lnside a Victorian school | Historian Ruth Goodman on lessons and discipline

Hi, I'm Ruth Goodman and we're going to be talking today about what it was like in a Victorian school. It was in the Victorian period that school shifted to becoming a more universal experience. We'll be talking about the ragged school movement, the social mobility that schooling offered and how the classroom was a different experience depending on whether you were a boy or a girl. In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, about half the population of Britain could read and write. In 1901, when she finally left us, pretty much everyone could read or write. It is a major social change, one that has far-reaching ramifications. But how did it come about? I'm stood here in a Victorian school. This one was built in 1842 and look at it. It's one huge great room. 300 children could be taught in this one space all at once. And that is the key on a practical front. How on earth could one find the resources to educate everyone? Well, a chap called Lancaster had come up in about 1797, somewhere around there, the very end of the 18th century, with this new idea how one adult teacher, just one at the front there, could handle three or even five hundred children, each paying a tiny fee towards their education. And because it was tiny, he felt pretty much everybody could afford it. And the system he came up with was what he called monitors, what later became called pupil teachers. Slightly older children, who were a lesson or two ahead, who brought the others with them. So in a room like this, with one adult at the front, you've got a series, perhaps eight or ten, teenagers who are looking after little groups of children. You start, when you're a tiny one, you first come to the school at the front desks with a tray of sand and there your little teenage teacher helps you to make the letters. When you've mastered that, you move back a row and the next teenage teacher, weeks later, starts teaching you how to put those letters together. And so it goes on. The teacher at the front gives a sort of general lecture to everybody and also teaches the pupil teachers, teaches the monitors, so that they can pass on the learning to the others. It was a revolutionary idea to make education cheap enough for the masses. And many, many philanthropic groups took hold of that idea and started turning them into reality. To begin with, the biggest was a set of non-conformist churches. They began to roll it out across the nation. Then the Church of England gets in on the act and it has its, it won't join with the other churches, it has its own set of schools rolled out across the nation. But this didn't cover everybody, even though it spread education much, much further than it had ever gone before. Nonetheless, there were all sorts of groups that somehow got lost. There were those, for example, who had no money at all to spare for education, even the penny was too much. And their clothes were in such a state that they couldn't be seen in a respectable place like a school. So another bunch of philanthropists, these people coming mostly from sort of ordinary trades people, set up something called ragged schools on much the same idea. And these were schools in which it didn't matter how bad your clothes were, and they were offered free of charge to those at the very bottom. Now the ragged school movement is a particularly interesting one because whereas things like the, you know, the non-conformist schools and the Church of England schools were set up by people that you might think of as at the top or at least at the upper middle of society, the ragged schools were the brainchild of a cobbler and a tailor, and really sort of moved within that area of society for a long time. This was a movement by trades people, ordinary working people, to spread the advantages of education which they might have had to those around them, to those who had even less than they started out with. Here was a set of people who knew the practical value of education from their own lives. This is how they had picked themselves up with their bootstraps and got on, and they wanted to give other kids, particularly the most disadvantaged kids, the same chances. So for a long time the ragged school movement was quite a lot of little small schools of people giving up their own time. These were very ordinary working people giving up their own time to teach others, and then it becomes a fashionable course. People like Lord Shaftesbury get involved and suddenly there is money to help make this happen on a bigger scale. But nonetheless at its heart it remains a social movement that is inspired by the people for the people. In 1880 a law is passed and suddenly schooling becomes compulsory. Now it's not a matter of will I send my kid to school, now you have to send your kid to school. Yes there's plenty of these big schools set up but it's still not quite enough and there's a bit of a flurry and an attempt to sort of plug the gaps at that point. And then later on, realising that they're still missing a few children, eventually education becomes free. The government starts giving money to schools so that they can carry on even if the kids can't afford to pay for it. And we finally have a universal education system right across the board. So when you arrived in school at the tender age of five or six, maybe even younger for some children, you started at the front of the class on what we'll call the sand desks. And you have one of these. This is a box, a tray, with sand in it. I mean it really is just sand in a box. But this is what you've started practising on. So you would shake it out so you've got a nice flat surface and then they give you something like a nail or a bit of stick or whatever. And this is how you practised your letter forms. So learning to make the shapes. Once you've made it, give it a shake, it's gone, you can start again. Cheap, simple, effective. When you've mastered making the shapes in the sand, they allowed you to move back a little bit in the classroom and you moved on to a slate like this. Now they're a little more expensive to produce and you've got a stick or a chalk to do something with and obviously it requires a little bit more dexterity to make the shapes. But in essence, it's still something that can be wiped clean and reused over and over again. Brilliant for providing a cheap way for children to learn and practise. And only once you have completely mastered the use of the chalk and the slate, you allow it anywhere near a pen. And this is what you were faced with, a dip pen. This is for filling the ink wells. So each child would get a little tiny pot full of ink, which would have to be topped up every morning. So you would fill each one with ink, there'd be an ink monitor, and each one would then go out to the little well on the desk. You can see them here, ready to take somebody's ink. Dip your pen in and then you can write on paper. It's not easy and if you blotted or splatted or spilt your ink, you could definitely expect a clip around the ear. Now although all children were educated in the same space, didn't everybody have exactly the experience of school? For a start, boys and girls were carefully separated. Boys on one side, girls on the other. Now some of their classes were the same, basic reading and writing tended to be the same. However, as soon as a curriculum was established, girls were segregated off to learn sewing and knitting for a large portion of the school week. The boys meanwhile, got additional maths and maybe just a tiny touch of something like geography. But there are a couple of things about this model of having one adult teacher and a bunch of teenage helpers. How on earth can you control a space this big with that many kids in it? Well there is only one way, isn't there? And that is absolute discipline. These places were ruled with a rod of iron and they had to be. How else could you cope? Total silence, total obedience. Discipline was extreme and harsh and the punishments were frequently very physical. I'd like you to think about what it must have been like to be the first person in your family who could read or write. Imagine how much difference that made. And I'd also like you to think of how little resistance there was to this because people actually wanted their children to be educated in general. They could see that this was a way of having a better life, of moving forward, of earning more perhaps in the future. People at the top saw it in terms of an educated workforce would be able to produce more, they would be more productive, more able to do a wider range of things. People at the bottom saw it as an opportunity to get on and get up. And what about those teenage helpers? Now for them this offered a truly astonishing opportunity. Children from working class backgrounds who could stay on at school because they received a tiny wage, okay it was only tiny, but they were receiving a tiny wage. So many families could afford to not put them into some other job, they could afford them to let them stay here at school, partly teaching the younger children and partly learning from the head teacher. This gave a really dedicated, and the kids had to be really dedicated, a really dedicated hard-working working-class youngster the chance of moving out of the working class entirely. With a system like this a working-class kid could become a pupil teacher, could become a teacher. They could move into the middle classes and it wasn't just boys that this opportunity was open for, girls could too. For a small group of the population this was an unprecedented moment for social mobility, for making something of yourself, for moving beyond. And they grabbed it, people grabbed it with both hands. Next time we'll be looking at health in Victorian Britain, from the slow adoption of germ theory to the move towards cleaner water supplies and antiseptics in the hospital and homes.