History of Education

Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2012, 87102

Interpreting biography in the History of Education: past and

present
Jane Martin*

Humanities and Social Sciences, Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK

Epigraph

At the time I began work in university, I entered a world which was leisured,
privileged and patriarchal, in the United Kingdom at least. . .. I came from a world in
which only 3% of the population aspired to university. I belonged to a world in which,
having got where I was through the eleven-plus and A levels, there was almost a
sense that society owed us a living. (Roy Lowe, 20021)

Women were not obviously on the outside when I attended my rst conference a day
conference in 1976 at what was then the Birmingham Polytechnic, now University of
Central England. Many women attended although in the rst years few were keynote
speakers. More importantly there was little about women in the history itself except in
the meetings of the Womens Education Study Group where Carol Dyhouse, June Purvis,
Penny Summereld and Gaby Weiner were all dominant. (Ruth Watts, 20052)

In 1967, aged 11, I moved on from my primary school in south London, and was
selected to enter the local grammar school. I left most of my friends behind and began
a daily routine of walking nervously through the council housing estates in my school
uniform. By the time I left this school, seven years later, it had moved to one of the
more prosperous suburbs of London to avoid being turned into a comprehensive. In
the early twenty-rst century, it is one of the leading academic secondary schools in
the country, which it certainly was not in 1967. (Gary McCulloch, 20073)

Keywords: autobiography; biography; historiography; gender; theory

Introduction
This article begins with a collage of quotations from three past presidents of the
British History of Education Society. All the autobiographical stories turn on
memories of schooling and the academy in the 1960s and 70s. In each case, the
placing of memory in a wider political and cultural milieu allows for the intercon-
nection between personal stories and historical pasts, blending contextual structures
and forces dening individual action and perceptions. Moving from the particular

*Email: j.martin@ioe.ac.uk
1
Roy Lowe, Do We Still Need History of Education: Is it Central or Peripheral? History of
Education 31, no. 6 (2002): 4923.
2
Ruth Watts, Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education, History of Educa-
tion 34, no. 3 (2005): 226.
3
Gary McCulloch, Forty Years On: Presidential Address to the History of Education Soci-
ety, London 4 November 2006, History of Education 36, no. 1 (2007): 6.

ISSN 0046-760X print/ISSN 1464-5130 online

2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2012.641268
http://www.tandfonline.com
88 J. Martin

to the general, the biographical turn4 embedded in the presentation of self during
a presidential address provides an appropriate motif with which to start an article
whose purpose is to map the journal History of Education onto the broader terrain
of the writing of lives. The objective is not to celebrate biography, but to write
about the biographical impulse within historical writing in the 40-year life of a
publication that provides a backdrop to my attempt to practise the historians
craft in time.5
Biography is one of the most successful of publishing genres. I have been
drawn to it, trusting that in the complexity and detail of a unique experience or
place resides essentially resonant universal themes. Historians make history through
the production of knowledge, explanations and interpretation of what has gone
before. I share Hilda Keans commitment to the making of a broader public history
about previous times, to the telling of individual and collective pasts in a way that
is accessible without being condescending.6 In common with the late Raphael Sam-
uel, my interest goes beyond command of institutionalised, archival sources. I am
concerned with the unofcial sources of historical knowledge and the ways these
are affected by ideas of progress and loss.7 Offered in the spirit of conversation,
embedded in these reections is the question of what counts as history. My interpre-
tation and the cases selected inevitably reect aspects of my personal life and expe-
rience.
Looking at the titles and content of articles as we took over the editorship of
History of Education in 2004, Joyce Goodman and I noted journal contributions
that focus on the relationship between education and particular social groups convey
the impression that biographical research has certainly been emphasised.8 Changing
ideas regarding the role of biography for historians who seek to engage the educa-
tional past was something Roy Lowe covered in his presidential address.9 Because
his auto/biographical practices10 raise questions about the various possible
approaches to the past, thinking forward from Lowes account is a useful starting
point for an attempt to take stock now.

4
Many scholars now talk of a biographical turn in the humanities and social sciences see e.
g. Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat and Tom Wengref, eds, The Turn to Biographical
Methods in Social Science (London: Verso, 2000); Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, Women
and Education (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).
5
Marc Bloch, The Historians Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008 edi-
tion). My rst article was in History of Education when Roy Lowe was editor. See Jane
Martin, Hard-headed and Large-hearted: Women and the Industrial Schools, 18701885,
History of Education, 20, no. 3 (1991): 187203.
6
Hilda Kean, London Stories: Personal Lives, Public Histories (London: Rivers Oram Press,
2004).
7
Quoted in Kean, London Stories, 8.
8
Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin, Editorial: History of Education dening a eld,
History of Education 33, no. 1 (2004): 110.
9
Lowe, Do We Still Need History of Education, 492.
10
Liz Stanley uses the term auto/ biography to describe a range of research methods drawing
on individual memory, both biographical and autobiographical. The insertion of a solidus is
shorthand for the blurred boundaries between the individual and the collective, conscious/
unconscious, the messiness of lived experience when thinking about the production of self-
narratives. See, for example, Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Prac-
tice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).
 History of Education 89

