Ragged Schools: Growth and Expansion, 1850-1860 by D. H. webster

By 1850, the Ragged School Union had evolved the principles that were to guide it for the next forty years. It had established a successful central organization; it attracted into its service men of the caliber of William Locke, S.R. Stary, and Joseph Gent, who gave unstintingly to the work in hand; it had obtained the services of Lord Ashley, whose active interest promoted the cause of the Union among the wealthy; it had defined its role in relation to a national system of schools. Somewhat optimistically, it observed: Read more…

1850: The Ragged School Union Magazine Address

“Man is surely, of all things in the creation, most interesting to man. It is his intellect and his moral sense—his conscious capacity of an excellence he has never reached— his inward vision of the true, the beautiful, and the good—that invest him with a dignity which belongs to him alone of all earthly beings, and, more than any mere external superiority, mark him as a creature of a higher order, and adapted to nobler ends than the rest, between which and himself there is a wide and inaccessible distance.” Read more…

1849 February: Ragged School Union Magazine; Ragged School Memorials: The Old Stable. No. II

In our last communication, we gave some accounts of the rise, progress, and results of the Ragged School in the Old Stable. These would show the necessity for such institutions, and their adaptation to the wants of these long neglected children of the streets. The reader would at once see, that, in cases not a few, ignorance is the parent of crime, and that the best and most simple means for the moral and physical elevation of such a class is to give them a useful and religious education. Read more…