CUAC conference – April 2009

A Founding Vision for Modern Times: The case of St Mark’s & St John’s, and the campaign against the Revised Code

Dr. Paul Grosch & Prof. David Harris

We would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Ms N. Chaffe, College Archivist UCP Marjon

1. D.Coleridge’s vision

2. J.Kay-Shuttleworth’s vision

3. Revised Code 1862

4. Modern version

Many are aware, broadly, of the central facts of St Mark & St John’s (Marjon’s) beginnings; the fact that St John's College, Battersea, was founded in 1838 by Edward Tufnell and Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, the latter being the College's first Principal; and that the Revd. Derwent Coleridge, the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was the first Principal of St Mark's College, Chelsea, founded in 1841. The two Colleges were, from the outset, unique in being the oldest residential teacher training institutions in the country, with St John's being the very first. The National Society, after some encouragement from a triumvirate of politicians, including WE Gladstone (Nicholas 2007), was responsible for St Mark's since its outset, and became responsible for St John's in 1843. But few, perhaps, will know much about the issues and debates surrounding their establishment, or their modest beginnings. Some brief historical comparisons and contrasts, by way of a few thumbnail sketches, may here be helpful.

We recognise that we are not historians and that there are controversies behind even the most seemingly straightforward accounts. We were tempted initially to see the history as reflecting a familiar story of secularization, where the vision of Coleridge gradually succumbs to growing powers of the secular State, perhaps as an example of the general ‘disenchantment’ of the world charted by sociologists like Max Weber. However, more recent work (see Neuhaus 2009 for a summary) shows that complex patterns of the secular and the religious persist, and there can be no simple general unidirectional trends. This lengthy debate cannot be pursued here, but it has guided us in seeing complex combinations of religiosity and politics at work, with different emphases at different times.

It might be tempting to see Coleridge as simply offering a religious vision, for example, while Kay-Shuttleworth represents the secular and utilitarian, but an examination of the archival material shows that to be too simple. Coleridge was well aware of the secular problems facing him, including the need to procure suitable finance and achieve political compromises with a number of powerful parties. Kay-Shuttleworth held strong religious beliefs (Nonconformist ones) and was far from being a simple dessicated Utilitarian (although Charles Dickens seems to have believed that he was, and this view has generally prevailed). The two Principals seem to have shared quite similar views at the most general level, although differing in important specific ways – both regretted the condition of the poor and saw education as the main remedy; both saw new teaching methods as the solution to the problem of widening participation; both believed in the non-vocational benefits of education; both fought to maintain high standards, and, as we shall see, both opposed the crudely calculative stance towards policy taken by State politicians. This is not to minimise the differences between them, of course. Indeed, early Church suspicion and hostility was responsible for the demise of Battersea College and its subsequent conversion to St John’s (Stewart and McCann 1967)

St Mark’s College :

In its humble beginnings St Mark’s, Chelsea, admitted 10 students in April 1841, and a further 7 in October. They were aged between 14 and 17, and most were to remain for between two and three years. It had 7 or 8 tutors, including the Principal, and the curriculum consisted mainly of mathematics, Latin and Greek, basic geography and history, drawing and music, along with the principles of teaching. Everything, however, was subordinate to the Anglican faith and doctrine, with the chapel being 'the keystone of the arch' (Gent 1891: 6). Formal examinations for certificates were not introduced until 1847-48. St Mark's was, in the beginning, funded almost entirely by the Church of England, through the National Society. It could have been largely funded by the state through the offices of the newly-established Committee of the Council on Education, but a grant was based on the understanding that the Council would undertake regular inspection. The National Society rejected the proposal on the grounds that continual inspection was undesirable, and so funded the College itself. Coleridge seems to have appointed his own inspector, the Rev. Prof. Moseley (also spelled Mozley), to help him maintain standards. The examination papers Moseley set for St Mark’s students were published for inspection (Moseley 1847). Kay-Shuttleworth and Tufnell also published not only the exam papers for Battersea College, but the student answers as well (HMSO 1841).

