Philosophers as Educational Reformers

Description

Conspicuous among the developers of a national arrangement of training in Britain after 1870 was a gathering of men who were either affected by British optimist rationalists or dreamer scholars in their own right. They included T.H.Green, Arthur Acland, R.B.Haldane, Henry Jones, Michael Sadler, Robert Morant—and at a later age R.H.Tawney, Fred Clarke, and A.D.Lindsay. Together, and with the co-activity of others of comparative persuasion, they had a crucial impact in establishing the frameworks of our current framework. A great part of the impulse towards changing the grade schools during the 1890s originated from them; they were prominent in the crusade for state auxiliary instruction which culminated in the 1902 Act and in squeezing for ‘optional training for all’ after the First World War; without them, the numerous colleges established in the principal long stretches of this century would not have appeared, or, in any event, not all that quickly; they were pioneers of grown-up education; they assisted with molding the 1918 Education Act.