EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

10 J. Martin, Making Socialists: MaryBridges Adams and the Fight forKnowledge and Power, ManchesterUniversity Press, 2010.11 C. Benn, ‘Common educationand the radical tradition’, in A.Rattansi and D. Reeder (eds),Rethinking Radical Education: Essaysin Honour of Brian Simon, Lawrence& Wishart, 1992, pp.142–65; andMartin, Making Socialists, p.106.the ideal state. Green provided an intellectualschema at the level of general moral values, whichsought to provide a meeting ground betweenmiddle class reformers and what they consideredthe ‘better part’ of the working class. Since thesecondary schools charged fees and were largelybeyond the reach of the ordinary child, teachersworking in elementary schools held the gaze asstate officials who might promote the morality ofthe common good through universal education.In this context, teaching and learning provideda sounding board for teachers’ civic engagement,acting within education, teacher associations andcommunities.Brian Simon argued that local authoritieshave been a progressive force in education. Theperiod from the 1870 Education Act to thefirst decade of the twentieth century broughtuniversal basic education. Popular educationalpolitics depended on locally elected singlepurposeelementary education authorities called‘school boards’, valued for the width of theirfranchise. The democracy of the boards wasprized in comparison with the proprietary rightsof clergy over the voluntary schools and workingclassradicals tried to extend opportunitieswithin the elementary system, advancing it in acommon direction. In the 1890s, Labour leaderslike Keir Hardie demanded a comprehensive‘broad highway’ that all could travel; othersdemanded that the system be organised basedon age divisions rather than those of social class.There was a tendency to see state schools as ‘thepeople’s own’. The policies favoured were localcontrol and ‘common schools’ rather than theworkable ‘ladder of opportunity’ that the 1902Education Act put into operation.The common schoolThere are similarities between the predicamentfacing activists in the National Labour EducationLeague (set up in 1901) and current hopes ofrenewing social democratic ideas in education.Espousing the common school as part of thesocialist vision of a better society, agitators raisedquestions of control: who decides the forms andcontents of schooling; what does democracymean in this sphere? The League organisedaround two key demands: the formation of asecular (not spiritual or religious) state educationsystem that would be free and compulsory for all,and the provision of state-funded maintenancegrants, school medical inspection and feedingof schoolchildren. 10 All were funded throughthe restoration of the educational endowmentsprovided by ‘do-gooders’ including religiousbodies to establish schools and colleges. TheEndowed Schools Commissioners, charged withreviewing their operation from 1864 to 1868,triggered several key changes at the expense ofthe working classes. These included empoweringsuch schools to charge fees and makingadmission to the schools dependent on winninga scholarship through ‘merit’, which usuallymeant proficiency in Latin or Greek, subjectsto which the ordinary child was unlikely to beexposed. This involved the adaptation of ancientfoundations, old statutes and trust deeds, whichhad begun as endowments for the educationof poor and indigent scholars. In practice, thisled to the abolition of the free education willedby benefactors in the past, and the removal ofrestrictions on curricula. The commissioners alsoconfiscated funds from charities providing foodand cash for poor families, which they regardedas outmoded, and handed them over to theendowed secondary schools. 11Offering a clear perspective on the scope ofeducation, the League believed a school had todo three things: train for a working life, for aninner life and for a communal life as a citizen.Campaigning for improvements in working-classeducation, they believed that everyone (regardlessof class, ethnicity or gender) should have accessto a common curriculum that combined physicaleducation, manual and mental labour and learningto use one’s hands in manual crafts. They foughtfor maintenance grants and welfare provisionto secure meaningful access to high qualityeducation delivered to a maximum class size of30 pupils. The restoration of the misappropriatededucational endowments was an important rootof the popular politics of education in this periodand crucial to the realisation of the League’seducation programme. Activists campaigned forpopular control over them, reinterpreting thecontent of culture by giving status to ‘modern’subjects (living languages, mathematics andscience) in opposition to the liberal–romantictradition in the hands of England’s elite. 1216 | www.compassonline.org.uk