Perspectives from the brink of extinction: the fate of history of education study in Wales

Abstract

Widespread academic study of education history in Wales was a phenomenon of a few decades in post-1950s higher education, arising from a confluence of developments in social and educational historiography, and in concepts of Welsh nationhood. While it lasted, in a context of expanded university provision, history of education was treated as part of wider social history, with critical reappraisal developing alongside an unprecedented emphasis on Welsh identity, accompanied by increasing national self-confidence. Creeping educational devolution was part of this process, while there could hardly have been a greater indication of growing self-esteem than the Welsh schools movement that accelerated from the late 1950s. A paradox remains that throughout the twentieth century, because of state involvement rather than in spite of it, educational devolution increased. Yet decline in the study of education history has correlated with increased independence and sense of identity of the Welsh educational system. While the history of education in Wales seemed central to debates about Welsh history and the nation before devolution, devolution itself led to highly distinctive policies that coincided with an academic downturn in our subject. Globalisation and its impact on the university structure in Wales threatens historical awareness and clearly demonstrates the need for continuing study of history as a critical perspective on policy.

Keywords:

• Wales
• history
• study
• decline
• university

Acknowledgement

The author is extremely grateful to Richard Aldrich and Peter Cunningham for their incisive comments and suggestions in relation to an earlier draft of this article. The author first explored this theme in the W. Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture ‘The History of Education in Wales – is it all in the past’, given in Aberystwyth in 2004. The situation has deteriorated.

Notes

¹Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908 and The Old Grammar Schools (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916).

²Russell Grigg, A History of Trinity College Carmarthen, 1848–1898: 150 Years of Teacher Training in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998); Becoming an Outstanding Primary School Teacher (London: Longman, 2010).

³Dr Sian Rhiannon Williams, of Cardiff Metropolitan University, is doing original research, involving oral history, on the history of women teachers in Wales. Her excellent article, ‘Women Teachers and Gender Issues in Teaching in Wales, c.1870–1950’, in the Welsh Journal of Education 13, no. 2, (2005): 68–83, breaks new ground as far as Wales is concerned.

⁴For example, E.J. Davies’s ‘The Origin and Development of Secondary Education in the Rhondda Valleys (1878–1923)’ (MA Wales, 1965). Doctoral theses range more widely and are sometimes indispensable, like J.R. Webster’s ‘The Place of Secondary Education in Welsh Society 1800–1918’ (PhD Wales, 1959) or Anita Jordan’s ‘History and Development of the Education of the Delinquent, Mentally and Physically Handicapped and Pauper Children in Wales from 1833 to 1933 (PhD Wales, 1977).

⁵J. Furlong, H. Hagger and C. Butcher, Review of Initial Teacher Training Provision in Wales. A Report to the Welsh Assembly Government (Cardiff, 2006), 31.

⁶G. McCulloch, The Struggle for the History of Education (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 11 ff.

⁷Ibid., 41–54.

⁸I owe the phrase to Gwyneth Lewis, first national poet of Wales. See the façade of the Millennium Centre in Cardiff.

⁹G.E. Jones, Controls and Conflicts in Welsh Secondary Education, 1889–1944 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982).

¹⁰G.W. Roderick, ‘The Institute of South Wales Engineers and the South Wales Economy in the Late 19th Century’, Welsh History Review 14, no. 4 (1989): 595–609; idem, ‘‘Technical Instruction Committees in South Wales, United Kingdom, 1889–1903 (parts 1 and 2)’, The Vocational Aspect of Education 45, nos 1 and 2 (1993), 59–70 and 145–62; idem, ‘Education in an Industrial Society’, in The City of Swansea: Challenges and Change, ed. R.A. Griffiths (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1990); idem, with M.D. Stephens, ‘The Influence of Welsh Culture on Scientific and Technical Education in Wales in the 19th Century’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1981), 99–108. Idem, ‘Social Class, Curriculum and the Concept of Relevance in Secondary Education: Industrial Glamorgan, 1889–1914’, Welsh History Review 19, no. 2 (1998): 289–318.

¹¹McCulloch, op. cit., 11 passim.

¹²For example Wilfred Harrison, Greenhill School Tenby, 1896–1964 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1979).

