership in twentieth-century education. Plato has been much more influential than Marx in English secondary education. Attempts to revise what was still often described as the ‘English tradition’ had an important bearing on the character and direction of educational change. Assertions of the values of community, character, morality and citizenship with which they were associated, represented significant responses to contemporary problems. There is no doubt, though, that the efforts of the revisionists met most commonly with failure and disappointment. With the overall decline of the classic nineteenth-century ideology, and the general failure of attempts to revive and revitalise it during this century, we need now to ask whether we have lost anything in this gradual process, and how to explain the character of our modern ‘guardians’.

POLITICS AND CULTURE

Decline and dispersal have been central themes in this book. The public school ideology, at the peak of its authority in the late nineteenth century, has been undermined by changing political, social and cultural expectations. Even though it retained much of its former influence, and the public schools themselves by and large survived these changes, their rationale as the exclusive source of future leaders was contested and effectively lost. By the 1960s it was a role to which only the critics of the public schools referred. Attempts to transfer their ideals and traditions to the new state system of secondary education and the mass of the population were largely frustrated.