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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Problem of Thor Bridge and the chosen topic is Children’s Education.
A few facts:
🏫 When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 education was still mainly for the privileged. Rich children might have a governess to teach them at home until they were old enough — if they were boys — to go to Public Schools such as Rugby… The girls continued to be educated at home. Most poor children did not go to day school, but earlier, Robert Raikes had started a system of education based in churches, the Sunday School, and by 1831 1,250,000 children went to lessons in this way. That was about a quarter of the population at the time. [The Victorian School]
🏫 In early Victorian Britain… school had not yet become compulsory. Children from poorer families often worked in order to help their families who did not have much money. In fact, poorer families often relied on their children to bring in extra money that they needed to survive. 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 were taught by a governess at home. [Kathryn Waite]
🏫 Sunday schools were run by churches, to teach children about the Christian faith. Journalist Robert Raikes started the first Sunday School for poor children in Gloucester in 1780.
Ragged Schools were schools for poor children. One of the first was started in Portsmouth by a shoe-mender named John Pounds. Older children helped to teach younger ones. Ragged Schools were often in one room of a house, or in an old barn. From 1833 factory owners were supposed to provide at least 2 hours education every day for child-workers, but not many children actually got lessons. [BBC]
🏫 From the 18th century onwards there had been some ragged schools, however they were few and far between. They had been started in areas where someone had been concerned enough to want to help disadvantaged children towards a better life. The schools were given this name because the children who attended had only very ragged clothes to wear and they rarely had shoes. In other words they did not own clothing suitable in which to attend any other kind of school.
In the beginning many of the schools were started by the Churches and were staffed by volunteers. However because of the growing number of children it soon became necessary to have paid members of staff. Many petitions to Parliament for grants were made...
In 1844 the Ragged School Union was formed with Lord Shaftesbury as its chairman. In the beginning there were just 16 schools connected with it but by 1861 there were 176 schools in the union. As well as giving basic lessons many schools provided food. As time went on some also opened refuges where the children could sleep especially in the extremely cold weather.
Many people believed that by giving the children an education they would be enabled to lead a better life in the future. They would be able to find work to keep themselves and so would not need to steal in order to live… [Hidden Lives Revealed]
🏫 The ragged school movement grew out of a recognition that charity, denominational and dames schools were not providing for significant numbers of children in inner-city areas. Working in the poorest districts, teachers (who were often local working people) initially utilized such buildings as could be afforded - stables, lofts, railway arches. There would be an emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic - and on bible study (the 4 ‘R’s!). This mix expanded into industrial and commercial subjects in many schools. It is estimated that around 300,000 children went through the London Ragged Schools alone between the early 1840s and 1881... [maybole.org]
🏫 'Dame' schools were usually run by one woman. The 'dame' often did her best, but she was a child-minder not a trained teacher. Often quite poor herself, she took as many children as she could cram into her house. Poor parents working hard to earn a living paid her a few pennies a week to look after their children, and perhaps teach them the alphabet or how to sew. [BBC]
🏫 Industrial Schools were intended to help those children who were destitute but who had not as yet committed any serious crime. The idea was to remove the child from bad influences, give them an education and teach them a trade...
Industrial schools had two main objects, to instil in the children the habit of working and to develop the latent potential of the destitute child. One of the earliest attempts to start an Industrial feeding School, as they were at first called, was in Aberdeen in 1846.
...the children rose at 6.00am and went to bed at 7.00pm. During the day there were set times for schooling, learning trades, housework, religion in the form of family worship, meal times and there was also a short time for play three times a day. The boys learned trades such as gardening, tailoring and shoemaking; the girls learned knitting, sewing, housework and washing.
At first like the ragged schools the Industrial Schools were run on a voluntary basis. However in 1857 the Industrial Schools Act was passed. This gave magistrates the power to sentence children between the ages of 7 and 14 years old to a spell in one of these institutions. The act dealt with those children who were brought before the courts for vagrancy in other words for being homeless… [Hidden Lives Revealed]
🏫 The children who were sent to reformatories were those who had come before the courts having committed more serious crimes. They had usually been arrested many times. The clear distinction between Industrial Schools and Reformatories was that the children sent to Industrial schools were destitute and those sent to Reformatories were juvenile offenders. [Hidden Lives Revealed]
🏫 By the 1860s, more than 40,000 of London’s poorest children were taught at Ragged Schools and by 1861, there were lots more schools available for children to attend, 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 was allocating more money than ever for education in the 1860s. The annual funding for schools at this time was more than £800,000. In 1862, parliament also made it compulsory for head teachers to keep daily and weekly records of what happened at their school in a log book. This was a good way to check that progress and attendance were being monitored. Head teachers were being made more responsible for the students under their care. However, with no laws still to make children attend, progress was difficult and was not helped by a continued lack of teaching resources and staff. [Kathryn Waite]
🏫 The idea of ragged schools was developed by John Pounds, a Portsmouth shoemaker. In 1818 Pounds began teaching poor children without charging fees. Thomas Guthrie helped to promote Pounds' idea of free schooling for working class children. Guthrie started a ragged school in Edinburgh and Sheriff Watson established another in Aberdeen. Ragged schools spread rapidly and there were 350 ragged schools by the time the 1870 Education Act was passed...
Charles Dickens' visit to the Field Lane Ragged School in 1843 inspired him to write A Christmas Carol. Appalled by what he saw at Field Lane (now Farringdon Road), he initially intended to write a pamphlet on the plight of poor children, but realised a story would have more impact.
The schools were gradually absorbed into the Board School system. [The Victorian School]
🏫 ...in 1869… the recently formed National Education League began its campaign for free, compulsory and non-religious education for all children. The views expressed by industrialists that mass education was vital to the nation's ability to maintain its lead in manufacture carried considerable weight in Parliament. A Bill which met many, but not all, of the League's wishes was drafted and introduced by W. E. Forster, and quickly passed.
The 1870 Education Act stands as the very first piece of legislation to deal specifically with the provision of education in Britain. Most importantly, it demonstrated a commitment to provision on a national scale.
