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THE history of the grammar schools is the story of English civilisation. Yet, by a catastrophic coincidence, they have been destroyed not once, but twice, by the incoming Protestant Parliament in the late 1540s, and by the incoming Labour Parliament in the late 1960s. The second destruction has been called “the greatest political mistake of the 20th century”.
The archetypal royal grammar school is Eton, which has survived both devastations. On October 11, 1440, King Henry VI issued the charter of foundation for the Kings College of our Lady of Eton beside Windsor. In July, the King had paid a personal visit to William of Wykehams college at Winchester, and he appointed William of Waynflete, then the master of Winchester, as the first headmaster of Eton. Just as Winchester had been linked by its founder to New College in Oxford, Eton was linked to Kings College in Cambridge. Wykeham had founded Winchester some 50 years before.
A Victorian scholar, A.F. Leach, has pointed out that Winchester was not all that different from other schools connected to colleges at Oxford or Cambridge, but that it was unique in that for the first time a school was established as a sovereign and independent corporation, existing by and for itself, self-centred, self-controlled. Independence is the backbone of the English grammar schools.
The special position of Eton and Winchester was recognised by the first Parliament of King Edward VI; in 1548 it completed Henry VIIIs destruction of the Church-based welfare system by nationalising the assets of the remaining colleges and chantries. In the confiscation Act of King Edwards first Parliament, only four educational institutions were exempted, the colleges of Eton and Winchester, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Some other schools did survive. Monasteries, chantries and colleges had been dispossessed. But the assets of cathedrals, parishes and town guilds were not directly attacked; they supported their own schools. William Shakespeare had the good fortune to attend the grammar school at Stratford-upon-Avon which was funded by a rather conservative religious town guild. Some schools were refounded; the names of schools, such as King Edwards in Birmingham, commemorate these refoundations. Nevertheless, Edward VIs seizure of the remaining Church assets supporting schools went a long way towards destroying the grammar school system, which took at least a generation to recover.
From the low point of King Edwards reign to the election of the Labour Government in 1964, the grammar schools flourished; their influence spread to America and the rest of the British Empire. Benefactors created new schools.
The difficulties of travel in the pre-railway age made boarding inevitable for boys outside the main cities, but most of the schools had the same financial structure. They were financed by charitable endowments and by fees for the students; they gave scholarships to poor students, selected by patronage or on ability.
John Locke, the philosopher, was nominated for his place at Westminster by a Somerset MP, of the Popham family, who had become a governor of the school when the royalist governors were turned out. Lockes father was Pophams estate agent. Clearly Locke would have qualified on his ability, but he got his place on patronage. By the late 17th century, Eton, Winchester and the two London schools, Westminster and Charterhouse, had gained a special prestige, and attracted aristocratic pupils.
In the late 18th and 19th centuries the social appeal of the leading public schools led to a separation between the two classes of grammar school. Ambitious Victorian headmasters wanted to preside over socially prestigious institutions. The great city grammar schools, such as Manchester, Leeds and Bristol, established academic standards as high as the best public schools, and higher than all but a few. They had close connections with local business, and were often ahead in developing a scientific curriculum. It was the minor public schools which suffered most from Victorian snobbery and the cult of athleticism; the major urban grammar schools were comparatively civilised and rational. Nevertheless, both taught much the same curriculum, and prepared their students for much the same professions, including the Army, Navy and the Church.
Grammar schools provided the bulk of the recruits for those occupations which had less prestige in the Victorian and post-Victorian era, including commerce and journalism. When I was on the Financial Times in the 1950s, I remember being told by an embarrassed hostess, Oh, we dont count the Financial Times as journalism.
In 1964, Labour came to power with a manifesto commitment to abolish the grammar schools, though not the independent public schools. With the surprising concurrence of the Conservatives, who continued the policy from 1970 to 1974, they largely succeeded in their aim. This was the second act of vandalism. Again, as in the Tudor period, many schools survived, some because of benign and reactionary county councils, some because they chose to become independent. In order to solve the problem of selection, which might have been done in many other ways, the English educational tradition was destroyed, mainly by former grammar school boys, such as Harold Wilson.
Something else was destroyed in the 1960s, not just the grammar schools, but their curriculum. The independent grammar schools and the public schools still survive, but they have largely abandoned the old classical curriculum. Education is dominated not by classical learning but by naive utilitarianism.
We owe the old grammar school curriculum directly to the 15th-century Renaissance, and the revival of classical learning. No doubt the Winchester College of 1394 taught some classical subjects, including Church Latin, and disputations in Aristotelian logic. I doubt if they taught Greek; they were preparing students for New College, and ultimately for the Church. The new learning came in with the Greek scholarship of Italy, and was spread by printing; it was led by Erasmus, whose Latin adages were a standard school text for at least two centuries.
The curriculum taught schoolboys how to think, not what to think; how to express themselves, not what to say. This was achieved by teaching Latin and Greek both as languages and literatures. This process formed our English culture. If one glances through the Dictionary of National Biography, one finds that some 90 per cent of the men born between 1500 and 1900 experienced the grammar school curriculum, if not always in its full rigour.
In 1736, an advertisement appeared in the Gentlemans Magazine: At Edial, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen are boarded and taught the Latin and Greek languages by Samuel Johnson. David Garrick, Englands greatest actor, became the schools only celebrated pupil. Johnson once outlined the curriculum he taught; the letter is to be found in Boswells Life. By the time he was ready for university, the pupil should have read Cebes, Aelian, Lucian, Xenophon, Homer, Theocritus and Euripides in Greek, and Terence, Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Nepos, Velleius Paterculus, Virgil, Horace and Phaedrus in Latin. That is a bit more than would be required for A level.
Johnson saw classical literature as a training in expression, which can only be acquired by a daily imitation of the best and correctist authors. For many years he made his living as a journalist; if the BBC were able to send its broadcasters to Edial, there would be no need to establish its new college. Yet the classical education goes far deeper than imitation. The best classicist in Parliament in the past 50 years was Enoch Powell; he had a lethal lucidity in debate. The classical teaching of the grammar schools taught clarity of expression and the logic of words. It provided an unequalled discipline for the mind. Unfortunately grammar has died with the grammar schools.
June 28, 2004 at 08:13 AM in UK | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home