Then
Roy Lowe came of age intellectually as the history from below debate was raging
in association with liberationist political movements. Historians pushed into new
territories to understand the historical experiences of the common people as a cor-
rective to a blinkered view of the world that excluded subordinate or invisible
groups and in deliberate reaction to the traditional way of doing history, which sees
itself as objective, the historians task to give readers the facts.11 Lowe offers an
insider perspective on the new history with its philosophical foundation that per-
ception of reality is constructed culturally or socially, subject to variation over time
as well as in space. As the historians universe expanded so did problems of deni-
tion, problems of sources and problems of explanation. Peter Burke argues this
position in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, describing a crisis in historical
consciousness and criticising the conventional view of a historian seeking truth
and objectivity, which assumes there was consensus amongst historians about
what evidence is.12
Remembering the coming of mass higher education, the rise of semesterisation
and of modular courses, Lowe traces a steady collapse in consensus about what con-
stituted the core of an honours history course (essentially concerned with national
history and high politics) and methodology, highlighting the change from a time
when a grounding in the written record in national and county record repositories
was seen as part of the necessary apprenticeship which any self-respecting historian
had to pass through . . . posited on the sure knowledge that the written record was
the fundamental and the yardstick.13 There was attention to interdisciplinary insights
especially from sociology and ethnography, opening up the possibility of a more
social history of schooling and other forms of educational history concerned with the
lives of minorities and of marginal and disempowered groups.14 In addition, inu-
encing an alternative and radical tradition to discuss, for example, the struggle for
power at the level of the schools (and the family) in the communities they serve.15
Quite rightly, Lowe reports the impact of Marxism both as a theoretical
approach and as an intellectual inuence. Kevin Brehony wrote an article exploring
the role of sociology and social theory in a selection of Brian Simons groundbreak-
ing historical writing on education.16 Brehony isolates some conceptual issues, nota-
bly Simons use of concepts like social class and ideology and Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramscis suggestions, relating to hegemony and the role of civil society
underlining the importance of education as a site of struggle. Simon developed a
more critical way of writing about state education policy and policy-making than

11
See Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991).
12
Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001 edi-
tion), 217.
13
Lowe, Do We Still Need History of Education?
14
See Harold Silver, Aspects of Neglect: The Strange Case of Victorian Popular Education,
Oxford Review of Education 3, no. 1 (1977): 5769.
15
See David Rubinstein, School Attendance in London, 18701904: A Social History (Hull:
University of Hull, 1969); Phillip McCann, ed., Popular Education and Socialization in the
Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1977); Gerald Grace, Teachers, Ideology and
Control (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
16
Kevin J. Brehony, Education as a Social Function: Sociology and Social Theory in the
Histories of Brian Simon, History of Education, 33, no. 5 (2004): 54558.
90 J. Martin

the more conservative form of orthodox political science concerned with centres of
government,17 what Gary McCulloch calls a peoples history of education.18
Taking the popular standpoint, his interest lies in grassroots politics, with the labour
movement as an active force. Driven by a belief in human educability, what
Godfrey Thomson called the social solidarity of the whole nation was of primary
signicance for Simon, underpinning his afrmation of the comprehensive ideal (as
author, teacher, activist), with popular struggles as a principle of movement in the
development of common education over several centuries.19
If Simons diverse but substantial oeuvre remains an exception within British
historiography of education, the concerns of historians changed very fast in the
1960s and 1970s.20 Breaking out of the conservatism that Lowe describes, history
of education as a eld of study became various. The rise of the new histories,
including microhistory (study of the past on a very small scale), womens history,
black history and post-colonial history, is part of the story. So is the decline of
large-scale historical theories and accounts such as Marxism. Gradually, the pre-
eminence of class division gave way to concerns about categories that intersect with
class boundaries, including gender, race, sexuality and disability.21 The substance
of historical materials expanded as historians sought to encapsulate everyday lives
and experiences, recognising the many different historical narratives produced at
any one time, all of which are contingent on the places in which people lived.
17
See his four studies in the history of education. Brian Simon, Two Nations and the Educa-
tional Structure, 17801870 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1960); Brian Simon, Education
and the Labour Movement, 18701920 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965); Brian Simon,
The Politics of Educational Reform, 19201940 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974); Brian
Simon, Education and the Social Order (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991).
18
Gary McCulloch, A Peoples History of Education: Brian Simon, the British Communist
Party and Studies in the History of Education, 17801870, History of Education. 39, no. 4
(2010): 43757.
19
Quoted by Brian Simon, A Seismic Change: Process and Interpretation, in Afrming the
Comprehensive Ideal, ed. R. Pring and G. Walford (London and New York: RoutledgeFal-
mer, 1997), 27.
20
See John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England (London:
Methuen, 1973); John Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 18601918
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
21
For gender see Ruth Watts, Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education,
History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 22541; Ruth Watts, Appendix: Gender Articles
in History of Education since 1976, History of Education 34, no. 6 (2005): 68994. For
race see Ian Grosvenor, From the Eye of History to a Second Gaze: the Visual
Archive and the Marginalized in the History of Education, History of Education 36, nos.
45 (2007): 60722. For disability see Patrick Devlieger, Ian Grosvenor, Frank Simon,
Geert Van Hove and Bruno Vanobbergen, Visualizing Disability in the Past, Paedagogica
Historica 44, no. 6 (2008): 74760; F. Armstrong, Disability, Education and Social
Change in England since 1960, History of Education, 36, no. 4 (2007): 55168; Richard
Altenbaugh, Where are the Disabled in the History of Education? The Impact of Polio on
Sites of Learning, History of Education 35, no. 6 (2006): 70530. I found nothing to
indicate the inuence of queer theory and little attention to sexuality unless within work
on sex education, health and welfare. See David Limond, I Never Imagined That The
Time Would Come: Martin Cole, the Growing Up Controversy and the Limits of School
Sex Education in 1970s England, History of Education 37, no. 3 (2008): 40930; Lesley
Hall, It was Affecting the medical profession: The History of Masturbatory Insanity
Revisited, History of Education 39, no. 6 (2003): 685700; Franz Eder, Diskurs und
Sexualpdagogik: der deutchsprachige Onanie-Diskurs des spten 18. Jahrhunderts, Paeda-
gogica Historica 39, no. 6 (2003): 71936.
 History of Education 91