The Act allowed voluntary schools to carry on unchanged, but established a system of 'school boards' to build and manage schools in areas where they were needed. The boards were locally elected bodies which drew their funding from the local rates. Unlike the voluntary schools, religious teaching in the board schools was to be 'non-denominational'. A separate Act extended similar provisions to Scotland in 1872. [parliament.uk]
🏫 In 1870 Parliament said there had to be a school in every town and village. 'School Boards' of local people built and ran the new schools. Families paid a few pennies a week to send their children, though not all children went to school. In the 1860s a farmer might pay 6 pence (6d) a week for each child. A labourer (who earned less) only paid 2d per child. [BBC]
🏫 The effect of the 1870 Education Act was to widen the gap between the educations of different classes. It marked the increasing involvement of the state in the financing and control of elementary education. The age of compulsory schooling was raised from ten, to eleven and then fourteen in 1800, 1893 and 1899 respectively. However, exceptions were made for part-time working under local byelaws. From 1870 to 1914 the state also increased the number of grants for certain subjects taught in elementary schools and supported scholarship schemes for entry to secondary education. Both these measures sharpened further existing sexual divisions between working-class boys and girls. The Education Department influenced the elementary curriculum through the provision of grants and for working-class girls the influence was in the expansion of domestic subjects. The Education Department Code of 1878 provided for compulsory domestic education for girls in the state sector. In 1882, grants were made for the teaching of cookery and in 1890 for laundry work. The textbooks used in schools made it quite clear that the ‘new’ subjects should involve the learning of useful, practical skills and character building. Such habits were, of course, to prepare working-class schoolgirls to become good women, capable of being efficient wives and mothers...
Working-class women interviewed by Elizabeth Roberts about their lives in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century stated that school domestic science was ‘never any help’. It would appear that for many working-class girls, it was their mothers’ training at home that was valued more than the unreal situations created in schools...
The increased emphasis on the sexual division between boys and girls between 1870 and 1914 was evident also in the scholarship system whereby poor elementary pupils could be offered a free place in a fee-paying secondary school. The number of scholarships was severely limited. More were, however, offered to boys than girls and this was especially so after the Technical Instruction Act 1889 enabled counties and county boroughs to make grants to secondary schools for scholarship purposes. In addition to this handicap, working-class girls might also find themselves discriminated against both by their parents and teachers when they had scholastic ambitions for secondary schooling. In essence, working-class girls were being trained in domestic skills while a proportion of middle-class girls were offered at least a route out of that sphere. [Richard Brown]
🏫 The issue of making education compulsory for children had not been settled by the [1870 Education] Act. The 1876 Royal Commission on the Factory Acts recommended that education be made compulsory in order to stop child labour. In 1880 a further Education Act finally made school attendance compulsory between the ages of five and ten, though by the early 1890s attendance within this age group was falling short at 82 per cent.
Many children worked outside school hours - in 1901 the figure was put at 300,000 - and truancy was a major problem due to the fact that parents could not afford to give up income earned by their children.
Fees were also payable until a change in the law in 1891. Further legislation in 1893 extended the age of compulsory attendance to 11, and in 1899 to 12.
Compulsory education was also extended to blind and deaf children under the Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf Children) Act of 1893, which established special schools. Similar provision was made for physically-impaired children in the Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act of 1899. [parliament.uk]
🏫 In 1870 the Forster Elementary Education Act established partially state-funded Board Schools to be set up to provide primary education in areas where existing provision was inadequate. Board schools were managed by elected school boards. These schools still charged a fee...
By 1880… children now had to attend school between the ages of 5 and 10 though with some local discretion was allowed including early leaving in agricultural areas. Parents of children who did not attend school could be fined. There were exemptions for illness, living more than a certain distance (typically one mile) from a school, or certification of having reached the required standard.
The Free Education Act 1891 provided for the state payment of school fees up to ten shillings per week. This was to help poor parents afford schooling fees...
The Voluntary Schools Act 1897 provided grants to public elementary schools not funded by school boards (typically Church schools). From April 1900 higher elementary schools were recognised, providing education from the age of 10 to 15. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Board Schools were the first state run schools and local Boards could:
raise funds from a rate
build and run non-denominational schools where existing voluntary provision was inadequate
subsidise church schools where appropriate
pay the fees of the poorest children
if they deemed it necessary, create a by-law making attendance compulsory between ages 5–13
not impose any religious education, other than simple Bible reading [The Victorian School]
🏫 One of the most important Education Acts to be passed towards the end of the century was the 1891 Elementary Education Act. This established new rules declaring that elementary education was to be free for all and not just for those in severe poverty. [Kathryn Waite]
🏫 Over 95% of children of elementary school age were already enrolled in schools well before it was made compulsory and free. [Wikipedia]
🏫 ...[but] by 1897 [school attendance] was still only just over 80%. Legislation helped but machinery of enforcement was necessary. The main pressure was that of the attendance officer (commonly called the ‘board man’) and ultimately a summons. This did not always prove effective and authorities were often unwilling to prosecute or convict parents especially in rural areas where cheap child labour was essential for farmers and parents. [Richard Brown]
🏫 There is a tendency to believe that education came to England with the 1870 Education Act. In fact, the state had been involved since at least the 1830s and the debate over education for the the poor had been going for many many years prior to that… It is difficult to know what percentage of the labouring classes' children attended school. Estimates suggest that it ranged from about one-third to one-half in the first few years of Victoria's reign. The most common schools were Sunday Schools where children could go if they were not working and could learn to "read" the bible. What schooling there was was sporadic and its primary function was to fit people for their place in the social order. To say that schools in the early Victorian years were simply instruments of social control is simplistic, but that they filled this role more clearly than others is unquestionable…
The years of Victoria's reign were years of educational ferment. In perspective, however, it should be noted that it was not until 1899 and the establishment of the National Board of Education that free public education was available to all children in England. And it was not until 1902, after Victoria's death, that public secondary education was available. In that same year, the school boards were abolished and the responsibility for education was placed in the hands of local government… [Dr Bruce Rosen]
🏫 Most Victorian lessons involved listening to the teacher and copying sentences from the blackboard. There was very little partner work or group work and very little chance for pupils to discuss their ideas and ask questions...
The most important lessons were the ‘three Rs’ – reading, writing and arithmetic (maths).
Pupils had to chant things (the times-table facts, for example) out loud until they could do it without making a mistake.
Victorian pupils also received lessons in history and geography.
Some lessons were called ‘object lessons’. Items (such as models, seeds, rocks and pictures) were placed on each pupil’s desk. The pupils were meant to make observations about the object in front of them. Most science lessons were taught in this way.
