The Literacy Attainment, Data and Discourse fellowship has been going for just over six months now. During that time I've read my way into what I now see as "my period" in history: the 1780s - 1860s. This is quite a peculiar place to have ended up, given that I am not a historian by training, and expected the LADD project to focus on a later period in the nineteenth century, the 1860s to 1890s.
Michele is a specialist on the long 18th century, and in our first conversation for the project she showed me some extracts from Priscilla Wakefield and Clara Reeve's writing on education (Wakefield, 1798; Reeve, 1792). These looked so different from the kind of texts I had been reading from much later in the 19th century, that they began to suggest a very different approach to understanding why public debate on education conducted in the late 19th century looked the way it did.
Most of the historical analysis of education in the 19th century focuses on the rise of a publicly funded education system which adopts the basic forms we still find: an age-related structure organised in three parts: primary, secondary, and higher education, with an entry point at 4/5 yrs, transition points at 11 and 16, and exit points now extended to roughly 18 and 22. Organisation by age is far less widely regarded as a legacy of the nineteenth century than organisation into differentiated pathways through the curriculum at 11. In particular the assumption is that the classed origins of education in the nineteenth century spills over and shapes the distinctions in curricular access written into the grammar school system, and still expressed in the sharp divide between vocational and academic routes through education that persists to this day.
The classed origins of the system in the nineteenth century are linked to the emergence of elementary education as an institutional arrangement designed for the poor. From this point of view the history of the formation of a publicly funded education system records the on-going attempt by the middle classes to constrain access to education, and maintain their own distinct class position. Attempts to thwart this and enlarge access for all on equal terms recur in the battles led by progressives and radicals which successively take place: over establishing the board schools in the nineteenth century; in opposition to the grammar school/secondary modern system in the 50s and 60s; up until the establishment of a comprehensive system of secondary education in the 1970s. This highpoint is now under attack from neo -liberal policies that seek to privatise education, fragment and exacerbate competition for scarce educational resources, and turn the clock back to a point be fore the State intervened for the public good. The ideological and material battle goes on.
The 18th century texts of Reeves and Wakefield complicate this story, not because of their radicalism, but rather precisely because of the nature of their conservatism. In particular, this older discourse expresses a very different view of what counts as knowledge, how it should be ordered and owned, and who is entitled to access it under what terms. To recast this argument in Bernsteinian terms, there is a different knowledge-knower relationship embedded in the discourse (Maton, 2007). This makes it possible to recognise that the (re)founding of new educational institutions during the early 19th century, their diverse forms of social organisation and curricula, the various permutations that are first tried out and then begin to settle, all represent part of a far more seismic shift in ideas, resources and social structures happening at the same time, that continues well on into the first half of the 19th century. What happens to elementary education in its organisational form - a building, a social entity, the relations it embeds and begins to cement between interested parties, the forms of knowledge it encompasses - plays out in relation to much larger shifts, one of which sees the middle class we recognise, and the professional and managerial roles they now occupy within the economy, come into being (See Hunter, 1988 for a longer exposition on this point). The middle class are not already in place, thwarting educational progress, rather they emerge alongside a more mobile working class as the economy itself re-structures through the application of new forms of knowledge to processes of production and industry. This produces a very different point of comparison between then and now. Arguably we are now witnessing something very similar at the start of the 21st century as the internet and computing power re-order working practices into new forms and challenge older ways of knowing.
Something of the high risks and high uncertainty of the late 18th century and their capacity to generate high levels of innovation in many different spheres, are now beginning to be (re)recognised and fruitfully explored in new terms across a range of academic literatures, most notably in literary and cultural studies (Goodlad, 2000; Janowitz,2004 ; Rauch, 2001); in feminist history (Cohen, 1998; Hilton, 2007; Watts, 1989) and in histories of publishing, print media and children's literature (Fyfe, 2004; Hilton, 1997; Lightman, 2000; Grenby, 2005; Myers, 1986; Ruwe, 2005; Norcia, 2010) . Much of this work is cross-disciplinary in character, and has used feminist and post-structuralist approaches to interrogate the texts they select whether in the form of poetry, children’s literature, educational texts and textbooks or polemical and religious tracts (Janowitz, 2004; Myers, 1986; Grenby, 2005; Ruwe, 2005; Cohen, 2005; Norcia, 2010; Butts and Garrett, 2006). Despite renewed interest in the history of the curriculum (Tröhler et al, 2011; Monaghan and Saul, 1987; Green and Cormack, 2008), education as a field has been at the margins rather than the centre of this conversation.
