Aspects of Neglect: The Strange Case of Victorian Popular Education

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

More has been researched and written about education in Victorian England than in any other period, and the majority of it has been about popular education. Yet we have neglected it. Most of what has been written has in fact disguised our neglect and ignorance of it. This is not just a question of 'gaps' that need to be filled, of historical inattention. It is a more basic question of the kind of historical enterprise in which we have been engaged. Judgements about historical 'neglect', of course, depend on assumptions about what is, could be, or should be known. They entail definitions of the area, purpose and value of study. Such judgements and definitions are ideological statements. My interest in our 'neglect' of Victorian popular education, in the nature of the historical definitions involved, and in related questions of ideology, arise from difficulties in my current research. In making a judgement about the apparently most explored area and period of English, education, I am inevitably making a judgement about the direction of the history of education-though I am here confining myself to the nineteenth century, and to the education of the poor. I cannot avoid outlining the personal research situation out of which this discussion arises, or the main thrusts of previous investigations in this field. In outlining these situations I cannot avoid discussing the reasons for them, and the theoretical and historiographical issues which they raise. The themes that have attracted the most attention in Victorian popular education have been those of policy formation and legislation, commissions and committees, the provision, control and administration of education, and the changing shape of different 'levels' of education-elementary and technical, infant and adult, and 'types' of educationboard and voluntary. Some attention has been paid to the broader 'context' of educational decisions and functions-notably that of the churches and the radical and labour movements, and the nature and extent of literacy. Studies have been national and (especially in the case of theses and dissertations) local-with a vast amount of (mainly unpublished) work on local school boards and local institutions. The most researched and discussed areas can be summarized as: the school boards, the voluntary school system, and the development of a national system of administration (focusing on Kay-Shuttleworth and the Committee of Council, Robert Lowe and the Revised Code, Forster and the 1870 Education Act, the politics of the school board era and the events leading up to the I902 Education Act). Attention has also been paid (again, largely in unpublished work) to pressure groups, from the Central Society of Education in the i83os to the bodies campaigning for public education in the late I84os and i85os, the National Education League of the late I86os, and the socialist organizations of the last decades of the century.l It seems a well-surveyed field, and it has produced such publication peaks as Brian Simon's first two volumes of 'Studies in the History of Education' which encompass the Victorian period (I960, I965), John Harrison's Learning and Living 1780-1960 (I96I), Mabel Tylecote's The Mechanics' Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire before 1851 (I957)