Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

133 although some education economists have argued that our old friends, cause and effect, had again been reversed, that is, we have an expensive education system because we have a relatively rich economy. And yet the anxiety about schooling was pronounced and urgent. Was there some hidden agenda, some other critical element noted, if without the same hullabaloo made about religious instruction or economic needs? The crucial answer lies in the emphasis laid on attendance. By 1900 there were 2511 School Boards and elsewhere a spread of 790 bodies dealing with attendance. It was a mildly punitive regime. For example, the Liverpool School Board in 1873 employed the surprisingly high number of 26 school visitors to oversee its by-laws; prosecutions in the first two years of its existence led to 1500 fines and 234 light prison sentences for parents. Truancy was the cardinal offence. Of the basic 10 shilling state grant or ‘payment by result’, 6 shillings was for attendance and only 4 for accrued learning. Changing technology in the work-place, including in farming, quickly reduced the need for child-labour, while the distinct gap between home and work also meant that working parents had difficulty in supervising non-working children. In consequence an impasse had arisen put pithily by WB Stephens when he wrote of children who ‘neither at work nor school, particularly in the large towns, may have lived a life of aimless drifting’. By the 1870s most children aged five to nine were in school but there were places for only a third of the boys and a fifth of the girls aged between ten and fourteen. There was now little regular work for that age-group. ‘Street-arabs..the residuum..the dangerous and perilous classes’..these were some of the tags of opprobrium attached to the parcels of listless and youthful humanity who now frightened the sombre middle classes by their actual and potential misbehaviour. There were in the years prior to the 1870 Act 50,000 ‘child-idlers’ in Birmingham, with other West Midlands towns having up to 80% of this age-range ‘who do not profess to go to any school and who pass the day idling in the streets.’ The new The Educational Effect