|
Adult Education at St Mark’s and St John’s 1838 onwards Dave Harris NB
This was a draft eventually incorporated into A
Founding Vision for Modern Times: The case
of St Mark’s & St
John’s, and the campaign against the Revised
Code,presented at a
CUAC conference April 2009 Dr.
Paul Grosch & Dr.
David Harris. This paper, and examples of
material from the actual Marjon archives are
fond in the other documents on this site
In 1838 and 1840, two significant colleges were established in London with the intention of training new kinds of teachers for schools in England and Wales. Dr James Kay, later Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, already well known for his account of poverty in Manchester and his reforming work to get pauper children taught in schools rather than in workhouses, had visited the Continent with his fellow philanthropist E C Tufnell, and returned with a proposal to establish a training college in Battersea. The project was self funded, and the college opened in 1838. On the other side of the Thames, the National Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge Among the Poor, a major Church of England charity responsible for a large number of schools, had been convinced by a powerful lobby, which included William Gladstone MP, to establish a training college of their own. They recruited as the first Principal of St Mark’s College the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, second son of S T Coleridge, who had previously been Head of Helston Grammar School. D Coleridge was a poet and scholar in his own right, and an ordained clergyman with rather controversial High Anglican practices of worship. The Church was initially suspicious of Kay-Shuttleworth, as indeed they were of all prominent Nonconformists or their spouses, and, after some refusal to cooperate, acquired Battersea College, and renamed it St John’s College, appointing Kay-Shuttleworth as its first Principal in 1841. The two Principals and the two colleges seem to have shared a number of interesting views about education, which we will summarise below. St Mark’s and St John’s actually merged in 1926. The merged college moved to Plymouth in 1973. The pioneering educational philosophy of the two colleges can be summarised by citing the Latin motto, suggested by Coleridge, for St Mark’s— abeunt in studia mores, usually translated as ‘education produces character’, or, more literally, ‘those who have studied display their learning in the ways in which they behave’. In other words, the intention was to develop character by shaping behaviour, or, in more sociological terms, to offer a disciplinary regime of subjectivation, in Foucault’s terms, or to instil a particular ideological set of beliefs and practices in order to enable the reproduction of capitalism in marxist ones. The intentions can be seen clearly in the documents that survive in the college archives, which refer both to policy and practice. To be very brief, Kay-Shuttleworth and Tufnell had been impressed by their visits by what are usually seen as ‘progressive’ philosophies and educational methods that they encountered, including the work of Pestalozzi (Home Office 1841). A major theme in the support for these approaches refers clearly to the beneficial moral and social effects on students who attended, who were often recruited from the poor. Kay-Shuttleworth and Tufnell suggested that a new form of community based on cooperation, independence, moral education and mutual respect was emerging in the European institutions they visited, and they thought this particularly meritorious when compared to the waves of civil disobedience, crime and revolt that had characterised European societies at the time. The same themes can be detected in Coleridge’s policies too. While Kay-Shuttleworth might have been inspired by his utilitarian/social democratic politics of reform, which he developed while working in the slums of Manchester, Coleridge was almost certainly influenced by the circle gathered around his father, who were social reformers. S.T. Coleridge advocated the development of a social ‘clerisy’ responsible for upholding a system of functional shared values. The similarity of views between Coleridge and Kay-Shuttleworth, developed further by subsequent struggles with Church and State seem to have survived the early disagreements about specific religious beliefs. These social reforming ideas were focused on providing an unusually demanding form of training teachers. Hitherto, certified masters, quite often with a classical elite education had been accompanied by various licensed teachers and teaching apprentices, often trained through the monitorial system. Most controversially of all, students were to be taught Latin. Coleridge (undated, probably 1842) defended this practice by insisting that classic languages, and the humanities in general, produced character, as well as a working knowledge of Church ritual. Kay-Shuttleworth and Tufnell took a rather more pragmatic line, arguing that a knowledge of classical languages would permit graduates of St John’s to feel more at ease with middle class speech and thus discharge their future duties as teachers with more confidence. Remarks like this implied that the new professional teachers would be expected to achieve some social mobility, and this was sometimes enough to worry educational commentators that the new teachers would ‘rise above their station’, especially if they used their training to go on to enter other professions instead. There is actually some basis for this specific fear, since Coleridge probably was training deacons for the Church of England in the guise of offering teacher training (Nicholas 2007). Graduates sometimes did find themselves in prestigious occupations as well, and they included several prominent scientists, such as Prof. George Henry With (1827-1904), who studied at St John’s from 1846-47 and went on to design astronomical mirrors; the actor Lewis Casson (St Mark’s 1896--8); and distinguished academics like Arthur William Reed, who had been a St. Mark’s student (1893-4), and was appointed English Tutor in 1897 before going on to teach at King’s College London as Reader in English and then as Professor, specialising in 16th century literature (source: Marjon archives) Disciplined