Georgian and Victorian Education

Education from the eighteenth century

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School recollections

In a talk between Alfred Farndale and his son, Martin on 29 July 1982, Alfred Farndale recalled, I remember going to school at Charltons near Tidkinhow. We then went to Standard 1 at Boosbeck. We stayed there until we were 14. It was a two mile walk each day. The headmaster was Mr Ranson. I remember Jim, my elder brother catching me fishing and playing truant. He just said "Get in" (he was in a pony and trap) and he took me to a day’s marketing at Stokesley. I remember the second masters name was Ackroyd. I got a fork through my leg and he sucked it out. We were always inspected as we arrived at school. We had to walk past the Bainbridge place and people used to say that he had more sheep on the moor than he was allowed. I remember William looking after me at mother's funeral. I was crying and very upset.

His son Martin Farndale recalled that every day Anne and I, and later Geoffrey as well, were driven into Northallerton, which was five miles away, to school and we were collected in the evening. School was a very new adventure and not easy going for me. Mrs Lord was a hard but far task master, insisting on high standards. Much was learnt by heart – poems, hymns and tables. Mr Lord taught history and geography and these quickly became my favourite subjects. On Friday afternoons the school walked in a long crocodile to the village of Romanby, there to sit and watch lantern slides given by a Mr and Mrs Linton about their travels to the Holy Land and Egypt. These were wonderful, hazy black and a browny colour and white, but they opened up the idea of travel and excitement. They also taught us a great deal and left a deep impression on me. It was at Wensley House school that I made my first friends. Richard Sawfell was the son of the county surveyor whose mother knew my mother before they were both married. David Ramsden was the son of a farmer near Northallerton. Jack Errington came with his mother during the school holidays to stay with his Grandmother in Thornton-Le-Moor.

Charity schools

In the early eighteenth century charity schools were founded to teach poorer children. Some charity schools provided board and lodging. Most were small schools such as the Postgate School in Great Ayton, which is today a museum. James Cook probably benefitted from the new opportunities of the Postgate School as the basis for his later achievements. There were contemporary objections to the education of the poor arguing that The ore a shepherd and ploughman know of the world, the less fitted he’ll be to go through the fatigue and hardship of it with cheerfulness and equanimity.

Most of the teaching in charity schools was one to one. The teacher would listen to a child recite or read, or test by questions and answers, while other children got on with their work. The main purpose of charity schools was religious education so pupils were taught to read so that they could read the Bible and prayer books. Those who stayed on at school may have learnt to write.

Children had to spend hours at their copybooks, copying out letters or words written for them at the top of the page by the teacher. They were also taught the basics of arithmetic.

An eighteenth century engraving of a charity schoolroom

Reading and writing were taught separately and reading came first. Books were scarce, so learning to read started at an oral skill, an exercise in memory. Children had to say aloud letters and syllables, and also spell long and complicated words before they learnt to read stories from books.

Pupils often started off with a hornbook, and then went on to the spelling book which contained long lists of words with one syllable, then progressing to multi syllabic words. All these had to be mastered first.

Hornbooks

Only when pupils were considered to be ready, were they allowed to read passages from the Bible or another book that was often used was Aesop’s Fables.

In the eighteenth century, literacy amongst women was lower than for men. If they went to school at all, girls tended to leave as soon as they could read. At home they learnt household skills from their mothers and grandmothers. These might include cooking and preserving food, needlework, knitting and spinning flax.

Victorian Education

In early Victorian Britain, many children still did not go to school, which had not yet become compulsory. Children from poorer families often worked as children were relied upon in a battle for survival. Girls, whether rich or poor, tended not to go to school in early Victorian times. With the exception of a small number of very wealthy girls who attended boarding school, most girls either worked if they were poor or if they were wealthy they were often taught by a governess at home.

The Victorian governments made gradual steps towards a more robust schooling system in Britain. In 1839, the first groups of school inspectors were employed.

