The Social Context of Eugenic Thought

The 1944 Education Act was a key item in the social legislation which constituted the blue-print for the post-war Labour government’s New Jerusalem. The fact that it had been authored by a Tory and enacted in the last year of the wartime coalition government did not diminish either Labour’s enthusiasm for the Act or the energy with which its Minister of Education, the first woman to hold the post(1), set about implementing, without amendment, its provisions.

Ellen Wilkinson (1891-1947) was the daughter of a cotton operative and made her way from a Lancashire working-class home by way of a scholarship and her local Grammar School to Manchester University. She was a suffragist, an early member of the ILP and, from 1920 to 1924, a member of the Communist Party which she left on becoming Labour member of parliament for Middlesbrough. Defeated there in the election of 1931 she re-entered Parliament as member for Jarrow in 1935 and her diminutive figure manages to dominate the often re-shown newsreel footage of the leaders of the Jarrow Marchers. Ellen Wilkinson was also a keen eugenicist and had urged the formation of a Eugenics Branch within the Labour Party. (2)

The 1944 Act enhanced the powers of the Minister over local authorities(3), abolished fees in all state schools, made the daily act of collective religious worship compulsory in all schools and raised the school-leaving age to 15 from April 1947 and to 16 as soon as practicable. Finally, in what was regarded at the time as its truly ground-breaking and egalitarian provision but was later to become its most controversial, it guaranteed secondary education for all: academic, technical or general according to ability.

“According to ability”, of course, implied selection and the egalitarianism underlying the Act was an egalitarianism based on equality of opportunity and not on equality of outcome: “it is just as important to achieve diversity as to ensure equality of educational opportunity”. This, unequivocally meritocratic, philosophy - together with the techniques of selection which its implementation required - was universally applauded by politicians, teachers and parents. It was also approved by those educational sociologists who were later to become its vehement critics. Professor D V Glass, who, it has been said, “provided the main link between pre-war eugenics and post-war sociology”(4), regarded the Act as one of the “the most important measures of the last half century” which by greatly increasing social mobility would “do much to enable ability to fulfil itself”.

Social mobility was a cherished concept in mid-twentieth century British sociology whose twin roots were to be found in the empirical tradition of the social survey combined with an attenuated Marxist theory of class. In this context social mobility had a pivotal function. The notion of “perfect mobility”, crudely adapted from the “perfect competition” of the economists, was the statistical, and empirically verifiable, mirror image of the classless society.

Because education was seen as the primary agency of social mobility it became a major field of enquiry for sociology. Educational research before the War was a small, but influential, enterprise largely dominated by psychologists amongst whom the veteran eugenicist Cyril Burt (founder and long-time editor of the British Journal of Statistical Psychology) was the most significant figure. After 1945 educational research and educational theory became a major academic industry wholly in the hands of the sociologists. The wag who extended Bernard Shaw’s famous aphorism “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” to conclude “those who can’t teach do educational research” had clearly seen the writing on the playground wall.

Though no mention of types of secondary school was made in the 1944 Act most local authorities adopted the tripartite system of allocating pupils to grammar, technical or modern schools, to correspond with the statutory forms of education - academic, technical and general - stipulated by the Act. Ostensibly enjoying parity of status (“equal but different”) the three components of this system in practice formed a distinct hierarchy and that hierarchical structure was reinforced by the nature of the selection process by which allocation to the more highly esteemed grammar schools was made. The eleven-plus examination was nevertheless a necessary mechanism for apportioning scarce educational resources: a “capacity-capturing” machine. It was also efficient.

The operation of the process of eleven-plus selection between 1945 and 1953 was investigated by three sociologist colleagues of David Glass, Jean Floud, A H Halsey and F M Martin. Taking industrial Middlesbrough and semi-rural south west Hertfordshire as representative local authority areas they set out to measure the effectiveness of the selection process. Their findings were published in 1956 in what was to become a classic work in educational sociology, Social Class and Educational Opportunity. In view of subsequent developments their findings must be quoted verbatim: “Virtually the full quota of boys with the requisite minimum IQ from every class was admitted to grammar schools, and the distribution of opportunity stands today in closer relationship to that of ability (as measured by intelligence tests) than ever before”. (5) There could have been no clearer vindication of the 1944 Education Act.

