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

135 the first Permanent Secretary to the new Board of Education that had been formed in 1899 to give the subject a clearer ministerial direction. A most politicised civil servant, Sir Robert Morant (Winchester and Oxford), sought to put a wholly classical stamp on the new dispensation. ‘The Assassin of the Boards’, as he was called by the Liberals, believed in ‘submitting the impulses of the ignorant many to the control of the few wise’, it being safe to add that he counted himself among the latter. His 1904 Memorandum of regulations for secondary schools – and it must be stressed that only those schools who complied with it received state grants – was extremely old-fashioned. It borrowed heavily on the public school tradition with an emphasis on languages, in particular Latin, and, although science was permitted on the curriculum, there were no signs, for instance, of any subjects that might have helped socially or vocationally. This austere academic package did, of course, include ‘physical exercise’. Robert Morant’s ‘view of the nature of secondary education was in the public school mould’, Eric Eaglesham in his acclaimed study of the transference of power from board to local authorities added that Morant shared with AJ Balfour, the Conservative premier and his colleagues, ‘similarmiddle- class educational values, similar doubts about the abilities of the masses’. Adrian Wooldridge in his study of the period reminds his readers that, in these post-Darwinian years, ‘the survival of the fittest’ dogma had led to a perverse zeal among thinkers and administrators across the political spectrum to uncover high-calibre human beings. In the first thirty years of the 20 th century, he writes, ‘eugenics became the political correctness of the day.’ The deliberate and conscious selection processes deployed for British eleven year olds were driven by this same flawed doctrine. It was social engineering of the worst kind. Francis Galton, a half- cousin of Darwin, coined the word ‘eugenics’ in 1883. It had very much worse effects elsewhere. It led to over 60,000 Swedish women being sterilised between 1935 and 1976. Most bestial and extreme of all, Nazi genocide was justified in terms of racial supremacy. The Educational Effect