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Working-Class Education and the State, 1839–1849: The Sources of Government Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

D. G. Paz
D. G. Paz*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Extract

The education of working-class children was a major governmental concern during the age of Peel and Cobden. In this period the state's financial commitment grew from £30,000 to £125,000, and a new department of state — the Education Committee of the Privy Council, with its bureaucratic establishment, the Education Department — was created to direct central policy. But who made that policy? Who guided education reform into channels which still, to some extent, contained the British educational establishment a century later? And does this example of Victorian reform suggest the dynamics of state intervention in other fields up to then left to private enterprise?

Civil servants, it has been alleged, were the responsible agents of change in this area. James Kay-Shuttleworth, the Education Department's first permanent secretary, has today a reputation as great as Chadwick's or Trevelyan's among historians. Henry Parris believes that he “organized” the department and made its policy; he calls his retirement in 1849 perhaps “the greatest single misfortune in the country's educational history.” David Roberts calls him “the chief architect of England's educational system;” he attributes to him all major government education policy between 1846 and 1849. That policy “came from the mind of a man who possessed not only a clear view of the ends which he wished to attain but also a sense of the possible means to those ends….” George Kitson Clark contended that his “services to public education have probably never been properly valued.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Fall 1976 , pp. 129 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1976

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