PE lessons were called ‘drill’ and usually took place in the playground. The children didn’t get changed for PE and the lessons involved lots of jogging on the spot, marching, stretching and lifting weights (dumbbells).
In the afternoons the girls and boys did different lessons. The boys were taught woodworking (and some schools also taught farming, shoe-making and gardening). The girls were taught how to cook meals, how to do embroidery and how to complete housework (such as washing and ironing). [James, on Primary Facts]
🏫 As they got older children would write in a book using a dip pen and blue-black ink from out of an inkwell. A book with ruled lines was used for handwriting practice, the copybook. The first line was printed, or copied carefully from the blackboard, then the entire page was filled with identical lines…
Arithmetic was performed with the help of a[n] abacus. [The Victorian School]
🏫 The day usually began with prayers and religious instruction. Morning lessons ran from 9a.m. to 12p.m. Children often went home for a meal, then returned for afternoon classes from 2p.m. to 5p.m. [Mandy Barrow]
🏫 Many schools were quite grim places, often with windows high up so that children could not see out. They were drab by modern standards, with very little on the walls except perhaps a stern text. Boys and girls generally were separated, having their own entrance and playground. Even though in smaller schools boys and girls were taught in the same classroom they would still sit separately. Some classes were very big, for example the British School in Hitchin has a classroom for 300 boys! Village schools would have had smaller classes, but often classes had a very wide age range. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Children often wrote on slates instead of paper. They scratched the letters onto the slate with a sharpened piece of slate (which they held like a pencil). The writing on the slate could easily be removed and slates could be used again and again. This saved the school money as paper was expensive.
The very youngest children used to practise writing letters in sand-trays. [James, on Primary Facts]
🏫 The Victorian teacher would use a cane to punish… children. The cane was given on the hand or the bottom, or sometimes given across the back of the legs. In public schools even prefects would carry and use a cane. All sorts of things might be punished: being rude, answering back, speaking out of turn, poor work, in fact anything that displeased the teacher… In Scotland a leather strap called a tawse was used in place of the cane. Other punishments were given including lines and detentions, and some, if not all, the deeds were written in a punishment book or log. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Children who were slow at their lessons… were made to wear a dunce's hat, a pointed hat with the letter D on it. They would then stand in a corner for an hour or more. Sometimes they stood on a small stool, the dunce's stool. At that time there was no understanding that some children had learning difficulties or learned more slowly, and teachers thought that these children were simply naughty or rebellious. Even left handed children were punished and made to use their right hand. [The Victorian School]
🏫 The official Log Books or diaries of many Victorian schools in country districts contain an amazing variety of reasons for children not being at school.
The most common excuse is the hay harvest, and the summer holidays were called the 'harvest holidays' for many years. The entry below from Llandeilo Graban School in 1895 shows just how much difference the harvest made to school life...
"Sept 16th - Harvest is not finished so could not open school". [Victorian Powys]
🏫 Many teachers were very strict and most schools kept a "Punishment Book" to record the names of the bad ones and the details of their offences… ...like these typical examples from Boughrood School...
17th February 1864 - "Cautioned a child against copying from another child's slate".
15th February 1865 - "Punished Margaret Price for being untidy and dirty".
5th June 1865 - Punished Edwin Lewis for using bad language, and throwing stones".
20th December 1882 - "Punished Gratten Tuck for using bad language in School". [Victorian Powys]
🏫 The most prominent feature of the schoolgirl was the white cotton apron, often trimmed with lace. These… did up at the back… and they were put on over the normal clothes as a means of protection. They were made of cotton and were often hand made by a parent. The normal schoolgirl dress would be knee length and be of a dark cotton or woollen material, often black and would be worn with long black stockings. The shoes would be flat and boot like… They may have won a bonnet, especially on special days, but often they just had their head uncovered, often wearing white ribbons in the hair. Long hair was the norm. [The Victorian School]
🏫 The Victorian schoolboy (not those in public schools) would have worn jackets and stout trousers. On their feet they wore ankle boots, and those in short trousers wore long socks. The colours would have been drab. Their shirt had large rounded, stiff collars and was often worn without a tie. Boys would wear a waistcoat or jumper under their jacket. Some boys wore a cap or even a bowler type hat, but these would not be worn indoors. [The Victorian School]
🏫 A lady teacher usually wore a simple black dress which was full length. A high collar white cotton blouse would be worn underneath. They would wear stout flat boots. The school mistress would wear her long hair up in a bun. The male teacher would wear a suit with a white shirt which had a deep rounded collar, and this was worn with a tie. Again he would wear the strong boots. Most teachers did not wear the graduate gown and mortar board because the majority were not graduates, although in public schools the standards were much higher and teachers would be graduates and most male teachers were in holy orders. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Teaching was often the job of unmarried ladies… and when you married you stopped teaching. Fewer men taught because pay was poor. Most teachers were not qualified by having a college education, they learnt "on the job" in a sort of apprenticeship. When it came to school leaving age, those with aptitude could stay on as "pupil teachers" where they would help the teacher in exchange for lessons. Some larger schools used a system of monitors. The teacher would select a number of the brightest boys and they would then be taught by the headmaster in separate lessons after school. The next day these monitors then took a group of boys each and taught them the things they themselves had just learned. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Victorian schools did break for holidays. There was a two-week hiatus for Christmas and one week for Easter. Summer was celebrated with a three to four week break between July and August. [“Tudor Rose”]
🏫 The National Society for Promoting Religious Education is a Church of England body in England and Wales for the promotion of church schools and Christian education.
