Down with Skool
25th June 2023
William Brown, Richmal Crompton’s “Just William”, faces a telling-off from a teacher for not paying attention. A hundred years ago, the 1920s teacher remarks, he might have been made to crawl up chimneys for a living instead of being educated, so he should consider himself jolly lucky to be in school. To which William replies that crawling up chimneys sounds pretty interesting, at least compared to having to sit behind a desk all day listening to said teacher banging on. Crompton, a feisty, disabled spinster, was a true subversive and she wasn’t going to let her fictional teacher get away with that crude application of the Whig theory of history.
From its inception the positive value of compulsory state education has been a nearly unchallenged orthodoxy. It wasn’t entirely unchallenged. The borough of Royal Leamington Spa, where I have lived for the great majority of my adult life, petitioned parliament to be excluded from the Education Act of 1870. The petition conceded that they could understand how it would be of benefit in the manufacturing districts if the working people could read and write and do arithmetic, but claimed that such training was an expensive irrelevance for the domestic servants of the Spa. They were given short shrift, of course. Then there was my grandfather’s village, Staithes, on the North Yorkshire coast. Nowadays it’s a famous tourist attraction, but in the 1870s it was a remote fishing village more easily accessed from the sea than the land. The first schoolteacher there reported that it was nigh on impossible to persuade the local children to turn up on time or sit behind desks all day. It worked in the end, and there is a rather staged photograph taken by the pioneering photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe in about 1880 of a small boy, explaining to several of my ancestors that they have misspelt the name on the prow of their boat.