The Centre for the History of Women’s Education at the University of Winchester had the honour and pleasure of hosting the fiftieth anniversary conference of the UK History of Education Society (HES) in 2017. The conference was held at the Winchester Hotel, Winchester from 10 to 12 November. Fittingly, the theme chosen was ‘Celebration, commemoration and collaboration: milestones in the history of education’. As ever at our conferences we looked forward to opportunities for collaboration, spurring the development of ideas, theories and practice in the history of education.
We were delighted to include among some 100 delegates the five immediate past presidents of the Society: Ruth Watts (2001–2004), Gary McCulloch (2004–2007), Joyce Goodman (2007–2010), Jane Martin (2010–2013) and Cathy Burke (2013–2016). Each was invited to speak briefly about the significant events during their presidency and their comments provided an important historical context for the development of both the HES and our field of research. Delegates came from not only the UK but across the globe. Following recent visits to Japan by Joyce Goodman, the founder of the Centre for the History of Women’s Education, we were pleased to welcome not only the keynote speaker, Professor Yuko Takahashi, who spoke on women’s higher education in Meiji Japan, but also a group of delegates from that country; Keiko Sasaki’s contribution is included in this special issue. The Society is also committed to supporting young researchers, both intellectually and financially. The now well-established postgraduate forum included eight speakers, and a further four contributed full papers. The future of the field is encouraging, as we see established academics working to publish in collaboration with early career researchers, as for example in the article on Church Congresses included here.
The book prizes awarded during the conference celebrated and commemorated the work of Anne Bloomfield and Kevin Brehony. In their time as familiar figures at our conferences, they epitomised the mixture of scholarly excellence and sociability that the Society seeks to provide for both early-career and more established members. The prizes named in their memory were awarded at the conference dinner to Tim Allender for Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932 and Tomás Irish for The University at War 1914–25: Britain, France and the United States.
On the occasion of the significant milestone of the fiftieth anniversary of the Society, it was appropriate to celebrate and commemorate its foundation, which took place in December 1967 at a conference held at the City of Liverpool C. F. Mott College of Education. The conference was opened by Professors Harry Armytage and Brian Simon with Professor Kenneth Charlton giving the opening address: an address that suggested new approaches to the study and teaching of the subject. These three professors were widely recognised at that time both as leaders in historical scholarship with particular reference to education and as prime movers in the foundation of the Society.Footnote1
Those writing in the first issue of the Society’s History of Education Bulletin 50 years ago could hardly have imagined the range of sources and resources available to the authors of the work that appears in this journal, and the Bulletin’s successor, the History of Education Researcher, today. Three in particular can be highlighted here. First and foremost, the internet has revolutionised research. It has been widely used in this issue of the journal, as a resource for accessing both primary material and a vast amount of secondary scholarly work. The research of Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alexander Hutton and Paul Readman on twentieth-century pageants has also been made available as an online resource in itself.Footnote2 Second, recognising the continuing value of physical documents, more and more institutions have either deposited archival material with suitable libraries or have taken steps to open them up on site to researchers. This is highlighted in the article by Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney and Deirdre Bennett celebrating the work of Honora (Nano) Nagle and the Presentation Order. These authors acknowledge that only in the last couple of decades have congregations begun to welcome scholars into their archives, but, more recently, they have employed trained archivists to catalogue their records and prepare them for researchers. Third, the use of oral history as a specific contribution to the historical record has grown since the 1960s and is used in two of the articles published here. Raftery, Delaney and Bennett have taken the opportunity to interview elderly sisters of the Presentation Order, while Mary Woolley, for her article marking the milestone of 30 years of the National Curriculum, carried out 20 interviews with 13 teachers. The significance of oral testimony in the contribution it makes to the depth of the archive of an institution itself, as well as the role it plays in scholarly interpretation of events, is clear.
The range of new sources has enabled authors to deepen our understanding of the themes of gender, religion and leadership, which are present in many of the articles in this special issue. In addition, the role played by government, and both private and public institutions, in either respecting or restricting the autonomy of individual teachers and students underpins several articles, as aspects of celebration, commemoration and collaboration are explored by an international group of authors.