It is interesting to note the degree of resistance at this time to the idea that religion could, or even should, inform education. By all accounts the 'original idea of the founders of this College (was) that the Schoolmaster should (also) be trained for the Deaconate...;(however a)...decisive blow was given to it by the regulation that any Schoolmaster admitted to Holy Orders thereby forfeited his Schoolmaster's certificate' (Benham 1891: 38). But, such was the influence of chapel life orchestrated by Coleridge, that of the original 17 students, 7 were ordained, and out of the 17 admitted in 1842, 12 completed their training, and of these, 5 were admitted to holy orders. Coleridge’s educational vision always placed character above curriculum, the person before the programme, although curriculum content was of significant importance in shaping a person’s character: ‘The plan (at St Mark’s) proposes to form the character, both generally and with a special reference to the scholastic office.’ (Coleridge 1842a: 9).

It is no wonder then that the motto taken for the combined colleges of St Mark & St John upon the fact of their merger in 1923 should be Coleridge’s chosen defence of classical learning :

Abeunt studia in mores or ‘character through study’, a line taken from Ovid’s Heroides. What is involved in this study is no less than ‘a sound and, to a considerable extent, a cultivated understanding; a certain moral power, the growth of religious principles but developed by intellectual culture’. (Coleridge 1842a: 8). Coleridge also knew that a knowledge of Latin in particular would have other benefits: it would 'humanise...[students’] coarse and rude natures...gentle their condition' (Coleridge 1842b: 22). For Kay and Tufnell (HMSO 1841):

Phrases of [Latin or Greek origin]… are so naturalized in the language of the educated classes, that entirely to omit them has the appearance of pedantry and baldness, and even disgusts persons of taste and refinement. Therefore, in addressing a mixed congregation, it seems impossible to avoid using them, and the only mode of meeting the inconvenience alluded to is to instruct the humbler classes in their meaning

By 1844, the College had a total of 86 students, and the buildings, set in 11 acres, consisted only of the Principal's house, the College library, the old dormitory, (all of which served as lecture halls and studies), and the chapel, ‘the keystone of the arch – the highest point, yet that to which every other part is referred, and from which, are derived the consistency and stability of the whole’ (Coleridge 1842a: 8).

St John’s College :

St John's College, Terrace House, Battersea, opened in February 1839, with a handful of mostly orphan boys aged about 13 years. By January 1841 there were 24 boys and 9 men, aged 20-30 years. In addition to Kay-Shuttleworth, there were (at the least) three other staff, one of whom was to be known as the 'master of method', and probably the first person in the UK to be so named. The College was also to be responsible for the local village school, and it became one of the first experimental schools in England. A basic education was given to the students, including manual labour in the garden, the cowshed, the pigsty, and the chicken coop for about 4 hours a day, depending on fitness, compared to 5 hours a day in school HSMO (1841). Tutors also labored, and shared the simple rustic meals made from home-grown produce. Battersea students also did a lot of housework, which was seen as important for pragmatic reasons as well as character-forming and preventing any ideas above their station, since teachers were likely to be living in rural communities and be too poor to do anything other than fend for themselves. The regime at St Marks’ was very similar, with the same 5:30 am start, and some compulsory housework, this time with ‘industrial occupations’ instead of agricultural ones and slightly more time spent in study. Out of the entire 16.5 hour day, 30 minutes were permitted for ‘leisure’

Religious instruction was a necessary part of the regime, as was a complex raft of examinations and tests. 'The Training School was a total institution...(with) a clear moral and social purpose, the defence of a social order Kay perceived to be under threat.' (Selleck 1994:185). St Mark’s could also be called a ‘total institution’, dominating and closely regulating the lives of students, even in their non-contact time. Students needed to be 'watched and warned, corrected, encouraged, advised' at all times. Even private reading was supervised in a friendly way, in order to forestall 'the false views of society laid before ...[an innocent reader]... by the Owenist, of constitutional government by the Chartist, of the Church by the Independent and the Romanist', which  'circulated in every pot house' (Coleridge 1842b: 42). In this way 'One way of thinking and feeling is alone recommended, or habitually exhibited, to the students' (1842b: 24).

Unlike Coleridge at St Mark's, Kay was enthusiastic about government inspection and intervention, himself becoming one of the first HM Inspectors of Schools. Moreover, St John's students were not only given a basic, rounded education, they were also systematically taught, or rather instructed in the art and science of teaching, by way of a number of increasingly mechanical and ever more precise teaching manuals. This was undertaken with a utilitarian zeal, partly in order to ward off social and moral collapse. There is evidence here of a kind of moral panic, and the students of St John's College were sent out as educational missionaries to stem the worst excesses of a culture given over to rampant individualism, and the pursuit of wealth and personal pleasure. At the same time, there was a genuine interest in developing intellectual depth: the elementary stages were based on demonstrating the immediate utility of knowledge, but in the later stages: ‘The… practice of dogmatic teaching is so ruinous, however, to the intellectual habits, and so imperfect a means of developing the intelligence, that it ought, we think, at all expense of time, to be avoided. With this conviction, the method of Pestalozzi has been diligently pursued’ (HMSO 1841).

