Educational History: John Pounds and the Ragged Schools

John Pounds was born on June 17th 1766 and died on January 1st 1839. In his time he did unfathomable amounts of work to improve the lives of many people, particularly children, in the city of Portsmouth. It is arguable that this humble man, ‘the crippled cobbler of Portsmouth’, has played one of the most significant roles in shaping the social and educational landscape of the United Kingdom, and possibly beyond. All because he gave his life over to being a teacher when there were none, and acting true to a selflessness and an altruism which was to go on to inspire people such as Charles Dickens and the Reverend Thomas Guthrie. Read more…

Educational History: The Edinburgh Settlement

The Edinburgh Settlement is a multi-purpose voluntary organisation with a rich history spanning more than 100 years. It is part of the international Settlement movement: a global network of social action centres which work closely with local communities, representing and responding to needs and aspirations, to promote social and environmental justice. Read more…

Educational History: Gramsci and Independent Working Class Education by Colin Waugh

The 1909 ‘strike’ (actually a boycott of specific lectures) by trade union-sponsored students at Ruskin College, in Oxford but not part of the university, is, to my knowledge, unique. As I tried to show in my 2009 pamphlet ‘Plebs’: The Lost Legacy of Independent Working-Class Education, these students, mainly mineworkers and railway-workers – in short, core members of the working class – took on the ruling class, in the shape of an alliance between the Oxford University Extension Delegacy and the Workers’ Educational Association, over the nature of adult education.
Was it to be, as these organisations hoped, a means for producing a compliant layer amongst working-class activists, and thereby for blunting the edge of class struggle? Or was it to be a means by which workers could pursue that struggle more effectively? In the lead-up to the ‘strike’, the students, with former students, organised the League of the ‘Plebs’, and began to put in place a national structure of ‘labour colleges’ (ie part time classes in working-class heartlands), while after it they set up the Central Labour College (in effect an institution for training tutors for those classes) and a publications structure. Read more…

Educational History: Emile Durkheim 1858 to 1917

Emile Durkheim founded the subject of Sociology on a lifetime of study and review of sociological phenomena. He published his “The Division of Labour in Society” in 1893, and his last, “The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life “ in 1912.

Educational History: The Democratic Intellect; Scotland’s Pedagogical Tradition

Scotland’s history in education is much tied to it’s culture. The methodical and logical approach of Scotland’s Parliament House looked to Roman and Continental law which was out of line with the inherited English practice. Even more alien to England was an education system which combined the democracy of the Kirk elders with the intellectualism of the advocates. This made expertise in metaphysics a condition of the open door of social advancement. Read more…

Educational History: Desiderius Erasmus (Gerrit Gerritszoon) 1455 to 1536

“It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity it’s due reverence”

Erasmus was born an illegitimate child in Rotterdam on 27^th October 1466 to Gerard of Gouda – a priest – and Margaret, daughter of a physician of Zevenbergen. His ‘illegitimacy’ troubled him greatly through life and as late as 1516 he sought papal dispensation for the circumstances of his birth.

Great Educator: Leo Tolstoy 1828 to 1910

“I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others. I lost at cards, wasted the substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all were committed by me, not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals to be a comparatively moral man. Such was my life for ten years.”