The English Higher Grade Schools

"This book focuses on the English higher grade schools, a short-lived but remarkable group of institutions that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century. They were a natural development of the successful board schools, which by the 1890s had educated a generation of children and awakened educational aspirations in a class of the population previously excluded from all but the most basic instruction."

"By their very existence, higher grade schools emphasised the notion that extending one's education was a normal thing for children to do. The abolition of the higher grade schools, as well as stunting the school life of the majority of children, conveyed a very clear message about the role they were expected to play in society. The 1902 Education Act, widely applauded by most historians to date, emerges from this analysis as a profoundly retrogressive move, by which much was lost and from which many of the twentieth-century's enduring educational problems stemmed."--Jacket.