In her presidential address in 2004 Ruth Watts drew attention to the increasing amount of research in our field that focused on gender as a category of analysis for exploring the experience of women in both formal and informal education. Articles in this issue demonstrate how that area has developed further, notably in those by Kay Whitehead on the Queen Elizabeth School (QES) in Nigeria, by Sue Anderson-Faithful and Catherine Holloway on women’s role as educators at Anglican Church Congresses and by Keiko Sasaki on the history of the alumnae association of the Tokyo Higher Normal School for Women (THNSW). Whitehead traces the development of traditions at the QES, describing how the commemorations engaged in during the fifth, twenty-fifth and sixtieth anniversaries of the school’s founding underscored the important role of girls’ education in nation-building as they shaped the school’s narration of its history. Anderson-Faithful and Holloway point to the opportunity for women to speak in public at Church Congresses as a means for them to claim expertise. Church Congresses provided women with opportunities for networking and collaboration. Those women who spoke at Church Congresses used these platforms to address topics like citizenship and temperance, as well as to advocate for the agenda of organisations such as the Mothers’ Union and the Girls’ Friendly Society. Anderson-Faithful and Holloway argue that the opportunity to speak in public enabled women to demonstrate their intellectual authority even as they did not explicitly challenge gender norms. Sasaki focuses on the graduates of the THNSW who worked as teachers. Drawing on a 1940 publication that celebrated and commemorated the achievements of alumnae from the first 60 years, she traces the evolution of the curriculum and discusses the accomplishments of graduates who became leaders in medicine, education and domestic economy. She sheds light on the experiences of four female teachers to show how they combined careers with home and family responsibilities.
Across the world women negotiated their entry into leadership positions as educators and within institutions. Whitehead points to the roles of successive principals in shaping the QES’s identity and ensuring its legacy in Nigeria. As part of its early celebrations, the school highlighted the success of several pioneering graduates across a range of fields. Whitehead also notes the leadership of the school itself, in training generations of women for a role in the development and sustenance of the Nigerian state. She identifies the legacy provided by the leadership of the founding principal and the chief women’s education officer in ensuring the quality of education offered by the school from its earliest days, simultaneously drawing on British examples and adapting them to local needs. Sasaki describes how members of the school’s alumnae association (the Ouinkai) provided leadership across Japan in discussions about improving the quality of secondary education for girls as well as the preparation of secondary school teachers. They took on a leadership role in advocating for the higher education of women in Japan. Additionally, they worked collaboratively with students by serving as mentors and demonstrating leadership as they petitioned the Japanese government to establish a women’s university. Raftery, Delaney and Bennett address the leadership and legacy of Nano Nagle, who founded the Presentation Order of nuns in Ireland. They trace Nagle’s pioneering work in founding both a school for the education of the poor and an order of nuns dedicated to that responsibility. Raftery, Delaney and Bennett describe the creativity of teaching sisters in developing responses to increasing demands for educational provision. In addition, they consider the financial leadership provided by individual sisters to found and finance early free schools. Taken together, these articles suggest multiple strands of leadership in a variety of educational institutions and in a range of national settings.
The continuing interplay between religion and education is mentioned in several of the articles and has often been highlighted at times of celebration or commemoration. Raftery, Delaney and Bennett use the tercentenary of the birth of Nano Nagle as a vehicle to reflect on the legacy of her work. In re-examining archival sources and with the addition of oral histories, they note the challenges faced by the sisters for the perpetuation of the Presentation schools. Such challenges needed the women to grow in their own knowledge and skills, if they were to exercise agency successfully within the confines of the Catholic Church and retain leadership of the schools. The annual celebrations of the Anglican Church Congresses, studied by Anderson-Faithful and Holloway, bring to the fore the informal educative work of prominent Anglican women who, although unable to hold office, used the Church Congresses as a platform to publicly address national audiences. Congress participants comprised men and women, from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, enabling the speakers to reach a broad audience. In addition to espousing agreed Anglican beliefs, the women extended their sphere to include education on social and political concerns, some of which were not always in accord with those held by the established Church. In Sasaki’s article, members of the alumnae association can trace the association’s origins, in part, to a school established by the Japanese government in 1870. The purpose of the school was to give girls a liberal western-style education. Whilst secular, its aims aligned with many Christian schools, for girls to be ‘good wives and wise mothers’. By the 1890s the school had become a women’s college, focused on teacher training.
