The death of Joan Simon in August 2005 marks the end of an era in history of education. Married for 61 years to Brian Simon, she had not only been jointly a part of the foundation of both the History of Education Society and the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE), but throughout her long life she had been a doughty defender of the founding principles of these societies and ever interested in their progress. She regularly attended conferences and contributed papers on various historical subjects including Richard and Maria Edgeworth and Margaret McMillan.Footnote
1
She was herself a writer on education, as early as 1945 author of a pamphlet for the University Labour Federation (ULF) entitled The People’s Education. In this she made clear her deep desire for an educational system that no longer retained benefits mainly for the middle class or regarded elementary education for the rest ‘mainly as a charity’ or an expediency for producing profitable future workers. Her clarion call for student teachers to realize the vested interests in the old system and ensure that they unite against ‘the forces of Fascism and reaction’Footnote
2
revealed her socialist beliefs and her abiding sense of using understanding of history to help change the present and influence the future.
Joan Peel, as she was until she married Brian Simon in February 1941, did not come from a Socialist background. Indeed she was a direct descendant of Sir Robert Peel and attended Roedean School whose dissenting origins she welcomed, although admitting she appreciated her schooldays there less than her mother had earlier. Joan did not go on to university, a factor she publicly applaudedFootnote 3 although she was always pleased when reputed historians praised her work. Her unordered professional life instead proceeded from her period as an assistant in a Montessori nursery school in the East End in the 1930s to journalism. Just before she married, she joined Harold Dent at the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and for two very influential years they comprised the entire journalistic staff.Footnote 4 Joan celebrated this exhilarating period as one which stimulated her ‘lasting interest in the history and politics of educational reform’.Footnote 5 That she did so much in these war years when at the same time her two sons were born and her husband was abroad for long periods, will not be surprising to those who knew her still battling for what she believed was right in her late eighties.
Joan herself attributed her later abilities as a historian to her grounding in journalism and her work for the Communist Party Historians’ Group.Footnote 6 A series of articles in the Communist Review from 1946, when still writing as ‘Joan Peel’, reiterated her passionate desire to secure ‘the best possible schools and universities for the people’, based not on the class structure but on democratic organization, ‘science and scientific method’ and deep humanism,Footnote 7 all qualities of education to which she returned repeatedly in other writings. In these articles can be seen an insistence on rooting into the historical origins of what Joan saw as a class‐ridden educational system that would teach any useless knowledge provided it taught people to keep their place. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Historians’ Group, to which Christopher Hill, George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm also belonged, assigned history of education to her. Since it was 1949, the tercentenary of the execution of Charles 1, she focused on the CommonwealthFootnote 8 and thence the Reformation. So began a lifetime of research on this period from which the most well‐known of her writings appeared, Education and Society in Tudor England. Published first in 1966, its popularity earned it a paperback version in 1979 and it is still a prime secondary source for historians, as I can personally testify. Even earlier Joan had written articles on this period,Footnote 9 her toppling of the hold of A. F. Leach’s interpretation of the origins of sixteenth‐century grammar schools being a source of great pride to her then and a potent stimulus to reviving her historical thesis in her later life when she suspected that her scholarship was being revised and the impact it had made on significant historical study ignored.Footnote 10 In the 1950s and ’60s she enjoyed the support of Tudor historians such as Geoffrey Elton, Denys Hay and A. G. Dickens, and quoted from them when further hammering the ‘Leach legend’.Footnote 11
Joan’s historical writings also included other pieces of work such as that on the social origins of seventeenth‐century Cambridge students, which still have not been superseded.Footnote 12 A number of these were published in Past and Present to which she subscribed from its beginnings in 1952. It began under Marxist auspices and welcomed historical research on education, an attribute, she later noted, that sadly diminished as the journal became ‘of moment’.Footnote 13
At the same time, Joan was collaborating with Brian on local studies in education in Leicestershire, having moved from Manchester to Leicester in 1950 for Brian to take up a post in the Education Department. These investigations led to an edited book which, beginning with three chapters by Joan on sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century developments, opened up the history of what actually happened in schools as opposed to the story in official documentation.Footnote 14