With this fracturing of certainties (e.g. as grand narratives came under question
in the late 1960s and more especially with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the
course of the 1980s) Roy Lowe recalls the parallel collapse of the great man
school of the history of education. Womens history and gender history both speak
to the political feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. In the UK, Sheila Rowbotham
was a distinguished exponent, shaping questions to address the politics of womens
situation, developing approaches to research that would validate and value the reali-
ties of womens lives and womens thought.22 She played a major part in organising
the rst National Womens Liberation conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in
1970 when groups from across Britain met to address the challenges facing women
and to establish a series of demands to combat social and cultural inequalities.
Rowbotham remained central to the intellectual developments of the UK womens
movement and, along with others, she helped to popularise personal accounts in the
writing of feminist history, using the once marginal theoretical framework of
gender.23
Feminist historians like Ruth Watts met at conferences where they discussed the
ramications of discrimination, dissecting the nineteenth centurys construction of
gender, rediscovering political foremothers (in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft
and others), investigating the educational experience of women, the forgotten major-
ity in virtually every society.24 Womens history and gender history offer an engage-
ment with the politics of history that operates on two levels. First, it constitutes a
challenge to traditional history through recognition that those overlooked by poster-
ity partook nonetheless in the making of history. Second, the insistence on making
women and gender central to social analysis seeks to address fundamental misun-
derstandings within the scholarly canon, promoting a more inclusive knowledge
base.
Equally, these points of departure apply to the history of biography. Indeed,
Joyce Goodman situates her use of educational biography in a critique of gendered
assumptions, raising questions about a historiography of founding fathers, to inter-
polate writer and translator Sarah Austin into the story of English campaigns for a
national system of popular education in the 1830s and 1840s.25 In this vein, Philip
Gardner sums up the contrast between the old and the new educational biography.

The rst, and far older, tradition settles its sights upon the elevated world of the great
educational policy-maker or the mould-breaking administrator. The second approach,
associated chiey with the progressive turn to social theory and to feminist analysis in
the later decades of the twentieth century, looks instead to the educational experiences
and aspirations of broader social constituencies, most obviously organized labour and

22
See Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1972); Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Womens Oppression and the
Fight Against It (London: Pluto Press, 1973); Sheila Rowbotham, Womans Consciousness,
Mans World (London: Pelican Books, 1973).
23
See Stephanie Spencer, Guest Editorial: Educational administration, History and Gender
as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis, Journal of Educational Administration and
History 42, no. 2 (2010): 10513.
24
See Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up In Late Victorian and Edwardian England
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), for a classic text.
25
Joyce Goodman, A Historiography of Founding Fathers? Sarah Austin (17931867) and
English Comparative Education, History of Education 31, no. 5 (2002): 42535.
92 J. Martin

women and, in particular in relation to schooling itself, classroom teachers, school

pupils and parents.26

Although Roy Lowe confessed he found it slightly ironic that there is a risk that
this great men school within history of education may be replaced by a great
women school as historians strive to establish the contribution made by women to
educational advance, despite all the long-held reservations about biographical
approaches to our eld (emphasis added).27 The sceptic saw a genre that was to
some extent not quite proper academic history.

Now
In a recent work exploring the place of biography within past and present historical
writing, Barbara Caine notes nineteenth-century writers who were entirely comfort-
able with the equation of personal and social history.28 In Britain, she cites the
example of Thomas Carlyles self-condent assertion that the history of mankind is
the history of its great men: to nd out these, clean the dirt from them, and place
them on their proper pedestals.29 Barbara Tuchman notes that the Greek philoso-
pher Plutarch used biography for moral purposes: to display the reward of duty
performed, the traps of ambition, the fall of arrogance.30
By 1900, a desire to professionalise history troubled historical method, encour-
aging a view of disciplinary practice as the collecting and reading of documents
which explained legal and political developments.31 Caine sees a defensiveness of
tone among those advocating the study of lives against scholars who concerned
themselves with the underlying structures governing human history. She quotes
from the lectures and essays of Herbert Buttereld, British historian and philosopher
of history, to support the point:

The genesis of historical events lies in human beings. The real birth of ideas takes
place in human brains. The reason why this happens is that human beings have vital-
ity. From the historians point of view it is this that makes the world go round. . ..
Economic factors, nancial situations, war, political crises, do not cause anything, do
not do anything, and do not exist except as abstract terms and convenient pieces of
shorthand. . .. It is men who make history.32

Writing in very different ways from Buttereld, E.H. Carr cautions against exagger-
ating the role of the individual too much in what would become one of the most
widely read of the general discussions of the nature of history, What is History?.
Stressing the importance of structures and of people in the mass, any historical
justication for the resurrection of an obscure gure from the past, Carr suggests,

26
Philip Gardner, There and Not Seen: E.B. Sargant and Educational Reform, 18841905,
History of Education 33, no. 6 (2004): 609.
27
Lowe, Do we Still Need History of Education, 49.
28
Barbara Caine, Biography and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 23.
29
Quoted in Marc Pachter, The Biographer Himself: An Introduction in Telling Lives: the
Biographers Art, ed. M. Pachter (Washington: New Republic Books, 1979), 11.
30
Barbara W. Tuchman, Biography as Prism of History, in Pachter, Telling Lives, 133.
31
Caine, Biography and History, 16.
32
Quoted in Caine, Biography and History, 21.
 History of Education 93

must rest upon the ground of historical signicance and not upon mere antiquarian
or sentimental interest.33
Yet, despite this, a move away from structuralist approaches and explanations in
all the social sciences is important in accounting for the increasing numbers of his-
torians who have turned to biography in the last 30 years. This is not to say that
Marxist historians had no interest in biography. While concerned primarily with
questions of social structure and development, Marxs statement, Men do make
their own history, but they do not do it just as they please; they do not make it
under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly given
and transmitted in the past34 has been very inuential. Indeed, Brian Simon was
not immune to the autobiographical impulse himself. Toward the end of his life, he
produced an autobiography, A Life in Education, which directed the readers atten-
tion away from the study of the personal, centring on the historical period through
which he lived to make sense of a lifetimes activity.35

