Interpreting biography in the History of Education: past and present

Epigraph

At the time I began work in university, I entered a world which was leisured, privileged and patriarchal, in the United Kingdom at least…. I came from a world in which only 3% of the population aspired to university. I belonged to a world in which, having got where I was through the eleven-plus and ‘A’ levels, there was almost a sense that society owed us a living. (Roy Lowe, 2002 ¹ )

¹Roy Lowe, ‘Do We Still Need History of Education: Is it Central or Peripheral?’ History of Education 31, no. 6 (2002): 492–3.

Women were not obviously on the outside when I attended my first conference – a day conference in 1976 at what was then the Birmingham Polytechnic, now University of Central England. Many women attended although in the first years few were keynote speakers. More importantly there was little about women in the history itself except in the meetings of the Women’s Education Study Group where Carol Dyhouse, June Purvis, Penny Summerfield and Gaby Weiner were all dominant. (Ruth Watts, 2005 ² )

²Ruth Watts, ‘Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education’, History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 226.

In 1967, aged 11, I moved on from my primary school in south London, and was selected to enter the local grammar school. I left most of my friends behind and began a daily routine of walking nervously through the council housing estates in my school uniform. By the time I left this school, seven years later, it had moved to one of the more prosperous suburbs of London to avoid being turned into a comprehensive. In the early twenty-first century, it is one of the leading academic secondary schools in the country, which it certainly was not in 1967. (Gary McCulloch, 2007 ³ )

³Gary McCulloch, ‘Forty Years On: Presidential Address to the History of Education Society, London 4 November 2006’, History of Education 36, no. 1 (2007): 6.

Keywords:

• autobiography
• biography
• historiography
• gender
• theory

Acknowledgements

In particular, the author would like to thank Kevin Brehony, the journal editors and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

¹Roy Lowe, ‘Do We Still Need History of Education: Is it Central or Peripheral?’ History of Education 31, no. 6 (2002): 492–3.

²Ruth Watts, ‘Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education’, History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 226.

³Gary McCulloch, ‘Forty Years On: Presidential Address to the History of Education Society, London 4 November 2006’, History of Education 36, no. 1 (2007): 6.

⁴Many scholars now talk of a ‘biographical turn’ in the humanities and social sciences see e.g. Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat and Tom Wengref, eds, The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science (London: Verso, 2000); Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, Women and Education (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).

⁵Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008 edition). My first article was in History of Education when Roy Lowe was editor. See Jane Martin, ‘“Hard-headed and Large-hearted”: Women and the Industrial Schools, 1870–1885’, History of Education, 20, no. 3 (1991): 187–203.

⁶Hilda Kean, London Stories: Personal Lives, Public Histories (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2004).

⁷Quoted in Kean, London Stories, 8.

⁸Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin, ‘Editorial: History of Education – defining a field’, History of Education 33, no. 1 (2004): 1–10.

⁹Lowe, ‘Do We Still Need History of Education’, 492.

¹⁰Liz Stanley uses the term auto/ biography to describe a range of research methods drawing on individual memory, both biographical and autobiographical. The insertion of a solidus is shorthand for the blurred boundaries between the individual and the collective, conscious/unconscious, the messiness of lived experience when thinking about the production of self-narratives. See, for example, Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical ‘I’: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

¹¹See Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

¹²Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001 edition), 2–17.

¹³Lowe, ‘Do We Still Need History of Education?’

¹⁴See Harold Silver, ‘Aspects of Neglect: The Strange Case of Victorian Popular Education’, Oxford Review of Education 3, no. 1 (1977): 57–69.

¹⁵See David Rubinstein, School Attendance in London, 1870–1904: A Social History (Hull: University of Hull, 1969); Phillip McCann, ed., Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1977); Gerald Grace, Teachers, Ideology and Control (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

¹⁶Kevin J. Brehony, ‘Education as a “Social Function”: Sociology and Social Theory in the Histories of Brian Simon’, History of Education, 33, no. 5 (2004): 545–58.

¹⁷See his four studies in the history of education. Brian Simon, Two Nations and the Educational Structure, 1780–1870 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1960); Brian Simon, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965); Brian Simon, The Politics of Educational Reform, 1920–1940 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974); Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991).

¹⁸Gary McCulloch, ‘A People’s History of Education: Brian Simon, the British Communist Party and Studies in the History of Education, 1780–1870’, History of Education 39, no. 4 (2010): 437-57.