This work suggests a new set of analytic and conceptual tools through which to approach the primary sources.
The biggest challenge I've faced in the project so far has been reading my way into the nineteenth century. It's too big and too vast to make much of a dent on the available primary sources within the available time frame without being highly selective. The sampling principles that history most commonly deploys are to select a case - an individual; a site - and scope the primary sources accordingly; or to follow a story already told, reviewing the source literature and looking for new evidence. Following the latter approach would place my 19th century case - the use of statistics by the Committee of Council on Education (CCE), the funding body for education prior to the establishment of a proper Department of State - within a broader story of the history of the emergence of publicly funded state education, waged as an ideological battle for or against extending education within the parliamentary process. Approach the questions the CCE was considering from the point of view of the earlier period, leaving open how these may later resolve themselves, and the enquiry takes on a different complexion.
In particular it has meant reframing my understanding of the introduction of payment by results in 1862. In the conventional historiography this is a decisive policy event which has a pernicious effect on the future development of a publicly-funded education system, trapping elementary education for the poor into a restrictive model of the curriculum tightly focused on the three Rs, and designed to be cheap. Lowe's maxim, "If it is not cheap it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient it shall be cheap" - a phrase he used in parliamentary debate on 13th Feb 1862 - is widely used to sum up the policy. Yet this is to overlook two more crucial innovations he introduced in the Revised Code: the concept of successive "Standards" in the curriculum; and the idea of age-grouping pupils - the latter proposal was defeated in the debate, leaving schools to sub-divide students into proficiency groupings. Arguably, these two proposals have had far more far-reaching effects on schooling than did the change in the mechanism for publicly funding those schools that applied for government grants at the time. Exploring how these concepts arose, were understood, applied, and debated in contemporary sources has become a key part of this study. Such an exploration places literacy attainment firmly back in the social context of contemporary discourse, exactly as the study intended. But shifts the focus very much to the processes of curriculum change taking place at this time.
Uncertainty in the early nineteenth century over what the elementary curriculum should look like cannot be answered at this point by reference to a middle class curriculum. The terms in which the latter were defined in the late 18th century were themselves being rendered redundant as new kinds of knowledge, making greater claims for their use value, were emerging and circulating outside the confines of formal education and the classical curriculum that still dominated provision for the (male) middle class. Understanding the role elementary education played in resolving these issues means revisiting some of the existing sources, but in the light of new questions. Statistics, as an emerging discourse of "useful knowledge" in the nineteenth century, provides another light on the unsettling of the old and the formation of the new. It's strengthening and shaping as a discipline and form of enquiry within what begins to call itself the social sciences parallels the attempt to define a relevant curriculum for the new elementary schools in terms that radically re-order and revise the older forms of curricular knowledge locked into earlier models of educational provision to be found elsewhere.
The Fellowship continues to scrutinise and understand hypothesis-building within statistical approaches in the quantitative social sciences. But in its historical phase this enquiry now also focuses on a broader set of concerns rooted in the sociology of knowledge, and given new impetus by reaching back to a period before a mass education system was clearly envisaged or fully worked out.
The blog opens up this starting point for comment. Setting an ethnographer loose on historical data may be asking for trouble ...... I'd be interested to know how this proposition reads to those coming to this from different perspectives.
References
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BUTTS, D and Garrett, P. (2006) From the dairyman's daughter to Worrals of the WAAF : the Religious Tract Society, Lutterworth Press, and children's literature. Cambridge : The Lutterworth Press.
COHEN, M. (1998) `A habit of healthy idleness`: boys’ underachievement in historical perspective. In D Epstein et al (eds) Failing Boys: Issues in Gender and Achievement. Buckingham: Open University Press.
