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In recent years, many scholars have drawn a distinction between procedural and programmatic secularism. Procedural secularists seek to build communities wherein 'competing concepts of the good life' are afforded opportunities for expression. Programmatic secularists seek to limit the influence of religion within the public sphere. The 1870 Education Act created a network of Board schools across England and Wales. In accordance with the Cowper-Temple Clause, religious education in Board schools would be non-denominational in character. Students would be taught Bible passages and hymns, but would not be taught any denominationally specific aspects of Christian doctrine. This development stimulated a controversy between the defenders of non-denominational education and those who believed that state-sponsored non-denominational education threatened the existence of voluntary schools. The debates that ensued are often characterised as sectarian in nature. However, they can alternatively be seen as negotiations of the proper definition and the proper parameters of religious freedom and toleration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together the ideas of three writers from the 1880s who argued for an enhanced status for history in the school curriculum. Although there is superficial agreement between the writers in calling for history to develop children's citizenship and patriotism, each conceives these values differently. Focusing on the teaching of history to children in elementary and third-grade schools, this paper suggests that the considerable plurality of views among advocates of history reflects the underdeveloped disciplinary identity of history in the Victorian academy. However, the paper also contends that, in considering the pedagogic complexity of teaching history to children, these writers were engaging with epistemic debates – about the place of myth-histories and the processes of narrativisation – that would not exercise historical philosophers until the late twentieth century. Then, as now, the school curriculum proved fertile ground for discussion about what history is, and what it is for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The educational policies of 1860s Britain came into being as a result of the interplay between social, economic and political conditions, and the changing discourses of childhood and education that arose from them. While essentialised conceptualisations of 'the child' had existed since the early Enlightenment period, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that universalised notions of childhood gained popular acceptance. Economic pressures and the rise of utilitarianism, coupled with a discursive construction of the child as the future of the state, led to the instrumentalism of the Revised Code. Both this understanding and the Romantic view of the innocent child influenced measures that increased levels of educational compulsion, culminating in the 1870 Elementary Education Act. Despite these prevailing discourses, however, a significant minority, particularly among the labouring classes, still saw economic productivity, often alongside education, as an ordinary part of childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have frequently referred to the British Association for the Advancement of Science as an institution that had the professionalisation of British science as its chief aim. This article seeks to complicate this picture by asking what, if any, concept of ‘professionalisation’ would have been understood by nineteenth-century actors. In particular, it seeks to move away from traditional functionalist understandings of professionalisation, as the possession of specialist knowledge and expertise, and consider instead broader definitions, which incorporate the power relationships and identities constructed through discourses of professionalisation. It argues that it was just as important for professional scientists in nineteenth-century Britain to possess a particular type of character (independent, rational, self-controlled) closely identified with popular ideals of elite masculinity and developed through a thorough scientific education. It also reinterprets the growing popularity of scientific internationalism, with its emphasis on the independence of the scientist (from state control) as a crucial part of this masculinising discourse of professionalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines a Victorian geographical card game entitled The Counties of England published by Jaques & Son. Advertised as highly instructive and educational, it was designed to teach children about the principal towns in each county, their products and notable buildings. The aims of the study were to discover whether the information printed on the cards accurately reflected the towns’ main features and if the number of cards allocated to each county was representative of its population size. The study found that many towns included in the first edition of the game were accurately represented, but later issues, despite some modification, carried somewhat outdated information. Counties with large populations were also generally allotted more cards. Several factors were identified as possibly influencing which towns were selected and how they were presented, including tourist appeal, the card designer’s interests and knowledge and the rules and conventions of the game. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focusing on the Working Men’s College (WMC), this study charts the chequered fortunes of a Victorian project: providing workers with a ‘liberal education’. The paper analyses the project’s aim (making ‘better citizens’), its disciplinary content (the humanities and/or the sciences) and its challenges (the increasing prestige of vocational studies). It argues that, in an increasingly professionalised society, a ‘liberal education’ for workers became contentious ground. As the role of the sciences within a ‘liberal education’ diminished, and the provision of practical skills took precedence in the local-authority-funded courses, Victorian workers’ opportunities for education became polarised between ‘useful’ sciences and ‘profitless’ humanities. With natural scientists losing the intellectual independence of their discipline to technicians, the WMC Edwardian educators chose to side unequivocally with the humanities. The paper contends that it was in the Edwardian context of the adult education movement that the ‘two cultures’ debate first emerged in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

1Within a 20-year period from the late 1850s to the late 1870s, most European countries created programmes in response to what appeared as a new social problem: unwed daughters of the middle classes in need of jobs. Taking off from the 150th anniversary of the English Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, this paper examines the diffusion of such courses across Europe and the very similar occupations that most thought appropriate for their clientele. It also highlights variations in structures, leadership and funding that emerged, and in particular how the English pacesetter remained much smaller than many later creations. Sponsors seldom sought public funding, but they had no problem seeking charitable contributions to help middle-class young women avoid being 'de-classed'. 1An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education in Utrecht in August 2009. I would like to thank the audience for comments at that time, and Rebecca Rogers for several bibliographical suggestions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the various types of domestic education, particularly cookery, available in Manchester between 1870 and 1902. The work of the two local School Boards and the Manchester School of Domestic Economy are shown as part of a complicated network of provision - a mixed economy of welfare, including enthusiastic philanthropists and educational entrepreneurs offering a range of practical and academic classes for middle-class ladies as well as working-class schoolgirls. The campaigners for domestic education managed a dual vision of what it was to be domestically competent, insisting on the value of lessons from professionals, while arguing that domesticity was a natural, innate feminine talent. Likewise, although women's education and/or employment could be blamed for a decline in domestic skills, re-centring domestic education in schools and evening classes could make education a cure not just for a generation of inadequate mothers and wives, but also for racial degeneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to ascertain the attitudes to, and work on, English school boards of clergymen from the three main Churches which had taken an active interest in education in England in the nineteenth century - the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Were the clergy 'the enemy within', attempting to subvert the cause of non-denominational education? Little has previously been written about this work. The research has used a variety of primary sources, among them annual HMI reports on the educational provision in their areas and the pronouncements made by the leaders of the three Churches about their own representations on the boards. A variety of qualitative data has been accessed on the clergy influence in certain areas in the North of England using extant school board managers' minutes. The picture that emerges from the evidence studied is of a significant and growing influence for Anglican clergy in rural areas. They undoubtedly had self-interests in their membership, to ensure religious teaching in schools, to protect their own institutions and in part to assert their own status within society. In large towns and cities, boards proved to be independent of clergy control, with much authority given over to the headteachers. Roman Catholic priests often became board members and in doing so were in a position to defend their own schools. Throughout, the one group that did not share the influence on boards was the Wesleyan ministers, who were constrained by their own itinerant ministry. It is hoped that this will encourage further studies of individual communities, where School Board Managers' Minutes survive, to add further qualitative evidence and further analysis of the direct influence of the clergymen of the three Churches discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with transformations in eighteenth-century medical education. Its focus is the work of an individual surgeon, Thomas Tomlinson, who delivered one of the earliest anatomical courses in provincial England. It examines methods of medical education between 1760 and 1825, when apprenticeship was being transformed into a more learned form of instruction and medical education was more regularly offered and undertaken in lecture, operation and dissection theatres, if not yet rooted in medical schools and teaching hospitals. By further considering developments in clinical training in Leiden, the emergence of clinical teaching methods in Edinburgh and London and the introduction of anatomical courses in both the English metropolis and provinces in the eighteenth century, it aims to establish the place of this relatively unknown provincial pedagogue in the wider world of eighteenth-century European medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]