Pupils at Harrow, where Norwood was headmaster, wheel books to class, 1930 ©Mary Evans Picture Library/Imagno
In 1757, Soames Jenyns MP writes in praise of ignorance: “Ignorance, or the want of knowledge and literature, the appointed lot of all born to poverty and the drudgeries of life, is the only opiate capable of infusing that insensibility, which can enable them to endure the miseries of the one, and the fatigues of the other. It is a cordial, administered by the gracious hand of providence, of which they ought never to be deprived by an ill-judged and improper education. It is the basis of all subordination, the support of society, and the privilege of individuals... by which means the prince and the labourer, the philosopher and the peasant, are, in some measure, fitted for their respective situations.”
Mary Wollstonecraft writes in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792: “My observations on national education are obviously hints; but I principally wish to enforce the necessity of educating the sexes together to perfect both, and of making children sleep at home that they may learn to love home; yet to make private support, instead of smothering, public affections, they should be sent to school to mix with a number of equals, for only by the jostlings of equality can we form a just opinion of ourselves.”
In 1868, Matthew Arnold, poet, cultural critic and inspector of schools, publishes his report on British education: “The aim and office of instruction, say many people, is to make a man a good citizen, or a good Christian or a gentleman; or it is to fit him to get on in the world, or it is to enable him to do his duty in the state of life to which he is called. It is none of these, and the modern spirit more and more discerns it to be none of these. These are at best secondary and indirect aims of instruction; its prime direct aim is to enable a man to know himself and the world… To know himself, a man must know the capabilities and performances of the human spirit; and the value of the humanities… is that it affords for this purpose an unsurpassed source of light and stimulus.”
Elizabeth Blackburn, a Lancashire weaver, describes her education just before the First World War: “By present standards [1977] our horizons were very limited... But I left school at 13 with a sound grasp of the basic arts of communication, reading and writing, and I could ‘reckon up’ sufficiently to cope with shopping and domestic accounts and calculate my cotton wages... I had gained some knowledge of the Bible, a lively interest in literature, and most important, some impetus to learn.”
Herbert Fisher, President of the Board of Education, who secured the raising of the minimum school leaving age to 14, addresses the House of Commons in 1917: “There is a growing sense… that the industrial workers of this country are entitled to be considered… as fit subjects for any form of education from which they are capable of benefiting… [A] new way of thinking about education has sprung up among the more reflecting members of our industrial army. They do not want education only in order that they may become better technical workmen and earn higher wages… They want it because they know that through the treasures of the mind they can find… a source of pure enjoyment, and a refuge from the necessary hardships of a life spent in the midst of clanging machinery in our hideous cities of toil.”
1929: Cyril Norwood, headmaster of Harrow School, writes: “The education that has so far been given to the people is at most partial and second best, and has little in common whether in range or in spirit with the universal education that may be. It was but the least possible with which the people would be contented, and it was calculated to equip not citizens, but servants… But education has to fit us for something… so incomparably precious that it will save a man from being a mere unit, a cipher: it will give him a life of his own, independent of the machine. And therefore at any cost our education must never sink to the level at which it will be merely vocational.”
Edward Blishen, a teacher in Archway, London, writes about the raising of the school leaving age to 15 in 1949: “This was still a raw issue with most of the boys and their parents. They felt it amounted to a year’s malicious, and probably illegal, detention... We teachers were nothing short of robbers. We had snatched a year’s earnings from their pockets.”
Richard Crossman, then a backbench Labour MP, describes his speech on education to the 1963 Labour Party conference: “I managed to put across the problem that if we just substitute a scientific elite for an oligarchy of old boys, we should be destroying democracy... Education had to be mass education and we had to have apprenticeship and training and a university of the air. I got a tremendous ovation.”
