The Job Market

Chapter five, ‘The Job Market’, maps out the challenges teachers faced in seeking work. They had to navigate a curious mix of paternalistic favouritism and bureaucratic meritocracy, procedural transparency and opaqueness, conservative and more radical ideas about gender on the part of hiring authorities. Most of all, teachers had to make big choices early in their careers: did they want to make personal sacrifices and endure a seemingly endless series of moves to try to secure a well-paying and prestigious position in a large urban school, or did they want to put down roots in a community, even if it meant settling for a less-than-desirable position? Did they want to stay in Britain or venture out to the empire, where they had a much greater chance of securing a well-paying job at a relatively young age? Teachers forged new understandings of what constituted fair and just hiring practices and desirable careers paths as they confronted, discussed, and protested the dilemmas they faced on the job market.

Education Policies

Chapter one, ‘Education Policies’, explores the policies that framed teachers’ careers, especially from the perspective of teachers. Seen this way, the history of policies looks quite different. It begins in 1846, more than two decades before the 1870 Education Act which so much scholarship on the history of education takes as its starting point. In the very year of laissez-faire’s supposed triumph, the state undertook a massive social intervention by creating two remarkable—and quite expensive—institutions open to girls and boys alike: pupil teaching and training colleges. Hundreds of thousands of British girls and boys took advantage of the clear, state-funded path which these institutions offered to becoming a teacher.

The Over-Pressure Controversy and Everyday Expertise

Chapter eight, ‘The Over-Pressure Controversy and Everyday Expertise’, examines the public debate in the wake of a sensational 1884 report claiming that the annual examination of children in elementary schools was driving them to do school work in their sleep, stunting their development, and leading dozens of them to commit suicide each year. In testimonies to government inquiries and articles in the press, teachers demonstrated how intimately they knew about children’s home situations and their health—and how much the doctors and educational policymakers who were trying to co-opt the debate over what to do about ‘over-pressure’ depended on that knowledge. Their testimony also revealed how desperately poor and working-class children needed more protection and help from the state. This was an important moment in the democratization of expertise and the making of the welfare state.

Everyday Stories

Chapter seven, ‘Everyday Stories’, argues that teachers turned the log books in which they were supposed to keep a basic, factual record of their work into vivid stories about the communities in which they worked. Acquiring and sharing intimate, textured knowledge about local communities and the people who inhabited them was central to teachers’ sense of professional duty. They opened up dialogues between and balanced the frequently competing desires of local communities, state officials, and private do-gooders. Teachers’ mediation ran both ways. They enforced state policies, albeit in a selective manner which took account of local circumstances. However, they also represented to policymakers the flaws that they saw in those policies, the difficulties they faced in their everyday work, and the particulars of the local culture and economy. Teachers moved back and forth between acting as servants of the central state, local advocates, and independent professionals sometimes occupying more than one role at once. They sought to affect significant changes, but to do so carefully, slowly, and by working through rather than against local cultures.

Conclusion

Elementary teachers vigorously opposed a plan by the Board of Education to create a new path to becoming a teacher in 1907. Under the new plan, intending teachers would go on to secondary school with the aid of a bursary instead of apprenticing as pupil teachers at age thirteen. They would now spend little time in actual elementary schools until after training college (though there was a temporary, optional student teaching scheme which allowed them to spend several days a week in an elementary school during their last year of secondary school if they chose)....

Seeing Britain and the World

Chapter six, ‘Seeing Britain and the World’ explores the remarkably widespread practice of travelling to the far corners of Britain, its empire, and the wider world during the summer holiday. Teachers tended to go alone or with just a couple friends and preferred to venture ‘off the beaten path’. When they got back, they wrote up short accounts of their trips for their training college alumni magazines. Teachers drew on bourgeois and elite conventions, but ultimately forged their own culture of travel and social and cultural observation. They put a premium on intimate knowledge about the everyday life of the peoples among whom they travelled and frequently confronted their own assumptions about important concepts like class and state welfare, race and the nature of imperial rule. Most of all, a sense of urgency pervaded teachers’ travel narratives. Engaging with the wider world was an ethical imperative and a key facet of teachers’ personal and professional identity.

‘A Home for Poets’?

Chapter four, ‘“A Home for Poets”?’ builds on this idea of a culture of defiance in training colleges by showing how teachers-in-training reshaped the curriculum. The official curriculum of the 1840s, 50s, and 60s, with its narrow focus and emphasis on rote memorization, frustrated budding teachers. Despite enduring long, exhausting days, they stayed up after ‘lights out’ to hold informal classes on Shakespeare and Byron, ancient history and modern science. They also turned their geography lessons into opportunities to reflect on the political cultures of the empire and the global networks of production and consumption that connected Britons of all social backgrounds to peoples from around the world. In large part owing to the everyday pressure of teachers-in-training, the official curriculum in training colleges came, over time, to be much more liberal as well as socially and globally engaged.

Introduction

The illegitimate son of a servant from the Scottish Highlands, William Campbell effected his own upward social mobility by becoming a teacher. The state paid for his apprenticeship as a pupil teacher in the small village of Durness and then his teacher training programme in bustling Edinburgh. After his training and an initial job in the village of Nethybridge, he settled into a position as an elementary teacher in the scattered crofting community of Rogart in Sutherland in 1898. Though he followed Whitehall policymakers’ directives and taught quite a bit of English history and literature during school hours, he went to great lengths to acquire Gaelic dictionaries, grammars, and works of literature so that he could teach the language and literary culture to children and adults alike in the evenings. This was no defiant gesture of nascent Scottish cultural nationalism. Campbell was determined to serve the distant British state ...

Pupil Teaching

Chapter two, ‘Pupil Teaching’, tells the story of those boys and girls who secured pupil teaching apprenticeships starting around age thirteen. These paid apprenticeships enabled boys and girls who would usually otherwise have had to go to work to continue their studies for five years—even to delve into subjects like Latin, French, literature, and physics. They had to balance these studies with their work teaching younger children, however. They both learned from and worked under head teachers, whose poignant accounts and painstaking work with their young charges testifies to the bonds they formed with pupil teachers. Like apprenticeship in its classic form (and emerging ideas about adolescence), pupil teaching involved working and learning, growing freedom but continued supervision, an institutionalized and paternalistic relationship. Teachers and the state together revived, but also modernized apprenticeship—though as much in tension with one another as in cooperation.

Rules and Rule Breaking in Teacher Training Colleges

Chapter three, ‘Rules and Rule Breaking in Teacher Training Colleges’, taps into the rich and virtually unused archives of seven training colleges in England and Scotland to show how tremendously liberating these institutions could be in practice despite their oppressive rules and infinitesimally detailed timetables. For instance, teachers-in-training reacted to bans on romantic relationships by creating a cult of the romantic. They celebrated courtship and more casual flirtation in poems, paintings, and short stories of their real-world exploits, all of which they circulated widely in ‘friendship albums’ and college ‘literary magazines’. This defiance became the basis of lifelong friendships—and a professional culture that pushed back against the imposition of policies.