It was founded on 16 October 1811 as the "National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in England and Wales". Its aim was that "the National Religion should be made the foundation of National Education, and should be the first and chief thing taught to the poor, according to the excellent Liturgy and Catechism provided by our Church…”
Historically, schools founded by the National Society were called National Schools. At ground level these schools were implemented by the local vicar and members of the Church of England. [The Victorian School]
🏫 In 1755 Samuel Johnson's Dictionary defined a grammar school as a school in which the learned languages [Latin and Greek] are grammatically taught. However, by this time demand for these languages had fallen greatly. A new commercial class required modern languages and commercial subjects. Most grammar schools founded in the 18th century also taught arithmetic and English…
The 19th century saw a series of reforms to grammar schools, culminating in the Endowed Schools Act 1869. Grammar schools were reinvented as academically oriented secondary schools following literary or scientific curricula, while often retaining classical subjects. [Wikipedia]
🏫 A public school in England and Wales is an older, student selective and expensive fee-paying independent secondary school which caters primarily for children aged between 11 or 13 and 18. The term "public" should not be misunderstood to mean that these are public sector schools: they are in fact private sector. Traditionally, public schools were all-male boarding schools…
Public schools emerged from charity schools established to educate poor scholars, the term "public" being used to indicate that access to them was not restricted on the basis of religion, occupation, or home location, and that they were subject to public management or control, in contrast to private schools which were run for the personal profit of the proprietors. [Wikipedia]
🏫 The Public Schools Act 1868 regulated and reformed these "public schools", for which it provided the first legal definition: schools which were open to the paying public from anywhere in the country, as opposed to, for example, a local school only open to local residents, or a religious school open only to members of a certain church. [Wikipedia]
🏫 Boys from rich families were sent away to boarding school. Some 'public schools', like Eton and Harrow, set high standards. Other schools were awful places, run to make profits for the owners. Boys in these bad schools were half-starved, ill-treated, and taught very little. [BBC]
🏫 The first good girls' schools were started in Victorian times, such as the North London Collegiate School (1850). [BBC]
🏫 The first girls' schools targeted at university entrance were North London Collegiate School (1850) and Cheltenham Ladies' College (from the appointment of Dorothea Beale in 1858). [Wikipedia]
🏫 Dorothea Beale and her friend Frances Mary Buss created respectively the girls’ public boarding school and the girls’ grammar school. In 1858 Miss Beale took over the recently founded Cheltenham Ladies College and turned it into the model of the high-quality girls’ boarding school. St Leonards and Roedean were founded after 1870 based on its example. Miss Buss’ North London Collegiate School began in 1850 in Camden Town to meet the problem of the lack of education for middle-class girls. She believed in the important [sic] of home life in the upbringing of girls and it deliberately remained a day school. In both institutions the curriculum included subjects like science and Latin. [Richard Brown]
🏫 According to Tim Reid's article in The Times on-line, the "List Of Books Read By Princess Victoria," a document in her own handwriting, reveals the "formidable reading list" of 150 works she studied "between the ages of seven and 16," many of which "would be largely impenetrable to even the most dedicated and scholarly modern pupil..."
By the time Victoria was 16 she had already read Dryden's translation of The Aneid, Pope's Iliad, Voltaire's history of Charles XII (in the original French), "and was studying Goldsmith's History of England, Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, had completed Goldsmith's histories of Greece and Rome and Magnall's Historical Questions."
In sum, Victoria, who "enjoyed a grasp of world affairs far superior to many of the 20 Prime Ministers who worked to serve her," was an extremely well educated person. She spoke excellent French plus "some Italian [and] adequate Latin" and had "an advanced knowledge" of subjects, such as business, still not adequately covered at Oxford. Victoria was clearly one nineteenth-century British woman who was not handicapped because not she did attend a major university. [George P. Landow]
Some useful resources:
Education in Victorian England An index of articles on The Victorian Web.
The Dictionary of Victorian London Link to the main index. Click on ‘Education’.
Education for the poor - Ragged Schools On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The Victorian School
Going to School in Victorian Times On The Victorian School.
Victorian Schooling On The Victorian School.
Ragged Schools On The Victorian School.
Dame School On The Victorian School.
Board Schools On The Victorian School.
What a Victorian Schoolgirl/Schoolboy/Schoolteacher Wore On The Victorian School.
Girl's School Uniform, Victorian, Replica On Object Lessons.
Victorian Britain: Children at school From the Primary History section of the BBC website.
Education in Victorian Britain By Kathryn Waite, on Simple History.
Hay and district Victorian school days On Victorian Powys.
A school curriculum in Victorian times By caitmo1, on HubPages.
The School Day On Welcome to 1876 Victorian England.
Facts About Victorian Schools and Classrooms By James, on Primary Facts.
Educating the middle-classes 1800-1870 By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Grammar and public schools, 1870-1914: revised version By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Elementary education 1870-1914 By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Educating girls 1800-1870: revised version By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Educating girls 1870-1914: revised version By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Punishing children in Victorian England By Margaret.Makepeace, on the British Library website.
Education in the Workhouse By Peter Higginbotham, on The Workhouse.
History of education in England On Wikipedia.
Elementary Education Act 1870 On Wikipedia.
The 1870 Education Act On parliament.uk
Ragged Schools By Imogen Lee, on the British Library website.
The History of Ragged Schools On the Maybole website.
Ragged Schools, Industrial Schools and Reformatories On Hidden Lives Revealed.
Ragged school On Wikipedia.
Jack Goring (1861 – 1942): Education and Schooling By Victoria Hoffman, on Writing Lives.
Schools during the Victorian Times By Mandy Barrow, on Primary Homework Help.
A List of Victorian School Punishments From an American school, 1848. On mutantspace.
Victorian-era grammar schools On Wikipedia.
National school (England and Wales) On Wikipedia.
Public school (United Kingdom): Victorian Period On Wikipedia.
The Education of the Working Classes to 1870 On British History Online. Pages 213-240 from ‘A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 1’.
Public Schools By Glenn Everett, on the Victorian Web.
State Involvement in Public Education before the 1870 Education Act By Dr Bruce Rosen, on the Victorian Web.
Victorian Schools By "Tudor Rose", on About Britain.
Middle Class and Orphan Schools as they relate to Jane Eyre By Katherine E. Monks, on the Victorian Web.
Queen Victoria's Education By George P. Landow, on the Victorian Web.
Education's Role in the Alice Books By May Lee, on the Victorian Web.
Thomas Arnold's Theories of Secondary Education By George P. Landow, on the Victorian Web.
Nineteenth-Century Education, Theory and Practice: A Bibliography On the Victorian Web.
Maggie Tulliver and Girls' Education in The Mill on the Floss By Jacqueline Banerjee, on the Victorian Web.
The Public School Experience in Victorian Literature By Jacqueline Banerjee, on the Victorian Web.
Education, Literacy and Publishing in Victorian England On Wikispaces.