¹⁹Quoted by Brian Simon, ‘A Seismic Change: Process and Interpretation’, in Affirming the Comprehensive Ideal, ed. R. Pring and G. Walford (London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 1997), 27.

²⁰See John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England (London: Methuen, 1973); John Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1918 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).

²¹For gender see Ruth Watts, ‘Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education’, History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 225–41; Ruth Watts, ‘Appendix: Gender Articles in History of Education since 1976’, History of Education 34, no. 6 (2005): 689–94. For ‘race’ see Ian Grosvenor, ‘From the “Eye of History” to a “Second Gaze”: the Visual Archive and the Marginalized in the History of Education’, History of Education 36, nos. 4–5 (2007): 607–22. For disability see Patrick Devlieger, Ian Grosvenor, Frank Simon, Geert Van Hove and Bruno Vanobbergen, ‘Visualizing Disability in the Past’, Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 6 (2008): 747–60; F. Armstrong, ‘Disability, Education and Social Change in England since 1960’, History of Education, 36, no. 4 (2007): 551–68; Richard Altenbaugh, ‘Where are the Disabled in the History of Education? The Impact of Polio on Sites of Learning’, History of Education 35, no. 6 (2006): 705–30. I found nothing to indicate the influence of queer theory and little attention to sexuality unless within work on sex education, health and welfare. See David Limond, ‘I Never Imagined That The Time Would Come’: Martin Cole, the Growing Up Controversy and the Limits of School Sex Education in 1970s England’, History of Education 37, no. 3 (2008): 409–30; Lesley Hall, ‘“It was Affecting the medical profession”: The History of Masturbatory Insanity Revisited’, History of Education 39, no. 6 (2003): 685–700; Franz Eder, ‘Diskurs und Sexualpädagogik: der deutchsprachige Onanie-Diskurs des späten 18. Jahrhunderts’, Paedagogica Historica 39, no. 6 (2003): 719–36.

²²See Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972); Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (London: Pluto Press, 1973); Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (London: Pelican Books, 1973).

²³See Stephanie Spencer, ‘Guest Editorial: Educational administration, History and ‘Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 42, no. 2 (2010): 105–13.

²⁴See Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up In Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), for a classic text.

²⁶Philip Gardner, ‘“There and Not Seen”: E.B. Sargant and Educational Reform, 1884–1905’, History of Education 33, no. 6 (2004): 609.

²⁵Joyce Goodman, ‘A Historiography of Founding Fathers? Sarah Austin (1793–1867) and English Comparative Education’, History of Education 31, no. 5 (2002): 425–35.

²⁷Lowe, ‘Do we Still Need History of Education’, 49.

²⁸Barbara Caine, Biography and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 23.

²⁹Quoted in Marc Pachter, ‘The Biographer Himself: An Introduction’ in Telling Lives: the Biographer’s Art, ed. M. Pachter (Washington: New Republic Books, 1979), 11.

³⁰Barbara W. Tuchman, ‘Biography as Prism of History’, in Pachter, Telling Lives, 133.

³²Quoted in Caine, Biography and History, 21.

³¹Caine, Biography and History, 16.

³³E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).

³⁴Matt Perry, Marxism and History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), 9.

³⁵Brian Simon, A Life in Education (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998).

³⁶Jane Martin, ‘Reflections on Writing a Biographical Account of a Woman Educator Activist’, History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 163–76.

³⁷C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 12.

³⁸Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago, 1986).

³⁹Stanley, The Auto/biographical ‘I’, 10.

⁴⁰Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 32.

⁴¹British Sociological Association Auto/Biography Study Group joining leaflet (1995) quoted in Liz Stanley ‘From “Self-Made Women” to “Women’s Made Selves”?’, in Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories and Methods, ed. T. Cosslett, C. Lury and P. Summerfield (London: Routledge, 2000), 41.

⁴²Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), 41.

⁴³Tuchman, ‘Biography as a Prism of History’, 134.

⁴⁴Barbara Finkelstein, ‘Revealing Human Agency: The Uses of Biography in the Study of Educational History’, in Writing Educational Biography: Explorations in Qualitative Research, ed. C. Kridel (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

⁴⁵Finkelstein, ‘Revealing Human Agency’, 45, 59.

⁴⁶Michael Sanderson, ‘Education and Economic History: The Good Neighbours’, History of Education 36, no. 4 (2007): 429–5.

⁴⁷See Melissa Benn, School Wars: the Battle for Britain’s Education (London: Verso, 2011).