Bodies As the surviving timetables for both colleges show, academic education was not the only activity, however. The college days began at 5:30 am followed by domestic labour, periods of intense academic study but also industrial labour, or work in the gardens, then academic instruction, and, occasionally, even an hour for ‘leisure’, before lights out at 10:00 pm. The regime actually resembled closely the punitive arrangements made for transportees in the appalling prison for juveniles in Van Diemen’s Land (Hughes 1988), although both Coleridge and Kay-Shuttleworth were firmly opposed to any corporal punishment, let alone flogging. A St Mark’s pupil, Michael Mahoney, was himself transported for seven years in 1847 for stealing from Coleridge, so he might have been well prepared. It would be easy to detect early strains of muscular Christianity in these policies, although exercise also had a pragmatic effect in improving the often very poor health of the students. Kay-Shuttleworth reported that some new students were so weak that they could only stand an hour’s gardening at first. Domestic labour was a cost-saving exercise, and was based on the real prospect that an impoverished rural schoolmaster would almost certainly be unable either to marry or to employ servants. Physical fitness, patience and faith were all essential requirements for those facing the ‘drudgery’ (Coleridge) of subsequent teaching in National Society schools. More systematic physical exercise was also introduced at the colleges. In the case of St Mark’s, contacts were established with the nearby Middlesex Regiment barracks, and a drill sergeant was invited to participate. Kay-Shuttleworth introduced the practice of taking long walks in the countryside around Battersea, using them, of course, as a pretext to offer discussion of history and geography, but he also installed some suitable equipment for physical exercise. Coleridge began to realise the importance of sport as well, and a memoir from a St Mark student (Hutchinson 1891: archives) records the introduction of a football to college premises some forty years before, and the enthusiastic reaction that it received:
Taking it from me, [his friend] shouted to others around, showed it to them, then wildly kicked it into the air and around and about the field till he was fairly out of breath. Then, having thus showed the lookers on how, as he thought, a football ought to be treated, he invited them to join in the fun, which they all did till they were as exhausted as he. Gradually, of course, they learned, from my poor teaching, something of the rules of the game.
It took a while for team games to develop, though, Hutchinson records. Eventually, St Mark’s was to play a substantial indirect role in the development of organized football in England and Wales instead, as Mangan & Hickey (2009) reveals. Schoolmasters, especially if they were also men of the cloth, were particularly useful in forming committees to run local sports clubs. They often had access to church land that could be used as a football pitch as well. As a result, we find graduates of St Mark’s joining other products of teacher training colleges to play a major part in the foundation of football and athletic clubs, including those at Cheltenham, Mansfield Town, and Southampton. Two Marjon personnel actually went on to play for Manchester City. There is a (photocopy of a) program in the archives recording a match in 1896 between St Mark’s Old Boys and Tottenham Hotspur, which the college team won, 5—0. Marjon graduates went off to play a role in developing school sport too. Phillip Kingsford (St Mark’s 1910—12) competed in the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, where he was unlucky not to gain a medal (he was injured). Like many contemporaries, he also fought in World War I in the Middlesex Regiment, and died of wounds in 1919. The Victorian ‘rational recreation’ movement has been seen as a way of depoliticising working class leisure pursuits. Unruly mobs playing local versions of football offered a particular threat to order, and the classic response was to regularise, systematize and regulate football instead. Eventually, organised football would be professionalised, commercialised, and even turned into a politically loaded spectacle (Hargreaves 1986). Parallel policies took popular music from inns and hostelries into licensed music halls and then into concert halls, while entertainment moved from local theatres to cinemas—and so on (Clarke and Critcher 1985) . According to this view, the Church would clearly have a political interest in promoting organised sport, in its colleges and schools and in the wider community. This critique in its turn has been criticised for ignoring the personal pleasure of participating in sport, the sense of release from the discipline of work (at least in the amateur game), and the ability of participants to reject official disciplinary discourses and preserve a rather more carnivalesque stance. The complexities are more apparent if we consider music. Coleridge and Kay-Shuttleworth both saw the disciplinary benefits of teaching their students music—it would encourage docility, cooperation and the nobler sentiments, and even improve physical fitness. They were particularly interested in Hullah’s (Wikipedia nd) method of teaching music, which involved representing each note by a gesture of the hand. Music would be learned literally by being impressed on the body, which would be wonderful grist to the Foucaldian mill. However music itself does not always produce meek social conformity. Like all artistic endeavours, it offers an ‘autonomy’, a distance from immediate social life, even a utopian element, which many leftwing critics, from Adorno to Rancière, have seen as offering a potential for cultural critique of the social relations of capitalism. Even Coleridge, in a suitably liberal way, argued that exposing students at St Mark’s to choral music would show them what was possible, and give them something to remember as they toiled in their rural practices, although he almost certainly did not intend that they would go on to ask why it was that particular cultural styles were confined to social elites and how that fitted general patterns of inequality and cultural control.