In the mid 1840s, volunteer led Ragged Schools appeared in London. They were the only possibility of education for those families who had been turned away from other charitable or church schools and who couldn’t pay for education. Children who went to Ragged Schools tended to be poor and commonly came from families where parents were abusive or drunks. Some pupils were orphans and some pupils’ parents were in prison so they had taken to sleeping on the streets. The Ragged Schools gave free meals and clothing to their pupils and taught them a trade such as shoemaking or domestic skills. In 1846 the government began to help pay for teacher training.

By 1861 the number of schools had multiplied, generally set up by individuals or organisations, but most of them not free. Although there were no schools fully funded by the government yet, parliament began to allocate more money to education in the 1860s. The annual funding for schools at this time was more than £800,000. In 1862, parliament made it compulsory for head teachers to keep daily and weekly records of what happened at their school in a log book, which helped to progress and attendance.

But that happy time of discovery did not last. A woman, the frequent absences from school of whose child had brought the dreaded Attendance Officer to her door, informed him of the end house scandal, and he went there and threatened Laura's mother with all manner of penalties if Laura was not in school at nine o'clock the next Monday morning. (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter II, A Hamlet Childhood)

By the late 1860s, many more voluntary schools had been opened. Many working-class children now went to school for some of their childhood. Even though some children still did not attend school, this was now a minority. It became clear was that more schools were needed. There was still an unacceptable amount of illiteracy in Britain and those children who lived in the urban slums and more remote areas still weren’t able to access a school. Britain was going through a period of rapid industrialisation and the imperial ambitions were widening her global ambitions.

In 1857 Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays immortalised Dr Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School of the 1830s. Public schools encouraged a degree of autonomy of boys, as training for adult life. Rudyard Kipling wrote his novel Stalky & Co in 1899 about three young boys at a British public school.

Grammar schools were cheaper and non boarding, and publicly funded Board schools copied the ethos of public schools, with an emphasis on games, toughness, independence and a code of silence which tolerated bullying.

In 1870, the government passed an Education Act with an increasing perception of the importance of the education of citizens throughout the nation. The Education Act 1870 initiated a national system of Elementary Schools, run by elected School Boards. Every child was to be given a place at school and school buildings had to be of a reasonable quality. Head teachers now had to be qualified. Schools throughout the nation were inspected and checked to make sure that the education they were offering met the new standards. New rules now meant that school boards could make school compulsory for children between five and ten years old and later thirteen.

The 1870 reforms were opposed by non conformists as it gave financial support to Anglican and Catholic schools. It was criticised for its narrow curricula, but working class parents were generally enthusiastic. Most remembered their teachers positively. Teaching included the 3Rs and English literature.

Over the next ten years, new schools were set up in areas where there had been none before making education accessible for everyone. School boards were set up to manage and build these.

The next big step towards education becoming was the Elementary Education Act 1880. Ten years had passed during which school boards had been given the choice whether to make children go to school. Now, the government had taken the decision out of their hands. New laws meant that every child had to attend school.

The Elementary Education Act 1891 established new rules declaring that elementary education was to be free for all and not just for those in severe poverty.

Literacy rose steadily from the 1830s and very sharply from about 55% in the 1850s to about 90% in the 1890s.

School life

Victorian children were often cold at school as there may not have been a fire to heat the school hall, or any heat source was so far away that it had no effect. Children often had to walk a long way to school. Having most probably walked to school, children might spend much of their time in wet, cold clothes depending on the time of year and would have been tired. There were rigorous inspections on arrival by teachers with the expectation of a smart turned out. Respect for teachers was very important and pupils would bow or curtsy to them during registration.

Lessons would focus on the three Rs, reading, writing and arithmetic. Sometimes, schools would teach geography, history and drill, the Victorian form of physical education. Books were often shared among the whole class and kept by the teacher in their desk at the front of the room. Pupils were expected to pay attention and work to a high standard. Mistakes, such as wrong spellings or even left handedness could sustain punishments would were sometimes painful or humiliating and included a sharp rap across the knuckles with a cane or being sent to the corner to wear the dunce’s cap.

