|
|
The scope of education has always been a broad issue and has evoked many
controversial debates about why people should be educated, what is to be taught
and what are the best teaching methods to achieve the required results.
The division in educational ideas, as Rachel Pinder argues in Why don't teachers
teach like they used to? , is,
... rather than a split existing between traditional and
progressive education, the real dichotomy is between the progressive tradition
in education and another tradition: that which is directed at maintaining the
status quo above all other objectives.
The first half of the nineteenth century experienced the excesses of the
industrial revolution, which deeply affected everyone's way of life in the whole
nation. From a feudal and agrarian society this transformed, in the eighteenth
century and continued in particular in the first half of the nineteenth century,
into a democratic and industrial society. This resulted in a break down of the
static class structures with new opportunities creating a new middle class.
W. E. Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Mind asserts that:
When class lines broke down and it became possible as never before to rise in
the world by one's own strenuous efforts, the struggle for success was
complemented by the struggle for rank.
With this radical change in class mobility came either a pessimistic or optimistic outlook. The pessimism arose from those who wanted to maintain the way things were in the 'good old days' where the masses remained illiterate and uneducated in the main. Obviously, for those in power (the ruling class) it was easy to dictate the dominant culture to the uneducated, unorganised and disenfranchised masses. The pessimists believed education was only desirable in the form of religious teaching.
The optimists wanted to change the status quo and the views for educational reform varied from the positive evolutionary effect it would have on society as a whole to the radical beneficial effect education would have on the individual.
These views on the debate toward the uneducated masses can be divided into the Mechanistic and Holistic approaches toward the desirability of education in the first half of the nineteenth century.