Disciplined Teaching The teaching methods employed were considered to be radical against existing practices of the time. Monitorialism had dominated educational policy in both church and state schools. The principles of monitorialism had been developed particularly systematically by Jeremy Bentham (1816), and they clearly modelled the reforming principles of his famous Panopticon, with its insistence on individual personal calculation of costs and benefits, emphasized by institutional rewards such as promotion or demotion. The point was to instil a personal ethic, an internalisation of the regulator, to use more Foucaldian terms, and this also would have important cost advantages since those students with the correct moral calculations would serve as monitors to supervise those at an earlier stage. Although the Church of England adopted this system, through the work of the Rev. Bell, Coleridge rejected it: students who had been taught using this method achieved good grades but demonstrated little understanding (1861).
Having said that, teaching notes stored by a certain Mr. MacLeod, a master at St Mark’s, reveal that the process was still pretty teacher centred, with individuals being asked to fill in ellipses in statements left by the tutor, or join in collective readings of various texts. The timetable at Battersea College also required quite a bit of memorising, of sections of the Gospel and the rules of arithmetic (HMSO 1841). Perhaps the poor initial education of the students permitted no other approach in the first years: Coleridge (1842b: 3) reported that many among the first intakes 'cannot read well... nor write correctly from dictation [and were] quite ignorant of grammar'. They had an insufficient vocabulary to benefit from 'oral teaching... much less to gain information for themselves from books'. The ‘object lesson’ recommended by Pestalozzi was also used in the colleges and practice schools. The original intention was to use common objects to launch into more academic analyses, allegedly guided by student questions. One example in the St Mark’s archive (A Battersea Schoolmaster 1847) contributed by ‘A Battersea Schoolmaster’, has a lesson based on a piece of coal that goes on to discuss the properties of carbon, for example. The example also comes with a script with imaginary student responses, just in case. That method had become rather more didactic, however, and had led to criticism from, among others, Charles Dickens, who was initially a supporter of Kay-Shuttleworth and had visited St John’s: [In the object-lesson] Form acquired ascendancy over subject matter, producing lessons whose vocabulary and content (including Latinate phrases and scientific jargon) were not suited to children's experience. Kay-Shuttleworth helped to popularize the object lesson by including it in the curriculum for his Battersea teacher training college, which then became the model for many others. Dickens's critique is embodied in the exchange between Gradgrind, Bitzer and Sissy Jupe over the proper definition of a horse. Bitzer, who has learned a definition by rote, classifies it as a "Quadruped" and "Gramnivorous," whereas Sissy, the horse-breaker's daughter dubbed "Girl number twenty," is reprimanded for possessing "no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals" (HT 1.2). The object lesson is also recalled in Nicholas Nickleby, where Squeers describes a horse as "a quadruped, and quadruped's Latin for beast, as everybody that's gone through the grammar knows" (NN 8) (Litvak nd) (I have since also found a good article by Alton 1992)
Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the colleges both achieved considerable levels of attainment with their initially unpromising students. The report of the inspector of St Mark’s records the questions that the students were asked in examination in 1846. They ranged from astronomy through Church History to Latin translation (the passages in Caesar and Tacitus relating to Britain) and arithmetic, and included questions such as: Account for the general rejection of the Messiah by the Jewish nation. Give some account of the superstitious worship of the Virgin Mary in the Church of Rome, and of the falsehoods by which it is kept up. Describe the last days of Dr. Rowland Taylor. Explain the following passage. "And he shall stand before Eleazar the Priest, who shall ask counsel for him after the Judgment of Urim before the Lord."—Numbers 27-21. Mention some of the events in the gospel narrative which are related exclusively by one of the Evangelists. In what reign was the poll-tax first levied, and with what results? Under what circumstances was the province of Bengal conquered by the British? Write down a passage from the writings of one of the following poets [Milton, Thompson, Wordsworth], specifying where it is to be found. What part of speech is that which, not being the name of an object, is nevertheless capable of forming either the subject or the predicate of a proposition? Write a paraphrase of the following passage [from a poem], and parse the words printed in italics. Reduce 0.005666 to its equivalent fraction Investigate a rule for setting a multiplication sum so that the answer may be readily verified by inspection
Trace the
line whose equation
is What are the principal coal fields of Great Britain and what manufacturing districts are situated upon them respectively? What is the difference between mean solar and sidereal time?