¹³Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998).

¹⁴Iolo Wyn Williams, ed., Gorau Arf. Hanes Sefydlu Ysgolion Cymraeg 1939–2000 (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 2002); Our Children’s Language (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 2003).

¹⁵G.E. Jones, ‘The “Welsh Revolt” Revisited: Merioneth and Montgomeryshire in Default’, Welsh History Review XIV, no. 3 (1988): 417–38.

¹⁶Gwennant Davies, The Story of the Urdd: (the Welsh League of Youth), 1922–1972 (Aberystwyth: Urdd Gobaith Cymru, 1973).

¹⁷Jones, Controls and Conflicts.

¹⁸Iolo Wyn Williams, op. cit.

¹⁹W. Gareth Evans, Education and Female Emancipation, the Welsh Experience, 1847–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1990).

²⁰McCulloch, op. cit., 98–111.

²¹The self-styled national newspaper of Wales.

²²McCulloch, op. cit., 70.

²³Ibid.

²⁴For the background to this question see G.E. Jones, ‘Welsh Universities and Devolution’, Welsh Journal of Education 14, no. 1, (2007): 14–33.

²⁵Welsh Assembly Government, Reaching Higher (Cardiff: Welsh Assembly Government, 2002).

²⁶Ronald Barnett, Being a University (London: Routledge, 2011), 2.

²⁷K. Robins and F. Webster, ‘Is the Global-Virtual University the Future of Higher Education?’, Welsh Journal of Education 12, no. 1, (2003): 7–14.

²⁸Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). I am grateful to Maurice Whitehead for having drawn my attention to this book in the first instance.

²⁹Ibid., 15.

³⁰Robins and Webster, op. cit., 7.

³¹T. Abeles, ‘The Academy in a Wired World’, Futures 30, no. 7 (1998): 606, quoted in Robins and Webster, op. cit., 10.

³²Letter from Leighton Andrews, Minister for Education and Skills, Welsh Government, to Roger Thomas, Chair of the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, dated March 16, 2012.

³⁶Robins and Webster, op. cit., 8.

³³T.M. Porter, ‘Information, Power and the View from Nowhere’, in Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Businesses, ed. L Bud-Frierman (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 221. Quoted in Robins and Webster, op. cit., 11.

³⁴Quoted in Robins and Webster, op. cit., 11.

³⁵Barnett, op. cit., 2.

³⁷Current Welsh Government policy, set out by HEFCW in 2010, is that no more than two Welsh university institutions should have an income below that of the median of UK institutions. In the three arbitrarily designated Welsh divisions, the south-west, the south-east and the north, there should be at least one research-led institution with an international reputation and another with a more teaching-centred, access-widening function. At the time of writing, the University of Wales Trinity St David (itself comprising the former University of Wales-affiliated institutions at Lampeter and Trinity College Carmarthen) amalgamated with Swansea Metropolitan University in October 2012. It has been rewarded financially for so doing. In south-east Wales the Minister is currently exerting considerable pressure on the universities of Glamorgan, Cardiff Metropolitan (the former University of Wales Institute, Cardiff) and Newport to amalgamate. Cardiff Metropolitan University is refusing. It remains to be seen what sanctions will operate in this area. For geographical reasons the north Wales area poses a more intractable problem and ‘softer’ forms of amalgamation are emerging where possible. There is no space to explore the implications further but they do impinge on the argument being made here. Anecdotal evidence indicates that vice-chancellors in England are following the dirigiste policies of the Welsh Minister of Education and Skills with some apprehension.

³⁸Barnett, op. cit., 4.

³⁹Ibid., 4.

⁴⁰Readings, op. cit., 40.

⁴¹Personal correspondence with the author, May 30, 2012.

⁴⁴R. Aldrich, ‘History in Education’, in Education and Cultural Transmission, ed. J. Sturm, J Dekker, R. Aldrich and F. Simon (Gent: CSHP, 1996), quoted in R. Aldrich, Lessons from History of Education: The Selected Works of Richard Aldrich (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 2.

⁴²See above quotation and notes 21, 22, 44 and 45.

⁴³R. Aldrich, Lessons from History of Education: The Selected Works of Richard Aldrich (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 1.