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The Real Interests of the Peasant Boy: The Development of Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Austin Gaskell O.P.
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Extract

(From the evidence of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham and Vaux, before the Parliamentary Committee on the State of Education, 1834.)

‘. . . Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor desirable.’

(Report of the Newcastle Commission, 1861.)

‘. . . Even if it were possible, I doubt whether it would be desirable, with a view to the real interests of the peasant boy, to keep him at school till he was 14 or 15 years of age. But it is not possible. We must make up our minds to see the last of him, as far as the day school is concerned, at 10 or 11. We must frame our system of education upon this hypothesis; and I venture to maintain that it is quite possible to teach a child soundly and thoroughly, in a way that he shall not forget it, all that is necessary for him to possess in the shape of intellectual attainment, by the time he is 10 years old. . . .’

(Evidence of the Rev. James Fraser, later Bishop of Manchester, quoted with approval by the Newcastle Commission, 1861.)

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 49 , Issue 569 , October 1967 , pp. 31 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

page 36 note 1 A corollary to Basil Bernstein's linguistic studies. ‘Language and Moral Education’, by K. D. Nicholls, appeared in New Blackfriars in February 1965.

page 37 note 1 This note has, of course, been even more forcefully struck in the Plowden Report.

page 38 note 1 W. O. Lester Smith, Government of Education, 1965, pp. 77–8.

page 38 note 2 ‘Why Catholic Schools?’Spode House Review, Vol. I, No. 6 (May 1965); Cf. Murphy, James, The Religious Problem in English Education: the crucial experiment. Liverpool University Press, 1959.Google Scholar

page 40 note 1 In 1964, there were 23,433 teachers in Catholic maintained schools, of whom 9.6 per cent were religious; 883 teachers in direct grant schools, of whom 40 per cent were religious; 6,024 in independent schools, of whom 45.5 per cent were religious.

page 41 note 1 Church and School, a study of the impact of education on religion, Liverpool University Press, 1964.Google Scholar