COHEN, M. (2005) Language and meaning in a documentary source: girls' curriculum from the late eighteenth century to the Schools Inquiry Commission, 1868, History of Education, 34:1, 77 — 93
FYFE, A. (2004) Science and salvation : evangelical popular science publishing in Victorian Britain. London : University of Chicago Press
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3 comments:
Dear Gemma, You raise a number of critical challenges that face those of us who seek historical understanding of literacy and its ties to everyday life. The issues you raise about a cultural guide with expertise in history is important, not only for your work but in thinking about what counts as literacies in different discipines, to different groups, as well as across different social, political and institutional contexts (including home, school, ad political contexts).
These are questions that your posts suggest are important to consider. These issues led me to think about my own journey from history undergraduate to anthropology and sociolinguistics as an educator involved in literacy research. Some of the thoughts that follow are responses to your journey and are offered as a conversation with your posts. In the following, I share areas and resources that I have found helpful in exploring these intersections.
One question that you raised made me thinking about work by sociologist and sociolinguist Jenny Cook-Gumperz, who raised questions about how to understand the relationship of history, literacy and schooling. In tracing the history of literacy and school in the UK, she raised the question of what counted as literacy that was in place before the move to more general access to schooling. In her book on the Social Construction of Literacy (first edition, 1986; second edition is 2005), she argued that literacy was in place in town criers, a form of public literacy and that schooling was promoted not to support the development of literacy but to control the direction that literacy learning and action took. [to be continued]
This issue ties historically to work on the Ethnography of Reading edited by Anthropologist Boyarin, who traced the ways in which readers were inscribed from biblical times onward, e.g., the king was not a reader as inscribed in the bible but was read to. He tied the view of readers to different social as well as philosophical developments (e.g., Acquinas among others)across centuries (from reading represented in paintings to women's reading groups and so forth). His volume provides an historical ethnography approach to the study of reading as an historial and situated process.
My undergraduate experience at Berkeley was in history and historical inquiry was grounded in an ethnographic perspective, not a colonial ethnographic framework but more of what is currently ethnography as a non-linear, recursive and iterative process of developing emic understandings of the lives of people and what was socially, culturally and linguistic constructed in particular social group (see Agar, in FQS among others). If you explore the historical form of citations to sources, you can see the difference with citations in education research and other forms of social science.
The form of citations across disciplines constitutes a form or warranting literacy in different ways, ways that often bring the 21st C understandings to the historical inquiry. I find APA style as a process of rewriting histories. You can see VanSledright's article in the Review of Research in Education (volume 32, 2008) that talks about historical research in education classrooms and the work of historians in teaching history from a US perspective). He had to write this in APA style given the publications panels decision and made his end notes in his original draft invisible. As editor who was in the middle of the argument, it suggested that reading about historical periods in particular venues (e.g., journals and books) was in itself a literacy event in which the local practices of inscribing historical arguments, analysis and such, like history itself, is a complex and situated process, one that is often overlooked. This raised questions that are being asked in both sociology and anthropology about whether we find culture or write culture. You may find the work of Paul Atkinson in the Ethnographic Imagination book for sociologists and Marcus and Clifford, Writing Culture for Anthropologists of interest, given your questions and the challenges you are facing.
Thank you for creating this blog and for affording those of us who share you interests with a space for dialogue.
Continuing thoughts:
You asked questions in the blog about possible discussions of ways of engaging in historical inquiry. In the Handbook of Complementary Methods in Education Research, there are two different chapters on historical inquiry approaches, on by John Rury from a more traditional framework and one by Annette Henry from a Cultural Studies perspective on
Thanks, Judith, for both of these postings. One of the best results of tangling with this kind of enquiry is that it is taking me to literatures I haven't read before and which I find really exciting. Partly because they reactivate old interests - my background is in Eng Lit, which always ignored the readers. What I've always enjoyed most about ethnography of literacy is it precisely doesn't.
Your point about footnotes is fascinating. I hadn't thought about them as signs of reading practice. And yes it is my own sense of myself as a reader that I am having to grapple with in doing the history.
The references you've suggested look really interesting and I will certainly follow them up. Two things about crossing out from old disciplinary boundaries are that it's enormously exciting and also slightly terrifying. I like the account of your own tangled past and how others are blending ethnography and history. I had stumbled across Jennifer Monaghan's Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America by searching on google books for one of my spellers, Dyche. There is a lot to read and be interested in waiting out there!
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