By contrast, St Mark's students were given an almost full, English classical education with some lectures on the art of teaching, but more with a view to disseminating the mysteries and aesthetic intellectual pleasures and demands of an Anglo-Catholic faith. The form of shadowy Benthamite utilitarianism, evident at St John's, was seriously resisted by Coleridge. Coleridge was not unaware of the political dimensions though. He certainly did not agree with those who said that the poor needed no education, that education would make them unhappy, that they were better off undisturbed by 'enlightenment', or that they should be taught by 'dogmatic instruction' only.

These seeming contradictions between liberal and reforming aims and conservative implications are inherent in the liberal thinking of the time, Marx (1844) argued. He criticized ‘Dr Kay’ as he was then, and the liberal views he embraced:

 [In England] According to the Whigs, the chief cause of pauperism is to be discovered in the monopoly of landed property and in the laws prohibiting the import of grain. In the Tory view, the source of the trouble lies in liberalism, in competition and the excesses of the factory system. Neither party discovers the explanation in politics itself but only in the politics of the other party. Neither party would even dream of a reform of society as a whole… Thus, for example, in his pamphlet "Recent Measures for the Promotion of Education in England", Dr Kay reduces the whole question to the neglect of education. It is not hard to guess the reason! He argues that the worker’s lack of education prevents him from understanding the "natural laws of trade", laws which necessarily reduce him to pauperism. For this reason, the worker rises up in rebellion. And this rebellion may well "cause embarrassment to the prosperity of the English manufactures and English commerce, impair the mutual confidence of businessmen and diminish the stability of political and social institutions."

This is the extent of the insanity of the English bourgeoisie and its press on the subject of pauperism, the national epidemic of England.

This sort of critique is characteristic of the Marx of the period, however, when he firmly believed that the industrial countries were on the verge of an irrevocable polaristion and class war. Later marxists (probably including Marx himself) would take a much more nuanced view of the contradictory possibilities offered by formal education.

Liberal anomalies continue. Coleridge argued for a broad liberal and classical education in order that wider learning for its own sake should result in an extraordinary impact on an otherwise impoverished culture. Education, as a critical route to the life of the mind as well as of the senses, ought to be the right of the poor as well as of the rich, of the disadvantaged as well as of the privileged. However, while such education would raise the poor 'to a sense of their own dignity... [it should also]… reconcile them to their lot in life'. Partly this was to overcome the effects of ignorance which has 'ever furnished political agitators with too powerful an aid' (Coleridge 1842b: 20). For Kay-Shuttleworth and Tufnell ‘It cannot be permitted to remain the opprobrium of this country that its greatest minds have bequeathed their thoughts to the nation in a style at once pure and simple, but still inaccessible to the intelligence of the great body of the people’ (HMSO 1841). However, the strict social hierarchy of the existing status quo, and the utilitarian need to train up the poor of the parish, was firmly underwritten by Kay-Shuttleworth (1862: 610-11) in a revealing set of clauses contained in his Four Periods of Public Education :

These uncivilized classes are trained by example and discipline: they are, as minors are, the care of the governing classes in some form…they are rescued not by their own art, but by that of the State and the upper classes, to whom their progress has become a social and political necessity.’

It is probably also the case that differences in personality, culture, and working experience between the two principals led to differences in teaching method and educational content at their respective institutions. James Kay had spent much of his early working life as a medical man in the inner city slums of Manchester, and as an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner in the impoverished parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, whereas Derwent Coleridge had spent much of his early life as a Headmaster in the quiet reaches of the far southwest in Helston, Cornwall. The former had seen the degradation of extreme urban poverty at first hand, as well as the insides of many a grim workhouse, whereas Coleridge had tended to witness only the genteel poverty of the minor landed gentry and the tough but comparatively straightforward lives of the Cornish farm worker and tin miner. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Kay-Shuttleworth should expend passionate energy on trying, both quickly and efficiently to improve the overall lot of the urban poor, whilst Coleridge was more inclined to raise spiritually-minded and classically-educated young men who would go amongst the poor in order that their high Anglican culture should somehow rub-off on their pupils. Whatever the truth of their material differences, both were engaged in alleviating the miseries of poverty through the provision of decent, universal education aided by the serious and lengthy training of suitable teachers.