Finger Stocks (aka Finger Cuffs) - Victorian school punishment - Dean Heritage Centre On YouTube. 2 minutes, 50 seconds.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts:
🏫 When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 education was still mainly for the privileged. Rich children might have a governess to teach them at home until they were old enough — if they were boys — to go to Public Schools such as Rugby… The girls continued to be educated at home. Most poor children did not go to day school, but earlier, Robert Raikes had started a system of education based in churches, the Sunday School, and by 1831 1,250,000 children went to lessons in this way. That was about a quarter of the population at the time. [The Victorian School]
🏫 In early Victorian Britain… school had not yet become compulsory. Children from poorer families often worked in order to help their families who did not have much money. In fact, poorer families often relied on their children to bring in extra money that they needed to survive. 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 were taught by a governess at home. [Kathryn Waite]
🏫 Sunday schools were run by churches, to teach children about the Christian faith. Journalist Robert Raikes started the first Sunday School for poor children in Gloucester in 1780.
Ragged Schools were schools for poor children. One of the first was started in Portsmouth by a shoe-mender named John Pounds. Older children helped to teach younger ones. Ragged Schools were often in one room of a house, or in an old barn. From 1833 factory owners were supposed to provide at least 2 hours education every day for child-workers, but not many children actually got lessons. [BBC]
🏫 From the 18th century onwards there had been some ragged schools, however they were few and far between. They had been started in areas where someone had been concerned enough to want to help disadvantaged children towards a better life. The schools were given this name because the children who attended had only very ragged clothes to wear and they rarely had shoes. In other words they did not own clothing suitable in which to attend any other kind of school.
In the beginning many of the schools were started by the Churches and were staffed by volunteers. However because of the growing number of children it soon became necessary to have paid members of staff. Many petitions to Parliament for grants were made...
In 1844 the Ragged School Union was formed with Lord Shaftesbury as its chairman. In the beginning there were just 16 schools connected with it but by 1861 there were 176 schools in the union. As well as giving basic lessons many schools provided food. As time went on some also opened refuges where the children could sleep especially in the extremely cold weather.
Many people believed that by giving the children an education they would be enabled to lead a better life in the future. They would be able to find work to keep themselves and so would not need to steal in order to live… [Hidden Lives Revealed]
🏫 The ragged school movement grew out of a recognition that charity, denominational and dames schools were not providing for significant numbers of children in inner-city areas. Working in the poorest districts, teachers (who were often local working people) initially utilized such buildings as could be afforded - stables, lofts, railway arches. There would be an emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic - and on bible study (the 4 ‘R’s!). This mix expanded into industrial and commercial subjects in many schools. It is estimated that around 300,000 children went through the London Ragged Schools alone between the early 1840s and 1881... [maybole.org]
🏫 'Dame' schools were usually run by one woman. The 'dame' often did her best, but she was a child-minder not a trained teacher. Often quite poor herself, she took as many children as she could cram into her house. Poor parents working hard to earn a living paid her a few pennies a week to look after their children, and perhaps teach them the alphabet or how to sew. [BBC]
🏫 Industrial Schools were intended to help those children who were destitute but who had not as yet committed any serious crime. The idea was to remove the child from bad influences, give them an education and teach them a trade...
Industrial schools had two main objects, to instil in the children the habit of working and to develop the latent potential of the destitute child. One of the earliest attempts to start an Industrial feeding School, as they were at first called, was in Aberdeen in 1846.
...the children rose at 6.00am and went to bed at 7.00pm. During the day there were set times for schooling, learning trades, housework, religion in the form of family worship, meal times and there was also a short time for play three times a day. The boys learned trades such as gardening, tailoring and shoemaking; the girls learned knitting, sewing, housework and washing.
At first like the ragged schools the Industrial Schools were run on a voluntary basis. However in 1857 the Industrial Schools Act was passed. This gave magistrates the power to sentence children between the ages of 7 and 14 years old to a spell in one of these institutions. The act dealt with those children who were brought before the courts for vagrancy in other words for being homeless… [Hidden Lives Revealed]
🏫 The children who were sent to reformatories were those who had come before the courts having committed more serious crimes. They had usually been arrested many times. The clear distinction between Industrial Schools and Reformatories was that the children sent to Industrial schools were destitute and those sent to Reformatories were juvenile offenders. [Hidden Lives Revealed]
🏫 By the 1860s, more than 40,000 of London’s poorest children were taught at Ragged Schools and by 1861, there were lots more schools available for children to attend, 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 was allocating more money than ever for education in the 1860s. The annual funding for schools at this time was more than £800,000. In 1862, parliament also made it compulsory for head teachers to keep daily and weekly records of what happened at their school in a log book. This was a good way to check that progress and attendance were being monitored. Head teachers were being made more responsible for the students under their care. However, with no laws still to make children attend, progress was difficult and was not helped by a continued lack of teaching resources and staff. [Kathryn Waite]
🏫 The idea of ragged schools was developed by John Pounds, a Portsmouth shoemaker. In 1818 Pounds began teaching poor children without charging fees. Thomas Guthrie helped to promote Pounds' idea of free schooling for working class children. Guthrie started a ragged school in Edinburgh and Sheriff Watson established another in Aberdeen. Ragged schools spread rapidly and there were 350 ragged schools by the time the 1870 Education Act was passed...
Charles Dickens' visit to the Field Lane Ragged School in 1843 inspired him to write A Christmas Carol. Appalled by what he saw at Field Lane (now Farringdon Road), he initially intended to write a pamphlet on the plight of poor children, but realised a story would have more impact.
The schools were gradually absorbed into the Board School system. [The Victorian School]
🏫 ...in 1869… the recently formed National Education League began its campaign for free, compulsory and non-religious education for all children. The views expressed by industrialists that mass education was vital to the nation's ability to maintain its lead in manufacture carried considerable weight in Parliament. A Bill which met many, but not all, of the League's wishes was drafted and introduced by W. E. Forster, and quickly passed.
The 1870 Education Act stands as the very first piece of legislation to deal specifically with the provision of education in Britain. Most importantly, it demonstrated a commitment to provision on a national scale.