Throughout the 50-year history of the Society the role that government plays in educational provision has remained in the spotlight. The 1988 Education Reform Act, which included the introduction of a National Curriculum in England and Wales, removed autonomy from teachers in deciding the curriculum that was taught in state-funded schools. Woolley considers the passage of 30 years a suitable juncture to commemorate this educational milestone. For Woolley, milestones allow an opportunity to look back and consider the impact and consequences of government policy. Using an oral history approach, Woolley gives voice to teachers who were tasked with enacting the national history curriculum. Whilst adhering to the curriculum, some teachers were resistant or subversive, inasmuch as they continued with their preferred methods for teaching and engaging students. Woolley’s analysis found that others were ultimately more troubled by the subsequent introduction of the ‘standards agenda’ and the government league tables than by the National Curriculum. Government involvement in education is also the starting point for Whitehead’s study of the QES. Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960 and, in preparation for this change, drew up a development plan for education. Despite opposition to the government’s inclusion of education for girls in the plan, the QES was founded as a girls’ secondary school in 1956. Whitehead examines commemorations of the school in 1961, 1981 and 2016 to understand how the school worked to socialise students, enhance cohesion and promote national unity. She notes that by 2016 the foundational narrative had been reinvented to include Northern Nigeria’s premier Ahmado Bello as the symbol of institutional and national unity in Nigeria, distancing the work of the original principal Kathleen Player.
The reinvention of the past to fit contemporary beliefs was also practised by those setting up pageants that celebrated aspects of British history. Bartie, Fleming, Freeman, Hulme, Hutton and Readman suggest that the pageants which set out to celebrate and commemorate events in the past also themselves became the subject of commemoration, as they made such an impact on the memories of those who performed in them. Pageantry moved the locus of education from a top-down to a bottom-up approach. The productions, which engaged people of all ages and social classes, provided informal education that was independent of centrally controlled formal curricula. It may be coincidence that interest in pageants that stimulated historical empathy, if not accuracy, had tailed off by the time of the 1988 Act and the introduction of the National Curriculum in England and Wales, but Woolley’s research highlights some of the dismay felt by teachers at the centralisation of the curriculum and the reduction in teacher autonomy. This made it harder for them to introduce topics of specific interest to their school and its surrounding community. The dislike of teachers for these central impositions is familiar but Woolley’s use of oral histories draws attention to some of the nuances within the familiar discourse of discontent. She identifies groups of teachers who negotiated their way through the demands of the curriculum, and in doing so introduces new subtleties to the contemporary and current narratives of 1988 and their impact on teacher morale. Just as teachers learned to work within the constraints of more centralised control, so middle- and upper-class women found a way to speak publicly within the Anglican Church Congresses between 1881 and 1913 despite the strong patriarchal governance of the established Church. Anderson-Faithful and Holloway argue that wives of clergy used their social networks to speak as experts on social issues and education. Despite conforming to expectations of domesticity and motherhood, women such as Mary Sumner, Louise Creighton and Laura Ridding could claim autonomy within the Women’s Sections of the Congresses to confirm their right to speak within the patriarchal structures of the church.
As they address the themes of ‘Celebration, commemoration and collaboration’ that framed debates and discussions at the HES conference of 2017, the articles in this special issue demonstrate continuity with the original intentions of the Society to research the complex relationship between government and the formal provision of schooling. Over the last 50 years, increasing interest in new methodological and analytical approaches to the study of the history of education has brought the significance of education outside the classroom to our attention. Whether that be in analysing the popular pageant or through the study of events such as the Church Congresses, these projects add new dimensions to our understanding of education as a lifelong endeavour. Meanwhile, research into the role that gendered expectations for leadership have played in the growth of girls’ education has been enhanced by sophisticated insights into women’s negotiation of power within traditional expectations of womanhood.
The Winchester pageant of 1908 with a cast of more than 2000 played to an opening-night audience of 8000. While we cannot claim such attendance at the Winchester conference of 2017, the academic debates and discussions that led to the refinement of the articles in this issue reflect ongoing wide interest in the history of education. They also underscore the strong belief that celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the HES, while possibly offering the opportunity for a nostalgic view of the past, also provided a legitimate and vibrant forum for demonstrating the significance of history of education for understanding the past on its own terms and enriching our ability to learn from the past to plan for the future.
Notes
1 Richard Aldrich, ‘Kenneth Charlton:1925–2008’, History of Education 38, no. 5 (2009): 601.
2 See http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk (last accessed November 26, 2018).