Changing biographical practice

Explaining a little of my biographical study of a (nowadays) virtually unknown
woman, Mary Bridges Adams,36 I said that I started from support of C. Wright
Millss vision of the sociological imagination.37 I wrote this as a way of convey-
ing my interest in capturing the interaction of individual and historical pasts (at the
level of the wider society of which that individual is a part), exploring how the
private informs the public and vice versa. This approach was central to Carolyn
Steedmans path-breaking work, Landscape for a Good Woman, which looked at
working-class women within their own social worlds. Interweaving elements of her
own and her mothers biography, in the 1950s and 1920s respectively, she gendered
the dominant interpretive devices of contemporary cultural studies (whereby the
traditional historical class perspective validates and values the accomplishments of
men) to show working-class women contesting, circumventing and undermining the
many setbacks and disadvantages placed upon them.38
British sociologist Liz Stanley similarly is concerned with analysing accounts in
connection with wider social structures and processes. She uses the composite term
auto/biography to encompass a range of methods drawing on individual memory,
both biographical and autobiographical, probing discursive constructions of selfhood
and identity in relation to notions of performativity through the cultural mappings
of a particular space and time.39 For example, Joan W. Scott frames the individual
in history as a site on which political and cultural contests are enacted to exam-
ine the nature and meaning of individual lives and the cultural network or larger
community of which the individual is a part.40
33
E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).
34
Matt Perry, Marxism and History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), 9.
35
Brian Simon, A Life in Education (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998).
36
Jane Martin, Reections on Writing a Biographical Account of a Woman Educator Activ-
ist, History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 16376.
37
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 12.
38
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago, 1986).
39
Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 10.
40
Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999), 32.
94 J. Martin

For Stanley, the idea that writing someone elses life could be kept completely
separate from writing ones own is problematical. Expressing the intertextuality of
autobiography and biography through the term the auto/biographical I, the I
denotes the active, inquiring presence of researchers in constructing, rather than
discovering knowledge. Stanley argues that to produce what she calls account-
able knowledge the researcher must make clear his, or her, own intellectual biog-
raphy. She challenges the idea that we can split the production of new knowledge
from the experience and/or standpoint of the researcher. Far from claiming the abil-
ity to gain access to the real person or to know facts that cannot be objects of per-
ception to her, Stanley likens biographical study to looking through a kaleidoscope.
With each shake, you see something different, even if the congurations remain the
same. The relations between writer and reader, author and subject lie at the heart of
auto/biography as method. The writer/speaker, the researcher and author, are
certainly not treated as transparent or dead, but very much alive as agents actively
at work in the textual production process.41
In History in Practice, Ludmilla Jordanova makes the claim that biography has
the capacity to cut across a number of different kinds of historical elds and
approaches, offering a form of history which she terms holistic history. For Jorda-
nova, taking a person as the unit of analysis is to adopt a quite particular historical
approach, which emphasizes individual agency and sees the individual as a point at
which diverse historical forces converge, while taking the span of life as a natural
period of time.42 In her work, Barbara Tuchman characterises this approach as using
biography as a vehicle for exhibiting an age, useful because it encompasses the
universal in the particular . . . a focus that allows both the writer to narrow his eld
to manageable dimensions and the reader to more easily comprehend the subject.43
Exploring the relationships that have developed over time between education
and the wider society, in the United States, Barbara Finkelstein shares Jordanovas
sense of the importance of biography. Biography, she argues, is to history what a
telescope is to the stars.44 With regard to the educational past, concludes Finkel-
stein, biographical studies provide a documentary context within which to judge
the relative power of material and ideological circumstances, the meaning of educa-
tion policy, the utility of schooling, the denition of literacy and the relationship
between teaching and learning and policy and practice.45
In History of Education, we see biographical approaches embedded within
articles covering the mid-fteenth century to the recent past. Authors utilise any
form of writing that includes a construction of the self (diaries, memoirs, letters,
autobiography and biography, travel writing), oral testimony, photographs and mate-
rial objects. However, what lessons might this reading provide of how historians of

41
British Sociological Association Auto/Biography Study Group joining leaet (1995) quoted
in Liz Stanley From Self-Made Women to Womens Made Selves?, in Feminism and
Autobiography: Texts, Theories and Methods, ed. T. Cosslett, C. Lury and P. Summereld
(London: Routledge, 2000), 41.
42
Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), 41.
43
Tuchman, Biography as a Prism of History, 134.
44
Barbara Finkelstein, Revealing Human Agency: The Uses of Biography in the Study of
Educational History, in Writing Educational Biography: Explorations in Qualitative
Research, ed. C. Kridel (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
45
Finkelstein, Revealing Human Agency, 45, 59.
 History of Education 95

education handle biography and new biographical subjects? What models of

biography do they use? What are the emergent themes and concerns?