⁴⁸P. Gordon, ‘The Holmes-Morant Circular of 1911: A Note’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 10 (1978): 36–40; N.D. Daglish, ‘The Morant–Chulalongkorn Affair of 1893–4’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 15, no. 2 (1983): 16–23; R.A. Lowe, ‘Robert Morant and the Secondary School Regulations of 1904’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 16, no.1 (1984): 37–46; R.S. Betts, ‘Robert Morant and the Purging of H.M. Inspectorate’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 16, no. 1 (1984): 37–46; T. Taylor, ‘An Early Arrival of the Fascist Mentality: Robert Morant’s rise to power’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 17, no. 2 (1985): 48–62; N.D. Daglish, ‘Robert Morant and Teacher Registration: a war of position?’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 23, no. 2 (1991): 25–37.

⁴⁹O.L. Banks, ‘Morant and the Secondary Schools Regulations of 1904’, British Journal of Educational Studies 33, no. 3 (1954); E. Eaglesham, ‘The Centenary of Sir Robert Morant’, British Journal of Educational Studies 12 (1963): 5.

⁵⁰N.D. Daglish, ‘Robert Morant’s Hidden Agenda? The Origins of the Medical Treatment of School Children’, History of Education 19, no. 2 (1990): 139–48.

⁵¹R. Lowe, ‘Constant Elements in Educational Policy: Morant, Butler and Baker Compared’, History of Education Society Bulletin 61 (1998): 10–14.

⁵²B.C. Bloomfield, ‘Sir James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth (1804–1877): A Trial Bibliography’, British Journal of Educational Studies 9 (1960): 155; B.C. Bloomfield, ‘Sir James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth (1804–1877): A Trial Bibliography – Addenda’, British Journal of Educational Studies 10 (1961): 76; A.M. Ross, ‘Kay-Shuttleworth and the Training of Teachers for Pauper Schools’, British Journal of Educational Studies 15 (1967): 275; H. Sharps, ‘The Educational and Social Content of Kay-Shuttleworth’s Novels’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 13, no. 2 (1981): 1–6; D.G. Paz, ‘Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth: The Man Behind the Myth’, History of Education 14, no. 3 (1985): 185–98.

⁵³See David Crook, ‘Edward Boyle: Conservative Champion of Comprehensives?’, History of Education 22, no. 1 (1993): 267–76; R.S. Betts, ‘Dr Macnamara and the Education Act of 1902’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 25, no. 2 (1993): 111–21; Bill Bailey, ‘James Chuter Ede and the 1944 Education Act’, History of Education 36, no. 3 (1995): 209–22.

⁵⁴Jacob Middleton, ‘Thomas Hopley and mid-Victorian Attitudes to Corporal Punishment’, History of Education 34, no. 6 (2005): 599–615.

⁵⁵Anna Danushevskaya, ‘The Formation of a Renaissance Nobleman: William Cecil, 2^nd Earl of Salisbury 1591–1668’, History of Education 31, no. 6 (2002): 505–20.

⁵⁶Camilla Leach, ‘Advice for Parents and Books for Children: Educational Texts for the Home, 1798–1850’, History of Education Society Bulletin 69 (2002): 49–58.

⁵⁷Middleton, ‘Mid-Victorian Attitudes to Corporal Punishment’, 601, 609.

⁵⁸Philip Gardner, ‘“There and Not Seen”: E.B. Sargant and Educational Reform, 1884–1905’, History of Education 33, no.6 (2004): 609–35.

⁵⁹Op. cit., 634 .

⁶⁰See Catherine Burke, ‘“The School Without Tears”: E.F. O’Neill of Prestolee’, History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 263–75; Ian Grosvenor, ‘From the “Eye of History” to “A Second Gaze”: the Visual Archive and the Marginalized in the History of Education’, History of Education 36, no. 4 (2007): 607–22; Catherine Hall, ‘Making Colonial Subjects: Education in the Eye of Empire’, History of Education 37, no. 6 (2008): 773–87; Kevin Myers, ‘The Hidden History of Refugee Schooling in Britain: The Case of the Belgians, 1914–18’, History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 153–62; Sian Roberts, ‘I Promised Them That I Would Tell England About Them: A Woman’s Teacher Activist’s Life In Popular Humanitarian Education’, Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 1–2 (2010): 155–72.

⁶¹Phil Gardner, ‘“Our Schools”; “Their Schools”. The Case of Eliza Duckworth and John Stevenson’, History of Education 20, no. 3 (1991): 163–86.