It is worth pointing out the obvious omission of women in these otherwise inspiring statements. Indeed, women students were not admitted to the College of St Mark and St John on an equal basis until the early 1960s. However, Coleridge was an early sponsor of Whitelands College which was set up to cater for females.

The Revised Code :

What united Coleridge and Kay-Shuttleworth, and indeed united them to a cause common to many working in education at that time, was their trenchant opposition to the notorious Revised Code of 1862, devised by the then first Minister of Education, Robert Lowe. In delivering his proposal to Parliament, Lowe uttered these now famous words :

I cannot promise the House that this system will be an economical one, and I cannot promise that it will be an efficient one, but I can promise that it shall be one or the other. If it is not cheap it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient, it shall be cheap (source ; Selleck 1994: 322).

Lowe, along with some of his compatriots, especially those who had contributed directly to the Newcastle Report, were convinced that the kind of education carried out at St Mark’s and St John’s, and the other newly-established training colleges, as well as the general education being received by the majority of children under the new provisions, was of poor quality whilst being absurdly expensive. Some of these critics were Churchmen: The Rev. James Fraser, who became Bishop of Manchester, submitted to the Newcastle Commission an argument for a very basic education for ‘ the peasant boy’, who needed only to be educated in basic reading, spelling, writing [letters home if he had to move], ciphering ‘to make out or test the correctness of a common shop bill’, and, above all, ‘acquaintance enough with the Holy Scriptures to follow the allusions and the arguments of a plain Saxon sermon’ (Stuart MacLure 1965: 75).

The Code led to scything cuts in the budgets of schools and training colleges, and savagely reduced the pay and conditions of teachers.

Among the grants abolished…were the capitation grant, the grants for books and apparatus, the augmentation grant given to teachers who successfully completed certificate examinations, the stipends for pupil-teachers, teachers’ pensions, grants to evening and ragged schools, and some grants to training colleges. (Selleck 1994: 321).

But the one overriding principle of the code was its ‘payment by results’ (Selleck 1994: 321), which meant that all schoolchildren would undergo some kind of regular examination, and all of a school’s grant was then determined on the basis of the children’s success or failure.

With the abolition of such grants and pensions, and the introduction of a streamlined payment or penalty by results Lowe demonstrated his contempt for mass education in general and teachers in particular. He had begun to view them, with their newly-found status and marginally-improved financial standing, with a distinctly jaundiced eye. They were becoming rather too self-important, and Lowe denounced them thus : ‘(T)eachers desiring to criticize the Code were as impertinent as chickens wishing to decide the kind of sauce in which they would be served.’ (source: Gordon & Lawton, 1979: 220)

Opposition to the Code :

Both Coleridge and Kay-Shuttleworth rejected the Revised Code and all that it represented. The diminution of the importance of education for all, the reduction in the capacity of the Colleges to provide a rich and full training programme, the intense narrowing of the curriculum to basic ‘reading, writing and reckoning’, the swingeing cuts in teachers pay and conditions, and the immense power given to a bureaucratic band of monitors and examiners, all were a logical outcome of Lowe’s pernicious bill.

Kay-Shuttleworth fought Lowe’s bill on all fronts. By this time he had ceased being Principal of St John’s, and had, instead, taken on a range of official duties connected with the Poor Law and the 1860s cotton famine. He was a key figure in both Manchester and London, on various Executive Committees, Boards of Guardians, and Central Relief Boards, whilst continuing his very public opposition to Lowe’s proposals. Through meetings with, and letters to MPs and political and administrative figures, and through published pamphlets and articles, Kay-Shuttleworth (1861: 582-83) tore into Lowe’s impoverished vision :

(it was)..an attempt to reduce the cost of the education of the poor, by conducting it by a machinery – half-trained and at less charge, to entrust it to a lower class of ill-paid teachers, and generally to young monitors as assistants; to neglect the force of a higher moral and religious agency in the civilization of the people, and to define national education as a drill in mechanical skill in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The State would pay less, and be content with a worse article.’