New biographical subjects

Writing about the relationship between economic and education history, Michael
Sanderson uses the older tradition of educational biography to illustrate his
argument about the desirability of each eld being informed by the other. Dening
their disciplinary agendas, he suggests the historian inclines to the empirical, the
narrative and the analysis of policy, with an emphasis on motive and intention.46
Appreciation of the need for education history is demonstrated by attention to Sir
James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworths expansion of the role of the state in public
education in the 1830s and 1840s. Second, Sir Robert Morants determination to
eliminate the Higher Grade Schools proving a form of working-class secondary
education in the 1900s and third, Sir David Eccless halt to the development of the
Secondary Technical Schools in the 1950s. Individually and collectively, he argues
that these policy stories provide essential mental baggage for a fuller understand-
ing of contemporary issues such as the desirability (or not) of selective education
and grammar schools as vehicles of social mobility.47
To pursue Sandersons point, a quick search on exe libris, the UK History of
Education Societys online bibliography of articles published in the leading histori-
cal journals founded or edited in the British Isles between 1939 and 2008, shows
the legacy of Robert Morant deeply woven into the historiography of English
education. Ten articles had his name in the title. The Journal of Educational
Administration and History published six,48 the British Journal of Educational
Studies published two,49 and the History of Education published one,50 as did the
History of Education Society Bulletin.51 Of the other great men to whom Sander-
son refers, ve articles focused on aspects of Kay-Shuttleworths life and work,

46
Michael Sanderson, Education and Economic History: The Good Neighbours, History of
Education 36, no. 4 (2007): 4295.
47
See Melissa Benn, School Wars: the Battle for Britains Education (London: Verso, 2011).
48
P. Gordon, The Holmes-Morant Circular of 1911: A Note, Journal of Educational
Administration and History 10 (1978): 3640; N.D. Daglish, The MorantChulalongkorn
Affair of 18934, Journal of Educational Administration and History 15, no. 2 (1983):
1623; R.A. Lowe, Robert Morant and the Secondary School Regulations of 1904, Journal
of Educational Administration and History 16, no.1 (1984): 3746; R.S. Betts, Robert
Morant and the Purging of H.M. Inspectorate, Journal of Educational Administration and
History 16, no. 1 (1984): 3746; T. Taylor, An Early Arrival of the Fascist Mentality:
Robert Morants rise to power, Journal of Educational Administration and History 17, no.
2 (1985): 4862; N.D. Daglish, Robert Morant and Teacher Registration: a war of posi-
tion?, Journal of Educational Administration and History 23, no. 2 (1991): 2537.
49
O.L. Banks, Morant and the Secondary Schools Regulations of 1904, British Journal of
Educational Studies 33, no. 3 (1954); E. Eaglesham, The Centenary of Sir Robert Morant,
British Journal of Educational Studies 12 (1963): 5.
50
N.D. Daglish, Robert Morants Hidden Agenda? The Origins of the Medical Treatment of
School Children, History of Education 19, no. 2 (1990): 13948.
51
R. Lowe, Constant Elements in Educational Policy: Morant, Butler and Baker Compared,
History of Education Society Bulletin 61 (1998): 1014.
96 J. Martin

three in the British Journal of Educational Studies with one apiece in the Journal
of Educational Administration and History and History of Education.52
Many journal articles describe the roles, attitudes and careers of individuals, and
reect a view that individual actors can and do have a signicance of their own
beyond the impersonal forces that were once reckoned by many to be the real driv-
ers of historical change. While a content analysis of article titles suggests powerful
men continue to dominate (aristocrats, administrators, politicians and bureaucrats
and a smattering of trade union leaders),53 we see those who represent the losers of
a particular era also. Jacob Middletons treatment of the trial and conviction of an
obscure nineteenth-century teacher, Thomas Hopley, for the manslaughter of one of
the pupils attending his school in Eastbourne, England, is one such example.54 We
can learn a lot from less obvious subjects such as Hopley. Arguably, his self-
representation in the public sphere and the associated media coverage offers greater
insight into cultural stereotypes regarding the character of Victorian schools and
those who taught in them, than studying those who just happened to get further in
career terms.
Parents are not common subjects for biographical approaches to the educational
past. My analysis showed they populate particular spaces addressing themes of
informal learning, discipline and school attendance. Anna Danushevskaya worked
from family letters to reconstruct a story of paternal concern for the education of a
child in early modern England.55 The correspondence concerns the upbringing and
education of William Cecil, 2nd Earl of Salisbury, at elite Westminster and Sher-
borne Schools and St Johns, Cambridge, followed by the Grand Tour. Camilla
Leach has brought to light the work and writing of Quaker women producing edu-
cational texts for the home in the rst half of the nineteenth century.56 The mothers
perspective is missing from discussion of the Eastbourne Manslaughter case, but
we discover that the father of the pupil who died, Reginald Cancellor, gave permis-
sion for his son to be physically punished, and that he subsequently died before
Hopleys trial (allegedly of a broken heart).57
Philip Gardner takes a historical gure whose public action bridges the conven-
tional downward and upward models of biography and troubles traditional
52
B.C. Bloomeld, Sir James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth (18041877): A Trial Bibliogra-
phy, British Journal of Educational Studies 9 (1960): 155; B.C. Bloomeld, Sir James
Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth (18041877): A Trial Bibliography Addenda, British Journal of
Educational Studies 10 (1961): 76; A.M. Ross, Kay-Shuttleworth and the Training of
Teachers for Pauper Schools, British Journal of Educational Studies 15 (1967): 275; H.
Sharps, The Educational and Social Content of Kay-Shuttleworths Novels, Journal of
Educational Administration and History 13, no. 2 (1981): 16; D.G. Paz, Sir James Kay-
Shuttleworth: The Man Behind the Myth, History of Education 14, no. 3 (1985): 18598.
53
See David Crook, Edward Boyle: Conservative Champion of Comprehensives?, History
of Education 22, no. 1 (1993): 26776; R.S. Betts, Dr Macnamara and the Education Act
of 1902, Journal of Educational Administration and History 25, no. 2 (1993): 11121; Bill
Bailey, James Chuter Ede and the 1944 Education Act, History of Education 36, no. 3
(1995): 20922.
54
Jacob Middleton, Thomas Hopley and mid-Victorian Attitudes to Corporal Punishment,
History of Education 34, no. 6 (2005): 599615.
55
Anna Danushevskaya, The Formation of a Renaissance Nobleman: William Cecil, 2nd
Earl of Salisbury 15911668, History of Education 31, no. 6 (2002): 50520.
56
Camilla Leach, Advice for Parents and Books for Children: Educational Texts for the
Home, 17981850, History of Education Society Bulletin 69 (2002): 4958.
57
Middleton, Mid-Victorian Attitudes to Corporal Punishment, 601, 609.
 History of Education 97