School began at nine o'clock, but the hamlet children set out on their mile-and-a-half walk there as soon as possible after their seven o'clock breakfast, partly because they liked plenty of time to play on the road and partly because their mothers wanted them out of the way before house-cleaning began. Up the long, straight road they straggled, in twos and threes and in gangs, their flat, rush dinner-baskets over their shoulders and their shabby little coats on their arms against rain. In cold weather some of them carried two hot potatoes which had been in the oven, or in the ashes, all night, to warm their hands on the way and to serve as a light lunch on arrival. They were strong, lusty children, let loose from control; and there was plenty of shouting, quarrelling, and often fighting among them. In more peaceful moments they would squat in the dust of the road and play marbles, or sit on a stone heap and play dibs with pebbles, or climb into the hedges after birds' nests or blackberries, or to pull long trails of bryony to wreathe round their hats. In winter they would slide on the ice on the puddles, or make snowballs—soft ones for their friends, and hard ones with a stone inside for their enemies. After the first mile or so the dinner-baskets would be raided; or they would creep through the bars of the padlocked field gates for turnips to pare with the teeth and munch, or for handfuls of green pea shucks, or ears of wheat, to rub out the sweet, milky grain between the hands and devour. In spring they ate the young green from the hawthorn hedges, which they called 'bread and cheese', and sorrel leaves from the wayside, which they called 'sour grass', and in autumn there was an abundance of haws and blackberries and sloes and crabapples for them to feast upon. There was always something to eat, and they ate, not so much because they were hungry as from habit and relish of the wild food. At that early hour there was little traffic upon the road. Sometimes, in winter, the children would hear the pounding of galloping hoofs and a string of hunters, blanketed up to the ears and ridden and led by grooms, would loom up out of the mist and thunder past on the grass verges. At other times the steady tramp and jingle of the teams going afield would approach, and, as they passed, fathers would pretend to flick their offspring with whips, saying, 'There! that's for that time you deserved it an' didn't get it'; while elder brothers, themselves at school only a few months before, would look patronizingly down from the horses' backs and call: 'Get out o' th' way, you kids!' Going home in the afternoon there was more to be seen. A farmer's gig, on the way home from market, would stir up the dust; or the miller's van or the brewer's dray, drawn by four immense, hairy-legged, satin-backed carthorses. More exciting was the rare sight of Squire Harrison's four-in-hand, with ladies in bright, summer dresses, like a garden of flowers, on the top of the coach, and Squire himself, pink-cheeked and white-hatted, handling the four greys. When the four-in-hand passed, the children drew back and saluted, the Squire would gravely touch the brim of his hat with his whip, and the ladies would lean from their high seats to smile on the curtseying children. A more familiar sight was the lady on a white horse who rode slowly on the same grass verge in the same direction every Monday and Thursday. It was whispered among the children that she was engaged to a farmer living at a distance, and that they met half-way between their two homes. If so, it must have been a long engagement, for she rode past at exactly the same hour twice a week throughout Laura's schooldays, her face getting whiter and her figure getting fuller and her old white horse also putting on weight. It has been said that every child is born a little savage and has to be civilized. The process of civilization had not gone very far with some of the hamlet children; although one civilization had them in hand at home and another at school, they were able to throw off both on the road between the two places and revert to a state of Nature.

Fordlow National School was a small grey one-storied building, standing at the cross-roads at the entrance to the village. The one large classroom which served all purposes was well lighted with several windows, including the large one which filled the end of the building which faced the road. Beside, and joined on to the school, was a tiny two-roomed cottage for the schoolmistress, and beyond that a playground with birch trees and turf, bald in places, the whole being enclosed within pointed, white-painted palings.

The average attendance was about forty-five.

