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

134 London School Board reckoned 250,000 to 300,000 school places were needed which even allowing for natural bias suggests a significant problem. The authoritative Victorian historianDonaldRead concluded that the authorities reacted ‘negatively at least by taking the street-arabs into schools.’ In other words, the emergence of a matured public elementary schools service was about not just the teaching of social control through the rudiments of a church-based code of good conduct. It was about the social control per se . It was, then, a custodial system, with possibly its major raison d’etre the obligatory insistence that children be subjected to a form of confinement for a sufficient number of years until they were old enough to work. As a result, children of school-age remain today the only British citizens, apart from convicted prisoners and those held under aspects of the mental health statutes, who are legally detained in requisite premises for so many sessions a year and for such a number of years. This important point must be borne in mind in turning to the shift to ‘secondary’ (the coinage of Matthew Arnold, poet, schools inspector and the son of Thomas Arnold) provision, where the narrative of schoolboy reading and cricket do assume significant roles. The problem of finding work for older youngsters expanded, leading to demands for higher-age schooling. A critical point came in the 1890s. When some ambitious School Boards, attempted to add technical and vocational lessons for older children, there was a ferocious argument between the Liberal and Conservative parties about the format of post-elementary schooling. There was a Conservative outcry about the illegality of public expenditure on other than purely elementary teaching and the Cockerton Judgement of 1899 agreed this was so. When next in power the Conservatives abolished the School Boards and transferred education to the County and County Borough authorities they had founded in 1884, with most of the former in Tory hands, with a remit to provide some secondary education. The author of the 1902 Act which legislated to this end was The Educational Effect