approaches to life writing.58 Probing the binary between the analytically separate
poles of policy and practice, Gardner uses a vignette from the career of Edmund
Beale Sargant to investigate this distinction further. First, he looks at Sargants
endeavours as founder of a short-lived experimental school in Londons East End,
followed by the ways in which Sargant built on his practical experiences of teachers
and teaching in his plans for educational reconstruction in South Africa in the
1900s. Stressing the place of personality and personal agency in giving shape to
the past, Gardner argues that many of Sargants ideas, formulated in the 1880s/
90s, became widely accepted in subsequent policy thinking associated with Sir
Robert Morant. Reconstructing the policy biography of Morants reform of the
pupil-teacher system from 1903 onwards, conclusions drawn demonstrate that the
two men (who knew each other personally) shared many of the same ideas . . .
though Sargants interpretation of them was always of a more liberal, generous and
socially adventurous stamp.59
As I suggested earlier, there is much greater variety of biographical subjects
now. We see the stories of ordinary teachers and activist educators, which Cather-
ine Burke, Ian Grosvenor, Catherine Hall, Kevin Myers, Sian Roberts and others
have brought to light.60 Another article by Philip Gardner was absorbing for the
way it rescues the story of Eliza Duckworth, the keeper of a working-class private
school in Birmingham, England, and John Stevenson, Chief Superintendent of the
Birmingham Attendance Department.61 Elizas words survive in correspondence to
the Board of Education, as she fought to protect her livelihood in the wake of legal
proceedings brought against the parents of three children attending her school.
Nonetheless, we can only extrapolate the parental voice from that of their defence
at the ensuing trial and the memories of former pupils at Miss Duckworths school
collected by the author. Gardner also cites the views of two working-class fathers
who gave evidence before the Cross Commission on Elementary Education in
1887. Their loyalty was to the new state schools. Both favoured a comprehensive
system of education without any class distinction and believed they represented the
views of the majority of working men.62

Writing educational biography: change and continuity

Examining the place of biography in History of Education, we see a genre that
holds out the possibility of exploring the origins of ideas, provides a vehicle for
58
Philip Gardner, There and Not Seen: E.B. Sargant and Educational Reform, 18841905,
History of Education 33, no.6 (2004): 60935.
59
Op. cit., 634 .
60
See Catherine Burke, The School Without Tears: E.F. ONeill of Prestolee, History of
Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 26375; Ian Grosvenor, From the Eye of History to A Sec-
ond Gaze: the Visual Archive and the Marginalized in the History of Education, History of
Education 36, no. 4 (2007): 60722; Catherine Hall, Making Colonial Subjects: Education
in the Eye of Empire, History of Education 37, no. 6 (2008): 77387; Kevin Myers, The
Hidden History of Refugee Schooling in Britain: The Case of the Belgians, 191418, His-
tory of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 15362; Sian Roberts, I Promised Them That I Would
Tell England About Them: A Womans Teacher Activists Life In Popular Humanitarian
Education, Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 12 (2010): 15572.
61
Phil Gardner, Our Schools; Their Schools. The Case of Eliza Duckworth and John
Stevenson, History of Education 20, no. 3 (1991): 16386.
62
Gardner, The Case of Eliza Duckworth and John Stevenson, 1689.
98 J. Martin

analysing social choices and alternative possibilities, a window through which to

observe the nature of social change and a way to explore intersections between
human agency and social structures. I have chosen examples that speak to these
possibilities and illustrate the changing concerns of those writing histories of the
educational past.
Biographical articles in the History of Education reect a general chronological
bias toward the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the role of
the individual in relation to institutional forms of education. Exceptions include
James Daybells utilisation of Tudor womens letters (what Ken Plummer calls
objects of biography)63 as evidence for female education and literacy.64 Daybell
builds on the work of Norma McMullen, writing in the late 1970s, who used bio-
graphical evidence to paint a picture of female education in the period 1560 to
1640. Based on an examination of the unpublished journal of Lady Grace Mildmay
and Lucy Aspley Hutchinsons unnished autobiography, McMullen showed the
general procedure did not change with regard to educational setting (the household),
age, method of instruction or subjects taught (in order to be a good wife and
mother) over the 80-year time span.65 For the most part women were excluded from
the landscape of male learning (the grammar schools, universities and Inns of
Court) so the historian of female education in early modern England is deprived of
institutional records, making the employment of varied materials a necessity. To be
sure, historians of women, in common with social and economic historians, are
used to employing types of documentation that have the advantage of the fact that
its compilers were not deliberately and consciously recording for posterity.66
While the general emphasis is on the presentation of a work-life history, concern
with an inner life is evident in Stephanie Mathivets interpretation of the legacy of
little-known Froebelian Alice Buckton, situated in the spiritual and cultural
landscape of Glastonbury Tor.67 Another example is D.G. Pazs analysis of British
politician and educationist Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, which shows how private
and public lives are connected.68 Identity and social action is central to Helen
Raptiss study of how Amy (Brown) Dauphinee constructed her teaching identity
and pushed gender boundaries in the context of British Columbia in 1939.69
Kay Whitehead suggests the development of teaching as a profession has
remained a constant theme in the shifting sands of history of education research.
Troubling the gendered assumptions that put men at the core of the teaching profes-
sion, while failing to recognise either male teachers or the concept of profession
as gendered categories that require analysis, she shows what a new awareness of
gender can do to the conventional account. Her source is the diary South Australian
William Anderson Cawthorne kept of his journey into manhood in the period 1842