Every morning, when school had assembled, and Governess, with her starched apron and bobbing curls appeared in the doorway, there was a great rustling and scraping of curtseying and pulling of forelocks. 'Good morning, children,' 'Good morning, ma'am,' were the formal, old-fashioned greetings.

Reading, writing, and arithmetic were the principal subjects, with a Scripture lesson every morning, and needlework every afternoon for the girls.

Every morning at ten o'clock the Rector arrived to take the older children for Scripture. He was a parson of the old school; a commanding figure, tall and stout, with white hair, ruddy cheeks and an aristocratically beaked nose, and he was as far as possible removed by birth, education, and worldly circumstances from the lambs of his flock. He spoke to them from a great height, physical, mental, and spiritual.

His lesson consisted of Bible reading, turn and turn about round the class, of reciting from memory the names of the kings of Israel and repeating the Church Catechism.

The writing lesson consisted of the copying of copperplate maxims.

History was not taught formally.

There were no geography readers.

Those children who read fluently, and there were several of them in every class, read in a monotonous sing-song, without expression, and apparently without interest.

It must be remembered that in those days a boy of eleven was nearing the end of his school life.

Miss Holmes carried her cane about with her. A poor method of enforcing discipline, according to modern educational ideas; but it served. It may be that she and her like all over the country at that time were breaking up the ground that other, later comers to the field, with a knowledge of child psychology and with tradition and experiment behind them, might sow the good seed.

'Oh, Laura! What a dunce you are!' Miss Holmes used to say every time she examined it. (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XI, School)

There were not many books in the house, although in this respect the family was better off than its neighbours; for, in addition to 'Father's books', mostly unreadable as yet, and Mother's Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, there were a few children's books which the Johnstones had turned out from their nursery when they left the neighbourhood. So, in time, she was able to read Grimms' Fairy Tales, Gulliver's Travels, The Daisy Chain, and Mrs. Molesworth's Cuckoo Clock and Carrots.

'Schools be the places for teaching, and you'll likely get wrong for him doing it when governess finds out.' (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter II, A Hamlet Childhood)

Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools came once a year on a date of which previous notice had been given.

Her Majesty's Inspector was an elderly clergyman, a little man with an immense paunch and tiny grey eyes like gimlets. He had the reputation of being 'strict', but that was a mild way of describing his autocratic demeanour and scathing judgement. His voice was an exasperated roar and his criticism was a blend of outraged learning and sarcasm. Fortunately, nine out of ten of his examinees were proof against the latter. He looked at the rows of children as if he hated them and at the mistress as if he despised her. The Assistant Inspector was also a clergyman, but younger, and, in comparison, almost human. Black eyes and very red lips shone through the bushiness of the whiskers which almost covered his face. The children in the lower classes, which he examined, were considered fortunate.

What kind of a man the Inspector really was it is impossible to say. He may have been a great scholar, a good parish priest, and a good friend and neighbour to people of his own class. One thing, however, is certain, he did not care for or understand children, at least not national school children.

Thomas Gradgrind was a school board Superintendent in Dickens's 1854 novel Hard Times who was dedicated to the pursuit of profitable enterprise. His name is now used generically to refer to someone who is hard and only concerned with cold facts and numbers. (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XII, Her Majesty’s Inspector)

Twentieth century education

The Education Act 1944 (The Butler Act) established tripartite education system of grammar schools, secondary modern schools and technical schools. The change was led by the Tory MP, R A Butler. It set up a new Ministry of Education with hundreds of small Local Education Authorities,. The new model was driven by a single aptitude test, the eleven plus, at age 11, and was originally intended to work with each of the types of school located together. It never worked as intended and in practice left a divide between grammar and secondary modern schools.

Rosamund Farndale, born 1931 (later Rosamund Martin and Rosamund Kwalker Pomevie) from Northumberland became a headmistress in Hampstead, London.

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There is an In Our Time podcast on the history of education which examines whether its modern purpose is to teach us the nature of reality, or to give us the tools to deal with it.