This study, first published in 1979, analyses the attitude of various income and occupational groups to elementary schools both before and after the introduction of compulsory school attendance. It also discusses the efforts made by voluntary organisations to provide school meals, as well as examining the quality of the meals themselves, before the enactment of remedial legislation in the early twentieth century. This title will be of interest to students of history and education.

Which books did the British working classes read--and how did they read them? How did they respond to canonical authors, penny dreadfuls, classical music, school stories, Shakespeare, Marx, Hollywood movies, imperialist propaganda, the Bible, the BBC, the Bloomsbury Group? What was the quality of their classroom education? How did they educate themselves? What was their level of cultural literacy: how much did they know about politics, science, history, philosophy, poetry, and sexuality? Who were the proletarian intellectuals, and why did they pursue the life of the mind? These intriguing questions, which until recently historians considered unanswerable, are addressed in this book. Using innovative research techniques and a vast range of unexpected sources, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes tracks the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. It offers a new method for cultural historians--an "audience history" that recovers the responses of readers, students, theatergoers, filmgoers, and radio listeners. Jonathan Rose provides an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves, told from their perspective. He draws on workers’ memoirs, oral history, social surveys, opinion polls, school records, library registers, and newspapers. Through its novel and challenging approach to literary history, the book gains access to politics, ideology, popular culture, and social relationships across two centuries of British working-class experience.

This volume considers how various sociological approaches to the exploration of the conditions of teachers’ might be co-ordinated so as to produce a more penetrating and reliable understanding of the main dimensions of teachers’ work. Three dimensions are selected for special attention: historical, institutional and interactional contexts in which teachers operate. In different way the papers in this collection explore the contribution such an investigation of these contexts can make to our understanding of wider educational concerns.

First published in 1998, this book reprints eight articles from The London Journal, covering the history of London from the middle ages to the twentieth century. Each is an extensive bibliographical essay, updated by the individual contributors for this anthology. The book comes with a new introduction from a previous editor of the journal, Patricia Garside, and also with a specially commissioned guide to sources for London history and the libraries and special collections that house them. The London Journal was founded in 1975 to provide a forum for the study of London history: an eclectic and multi-disciplinary field. As well as articles based on original research, The London Journal has carried notes and comments, viewpoint and review articles, and general surveys of particular aspects of London life. In the past few decades the specialist literature on London has become extensive, intricate and dense. The opportunity for a systematic review of this literature presented itself on the twentieth anniversary of the founding of The London Journal, and the core of the work presented here first appeared in Volume 20(2), November 1995. Each of the authors, specialists in one of seven periods from Roman to contemporary times, was asked to evaluate the literature that had appeared in their field of London expertise during the last 20 years. For this book, each contribution has been updated where possible to take account of the very latest publications.

In the 1990s education has become one of the major social and political questions of the day. This book has been written to provide an authoritative guide to the issues which underlie the formulation of educational policy. It stands both as a substantial historical study in its own right and as an essential background and introduction to the current educational debate.

First published in 1982, this work is a critical survey of contemporary educational debates and themes which took on new urgency and importance at the time. In particular, it explores the problematic nature of ‘progressive education’ and ‘discipline’; the changes in the labour process and youth unemployment; the nature of the state and its relationship with schooling; the growth of state intervention and the specific forms of discrimination suffered by women and black people. It argues that trends in education at the time can be explained by a Marxist analysis. It suggests that the changes taking place in schools and colleges were expressions of the contradictions of capitalism and of the state’s attempt to restructure education.