Kay-Shuttleworth (1861) was able to use his authority as an Inspector to challenge the ill-founded views of the reformers and to claim that the existing system had achieved success:

In building and founding schools.

In getting rid of brutish incapacity to learn, gross habits, heathenism and barbarism in their scholars, notwithstanding frequent migration, extreme irregularity of attendance at school and the rareness of auxiliary home training

In teaching the elements, and giving general intelligence

In training the existing machinery of 23,000 pupil teachers, assistant and certificated teachers

In accomplishing all these results, while they have succeeded in satisfying the feelings and convictions of the Church and other communities

In the moral and religious influences exercised by the schools as one of the most powerful agencies of civilisation; the value of which receives a signal recognition from the Commissioners

Matthew Arnold who had once argued that Kay-Shuttleworth had been the ‘founder of English popular education’ (Selleck 1994: 326), supported him, in national print, in his attack upon the Revised Code : ‘..for every glimmer of civilization which is quenched, for every poor scholar who is no longer humanized, owing to a reduction, on the plea that reading, writing, and arithmetic are all the State ought to pay for,…the State will be directly responsible.’ (Selleck 1994: 331)

At St Mark’s, Derwent Coleridge was still in the office of Principal when the Revised Code was introduced. He immediately began enlisting the help of key members of the church and parliament in trying to mitigate the worst excesses of what he saw as an ill-conceived and spiteful attack on teachers and training colleges. He published an elegant denunciation of the Revised Code in The Teachers of the People, a Tract for the Times (1862). He accused Lowe and others of deliberately belittling the work of the training colleges, through their depiction of them as self-regarding institutions of needless higher learning designed solely to produce ‘second-rate ladies and gentlemen’. Lowe, he claimed, wanted merely cheap and efficient factories of instruction designed to keep teachers ‘in their place’ (see Gent 1891: 12).

In an earlier letter, Coleridge insisted that ‘Education is not, any more than religion, a mere commodity, nor can it be regulated exclusively by economic laws’ (Coleridge 1861: 9). Defending his early stance on the need for well-educated teachers, especially since St Mark’s had been particularly criticised, Coleridge argues that ‘It is NOT true, it is the reverse of true, that first class men make inferior elementary Schoolmasters’ (1861:16), and addresses the accompanying fears that educated schoolteachers would rise above their station by providing some encouraging ‘first destination’ data showing that most entered the profession. Schoolmasters of this kind should not be treated as a ‘mere tool’, still less as a simple fund-raiser, but should be encouraged to work faithfully and well: regular contact with the clergy can only help in this (1861: 20).Coleridge insists on ‘indirect benefits’ of high standards as well, arguing that the whole community benefits ‘when useful work, of whatever kind, is done efficiently by men who have been educated at less than the average cost’ (1861: 17).

Coleridge feared that greater State involvement will bring education back into everyday politics, profane politics with all its party disputes and calculations of advantage. Part of this will be to encourage the many critics of the existing system of schooling who accuse it of inefficiency. He refutes those who have criticised his efforts in developing a suitable form of high quality education for the poor which ‘argues a limited acquaintance with the facts of the case or a very limited intellectual horizon, whether it proceed from the caste prejudices of the privileged classes, or from the smooth side of Democracy’s rough tongue’ (1861: 17). Instead, he argues that the Privy Council should represent a genuine national consensus, based on the full involvement and agreement of the parties affected, and operating according to agreed rules. Coleridge commends the efforts of ‘a most zealous and able educationist’ who ran the old system – presumably Kay-Shuttleworth.

Unfortunately, Coleridge, then entering the autumn of his days, managed only another three years before handing over to his successor, Canon Cromwell. Coleridge had, by 1865, become exhausted through being forced, under the Revised Code, to clip budgets, appeal to prospective private donors, and, worst of all, hack down his beloved classical curriculum. As the second Principal, Cromwell, sorrowfully affirmed : ‘..Under the operation of the Revised Code, the syllabus of instruction in Training Colleges had unwisely been reduced almost to the condition of a skeleton’ (Cromwell in Gent 1891: 72), although thankfully in 1891 Gent was able to report that, partly owing to the success of the 1870 Education Act, and active opposition to Lowe’s so-called reforms, the worst excesses of the Revised Code had been finally been abolished.