The collaboration with Brian, of course, was wider than the historical studies and was a part of educational history in itself. She shared Brian’s doubts about the fairness and efficacy of the intelligence testing currently in vogue and was keenly interested in Soviet psychology on which she wrote as early as 1948, this time as Joan Simon. Using just one article as an example indicates the thrust of her arguments. In this, after contrasting the clarity of Aristotle and the slippery proposals of the Norwood Report, she berated the latter for flying in the face of history, denying the modern findings of psychology and contradicting its supposed democratic creed ‘by asserting that only a few have the innate qualities to approach the higher good while the majority are fit only for practical activity’.Footnote 15 This signalled the investigations of the Simons into mental testing, which were of such significance both in the history of educational selection generally and in the interrelated struggle for comprehensive education. Joan wrote on each of these early on,Footnote 16 but it was her translations of the Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria who was, in turn, mentored by L. S. Vygotski, that underpinned much of Brian’s celebrated arguments. Such work fed into both Educational Psychology in the USSR, which she jointly edited with Brian in 1963,Footnote 17 and other publications for many years to come.Footnote 18
Joan’s deep educational convictions were made manifest in her work as an occasional reporter and constant reviewer for Forum for the Discussion of New Trends in Education, which Brian co‐established and co‐edited for many years. Her articles on a wide range of educational subjects are too many to be enumerated here, but one contribution of which she was particularly proud was the 35‐page pamphlet she wrote for Forum in 1973 – Indictment of Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State for Education 1970–3 – in which she accused the future Prime Minister of playing politics with children’s lives.Footnote 19
Joan had trenchant views on the value of deep historical investigation into educational issues rather than sociological approaches, which she regarded as most likely to search for historical materials merely to throw light on some prevailing interest ‘with little appreciation or engagement so far as the kernel of the matter is concerned’. Thus she said education would be seen as ‘something applied to people from outside’ rather than being understood as an active process.Footnote 20 She and Brian both feared the new sociology and its relativist view of knowledge as a threat to their socialist agenda, although Joan also accepted the positive gains traditional history had received from the challenge from ‘functionalist sociology’. Her urgent plea was for ‘a proper understanding of education as involving not merely passive conditioning by the social structure but active mastery of a social heritage of knowledge’ – that is, history of education – stored for each generation to explore anew throughout life. For her social history was always political.Footnote 21
Joan was a feisty, strong‐minded woman whose sharp intelligence made her appear formidable to some. Those closer to her loved her for her warm‐heartedness, humanity and passionate support of people and causes she believed in. She endured the death of one son and in 2002 that of Brian. She lamented her subsequent loss of memory but on much to do with her scholarship her mind remained keen to the last. Her deepest wish since Brian’s death was to ensure that his archives would find a proper place for the use of scholars. Just before she died she was happy in the knowledge they had gone to the Institute of Education. Her own contribution to the history of education was considerable and deserves its own place in history.
Notes
1 The second was published as “Margaret McMillan (1860–1931) and the English nursery school.” In Twentieth Century Pre‐School Education.Times, Ideas and Portraits, edited by Enzo Catarsi. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1955: 192–205.
2 Simon, Joan. The People’s Education. ULF Pamphlet No. 11, 1945. No author’s name appears on the pamphlet but I own a copy in which Joan has written that it is by her.
3 Simon, Joan. “My Life in the History of Education.” History of Education Society Bulletin no. 54 (autumn 1994): 29, 33.
4 Simon, Brian. A Life in Education. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998: 45.
5 Simon, Joan. “Promoting educational reform on the home front: The TES and The Times 1940–1944.” History of Education 18, no. 2 (1989): 195–211.
6 Ibid., 29.
7 Peel, Joan. “Education and social progress.” Communist Review (June 1946): 15–23; “Education and social solidarity.” Communist Review (July 1946): 26–30; “Principles of higher education.” Communist Review (May 1947): 145–51.
8 Simon, Joan. “Educational policies and programmes.” Modern Quarterly, special issue on 1640–1660, 4 (1949): 154–68.
9 For example Simon, Joan. “A. F. Leach on the Reformation.” British Journal of Educational Studies 4, no. 2 (November 1953): 32–48.
10 Joan did publish “The state and schooling at the Reformation and after: from pious causes to charitable uses.” History of Education 23, no. 2 (June 1994): 157–69 and wrote a further article before she died.
11 Simon, Joan. “A. F. Leach: a reply.” British Journal of Educational Studies 12, no. 1 (November 1963): 41–50.
12 For example Simon, Joan. “The social origins of Cambridge students, 1603–1640.” Past and Present 26 (1963): 58–67.
13 Simon, Joan. “My life”, 29–30.
14 Simon, Joan. “Town estates and schools in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.”; “Post‐restoration developments: schools in the county 1660–1700.”; “Was there a Charity School Movement? The Leicestershire evidence.” In Education in Leicestershire, 1540–1940, edited by Brian Simon. Leicester University Press, 1968: 1–100.
15 Simon, Joan. “Educational Theory and practice.” Modern Quarterly 3/4 (Autumn 1948): 35–51.
16 See for example, Simon, Joan. “Mental testing.” Modern Quarterly 5, no. 1 (Winter 1949/50): 19–37; “Organisation of secondary education.” Labour Research (April 1959): 61–64.
17 Simon, Brian, A Life, 5–6, 82–83, 84, 98.
18 See e.g. Simon, Joan. “Scientist and Educationist A. R. Luria.” Forum 20 (1978): 95–98; “Vygotsky and the Vygotskians.” American Journal of Education 95, no. 4 (August 1987): 609–13.
19 Simon, Joan. Indictment of Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State for Education 1970–3. Leicester: P.S.W. (Educational Publications) September, 1973: 32.
20 Simon, Joan. “The history of education in Past and Present.” Oxford Review of Education 3, no. 1 (1977): 71–86.
21 Simon, Joan. “The history of education and the ‘new’ social history.” History of Education Review 12 (1983): 11–12, 1–15; Simon, Brian, A Life, 122–23.