63
Ken Plummer, Documents of Life (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 4877.
64
James Daybell, Interpreting Letters and Reading Script: Evidence for Female Education
and Literacy in Tudor England, History of Education 34, no. 6 (2005): 695715.
65
Norma McMullen, The Education of English Gentlewomen 15401640, History of
Education 6, no. 2 (1977): 87101.
66
Jim Sharpe, History from Below, in Burke, ed., New Perspectives, 30.
67
Stephanie Mathivet, Alice Buckton (18671944): The Legacy of a Froebelian in the Land-
scape of Glastonbury, History of Education 35, no. 2 (2006): 26381.
68
Paz, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, 18598.
69
Helen Raptis, Bending the Bars of the Identity Cage: Amy Brown and the Development
of Teacher Identity in British Columbia, History of Education 39, no. 2 (2010): 199218.
 History of Education 99

to 1846 when he was a classroom teacher in his mothers school. Within four years
he had earned a reputation as one of the colonys leading schoolmasters and was
able to play an important role in education decision-making as the state school
system was established. Among the points that Whitehead examines from his life
story are the links between class, masculinity and the professional foundation upon
which public education in the colony of South Australia could be built.70
In 2001, Anne Bloomeld told the story of teacher training inspector Cecil
Sharp, the driving force behind the English folk-dance revival that reached its prac-
tical apogee in state schools in the years leading up to and immediately after the
First World War.71 Showing the link between narrative identity at the level of the
individual and at the level of the nation, Bloomeld utilises the concepts of network
theory to probe a further relationship between voluntary and state action. Clearly
demonstrating the motivation, response and perpetuation of revivalist folk-art by
people like Sharp supports E.J. Hobsbawms argument that education was a power-
ful element in spreading nationalism, often inventing tradition used by the state.72
David Smith invokes the recent past, using biography as a lens through which
to view the coalescence of higher education policy, ideology and institutional his-
tory.73 The 1960s expansion of English higher education, the vision of a new insti-
tution for a new scientic and technological age, articulating the relationship
between education and democracy, is explored through an evaluation of the contri-
bution of Eric James, rst vice-chancellor of the University of York.
Richard Aldrich also goes beyond institutional history-making to investigate the
links between ideas, institutions and people.74 In this case, elements of educational
progressivism in Britain, the New Education and the transformation of knowledge,
explored within the institutional context of the Institute of Education, University of
London in the period 19191945, focusing upon the contributions of John Adams,
Percy Nunn, Susan Isaacs and Fred Clarke. Aldrich shows Nunn and Clarke were
advocates of freedom in education, and in society more broadly, but their concepts
of freedom were construed in signicantly different ways and contexts.
Telling Susan Isaacss life story speaks to the gendered practices of self-invention,
professional cultures of the past. An intellectual woman worker who made a substan-
tial contribution to public life she was also that much more acceptable thing, a teacher
of women training to teach young children. Nonetheless, Isaacs encountered many
setbacks and disadvantages because of her sex. She did not obtain a readership as
Head of the newly formed Department of Child Development at the Institute of Edu-
cation. Her pay was low, she had to make a personal plea for some secretarial help
and never obtained the hoped-for grant to establish a laboratory in the form of a

70
Kay Whitehead, From Youth to Greatest Pedagogue: William Cawthorne and the Con-
struction of a Teaching Profession in Mid-nineteenth Century South Australia, History of
Education 28, no. 4 (1999): 395412.
71
Anne Bloomeld, The Quickening of the National Spirit: Cecil Sharp and the Pioneers of
the Folk-dance Revival in English State Schools (190026), History of Education 30, no. 1
(2001): 5975.
72
E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 91.
73
David Smith, Eric James and the Utopianist Campus: Biography, Policy and the Build-
ing of a New University during the 1960s, History of Education 37, no. 1 (2008): 2342.
74
Richard Aldrich, The New Education and the Institute of Education, University of Lon-
don, 191945, Paedagogica Historica 45, nos. 45 (2009): 485502.
100 J. Martin

nursery school or the appointment of an assistant lecturer to enable the course to

expand. Only in her nal year did she have a telephone in her ofce.75
In addition to emphases on the individual life, we also see attention to group lives,
including marriage, in the analysis of the partnership of Beatrice and Sidney Webb.76
As Gaby Weiner notes, various designations have been made of the term collective
biography, so called because it focuses on the lives of a number of individuals who
share a particular characteristic that is of interest to the biographer. It therefore allows
the possibility both of illuminating individual lives, and of gaining an insight into a
specic area of activity or eld.77 Acknowledging the difculty of nding a hard-
and-fast denition, Barbara Caine suggests that we think of collective biography as a
continuum. With individual studies which are grouped together to make up a collec-
tive whole (like dictionaries of national biography) at one end, to those works in
which the primary subject is a group of people and which focus on the interactions
and shared experiences of its members, at the other end.78 In 2001, Linda Eisenmann
expertly explained how one specialised collection of biographical studies, The Histor-
ical Dictionary of Womens Education in the United States, might provide raw mate-
rial on which to build new interpretive frameworks of womens educational history.79
Ruth Watts and Peter Cunningham have argued the importance of examining
familial, social and associational connections in work on radical educational net-
works.80 Shortly before this journals birth, Lawrence Stone anticipated the dominance
of prosopography as historical method, dened as the investigation of common back-
ground characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of
their lives.81 Cunningham suggests the method might be used to interpret the compet-
ing and contradictory interests often perceived as a homogeneous progressive educa-
tion movement. In 2008, Rosemary ODay showed its impact on studies of the
professions and the grafting of new techniques onto these, made possible by the intro-
duction of the computer and statistical study.82 The possibilities of biographical work
were opening up when Gaby Weiner combined qualitative and quantitative methods,
using statistical evidence to revisit her work on Unitarian Harriet Martineau.83