Modern Times :

So what, if anything, have the events of one hundred and fifty years ago got in common with events today? What cultural and educational imperatives (or, in management-speak, ‘drivers’) were relevant then, and still relevant in a modern context?

Over the past thirty years or so, we have witnessed a growing governmental prescriptiveness in educational policy, and an increasing reliance on the ‘payment by results’ philosophy that clearly characterized events in Coleridge’s and Kay-Shuttleworth’s time. There have been, broadly, four main thrusts :

1. Centralised control : There has been increased centralized management of the curriculum by politicians and administrators who have had little or no professional training or experience. This was begun by Callaghan in the 1970s and culminated in the 1988 Education Reform Act of 1988 devised by, and presented to the House by the Conservative Secretary of State, Kenneth Baker.(see e.g. Lawton 1989). The Act gave to ministers, some 100 new powers over educational policy, and enshrined in full bureaucratic force a national curriculum to which all schools (excepting of course, those in the private sector) must adhere. Allied to this was the prior establishment of the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE), a policy-making and administrative auditing body that prescribed and validated what should be taught to students on professional education courses. By 1988 this meant the abolition of the old foundation disciplines of philosophy, sociology, psychology and history, seen as unnecessarily intellectual, and their replacement by a series of shallow competency-based and performance-based courses which relied heavily on the already discredited philosophy of rational curriculum planning by behavioural objectives. This has since been translated into the massive tick-boxing exercise governing the so-called ‘core standards’.

2. Assessment Targets and league tables : There is now an unprecedented emphasis placed on nationally prescribed assessment targets and examination results, which in turn lead to ever more complex sets of league tables and monitoring scores. The notorious standardized assessment tests (SATs) at the ages of seven, eleven and fourteen, and the year by year, hotly-contested GCSE and A Level results, at sixteen and eighteen respectively, have led to the published rank-ordering of schools in the national and local press, a not-so-cleverly-disguised naming and shaming process. Combined with this process, a relatively newly-established body of Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED), inspects and grades each and every school on a regular basis, and these results are also published nationally and locally. It is interesting to note that the old HMI (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate), comprised largely of experienced head teachers, saw its role more in terms of quietly providing expert advice and professional support, rather than in terms of managerially inspecting, grading and then publicly pronouncing on perceived failings. Higher Education too has its OFSTED and its companion Weberian bureaucracy, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA).

3. Language and culture of the free-market : The language of education has changed alongside a broad change in culture. Since the early part of the twentieth century, and certainly since the post-war social democratic consensus, right up to the defining moment in 1979, education was viewed as a social, public and individual ‘good’, shaped by those who had been educated and professionally trained to assume the responsibilities of teaching. There was a collective sense of purpose and being, in both society and in the institutions charged with education, limited as ever by a deep conservatism that retained public schools and a highly selective system of HE? The conservatism extended to considerations of what a more open ‘mass’ system would look like as well. In 1979, with the advent of the New Orthodoxy in politics, economics, and social relations, a new language emerged reflecting a new set of created identities, all of it rooted in the notion of so-called ‘free-markets’. In medicine, an internal market was established, artificial lines were drawn between providers and purchasers, and accountants and managers took over from doctors and nurses; hospitals had to compete with one another for branding ‘stars’ and cash payments, GP surgeries became fund-holding trusts, and people were transformed almost overnight from patients to clients. In education things have become just as worse (see e.g. Bridges & Jonathan 2003: 126-145). Pupils, students and their parents have also become clients or customers; curriculum content has to be delivered, like milk or pizzas; schools and universities compete with one another over recruitment, cash incentives, and short-term projects; league tables, targets and outcomes have replaced collegiality, ethos and education; vocationalism and careerism have been substituted for academic reflection, and worst of all, teachers and lecturers have become ‘learning managers and facilitators’, and the class and seminar room have been turned into ‘managed learning environments’, preferably virtual, so that real human contact can be eradicated altogether. Schools compete to become academies or specialist centres complete with business logos, while universities and colleges periodically employ highly-paid consultants to help them brand and re-brand themselves according to whatever prevailing managerial fashion is in vogue.

