If you haven’t read the introduction to this series, Part 1, go here.
Part 2 focuses on early 19th Century education reforms: the key players, the drivers, what this looked like, the interplay between religion and the economy, and the relationship to the Industrial Revolution. Today, I want to dive a bit into education reform and what that looked like during the Industrial Revolution.
Its impossible to have this discussion without talking about my favorite stuffed-former-living-thing: Jeremy Bentham (Jeremy Bentham finds new home in UCL’s Student Centre | UCL News – UCL – University College London).
Aside from his wacky wish to be preserved like a wax figure, Jeremy Bentham was a highly influential figure of the late 18th/early 19th century that pushed forward Utilitarianism, increasing happiness for the maximum number of people, championing equal rights/universal suffrage/decriminalization of homosexuality, prison reform, animal welfare…basically this guy was a huge progressive that still has influences on the Western world today.
It was Bentham’s firm belief in equity that formed the basis for many of the reforms Bentham would advocate for; Bentham “regarded education as a prime vehicle for maximizing the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (Taylor, 19). Part of this, Taylor argues, is wrapped up in class bias that saw the poor as a threat, problem to be fixed, and with the tendency to vice that a good education would fix. These values also reflected a general weltsicht during the Age of Enlightenment about the pursuit of happiness, liberty, and progress. England’s Enlightenment also stressed the improvement of individuals above all (Porter, 2000), lending itself to the concept of broad based education.
Bentham was pals with Lady Noel-Byron, and the two were key figures pushing for education reform with the goal of educating poor, young people. In Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation he posits that education is a complex process involving the physical/mental and internal/external which can improve circumstances:
In his Radical Reform Bill (1819), Bentham makes moral argument for education, arguing that an immoral man is necessarily deficient in education to essentially understand right and wrong. Much of the educational reform from this era happened in lock step with religion. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in the UK worked for over two hundred years, beginning in the early 1700s, forming charity schools for children ages 7-11 living in poverty. Some view these charity schools as the model for modern primary and secondary education, albeit with less religious focused curriculum.
All teachers were expected, at the time, to have a religious education and foundation, which was in keeping with the over 50% of individuals who attended University intending a religious occupation or calling. Religion, particularly the Church of England, permeated most aspects of education in the early 19th century including the tutelage of the gentry’s children.
Hannah More, as a lead Bluestocking during the Regency era, founded a school in rural Somerset that limited the education of children to religious instruction and rudimentary reading and other subjects that would benefit them for lives of service. This competed with Wollstonecraft’s earlier advocacy for educating all children (of all genders) to meet the emerging middle-class ethos. Even her radical works had religious overtones entrenched in the 18th century concept of sensibility.
Considering how entrenched the British educational system was with the Church, its not surprisingly that the thinkers of the era found it hard to decouple, either in analysis or rhetoric, education from religion. I think, however, this is a nuance that is easy to overlook when jumping to the thesis that broad scale education was based purely from the need to educate factory workers.
On the contrary, figures like Bentham, Byron, and Wollstonecraft seemed to believe they were rescuing people from the tyranny of poverty (or at least elevating people from the moral problems of poverty), which is still very much an underlying value in Western culture when we talk about education. Education is seen, even today, as a means to escape a person’s circumstance and push towards something else, particularly when that something else is a new life within a new tax bracket.
Inherent in that is a value judgment about class and value. Still, today, we hold up wealthy people as aspirational objects despite many studies on happiness and contentment that clearly demonstrate the adage “mo’ money, mo’ problems”. I am suggesting that these values were baked in to education reform not just as a scheme to increase the wealth of Cits and the upper orders, but also as a moral imperative necessary for happiness; in other words education begets more wealth which begets happiness.
Increased incomes do trend up with happiness into a point whereby happiness flatlines. The uptrend is likely because increases in wealth help reduce stress around the average cost of living. But money is not necessarily the foundation of that equation, I would argue, but instead the things that money can provide: safe housing, access to health care, food security, and opportunities for non-essentials (like holidays, art, experiences). What I am getting at is the underpinning of this shift in thinking, necessitating the education reform: Adam Smith and the influence of capitalism.
Education was necessarily entwined with the economy, but prior to the Victorian era major educational reforms, many key reformist leading the charge were coming at it from a religious or moral angle. We will continue to explore these themes in future posts in the series, and look how the ways of life, tied up in economics, religion and culture, would support the machine of capitalist production to look for sameness and efficiency as a way to reproduce itself.
Liebfried, Stephan, Jutta Allmendinger (2003) Education and the welfare state: the four words of competence production, Journal of European Social Policy, 13:1, p. 63-81
Roy Porter, The creation of the modern world: the untold story of the British Enlightenment (2000), pp. 1–12, 482–84
Sherman Dorn, Douglas Fuchs & Lynn S. Fuchs (1996) A historical perspective on special education reform, Theory Into Practice, 35:1, 12-19, DOI: 10.1080/00405849609543696
Taylor, Brian W (1998) Annabella, Lady Noel-Byron: A Study of Lady Byron on Education. History of Education Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 430–455. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/369850. Accessed 6 Apr. 2021.
Taylor, Brian W (1980) Jeremy Bentham and the Education of the Irish People. The Irish Journal of Education. xiv: 1, pp. 19-32.
