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"Of all the matters on the agenda for discussion and decision, one of the most urgent is the reform of the educational services and the hammering out of a policy to counter the growing disinclination for parenthood"
Planning (PEP) 16 March 1943, p.1.
The omission of any mention of an Education Bill in the King’s speech in 1942 led Beveridge’s brother-in-law, Professor R H Tawney, to launch the Council for Educational Advance in an attempt to rectify this omission (1). Muscled by the TUC, the WEA and the Co-operative Union, its twelve-point programme (2) carried the argument beyond the facile opportunism afforded by falling numbers (two million fewer than in 1918) to re-organise the schools and reduce the size of classes. It was seen by the Journal of Education as "making it plain that the birth rate in England is too low, and that it is in everybody’s interest to secure the physical and mental welfare of every child, however humbly born." (3).
But if the greatly diminished numbers of children in the state educational system afforded the opportunity of applying existing resources to greater benefit amongst the reduced numbers being provided for, the corresponding reduction of numbers available to the private sector was a cause for alarm. The crisis of falling numbers of applications for private schools had already led a physician from Eastbourne - a famous centre of the prep school industry - to lament what he called the steady decrease in supply of such young people to "carry on the race" (4). Whether or not contraception was the cause of the high cost of education (as R F Harrod maintained)(5) or the high cost of education was the cause of contraception (as Dr Evelyn Fisher more plausibly put it)(6), headmasters of fee paying schools had seen the writing on the wall before the war.
As Churchill’s old school, Harrow, had to reduce its numbers and Eton had to close a house, he suggested that public schools should revert to their original purpose and take poor scholars(7). Perhaps he was endorsing the earlier proposal of the Headmaster of Winchester that they should take State Scholars. The very idea was anathema to Aneurin Bevan who, in a Social Darwinist mood, wished to "close the doors of the public schools and allow the rich to enter the portals of the more wholesome if less romanticised state schools."(8)
The adjective "wholesome" also reverberated so strongly through the British Social Hygiene Council’s memorandum that it was interpreted as "a dark hint that the public schools may be ‘co-ed’-ed.(9)" . So a committee under Lord Fleming - a childless Scottish judge - was appointed - the names being announced on 2 July 1942 - to consider "the means whereby the association between the Public Schools ... and the general education system of the country could be developed and extended." "Public schools" meant "schools in membership of the Governing Bodies Association or of the Headmasters Conference." And though the chairman was a Scotsman, the Scottish members of the HRC unanimously decided that they did not want the scope of the enquiry extended to them.
Amongst its 18 members was G D H Cole who, as his wife said, "was never deeply interested in the politics of education and educational reform." Even his enthusiasm for "secondary education for all" (an almost ritual resolution of annual Labour Party conferences) was "comparatively lukewarm." So he resigned from the Fleming committee, a resignation accelerated, as his wife acknowledged, because "he did not know really what he wanted to do with them in terms which would have been seriously discussed in a Government committee."(10)
A sudden upturn in public school recruitment in 1942 may well have impressed him. Conversely he may have been depressed by the views of the Permanent Secretary, Sir Maurice Holmes ... a man, said Butler, "derisive of many of the persons and fatuities that came our way."(11) For though Holmes told the committee that the crisis was due to the falling birth-rate and the decreasing real income of the families from which the pupils normally came, at the same time he declared himself "opposed to the notion of the common school and to the forcible abolition of all private schools, a term which embraces all non-grant aided public schools."
A majority of the committee wanted the Board of Education to pay increased grants to cover the abolition of fees in Direct Grant Schools and the schools not assimilated into the general pattern of local authority schools; the minority did not want fees abolished in local authority (grammar) schools. Little wonder then that Butler should describe the report as "sensationally ingenuous...." tending "only to confirm the view of my old Corpus mentor, Sir Will Spens, that there was no practical solution to the problem of public schools."(12).
But in 1942 his old headmaster - and later the headmaster of Churchill’s old school - had thought there was, when on 24 October 1942 he urged the nation to become "biologically-minded" with a "right attitude to sex, marriage, nutrition and employment at a wage adequate to cover biological needs."(13) Sir Cyril Norwood had been chosen to do this by the British Social Biology Council as he was in a unique position to influence the most potent capillarising agency in education after school fees - examinations. He had also made the suggestion as early as 1935 that local authorities might find it convenient to create scholarships to public schools for boys chosen not on "precocity and intellectual performance" but on "sensible use of the school record, intelligence tests, the schoolmaster’s report on character, the doctor’s report on physique, together with an interview."(14)
Also, he was Chairman of the Secondary Schools Examinations Council which set the standards for the school certificate examinations, which had come under criticism from those who deplored the sterilising effects of the curriculum on girls, depriving them as it did of all knowledge of housecraft, music, handicraft and art(15), playing, as one critic put it, straight into the hands of home-destroying competitive individualism, with the result that in the more educated classes barely 40% of the girls married(16). Perhaps ironically, Norwood forecast that by 1978 it might be construed as "undemocratic to require a standard ... beyond the range of the weakest candidate, and contrary to the principle of sex equality to plough ... a greater number of girls than boys."(17).
Anticipating the abolition of all external examinations for the average boy or girl and a time when properly inspected schools would issue their own certificates to pupils and only those who wished to enter universities or the professions would take "examinations", Norwood saw Secondary Schools awarding two certificates: one for the academic child and one for the child who had taken at school that course of education for which he (or she) was "most fitted". This second category would include proficiency in music, art, handicraft, housecraft "and other subjects of a more motley character and more dubious claim." This was also a riposte at the headmistresses who disapproved of his emphasis on "headucation" as opposed to "handucation". These two types were to be different, not superior or inferior to each other.