⁶²Gardner, ‘The Case of Eliza Duckworth and John Stevenson’, 168–9.

⁶³Ken Plummer, Documents of Life (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 48–77.

⁶⁴James Daybell, ‘Interpreting Letters and Reading Script: Evidence for Female Education and Literacy in Tudor England’, History of Education 34, no. 6 (2005): 695–715.

⁶⁵Norma McMullen, ‘The Education of English Gentlewomen 1540–1640’, History of Education 6, no. 2 (1977): 87–101.

⁶⁶Jim Sharpe, ‘History from Below’, in Burke, ed., New Perspectives, 30.

⁶⁷Stephanie Mathivet, ‘Alice Buckton (1867–1944): The Legacy of a Froebelian in the Landscape of Glastonbury’, History of Education 35, no. 2 (2006): 263–81.

⁶⁸Paz, ‘Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth’, 185–98.

⁶⁹Helen Raptis, ‘Bending the Bars of the Identity Cage: Amy Brown and the Development of Teacher Identity in British Columbia’, History of Education 39, no. 2 (2010): 199–218.

⁷⁰Kay Whitehead, ‘From Youth to “Greatest Pedagogue”: William Cawthorne and the Construction of a Teaching Profession in Mid-nineteenth Century South Australia’, History of Education 28, no. 4 (1999): 395–412.

⁷¹Anne Bloomfield, ‘The Quickening of the National Spirit: Cecil Sharp and the Pioneers of the Folk-dance Revival in English State Schools (1900–26)’, History of Education 30, no. 1 (2001): 59–75.

⁷²E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 91.

⁷³David Smith, ‘Eric James and the “Utopianist” Campus: Biography, Policy and the Building of a New University during the 1960s’, History of Education 37, no. 1 (2008): 23–42.

⁷⁴Richard Aldrich, ‘The New Education and the Institute of Education, University of London, 1919–45’, Paedagogica Historica 45, nos. 4–5 (2009): 485–502.

⁷⁵Jane Martin, ‘Commentary on Susan Isaacs’, Gender and Education 23, no. 2 (2011): 215–18.

⁷⁶Edward J.T. Brennan, ‘Educational Engineering with the Webbs’, History of Education 1, no. 2 (1972): 174–99.

⁷⁷Gaby Weiner, ‘Olive Banks and the Collective Biography of British Feminism’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 29, no. 4 (2008): 404.

⁷⁸Caine, Biography and History, 48.

⁷⁹Linda Eisenmann, ‘Interpreting US Women’s Educational History’, History of Education 30, no. 5 (2001): 453–70.

⁸⁰Ruth Watts, ‘Some Radical Educational Networks of the Late Eighteenth Century and Their Influence’, History of Education 27, no. 2 (1998) 1–14; Peter Cunningham, ‘Innovators, Networks and Structures: Towards a Prosopography of Progressivism’, History of Education 30, no. 5 (2001): 433–51.

⁸¹Lawrence Stone, ‘Prosopography’, Daedalus 100, no. 1 (1971): 46–71.

⁸²Rosemary O’Day ‘Social Change in the History of Education: Perspectives on the Emergence of Learned Professions in England, c.1500–1800’, in Social Change in the History of Education, ed. J. Goodman, G. McCulloch and W. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2008), 7–26.

⁸³Gaby Weiner, ‘Harriet Martineau and her Contemporaries: Past Studies and Methodological Questions on Historical Surveys of Women’, History of Education 29, no. 5 (2000): 389–404.

⁸⁴Elaine Unterhalter, ‘Remembering and Forgetting: Constructions of Education Gender Reform in Autobiography and Policy Texts of the South African Transition’, History of Education 29, no. 5 (2000): 457–72.

⁸⁵Kate Rousmaniere, ‘Being Margaret Haley, Chicago, 1903’, Paedagogica Historica 39, nos. 1–2 (2003): 5–18.

⁸⁶Joyce Goodman, ‘International Citizenship and the International Federation of University Women before 1939’, History of Education 40, no. 6 (2011): 701–21

⁸⁷See K.J. Brehony ‘Lady Astor’s Campaign for Nursery Schools in Britain, 1930–1939: Attempting to Valorize Cultural Capital in a Male-dominated Political Field’, History of Education Quarterly 49 no. 2 (2009): 196–210.

⁸⁸See Jane Martin, Making Socialists: Mary Bridges Adams and the Fight for Knowledge and Power (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

⁸⁹Raphael Samuel, ‘People’s History’, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981), xv–xxxiii.