75
Jane Martin, Commentary on Susan Isaacs, Gender and Education 23, no. 2 (2011):
21518.
76
Edward J.T. Brennan, Educational Engineering with the Webbs, History of Education 1,
no. 2 (1972): 17499.
77
Gaby Weiner, Olive Banks and the Collective Biography of British Feminism, British
Journal of Sociology of Education 29, no. 4 (2008): 404.
78
Caine, Biography and History, 48.
79
Linda Eisenmann, Interpreting US Womens Educational History, History of Education
30, no. 5 (2001): 45370.
80
Ruth Watts, Some Radical Educational Networks of the Late Eighteenth Century and Their
Inuence, History of Education 27, no. 2 (1998) 114; Peter Cunningham, Innovators, Net-
works and Structures: Towards a Prosopography of Progressivism, History of Education 30,
no. 5 (2001): 43351.
81
Lawrence Stone, Prosopography, Daedalus 100, no. 1 (1971): 4671.
82
Rosemary ODay Social Change in the History of Education: Perspectives on the Emer-
gence of Learned Professions in England, c.15001800, in Social Change in the History of
Education, ed. J. Goodman, G. McCulloch and W. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2008),
726.
83
Gaby Weiner, Harriet Martineau and her Contemporaries: Past Studies and Methodologi-
cal Questions on Historical Surveys of Women, History of Education 29, no. 5 (2000):
389404.
 History of Education 101

That there are different ways of doing educational biography should be clear
from this brief survey. The idea that places and locations matter is brought out
effectively. Elaine Unterhalters use of autobiographies as part of her exploration of
intertextual resonances between different kinds of texts of the South African transi-
tion to democracy is a good example. She explores how, in a context where little
empirical research was available, those charged with educational policy-making
came to know aspects of education through constructing the narratives of their own
lives.84 Kate Rousmaniere uses auto/biography to tackle the inuence of city spaces
on the lives of urban women, combining autobiographical reections on the ve
years she spent as a graduate student and a part-time worker in New York, with an
exploration of what being Margaret Haley, leader of the Chicago Teachers Federa-
tion, meant, one year in Chicago, 1903.85 To return to the quotations with which
we started, Joyce Goodmans presidential address, delivered at the conference of
the UK History of Education Society in the winter of 2010, shows another way in
which historians of education handle biography. No auto/biographical turn here, but
a nuanced use of theoretically informed biographical approaches to place the actions
and ideas of her subjects, leading members of the International Federation of
University Women, within the appropriate social, intellectual and political context.86

Conclusion: back to the future

The genre of educational biography in History of Education shows how the meth-
odological terrain has changed in the past 40 years. We see history writing that
places gures very carefully and securely into their various milieux, takes intellec-
tual developments seriously and allows us to think about ways of bridging the old
and the new histories, offering a mode of explanation that enables the writer to
craft a narrative of events interwoven with analysis of structures. We see a method
that offers a prism through which to view the complex layers of society, culture
and politics, a way of moving from the general to the particular and back again, of
estimating character, motive, behaviour, intention. To those who would do the spade
work, biography can be a challenging and exciting way of doing history, especially
when part of history-from-below. The genre of educational biography is worthwhile
but it has to do more than just recount prominent lives. The treatment of history
must include stories from marginal educational settings as well as the mainstream.
Kevin Brehony ends his interpretation of Brian Simons historical writing with a
plea for historians of education to return to Simons example and pay more atten-
tion to sociology and social theory in general and to collective identities such as
class, gender and ethnicity, while recognising that an attention to structure should
not exclude agency.87

84
Elaine Unterhalter, Remembering and Forgetting: Constructions of Education Gender
Reform in Autobiography and Policy Texts of the South African Transition, History of
Education 29, no. 5 (2000): 45772.
85
Kate Rousmaniere, Being Margaret Haley, Chicago, 1903, Paedagogica Historica 39,
nos. 12 (2003): 518.
86
Joyce Goodman, International Citizenship and the International Federation of University
Women before 1939, History of Education 40, no. 6 (2011): 70121
87
See K.J. Brehony Lady Astors Campaign for Nursery Schools in Britain, 19301939:
Attempting to Valorize Cultural Capital in a Male-dominated Political Field, History of
Education Quarterly 49 no. 2 (2009): 196210.
102 J. Martin

I end my narrative with a plea for a theoretically informed peoples history of

education that learns from life histories in an attempt to change our understanding
of history as a whole, without subordinating the political to the cultural and
social.88 I would like to call for a renewal of Raphael Samuels aspiration to
democratise the act of historical production,89 to take into account the people who
inhabit classrooms and the forms, dimensions and meaning of their experience, to
ensure progressive ideas and the story of those who campaigned for them are not
quietly forgotten.

Acknowledgements
In particular, the author would like to thank Kevin Brehony, the journal editors and the
anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes on contributor
Dr Jane Martin is professor in Social History of Education and head of department of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the Institute of Education, University of London. Her
publications include Women and the Politics of Schooling in Victorian and Edwardian
England, winner of the History of Education Society Book Prize, 2002. Her most recently
published work is Making Socialists: Mary Bridges Adams and the Fight for Knowledge
and Power, 18551939 published by Manchester University Press. Currently, she is
President of the UK History of Education Society.

88
See Jane Martin, Making Socialists: Mary Bridges Adams and the Fight for Knowledge
and Power (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
89
Raphael Samuel, Peoples History, in Peoples History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael
Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981), xvxxxiii.
Copyright of History of Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to
multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users
may print, download, or email articles for individual use.