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International Socialism, Winter 1963/4

 

Peter Ibbotson

Our Children’s Cross

 

From International Socialism, No.15, Winter 1963/4, p.40.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Church and State in English Education: 1870 to the Present Day
Marjorie Cruickshank
Macmillan; 35s.

Before the Reformation, the Church needed literate Latinists, from the Pope down to the humblest priest. The Renaissance brought in its train a mercantile bourgeoisie who demanded numeracy and literacy in the vernacular – provided in schools founded by pious benefactors acting under church influence. The Industrial Revolution enlarged the demand for education, and widened its scope; but the church resolutely refused to abdicate its entrenched position in the educational world, and until 1870 successfully resisted the establishment of a state system. Popular demand could not forever be opposed; and eventually church and state – God and Mammon – became partners in a national system of education.

Since 1870 controversy (which Dr Cruickshank extensively details and documents) has reigned about the role of church and state in their educational partnership. Sectarian denominationsm at public expense roused tremendous political dissensions for years; in the barren debates about finance and control, the quality of the church schools themselves, and of the education provided in them, was all but ignored. Today’s legacy is a mass of substandard ill-equipped buildings – especially in villages – where the prevailing odour is not of sanctity but of earth closets. The moral is plain. The church-state partnership, despite the special pleadings of Dr Cruickshank, Mr Butler (whom she fulsomely praises – and the book is published by Macmillan!) and the bench of bishops, has had a deleterious effect on the education on generations of children. The sooner the partnership is dissolved, therefore, and replaced by a secular system, the better for English education as a whole. Dr Cruickshank’s record of squalid dispute and un-Christianlike clerical posturings does nothing to dispel this secularist attitude.

 
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