Education

The British exhibits at the 1867 Paris exhibition looked pretty shabby next to the state of the art Prussian stand; three years later the Prussians had conquered France. Nothing wrong with Prussian technical education, Britain noted, enviously.

British teachers were still paid by a crude code based on attendance and performance in tests on the ‘three Rs’. Wise teachers taught large classes by rote: nothing else paid the bills. The first teacher associations got going specifically to fight The Code but got nowhere.

The Clarendon Commission in to the big public schools and the more radical Taunton Commission in to endowed schools proposed a radical shake-up, especially to kick-start science and languages and generally let in the nineteenth century. The public school heads however, formed the Headmasters’ Conference to defend their Latin and games. They won.

In 1868, one of Taunton’s men, W.E. Forster, got the education brief in Gladstone’s government. His solution: ‘send ‘em all to school’.

But his 1870 Education Act ran into a storm of criticism, especially from non-conformists and secularists who objected to paying rates for schools which taught Anglicanism.

The Cowper-Temple clause tried to keep RE non-sectarian, though the Anglicans usually got their way. The Act set up elected School Boards to build schools in areas not covered by the Church societies: the first genuine state schools.

Cambridge opened its first women’s college, at Hitchin (later it moved to Girton) and University College London was mixed, but Edinburgh was fighting tooth and nail to avoid awarding a medical degree to Sophia Jex-Blake. They lost.

Sean Lang