The HMSO 1841 report on progress at St John’s is even more detailed, and includes not only an impressive range of questions posed to students, but examples of their actual answers (correct and well structured) as well. Critical commentary Foucault (1977) famously cited Bentham’s proposals for prison reform (Panopticon) as an example of the emerging conceptions of subjectivity and social discipline which marked a significant change from external regulation of behaviour through force, to internal regulation by individuals themselves who anticipated the consequences of their actions imagining themselves to be under constant surveillance. Bentham’s (1816) proposals for schools (Chrestomathia) applied the same principles but in a rather more benevolent way, and so we might be able to apply Foucault’s critique to monitorial schooling as well. Of course, we can agree that Bentham’s reforms were much more progressive and probably more effective than the old regimes of crowd control backed up with severe corporal punishment. In other words, the proposals were both liberating and controlling, in a complex combination. The same combination is apparent in the development of the colleges. Both were run as boarding institutions, and thus were able to operate as ‘total institutions’ in Goffman’s (1968) phrase, operating a regime of complete control over such matters as sleep, diet and daily activity. Even leisure time was subject to regulation, and Coleridge was particularly worried, for example, that students might be reading subversive literature in their study bedrooms: '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).. He proposed that masters and tutors exercise constant supervision, which included the right to enter study bedrooms to examine reading matter. It is not that subversive literature was actually banned, but students would be expected to enter a discussion with the tutors on their merits. This looks like Foucaldian regulation. No doubt students would soon learn to police their own reading material in order to avoid such stern tutorials: we do not know if they actually did. On the other hand, the example shows the power of the total institution to raise reading standards and develop some kind of autonomy on the part of the student. At least it was serious political and religious texts that students were reading. It is necessary to remember that others in the church, notoriously the Bishop of Manchester of the time, who gave evidence to the Newcastle Commission, were suggesting that all that was required was a functional reading of simple instructions and elementary religious texts. Coleridge had also condemned the monitorial system for producing excessive rote learning even of religious texts: one of the applicants to St Mark’s had been able to recite the Anglican creed perfectly well, but could not distinguish the actual words of which it consisted. If anything, it was the monitorial system that seemed best at producing the sort of barely literate and dependent workforce that seemed best adapted to Victorian industry and agriculture, and the education offered at the colleges seemed dangerously excessive. We see the same themes emerging in the responses to the Revised Code of 1862, which proposed narrowing the curriculum in schools to make it more vocational, and setting targets of attainment and attendance for each school. State finance would be based on results. This might be seen as the strict application of the logic of capitalism to the provision of schooling, establishing, in effect, a simulated market. Coleridge and the Kay-Shuttleworth were totally opposed, partly for pragmatic reasons, since teacher training courses would also be reduced to two years and both colleges would lose income. Nevertheless, there were genuine issues of principle as well. Coleridge (1861) insisted that ‘Education is not, any more than religion, a mere commodity, nor can it be regulated exclusively by economic laws’. Kay-Shuttleworth (1861) was in favour of teaching useful occupational skills, but argued that these were not sufficient on their own: ‘the merely technical and mechanical results follow a large part of the moral and religious training and never precede them’. The Government had simply overlooked one of the key findings of the School Commissioners, a body established by Kay-Shuttleworth himself to inspect schools: ‘the moral and religious influences exercised by the schools [are] one of the most powerful agencies of civilisation; the value of which receives a signal recognition from the Commissioners’. Neither Principal could be seen as offering unconditional support for capitalism, but nor can they be seen