The Act allowed voluntary schools to carry on unchanged, but established a system of 'school boards' to build and manage schools in areas where they were needed. The boards were locally elected bodies which drew their funding from the local rates. Unlike the voluntary schools, religious teaching in the board schools was to be 'non-denominational'. A separate Act extended similar provisions to Scotland in 1872. [parliament.uk]
🏫 In 1870 Parliament said there had to be a school in every town and village. 'School Boards' of local people built and ran the new schools. Families paid a few pennies a week to send their children, though not all children went to school. In the 1860s a farmer might pay 6 pence (6d) a week for each child. A labourer (who earned less) only paid 2d per child. [BBC]
🏫 The effect of the 1870 Education Act was to widen the gap between the educations of different classes. It marked the increasing involvement of the state in the financing and control of elementary education. The age of compulsory schooling was raised from ten, to eleven and then fourteen in 1800, 1893 and 1899 respectively. However, exceptions were made for part-time working under local byelaws. From 1870 to 1914 the state also increased the number of grants for certain subjects taught in elementary schools and supported scholarship schemes for entry to secondary education. Both these measures sharpened further existing sexual divisions between working-class boys and girls. The Education Department influenced the elementary curriculum through the provision of grants and for working-class girls the influence was in the expansion of domestic subjects. The Education Department Code of 1878 provided for compulsory domestic education for girls in the state sector. In 1882, grants were made for the teaching of cookery and in 1890 for laundry work. The textbooks used in schools made it quite clear that the ‘new’ subjects should involve the learning of useful, practical skills and character building. Such habits were, of course, to prepare working-class schoolgirls to become good women, capable of being efficient wives and mothers...
Working-class women interviewed by Elizabeth Roberts about their lives in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century stated that school domestic science was ‘never any help’. It would appear that for many working-class girls, it was their mothers’ training at home that was valued more than the unreal situations created in schools...
The increased emphasis on the sexual division between boys and girls between 1870 and 1914 was evident also in the scholarship system whereby poor elementary pupils could be offered a free place in a fee-paying secondary school. The number of scholarships was severely limited. More were, however, offered to boys than girls and this was especially so after the Technical Instruction Act 1889 enabled counties and county boroughs to make grants to secondary schools for scholarship purposes. In addition to this handicap, working-class girls might also find themselves discriminated against both by their parents and teachers when they had scholastic ambitions for secondary schooling. In essence, working-class girls were being trained in domestic skills while a proportion of middle-class girls were offered at least a route out of that sphere. [Richard Brown]
🏫 The issue of making education compulsory for children had not been settled by the [1870 Education] Act. The 1876 Royal Commission on the Factory Acts recommended that education be made compulsory in order to stop child labour. In 1880 a further Education Act finally made school attendance compulsory between the ages of five and ten, though by the early 1890s attendance within this age group was falling short at 82 per cent.
Many children worked outside school hours - in 1901 the figure was put at 300,000 - and truancy was a major problem due to the fact that parents could not afford to give up income earned by their children.
Fees were also payable until a change in the law in 1891. Further legislation in 1893 extended the age of compulsory attendance to 11, and in 1899 to 12.
Compulsory education was also extended to blind and deaf children under the Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf Children) Act of 1893, which established special schools. Similar provision was made for physically-impaired children in the Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act of 1899. [parliament.uk]
🏫 In 1870 the Forster Elementary Education Act established partially state-funded Board Schools to be set up to provide primary education in areas where existing provision was inadequate. Board schools were managed by elected school boards. These schools still charged a fee...
By 1880… children now had to attend school between the ages of 5 and 10 though with some local discretion was allowed including early leaving in agricultural areas. Parents of children who did not attend school could be fined. There were exemptions for illness, living more than a certain distance (typically one mile) from a school, or certification of having reached the required standard.
The Free Education Act 1891 provided for the state payment of school fees up to ten shillings per week. This was to help poor parents afford schooling fees...
The Voluntary Schools Act 1897 provided grants to public elementary schools not funded by school boards (typically Church schools). From April 1900 higher elementary schools were recognised, providing education from the age of 10 to 15. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Board Schools were the first state run schools and local Boards could:
raise funds from a rate
build and run non-denominational schools where existing voluntary provision was inadequate
subsidise church schools where appropriate
pay the fees of the poorest children
if they deemed it necessary, create a by-law making attendance compulsory between ages 5–13
not impose any religious education, other than simple Bible reading [The Victorian School]
🏫 One of the most important Education Acts to be passed towards the end of the century was the 1891 Elementary Education Act. This established new rules declaring that elementary education was to be free for all and not just for those in severe poverty. [Kathryn Waite]
🏫 Over 95% of children of elementary school age were already enrolled in schools well before it was made compulsory and free. [Wikipedia]
🏫 ...[but] by 1897 [school attendance] was still only just over 80%. Legislation helped but machinery of enforcement was necessary. The main pressure was that of the attendance officer (commonly called the ‘board man’) and ultimately a summons. This did not always prove effective and authorities were often unwilling to prosecute or convict parents especially in rural areas where cheap child labour was essential for farmers and parents. [Richard Brown]
🏫 There is a tendency to believe that education came to England with the 1870 Education Act. In fact, the state had been involved since at least the 1830s and the debate over education for the the poor had been going for many many years prior to that… It is difficult to know what percentage of the labouring classes' children attended school. Estimates suggest that it ranged from about one-third to one-half in the first few years of Victoria's reign. The most common schools were Sunday Schools where children could go if they were not working and could learn to "read" the bible. What schooling there was was sporadic and its primary function was to fit people for their place in the social order. To say that schools in the early Victorian years were simply instruments of social control is simplistic, but that they filled this role more clearly than others is unquestionable…
The years of Victoria's reign were years of educational ferment. In perspective, however, it should be noted that it was not until 1899 and the establishment of the National Board of Education that free public education was available to all children in England. And it was not until 1902, after Victoria's death, that public secondary education was available. In that same year, the school boards were abolished and the responsibility for education was placed in the hands of local government… [Dr Bruce Rosen]
🏫 Most Victorian lessons involved listening to the teacher and copying sentences from the blackboard. There was very little partner work or group work and very little chance for pupils to discuss their ideas and ask questions...
The most important lessons were the ‘three Rs’ – reading, writing and arithmetic (maths).
Pupils had to chant things (the times-table facts, for example) out loud until they could do it without making a mistake.
Victorian pupils also received lessons in history and geography.
Some lessons were called ‘object lessons’. Items (such as models, seeds, rocks and pictures) were placed on each pupil’s desk. The pupils were meant to make observations about the object in front of them. Most science lessons were taught in this way.
