CHILDREN, TEACHERS AND SOCIETY: THE OVER-PRESSURE CONTROVERSY,1880-1886.

The article focuses on the areas of tension in and related to the teaching profession as far as they concerned the children of the poor in Great Britain. With the growth of the state system after 1870 new and powerful pressures confronted education. Government supervision and control aggravated innate problems of organization in a sphere of society which had no experience of mass movements and neither the facilities nor the experience to cope with them. Inevitably tensions appeared as the state provision grew in complexity and scope with remarkable speed. Since the Revised Code had been introduced in 1862 there had been no lack of evidence that its effect had been to create tension between the Education Department and the schools, between the teachers and the managers and between teachers and children. On the whole, criticism of the Code was leveled at its effect inhibiting the curriculum and on narrowing education generally, rather than as a possible danger to mental and physical health. The medical profession regarded it as a cause of ill health or even of death among children, while teachers tended to interpret it as stress on themselves which inevitably passed to their pupils and was the result of government manipulation of education through examinations. Before about 1860 leading medical journals concentrated on the containment of contagious and infectious diseases in the school setting, rather than upon the effect of general school life on children.