Was there really a great educational debate in early modern England?

By Ken Clayton

One of the questions on which most historians of education seem to be agreed is that there was a widespread debate on the need for reform of education in early modern England. Lawson and Silver stated that the 1640s and 1650s saw education being “endlessly debated and reforming ideas circulated as never before”. [1] Ann McGruer devoted a whole book to the subject although she locates the discussions about educational reform within “a broader programme of religious, political and social reform and communication”. [2] Helen M. Jewell was more nuanced suggesting that there were many ranges of opinion “from extending to restricting educational opportunity”[3] while Rosemary O’Day wrote that there was a move to “a national education system”.[4] This idea was also promoted by W.A.L. Vincent who suggested that the debate even reached Westminster resulting in Parliament granting funds to schools affected by the confiscation of Cathedral property during the Long Parliament of 1640 to 1660. His opinion was that this demonstrated a commitment to a centrally funded educational system.[5] 

These claims of widespread debate all seem to be based on the writings of a few individuals, in particular, Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Johan Amos Comenius, John Milton and Marchamont Nedham although Vincent added Hobbes, using a quote from Leviathan to support his argument. This is where the interpretation starts to fail: these people undoubtedly argued in favour of reform of the educational system but the only evidence of any sort of national debate is the fact that a small group of men could afford to pay for the production of books and pamphlets promoting their ideas. This falls short of providing evidence of a national debate and, it could be argued, places more significance on the group than can be justified. This is especially so given that the men in question saw educational reform as merely a step on the road to a restructuring of society as a whole. That said, none of the historians claims that this group had any effect on the structure of education in England and Wales.

The inclusion of Hobbes in this group is particularly odd, given that John Parkin and others maintain that he was regarded as a subversive renegade in the decades after the publication of Leviathan.[6]   

The idea that there was a national debate about education has been extended to explain why Christopher Wase undertook his survey of free schools between 1673 and 1677. He was a senior academic at the University of Oxford and devoted considerable time and money to gathering information about free schools. He accumulated data about 537 schools although he seems to have done little with it other than to include passages from some of his correspondents in his book Considerations Concerning Free-Schools as Settled in England. The material he collected is held in the library at Corpus Christi College, Oxford but there is nothing in the collection to explain why Wase conducted the survey. This has led to speculation about his purpose and one of the most popular reasons suggested is that he was gathering material to defend the free schools from their critics. If that were the case, it is reasonable to suggest that at least a few of Wase’s 143 correspondents would have mentioned that the schools about which they provided information were under threat. None made any such suggestion.

Overall, then, although many historians of education have characterised the events they describe as a national debate, there is no evidence to support their claims. A few men were able to have books and pamphlets published to promote their opinions, but to describe their activities as a national debate seems to be giving them more importance than is their due.

 Footnotes:

[1] John Lawson & Harold Silver. (1973) A Social History of Education in England London, Methuen & Co Ltd, 1973 (p153)

[2] Ann McGruer Educating the ‘Unconstant Rabble’: Arguments for Educational Advancement and Reform during the English Civil War and Interregnum Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, (pp.2-3)

[3] Helen M. Jewell Education in Early Modern England Basingstoke, Macmillan Press Ltd. 1998 (p.5)

[4] Rosemary O’Day, “Education and Society 1500-1800” Harlow, Longman Group Ltd. 1982 (p26)

[5] W.A.L. Vincent The Grammar Schools Their Continuing Tradition 1660-1714 London, John Murray, 1969 (p16)

[6] More recent accounts of Hobbes argue that it would be ‘intellectually perverse’ to cast Hobbes as a sincere if eccentric Protestant theist in the 1670s, see John Parkin, Taming the Leviathan (York: University of York, 2007), (p2), and S.A. Lloyd, “Editor’s Introduction” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes ed. S.A. Lloyd, xii (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), (pxii). John Bowle maintained that ‘all the critics were unanimous that the Leviathan was utterly subversive’, see John Bowle, Hobbes and his critics A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), (p13).