Yet by the time this book was published the system created by that Act was beset by criticism. Some of it was structural and administrative and in time could have been remedied; some was more fundamental; all of it was widespread. The average national provision of grammar school places in England was just over 20 per cent but this average concealed variations which ranged from 10 per cent to 40 per cent. In parts of Wales, where grammar school provision had traditionally been more generous, the figure was 60 per cent. (A consequent feature of the pre-war teaching profession in England was the high proportion of Welshmen all of whom shared the secret ambition to be repatriated as headmaster of Ebbw Vale Grammar School). Because a large proportion of grammar schools were single sex the proportion of boys’ and girls’ places in any area was likely to be unequal with further consequent discrimination against one or other.

The secondary modern schools, for which of course a majority of pupils were destined, presented an even less attractive alternative. They occupied the former buildings and employed the former teachers of the elementary schools. They lacked tradition, aspirations - or even identity. The story is recounted of the new headmaster of a secondary modern who noticed the school’s former name carved on a board over the main entrance. “It read ‘Firshill Senior School’. The newly appointed woodwork master was keen to carve their new title on the reverse of the board: ‘Firshill Secondary Modern School’. The help of the caretaker was enlisted to take the board down so the operation could begin. Returning sometime later the head saw the board had been removed to reveal on its reverse face deeply carved in gothic lettering ‘Firshill Elementary School’. Even more revealing, it was now clear the board had been originally designed to hide the inscription carved in the stone lintel over the doorway, ‘Firshill Board School’.” (7)

Given the fact that four out of five children would complete their education in places like this it is little wonder that Eleven Plus Day, when the results were made public, should be regarded by parents as a national day of “mourning” when, according to Professor D V Glass, they sat “like King Aegeus … on the cliffs, waiting to see if the returning sails are black or white”.(8)

Comprehensive schools had been endorsed by the LCC as early as 1944 and copied, sometimes in the modified form of bilateral schools, junior colleges and school base shared campuses, in a dozen other local authority areas. The shortcomings of the tripartite system now accelerated the shift to comprehensivisation under parental pressure, academic criticism and on grounds of administrative convenience (e.g. the uneconomic nature of two-stream grammar schools in rural areas). Pupils in comprehensive schools increased from 7,988 in 1950 to 128,835 in 1960. Whereas in 1956 only two per cent of the school population was educated in comprehensive schools, by 1965 there were only two types of school: the comprehensive and the apprehensive.

The bold attempt to construct an educational system based on merit had been short-lived. After little more than a decade its assumptions were being effectively challenged by environmentalism which was to be the dominant ideology for the next twenty years. It, too, claimed a commitment to equality but it was equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.

Differences amongst children were in future not to be measured but eradicated. Those arguments which had been used against the eleven-plus examination were now deployed against streaming or grading. Homogenising efforts were directed not only at differences of ability but also differences of gender. School books which depicted men going to work or women shopping were condemned for promoting sex-stereotyping. Girls were now encouraged to enrol for metalwork and boys for domestic science. Even the differences between teachers and pupils were now minimised; the former’s role was now to facilitate freedom of expression and group activity learning.

When one of the authors of Social Class and Educational Opportunity spoke at the Eugenics Society’s 1974 Symposium her title was significantly “Making Adults More Equal: The Scope and Limitations of Public Educational Policy”.(9) Many in those years doubted that there were any limitations whatsoever.

References:

(1) She was not the first woman cabinet minister. That distinction belongs to Margaret Bondfield who was Minister of Labour in MacDonald’s 1929 government.

(2) Richard A Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, Chapel Hill, N Carolina, 1995, p.198.

(3) W H G Armytage, Four Hundred Years of English Education, Cambridge University Press, 1964.

(4) Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 272.

(5) Floud, Halsey and Martin, ut supra, p. 143.

(6) Education in 1951 (1952) p.17.

(7) Nigel Middleton and Sophia Weitzman, A Place for Everyone, Gollancz, 1976, p.330.

(8) D V Glass “Educational and Social Change in Modern England”, in M Ginsberg (ed) Law and opinion in the Twentieth Century (1959).

(9) in Peter R Cox et al Equalities and Inequalities in Education, Academic Press, 1975.