4. The bureaucratic manager : This last gives us a clue as to the problem, namely, the fervent belief in so-called ‘managerial expertise’, and the consequent rise of the ‘bureaucratic manager’ in culture at large, and in education in particular. MacIntyre (1985: 73-78) has carefully documented the rise of this strange creature who has been allowed, along with the aesthete and the therapist, to dominate contemporary culture so ubiquitously and so disastrously. And now, it seems, we are beginning to pay the price. The ineptly-named ‘masters of the universe’ who have taken global banking and finance to the brink of utter collapse have turned out to be ‘clowns of the cosmos’, utterly undeserving of their absurd salaries, massive perks, and fat bonuses. Brute economics, not intellectual spirit, is at the heart of philosophical culture, and the simplistic culture of the bureaucratic manager has infected all walks of life, and all of the major institutions of society, from medicine and education, to law and banking, welfare, business and commerce. The idea of the manager, possessed of the infinitely transferable skill of managerial expertise, has now become so embedded in society at large, and at all levels of education, that we are almost unaware of the strangeness of its existence, and hence fail to question it.

Langford (1985: 50-67) in a prescient analysis drew the distinction between a bureaucratic model of education and a professional model of education. In the former, it is assumed that a person or persons schooled in the arts of management alone would shape the purposes and processes of education, and then simply hand them to teachers and lecturers for their effective delivery, the professionals being relegated to the position of mere functionaries in a pre-ordained system devised by their managerial betters. In the latter model, teachers and lecturers, being educated and professionally trained in their respective disciplines and responsibilities are charged with the tasks of shaping, describing, analyzing and then enacting their calling within the traditional and historically-informed practices which have governed their work for over two and a half thousand years. We have, since the 1980s, fallen prey to Langford’s bureaucratic model, a model beloved by Lowe in the nineteenth century, and Baker and his successors in the twentieth century. We ought, and it is a moral as well as a practical ‘ought’, work towards creating a fully professional model. Only then will the words of Canon Gent, one of Derwent Coleridge’s successors at St Mark’s, become a reality :

..we want to make the school not only a vehicle of instruction, but also a means of civilization. It has become clear that if anything of the kind is to be successfully done, teachers must be obtained who have been brought into touch with the higher education of the country, and that able teachers when secured must be allowed, as far as possible, a free hand in the classification of their children and the organization of their schools.’ (Gent 1891: 15)

But, perhaps, the last word should go to Selleck, whose painstaking analysis of Kay-Shuttleworth’s contribution to the eventual demise of the Revised Code, reveals a telling truth :

..(E)ach (Matthew Arnold and James Kay-Shuttleworth) saw that the Revised Code grew out of a view of public elementary education which restricted its educative power. Since the Revised Code controversy, those wishing to limit educational opportunity have often used Lowe’s tactics. These essentially involve crippling the state’s vision by imposing a rigid and restricted interpretation of its task through a centralized testing system. Lowe used the classic political justifications for this approach: a cry for economy, an insistence that schools should act as if they were part of the market economy, and an accusation that schools are inhabited by over-educated teachers and under-educated students’ (Selleck 1994: 332)

References

A Battersea Schoolmaster (1847) ‘First Lessons on Agricultural Chemistry’, in Journal of Education, V.

Benham, W., (1891) ‘S. Mark’s College Forty-Five Years Ago’ in Gent, G. (ed) (1891) Memorials of S. Mark’s College, London : George White

Bridges, D. & Jonathan, R., (2003) ‘Education and the Market’, in Blake, N. et.al. (eds) (2003) Philosophy of Education, Oxford: Blackwell.

Coleridge, D. (1842a) ‘Aims and Principles’, in Roberts, M., (ed) (1946) Notes on College History, London : George White

Coleridge, D  (1842b) A Second Letter on the National Society's Training Institution for Schoolmasters, St Mark's College, Chelsea, addressed to the Venerable Archdeacon Sinclair, Treasurer of the Society unpublished, UCP Marjon archives.

Coleridge, D. (1861) The Education of the People: A letter to the Right Hon Sir John Coleridge, London: Rivingtons [online] http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qu0BAAAAYAAJ

Cromwell, Canon, (1891), ‘Reminiscences’ in Gent, G. (ed) (1891) Memorials of S. Mark’s College, London : George White.

Gent, G. (1891) ‘Training Colleges’ in Gent, G. (ed) (1891) Memorials of S. Mark’s College London : George White.

Gordon, P. & Lawton, D., (eds) (1979) Curriculum Change in the Nineteenth & Twnetieth Centuries, London : Hodder & Stoughton.

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