Originally published in 1977, this volume analyzes aspects of elementary schooling in the nineteenth century and the ways in which it prepared working-class children for life in industrial Britain. The book examines: The procedures and practices of different types of schools. The ideologies guiding elementary education The social implications of curriculum content and pupils’ and parents’ attitudes to the education provided by the church and state.

This book investigates the relationship between ideas about childhood and the actual experience of being a child, and assesses how it has changed over the span of five hundred years. Hugh Cunningham tells an engaging story of the development of ideas about childhood from the Renaissance to the present, taking in Locke, Rosseau, Wordsworth and Freud, revealing considerable differences in the way western societites have understood and valued childhood over time. His survey of parent/child relationships uncovers evidence of parental love, care and, in the frequent cases of child death, grief throughout the period, concluding that there was as much continuity as change in the actual relations of children and adults across these five centuries. For undergraduate courses in History of the Family, European Social History, History of Children and Gender History.

Nineteenth-century educational reformers were fond of an agricultural metaphor when it came to the provision of more and better schooling: even good land, they argued, had to be cultiated; othersie noxious weeds sprang up. In this study of education in Ontario from the establishment of Upper Canada to the end of Egerton Ryerson's career as chief superintendent of schools in 1876, Susan Houston and Alison Prentice explore the roots of the provincial public school system, set up to instill a work ethic and moral discipline appropriate to the new society, as well as the beginnings of separate schools. today the Ontario school system is once again the subject of intense and often bitter deabte. Many of the most contentious issues have deep and complex roots that go back to this era. Houston and Prentice tell the story of how Ontario came to have a universal school system of exceptional quality and shed valuable light on an area of current concern.

Neil Smelser's Social Paralysis and Social Change is one of the most comprehensive histories of mass education ever written. It tells the story of how working-class education in nineteenth-century Britain—often paralyzed by class, religious, and economic conflict—struggled forward toward change. This book is ambitious in scope. It is both a detailed history of educational development and a theoretical study of social change, at once a case study of Britain and a comparative study of variations within Britain. Smelser simultaneously meets the scholarly standards of historians and critically addresses accepted theories of educational change—"progress," conflict, and functional theories. He also sheds new light on the process of secularization, the relations between industrialization and education, structural differentiation, and the role of the state in social change. This work marks a return for the author to the same historical arena—Victorian Britain—that inspired his classic work Social Change in the Industrial Revolution thirty-five years ago. Smelser's research has again been exhaustive. He has achieved a remarkable synthesis of the huge body of available materials, both primary and secondary. Smelser's latest book will be most controversial in its treatment of class as a primordial social grouping, beyond its economic significance. Indeed, his demonstration that class, ethnic, and religious groupings were decisive in determining the course of British working-class education has broad-ranging implications. These groupings remain at the heart of educational conflict, debate, and change in most societies—including our own—and prompt us to pose again and again the chronic question: who controls the educational terrain?

All students of history use maps. This atlas is designed specifically to enhance the understanding of British history since 1700, as well as emphasizing social as well as economic change. The contributors are all subject specialists who have taught in higher education institutions, and a large proportion of both maps and text is based on their own original research. The combination of maps and text is intended to illustrate not only historical developments, such as the spread of agriculture or the growth of an integrated transport system, but also regional contrasts at points in time. The end product offers support for those historians who question the usefulness of thinking in terms of national economic histories.

Education has always been a key instrument of nation-building in new states. National education systems have typically been used to assimilate immigrants; to promote established religious doctrines; to spread the standard form of national languages; and to forge national identities and national cultures. They helped construct the very subjectivities of citizenship, justifying the ways of the state to the people and the duties of the people to the state. In this second edition of his seminal and widely-acclaimed book on the origins of public education in England, France, Prussia, and the USA, Andy Green shows how education has also been used as a tool of successful state formation in the developmental states of East Asia. While human capital theories have focused on how schools and colleges supply the skills for economic growth, Green shows how the forming of citizens and national identities through education has often provided the necessary condition for both economic and social development.

`I believe that next to good Religious education, a sound knowledge of Political Economy would tend as much to tranquilize this country, if not more, than any other branch of knowledge that can be taught in schools.' - Cork Schools Inspector, 1853 In a nineteenth century Ireland that was divided socially, economically, politically and denominationally, consensus was sought in the new discipline of political economy, which claimed to be scientifically impartial and to transcend all divisions. The authors explore the ideological mission of political economy, and the reasons for the failure of that mission in the wake of the crisis induced by the great famine of 1846/47.