“For Home, Country and Race”: The Gendered Ideals of Citizenship in English Elementary and Evening Continuation Schools, 1885-1914

Between 1885 and 1914, English Elementary and Evening Continuation Schools - the institutions designed to cater to the educational needs of the working class - engaged in both formal and informal efforts to indoctrinate their students in the principles of “good citizenship”. This ideological initiative was an attempt to construct “appropriate” individual and collective character traits in children, many of whom were never expected to attain formal political rights. The books and lessons of the schools tended to romanticize English history and use specific figures from the past to explain values and traits deemed especially worthy in the“good citizen”. This article points to the ways in which these projected civic virtues were explained to working-class boys through association with accepted notions of virtuous masculinity. Demonstrated with examples of both real and fictitious martial heroes this masculine code resembled the ethic of service to the nation prevalent in elite educational culture, but with an entirely different result implied.

The Use of Test Scores for Classification Decisions with Threshold Utility

The classification problem consists of assigning subjects to one of several available treatments on the basis of their test scores, where the success of each treatment is measured by a different criterion. It is indicated how this problem can be formulated as an (empirical) Bayes decision problem. As an example, the case of classification with a threshold utility function is analyzed, and optimal assignment rules are derived. The results are illustrated empirically with data from a classification problem in which achievement test data are used to assign students to appropriate continuation schools.