The Whigs, the Church, and Education, 1839

Abstract

The Whig educational proposals of 1839 are regarded as an important step in the centralization and growth of state control over the education of English working-class children. Introduced by Lord John Russell on February 12, the plan called for state supervision of education by a committee of the Privy Council, the erection of a nondenominational state normal school and two model schools, state inspection of all schools in receipt of the grants established in 1833, and a new system of allocation of those grants based not on the size of the voluntary contributions raised by the National Society or the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) but on the local needs as ascertained by any “reputable” school society. Historians have viewed the proposals as the inevitable outcome of popular pressures brought to bear on government. Unable to resist their own Erastian urge to attack the privileged position of the church, and persuaded by Brougham, who figured prominently in the 1833 grant and had unsuccessfully proposed a national system as recently as the autumn of 1837, or alternatively by the Radicals J. A. Roebuck and Thomas Wyse, themselves supporters of the Central Society for Education's plans for a national secular system of education, the Whigs are regarded as having responded to popular, reformist demands. “In 1839,” wrote Halevy, “the cabinet yielded.” England was last among the Protestant countries in the matter of primary education; Roebuck, Wyse, and Brougham had failed in their separate efforts to promote the cause; and the government could do little other than propose a remedy for 3 million uneducated children.