as political radicals. Their views are clearly based on their own philosophical positions, and these have often been criticised as limited. As we shall see, they were at the time. Kay-Shuttleworth, for example, spoke against strike action in the case of the famous Preston cotton workers dispute that lasted for several months and polarised opinion. It is worth noting that Dickens’s Hard Times referred to the same dispute, and also had its lead characters opposing strike action. Kay-Shuttleworth argued that strikers ‘had violated the laws of political economy: “to understand what are true relations of capital and labour involves the study of a class of abstract truths, easily obscured or perverted to an uneducated people” (Manchester Guardian 14 January 1854 and 18 January 1854)’ (Simpson 1997: 35). Coleridge (undated, but possibly 1842: 20) had classically limited views as well. He certainly did not agree with those who said that the poorer needed no education, or that education would make them unhappy, all that they were better off undisturbed by ‘enlightenment’. They clearly did not deserve to be taught by merely ‘dogmatic instruction’. Coleridge was in favour of the ‘free circulation of knowledge’, aiming to inspire the poor with hope, to raise them ‘to a sense of their own dignity’. However, the aim was also ‘to reconcile them to their lot in life’, and to combat the sort of ignorance that ‘as ever furnished political agitators with too powerful an aid’. In particular, it was necessary to reject ‘the false views of society laid before [students] by the Owenist, of constitutional government by the Chartist, of the Church by the Independent and the Romanist’, which ‘circulated in every pot house’ (42). Kay-Shuttleworth (or Dr. Kay as he was known until his marriage to Lady Janet Shuttleworth in 1842) had also come to the attention of none other than Marx and Engels. Engels had clearly read Kay’s account of poverty in Manchester (1832), where he had worked as a young general practitioner. Engels (1845) refers to the work quite extensively and concludes that ‘Dr. Kay confuses the working class in general with the factory workers, otherwise an excellent pamphlet’. Marx was less appreciative, and in one of his most acute denunciations of liberalism in England, (Marx 1844) singles out Dr. Kay:
The absence of such a development permits us to make a more relative assessment of the contributions of Coleridge and Kay-Shuttleworth. At least the colleges provided a more open access to aspects of elite education on an unprecedented scale, and did much to construct a teaching as a profession and to create subsequent social mobility. Of course, this applied to males only—the College of St Mark and St John only admitted women as full time students in the 1960s. This is not to say that Coleridge did not support teacher education for women, although he saw it as responding to a limited demand. Nevertheless, he fully supported the establishment of Whitelands College, which admitted only women, in 1841, close to St Mark’s, and served on its board of governors. References A Battersea Schoolmaster (1847) ‘First Lessons on Agricultural Chemistry’, in Journal of Education, V. Alton A. ( 1992) Education in Victorian Fact and Fiction:Kay-Shuttlworth and Dickens’s Hard Times. Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (June 1992), pp. 67-80 (14 pages). Bentham, J. (1816)
Chrestomathia http://reparti.free.fr/bentham1816.pdf Clarke, J. and Critcher, C. (1985) The Devil Makes Work Leisure in Capitalist Britain, London: Macmillan.
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 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. Foucault M (1977) Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison, London: Penguin Books Ltd Goffman, E (1968) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.
HMSO
(1841) ‘Dr.
Kay And Mr. Tufnell On The Training School At
Battersea’, Report to
the Secretary of State for the Home Department
from the Poor Law
Commission on the Training of Pauper Children,
London. Hargreaves, John (1986) Sport Power and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hughes, R. (1988) The Fatal Shore Random House: USA Litvak,L. (nd) Charles Dickens and Victorian Education. https://omf.ucsc.edu/london-1865/schools-and-education/victorian-education.html Nicholas, D. (2007) Derwent Coleridge (1800 – 1883) and the Deacon Schoolmaster,. Unpublished, London PhD thesis. Mangan, J. and Hickey, C. (2009) Soccer's Missing Men: Schoolteachers and the Spread of Association Football (Sport in the Global Society) Wikipedia (nd) John Pyke Hullah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pyke_Hullah
|