Such was the male orientation of the curriculum that in a report issued by the Board of Education entitled Conditions affecting the teaching of Science in Secondary Schools for Boys in England (1925), girls who had reached the age of 15 were actually allowed to omit science or mathematics (except arithmetic) from the curricula. Their spokeswomen Dr Lilian Clarke, Miss Van Wyss and Mrs Gordon Wilson, were most active on the British Association committees in 1928 and 1933, the latter of which gave especial attention to the teaching of biology. The Association of Headmistresses and Assistant Mistresses campaigned for group (iv) subjects to be counted as equal to those of groups (i) to (iii). The Women Science Teachers (whose association was founded in 1914) also campaigned for more attention to biology in the group (iii) subjects, which (like most of the girls’ school subjects) was modelled mainly on the supposed need for chemistry and physics. Yet others argued for general science as outlined in the pamphlet Science for All (1916) worked out by the Association of Public School Science Masters at the request of the committee under Sir J J Thomson during the Great War. The syllabus in this was successively brought up to date in 1924, 1936, 1928 and 1952. But the proper integration of the group (iv) subjects was continually shelved, justifying the complaint from the N U T that the universities had been put in "permanent control of the whole system of secondary education." Local authorities then tried to invest their central schools with a credible image and the Association of Municipal Corporations argued that "more value should be attached to practical subjects." But the secondary Schools sat pat because this broached the very concept handed down in the days when, like Moses, Morant led the secondary schools out of technical bondage. It would, said the Board, "pre-judge the question of the future relations between secondary schools and schools of the type described as modern schools in the Report of the Consultative Committee on the Education of the Adolescent."
And if an object lesson in the pernicious effect of social capillarity was required, the collapse of France, which had now installed an 84 year old Head of State, was publicly attributed by him to the French refusal to bear children. Certainly the leader of the Free French in England at this time was so convinced of the fatal effect of a falling birth rate that on his return as Head of State he called for twelve million beautiful babies in the next decade (18).
Underlining the lesson on 22 September 1942, P E P pointed out that from constituting one fifth of the total population of Europe in the seventeenth century, France constituted less than one twelfth by 1931, with one in twelve a naturalised foreigner. It added, "the birth rates of France and Britain are still falling, whilst the average age of both populations is steadily rising." France, it concluded, was "the most elderly nation on earth."(19).
References:
1. Journal of Education, December 1942, p.540
2. This duodecalogue of parental encouragement encompassed a school leaving age of 16 three years after the end of the war, free education under a secondary code, common amenities and standards in all schools, adequate nursery provision - free medical services and school meals, maintenance allowances for post-primary children, day-continuation for education authorities up to the age of 18, the licensing and inspection of all non-state schools - no dual control, free access to universities and technical colleges for those who could benefit and ample provision of adult education.
3. Journal of Education, July 1943, p.316.
4. Journal of Education, May 1942, p.196.
5. R F Harrod, "Modern Population Trends", The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, x, 1 (1939), p13.
6. "From ten years experience in birth-control work I believe that the greatest single cause of family restriction in the upper and middle classes is the present high cost of a so-called ‘good education’", Dr Evelyn Fisher, British Medical Journal , 21 February 1942, p.272.
7. Journal of Education, February 1941, p.38.
8. ibid., p.47.
9. "Human Biology and the Crisis in the Public Schools", School Science Review, October 1941, p.100.
10. Margaret Cole, The Life of G D H Cole, Macmillan, 1971, p.115.
11. R A Butler, The Art of the Possible, Hamish Hamilton, 1971, p.93.
12. P H J H Gosden, Education in the Second World War, Methuen & Co., 1976, p.61.
13. Journal of Education, December 1942, p.534.
14. Cyril Norwood, "Sons of the Poor and Schools of the Rich", The Nineteenth Century, June 1935, p.701.
15. For the groups system meant that every boy or girl who wished to obtain a School Certificate had to satisfy the examiners in the five subjects chosen from three groups: (i) An English subject, (ii) Foreign Languages, and (iii) Science and Mathematics. To obtain a Higher Certificate, he or she had to satisfy the examiners in three subjects chosen from only one of these groups. Yet in the original design of this Certificate (Circular 849 of July 1914) the School Certificate was intended for all pupils "of reasonable industry and ordinary intelligence in an efficient secondary school", and was to include such subjects as art, handicraft, housecraft or music in a group (iv). But group (iv) subjects were ‘banausic’, not suited to a "managing race".
Hence the equipment for them was lacking in the schools. Even more, the professional associations were not interested. So though the SSEC agreed (in 1923) that art or music might be included as subjects counting for a Certificate, they still did not count. Moreover, these ‘rights’ varied with each university. Whereas Oxford allowed candidates to accumulate four credits (of which two had to be a classic and a modern language), London insisted on five, all taken at the same time, of which English, Mathematics and a classical language or a science were indispensable.
16. Meyrick Booth, The Nineteenth Century, August 1927, p.268.
17. Sir Cyril Norwood, The Spectator, November 1928. See also his forecast in Presidential Address to the Educational Science Section of the British Association, 7 September 1928.
18. Colin Dyer, Population and Society in Twentieth Century France, Hodder & Stoughton, 1978, pp. 101 and 181.
19. Planning, No 193, "Outlook for France", 22 September 1942, pp. 4-16. It did not give adequate weight to the measures being taken to increase the birth rate subsequently described as "half-way towards the teaching of Rassenkunde." W D Halls, The Youth of Vichy France, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981, pp. 174-5.