PE lessons were called ‘drill’ and usually took place in the playground. The children didn’t get changed for PE and the lessons involved lots of jogging on the spot, marching, stretching and lifting weights (dumbbells).
In the afternoons the girls and boys did different lessons. The boys were taught woodworking (and some schools also taught farming, shoe-making and gardening). The girls were taught how to cook meals, how to do embroidery and how to complete housework (such as washing and ironing). [James, on Primary Facts]
🏫 As they got older children would write in a book using a dip pen and blue-black ink from out of an inkwell. A book with ruled lines was used for handwriting practice, the copybook. The first line was printed, or copied carefully from the blackboard, then the entire page was filled with identical lines…
Arithmetic was performed with the help of a[n] abacus. [The Victorian School]
🏫 The day usually began with prayers and religious instruction. Morning lessons ran from 9a.m. to 12p.m. Children often went home for a meal, then returned for afternoon classes from 2p.m. to 5p.m. [Mandy Barrow]
🏫 Many schools were quite grim places, often with windows high up so that children could not see out. They were drab by modern standards, with very little on the walls except perhaps a stern text. Boys and girls generally were separated, having their own entrance and playground. Even though in smaller schools boys and girls were taught in the same classroom they would still sit separately. Some classes were very big, for example the British School in Hitchin has a classroom for 300 boys! Village schools would have had smaller classes, but often classes had a very wide age range. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Children often wrote on slates instead of paper. They scratched the letters onto the slate with a sharpened piece of slate (which they held like a pencil). The writing on the slate could easily be removed and slates could be used again and again. This saved the school money as paper was expensive.
The very youngest children used to practise writing letters in sand-trays. [James, on Primary Facts]
🏫 The Victorian teacher would use a cane to punish… children. The cane was given on the hand or the bottom, or sometimes given across the back of the legs. In public schools even prefects would carry and use a cane. All sorts of things might be punished: being rude, answering back, speaking out of turn, poor work, in fact anything that displeased the teacher… In Scotland a leather strap called a tawse was used in place of the cane. Other punishments were given including lines and detentions, and some, if not all, the deeds were written in a punishment book or log. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Children who were slow at their lessons… were made to wear a dunce's hat, a pointed hat with the letter D on it. They would then stand in a corner for an hour or more. Sometimes they stood on a small stool, the dunce's stool. At that time there was no understanding that some children had learning difficulties or learned more slowly, and teachers thought that these children were simply naughty or rebellious. Even left handed children were punished and made to use their right hand. [The Victorian School]
🏫 The official Log Books or diaries of many Victorian schools in country districts contain an amazing variety of reasons for children not being at school.
The most common excuse is the hay harvest, and the summer holidays were called the 'harvest holidays' for many years. The entry below from Llandeilo Graban School in 1895 shows just how much difference the harvest made to school life...
"Sept 16th - Harvest is not finished so could not open school". [Victorian Powys]
🏫 Many teachers were very strict and most schools kept a "Punishment Book" to record the names of the bad ones and the details of their offences… ...like these typical examples from Boughrood School...
17th February 1864 - "Cautioned a child against copying from another child's slate".
15th February 1865 - "Punished Margaret Price for being untidy and dirty".
5th June 1865 - Punished Edwin Lewis for using bad language, and throwing stones".
20th December 1882 - "Punished Gratten Tuck for using bad language in School". [Victorian Powys]
🏫 The most prominent feature of the schoolgirl was the white cotton apron, often trimmed with lace. These… did up at the back… and they were put on over the normal clothes as a means of protection. They were made of cotton and were often hand made by a parent. The normal schoolgirl dress would be knee length and be of a dark cotton or woollen material, often black and would be worn with long black stockings. The shoes would be flat and boot like… They may have won a bonnet, especially on special days, but often they just had their head uncovered, often wearing white ribbons in the hair. Long hair was the norm. [The Victorian School]
🏫 The Victorian schoolboy (not those in public schools) would have worn jackets and stout trousers. On their feet they wore ankle boots, and those in short trousers wore long socks. The colours would have been drab. Their shirt had large rounded, stiff collars and was often worn without a tie. Boys would wear a waistcoat or jumper under their jacket. Some boys wore a cap or even a bowler type hat, but these would not be worn indoors. [The Victorian School]
🏫 A lady teacher usually wore a simple black dress which was full length. A high collar white cotton blouse would be worn underneath. They would wear stout flat boots. The school mistress would wear her long hair up in a bun. The male teacher would wear a suit with a white shirt which had a deep rounded collar, and this was worn with a tie. Again he would wear the strong boots. Most teachers did not wear the graduate gown and mortar board because the majority were not graduates, although in public schools the standards were much higher and teachers would be graduates and most male teachers were in holy orders. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Teaching was often the job of unmarried ladies… and when you married you stopped teaching. Fewer men taught because pay was poor. Most teachers were not qualified by having a college education, they learnt "on the job" in a sort of apprenticeship. When it came to school leaving age, those with aptitude could stay on as "pupil teachers" where they would help the teacher in exchange for lessons. Some larger schools used a system of monitors. The teacher would select a number of the brightest boys and they would then be taught by the headmaster in separate lessons after school. The next day these monitors then took a group of boys each and taught them the things they themselves had just learned. [The Victorian School]
🏫 Victorian schools did break for holidays. There was a two-week hiatus for Christmas and one week for Easter. Summer was celebrated with a three to four week break between July and August. [“Tudor Rose”]
🏫 The National Society for Promoting Religious Education is a Church of England body in England and Wales for the promotion of church schools and Christian education.
