PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND SOCIAL CLASS, 1801-1850.

By 1800, public school education was already an accepted pattern of life for the upper classes of society in Great Britain. The eight schools mentioned in the article can be ranked for the first half of the nineteenth century as Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Rugby, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury, St. Pauls. This presents interesting parallel patterns with the position at the present day. Boys entering the acknowledged public schools, at that time, came from a wide range of social classes. The lower classes were excluded and the middle class entry was severely restricted to boys on the foundation. Of the professional groups as a whole, less than one out of ten sons of service officers, and less than one in six sons of clergymen were catered by the school while the proportion of boys from the other professions of medicine, law and scholastics was negligible. In the upper classes, however less than one in two gentry boys attended school and more than one in two for the titled aristocracy.