It was founded on 16 October 1811 as the "National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in England and Wales". Its aim was that "the National Religion should be made the foundation of National Education, and should be the first and chief thing taught to the poor, according to the excellent Liturgy and Catechism provided by our Church…”
Historically, schools founded by the National Society were called National Schools. At ground level these schools were implemented by the local vicar and members of the Church of England. [The Victorian School]
🏫 In 1755 Samuel Johnson's Dictionary defined a grammar school as a school in which the learned languages [Latin and Greek] are grammatically taught. However, by this time demand for these languages had fallen greatly. A new commercial class required modern languages and commercial subjects. Most grammar schools founded in the 18th century also taught arithmetic and English…
The 19th century saw a series of reforms to grammar schools, culminating in the Endowed Schools Act 1869. Grammar schools were reinvented as academically oriented secondary schools following literary or scientific curricula, while often retaining classical subjects. [Wikipedia]
🏫 A public school in England and Wales is an older, student selective and expensive fee-paying independent secondary school which caters primarily for children aged between 11 or 13 and 18. The term "public" should not be misunderstood to mean that these are public sector schools: they are in fact private sector. Traditionally, public schools were all-male boarding schools…
Public schools emerged from charity schools established to educate poor scholars, the term "public" being used to indicate that access to them was not restricted on the basis of religion, occupation, or home location, and that they were subject to public management or control, in contrast to private schools which were run for the personal profit of the proprietors. [Wikipedia]
🏫 The Public Schools Act 1868 regulated and reformed these "public schools", for which it provided the first legal definition: schools which were open to the paying public from anywhere in the country, as opposed to, for example, a local school only open to local residents, or a religious school open only to members of a certain church. [Wikipedia]
🏫 Boys from rich families were sent away to boarding school. Some 'public schools', like Eton and Harrow, set high standards. Other schools were awful places, run to make profits for the owners. Boys in these bad schools were half-starved, ill-treated, and taught very little. [BBC]
🏫 The first good girls' schools were started in Victorian times, such as the North London Collegiate School (1850). [BBC]
🏫 The first girls' schools targeted at university entrance were North London Collegiate School (1850) and Cheltenham Ladies' College (from the appointment of Dorothea Beale in 1858). [Wikipedia]
🏫 Dorothea Beale and her friend Frances Mary Buss created respectively the girls’ public boarding school and the girls’ grammar school. In 1858 Miss Beale took over the recently founded Cheltenham Ladies College and turned it into the model of the high-quality girls’ boarding school. St Leonards and Roedean were founded after 1870 based on its example. Miss Buss’ North London Collegiate School began in 1850 in Camden Town to meet the problem of the lack of education for middle-class girls. She believed in the important [sic] of home life in the upbringing of girls and it deliberately remained a day school. In both institutions the curriculum included subjects like science and Latin. [Richard Brown]
🏫 According to Tim Reid's article in The Times on-line, the "List Of Books Read By Princess Victoria," a document in her own handwriting, reveals the "formidable reading list" of 150 works she studied "between the ages of seven and 16," many of which "would be largely impenetrable to even the most dedicated and scholarly modern pupil..."
By the time Victoria was 16 she had already read Dryden's translation of The Aneid, Pope's Iliad, Voltaire's history of Charles XII (in the original French), "and was studying Goldsmith's History of England, Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, had completed Goldsmith's histories of Greece and Rome and Magnall's Historical Questions."
In sum, Victoria, who "enjoyed a grasp of world affairs far superior to many of the 20 Prime Ministers who worked to serve her," was an extremely well educated person. She spoke excellent French plus "some Italian [and] adequate Latin" and had "an advanced knowledge" of subjects, such as business, still not adequately covered at Oxford. Victoria was clearly one nineteenth-century British woman who was not handicapped because not she did attend a major university. [George P. Landow]
Some useful resources:
Education in Victorian England An index of articles on The Victorian Web.
The Dictionary of Victorian London Link to the main index. Click on ‘Education’.
Education for the poor - Ragged Schools On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The Victorian School
Going to School in Victorian Times On The Victorian School.
Victorian Schooling On The Victorian School.
Ragged Schools On The Victorian School.
Dame School On The Victorian School.
Board Schools On The Victorian School.
What a Victorian Schoolgirl/Schoolboy/Schoolteacher Wore On The Victorian School.
Girl's School Uniform, Victorian, Replica On Object Lessons.
Victorian Britain: Children at school From the Primary History section of the BBC website.
Education in Victorian Britain By Kathryn Waite, on Simple History.
Hay and district Victorian school days On Victorian Powys.
A school curriculum in Victorian times By caitmo1, on HubPages.
The School Day On Welcome to 1876 Victorian England.
Facts About Victorian Schools and Classrooms By James, on Primary Facts.
Educating the middle-classes 1800-1870 By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Grammar and public schools, 1870-1914: revised version By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Elementary education 1870-1914 By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Educating girls 1800-1870: revised version By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Educating girls 1870-1914: revised version By Richard Brown, on Looking at History.
Punishing children in Victorian England By Margaret.Makepeace, on the British Library website.
Education in the Workhouse By Peter Higginbotham, on The Workhouse.
History of education in England On Wikipedia.
Elementary Education Act 1870 On Wikipedia.
The 1870 Education Act On parliament.uk
Ragged Schools By Imogen Lee, on the British Library website.
The History of Ragged Schools On the Maybole website.
Ragged Schools, Industrial Schools and Reformatories On Hidden Lives Revealed.
Ragged school On Wikipedia.
Jack Goring (1861 – 1942): Education and Schooling By Victoria Hoffman, on Writing Lives.
Schools during the Victorian Times By Mandy Barrow, on Primary Homework Help.
A List of Victorian School Punishments From an American school, 1848. On mutantspace.
Victorian-era grammar schools On Wikipedia.
National school (England and Wales) On Wikipedia.
Public school (United Kingdom): Victorian Period On Wikipedia.
The Education of the Working Classes to 1870 On British History Online. Pages 213-240 from ‘A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 1’.
Public Schools By Glenn Everett, on the Victorian Web.
State Involvement in Public Education before the 1870 Education Act By Dr Bruce Rosen, on the Victorian Web.
Victorian Schools By "Tudor Rose", on About Britain.
Middle Class and Orphan Schools as they relate to Jane Eyre By Katherine E. Monks, on the Victorian Web.
Queen Victoria's Education By George P. Landow, on the Victorian Web.
Education's Role in the Alice Books By May Lee, on the Victorian Web.
Thomas Arnold's Theories of Secondary Education By George P. Landow, on the Victorian Web.
Nineteenth-Century Education, Theory and Practice: A Bibliography On the Victorian Web.
Maggie Tulliver and Girls' Education in The Mill on the Floss By Jacqueline Banerjee, on the Victorian Web.
The Public School Experience in Victorian Literature By Jacqueline Banerjee, on the Victorian Web.
Education, Literacy and Publishing in Victorian England On Wikispaces.
Finger Stocks (aka Finger Cuffs) - Victorian school punishment - Dean Heritage Centre On YouTube. 2 minutes, 50 seconds.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
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