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lnside a Victorian school | Historian Ruth Goodman on lessons and discipline | HistoryExtra | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: lnside a Victorian school | Historian Ruth Goodman on lessons and discipline
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Core Theme
Victorian schooling transformed from a rare privilege to a universal experience, driven by innovative teaching methods, philanthropic efforts like the Ragged School movement, and eventually compulsory education, significantly increasing literacy and offering unprecedented social mobility.
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hi I'm Ruth Goodman and we're going to
be talking today about what it was like
in a Victorian
school it was in the Victorian period
that school shifted to becoming a more
Universal experience we'll be talking
about the Ragged School movement the
social Mobility that schooling offered
and how the classroom was a different experience
experience
[Music]
girl in 1837 when Queen Victoria came to
the throne about half the population of
Britain could read and write in
1901 when she finally left
us pretty much everyone could read or
write it is a major social change one
that has far reaching
ramifications but how did it come
about I'm stood here in a Victorian
school this one was built in
1842 and look at it it's one huge great
room 300 children could be taught in
this one space all at once and that is
the key on a practical front
how on Earth could one find the
resources to educate
everyone well a chat called Lancaster
had come up in about 1797 somewhere
around there the very end of the 18th
century with this new idea how one adult
teacher just one at the front there
could handle three or even 500 children
each paying a tiny
towards their education and because it
was Tiny he felt pretty much everybody
could afford it and the system he came
up with was what he called monitors what
later became called pupil teachers
slightly older children who were a
lesson or two ahead who brought the
others with them so in a room like this
with one adult at the front you've got a
series perhaps eight or
10 teenagers who are looking on after
little groups of children you start when
you're a tiny when you first come to the
school at the front desks with a tray of
sand and there your little teenage
teacher helps you to make the letters
when you've mastered that you move back
a row and the next teenage teacher Weeks
Later starts teaching you how to put
those letters together and so it goes on
the teacher at the very front gives a
sort of General
lecture to everybody and also teaches
the pupil teachers teaches the monitors
so that they can pass on the learning to the
the
others it was a revolutionary idea to
make education cheap enough for the
masses and many many philanthropic
groups took hold of that idea and
started turning them into reality to
begin with the biggest was a set of
non-conformist churches who began to
roll it out Across the Nation then the
Church of England gets in on the ACT and
it has it it won't join with the other
churches it has its own set of schools
rolled out Across the
Nation but this didn't cover everybody
even though it spread education much
much further than it had ever gone
before nonetheless there were all sorts
of groups that somehow got lost there
were those for example who had no money
at all to spare for Education even the
penny was too much and their clothes
were in such a state that they couldn't
be seen in a respectable place like a
school so another bunch of
philanthropists these people coming
mostly from the sort of ordinary trades
people um set up something called ragged
schools on much the same idea and these
were schools in which it didn't matter
how bad your clothes were and they were
offered free of charge to those at the
very bottom [Music]
[Music]
now the Ragged School movement is a
particularly interesting one because
whereas things like the you know the
non-conformist schools and the church of
England schools were set up by people
that you might think of as at the top or
at least at the upper middle of society
the Ragged schools were the brainchild
of a cobbler and a tailor and really
sort of moved within that area of
society for long time this was a
movement by trades people ordinary
working people to spread the advantages
of Education which they might have had
themselves to those around them to those
who had even less than they started out
with here was a set of people who knew the
the
Practical value of Education from their
own lives this is how they had picked
themselves up with their bootstraps and
got on and they wanted to give other
kids particularly the most disadvantaged
kids the same chances so for a long time
the Ragged School movement was quite a
lot of little small schools of people
giving up their own time these were very
ordinary working people giving up their
own time to teach
others and then it becomes a fashionable
cause people like Lord Shaftsbury get
involved and suddenly there is money to
help make this happen on a bigger scale
but nonetheless at its heart heart it
remains a social movement that is
[Music]
people in
1880 a law is passed and suddenly
schooling becomes
compulsory now it's not a matter of will
I send my kid to school now you have to
send your kid to
school yes there's plenty of these big
schools set up but there still not quite
enough and there's a bit of a flurry and
an attempt to sort of plug the gaps at
that point and then later on realizing
that they're still missing a few
children eventually education becomes
free the government starts giving money
to schools so that they can carry on
even if the kids can't afford to pay for
it and we finally have a universal
education system right across the board [Music]
[Music]
so when you arrived in school at the
tender age of five or six maybe even
younger for some children you started at
the front of the class on what we call
the sand desks and you had one of these
this is a box a tray with sand in it I
mean it really is just sand in a box but
this is what you've started practicing
on so you would Shake It Out so you've
got a nice flat surface and then they
give you something like a nail or a bit
of stick or whatever and this is how you
practiced your letter forms so
learning to make the shapes once you've
made it give it a shake it's gone you
again cheap
cheap simple
simple
effective when you've mastered making
the shapes in the sand they are allowed
you to move back a little bit in the
classroom and you moved on to a
slate like this now they're a little
more expensive to produce and you got a
stick or a chalk to do something with
and obviously it requires a little bit
more dexterity to make the
shapes but in sence it's
still something that can be WIP clean
again brilliant for providing a cheap
way for children to learn and practice
and only once you have completely
mastered the use of the chalk and the
pen and this is what you were faced with
a dip pen this is for filling the ink
Wells so each child would get a a little
tiny pot full of ink which would have to
be topped up every morning so you would
fill each one with ink there'd be an ink
Monitor and each one would then go out
to the little well on the desk you can
see them here ready to take somebody's
ink dip your pen in and then you can
write on
paper it's not easy and if you blot it
or splattered or spilt your ink you
could definitely expect a clip around the
year now although all children were
educated in the same space didn't mean
everybody had exactly the same
experience of school for a start boys
and girls were carefully separated Boys
on one side girls on the other now some
of their classes were the same BAS basic
reading and writing tended to be the
same however as soon as a curriculum was
established girls were segregated off to
learn sewing and knitting for a large
portion of the school week the boys
meanwhile got additional maths and maybe
geography but there are a couple of
things about this model of having one
adult teacher and a bunch of teenage
helpers how on Earth can you control a
space this big with that many kids in it
well there is only one way isn't there
and that is absolute
discipline these places were ruled with
a rod of iron and they had to be how
else could you cope total silence total
obedience discipline was extreme and
harsh and that punishments were frequently
frequently very
physical I'd like you to think about
what it must have been like to be the
first person in your family who could
read or write imagine how much
difference that
made and I'd also like you to think out
how Little Resistance there was to this because
because
people actually wanted their children to
be educated in general they could see
that this was a way of having a better
life of moving forward of earning more
perhaps in the future people at the top
saw it in terms of an educated Workforce
would be able to produce more they would
be more productive more able to do a
wider range of things people at the
bottom saw it as an opportunity to get
on and get up and what about about those teenage
teenage
helpers now for them this offered a
truly astonishing
opportunity children from workingclass
backgrounds who could stay on at school
because they received a tiny wage okay
it was only tiny but they were receiving
a tiny wage so many families could
afford to not put them into some other
job they could afford them to let them
stay here at school partly teaching the
younger children and partly
learning from the head
teacher this gave a really dedicated I
the kids had to be really dedicated a
really dedicated hardworking
workingclass youngster the chance of
moving out of the working class
entirely with a system like this a
workingclass kid could become a people
teacher could become a teacher they
could move into the middle classes and
it wasn't just boys that this
opportunity was open for girls could too
for a small group of the population this
was an unprecedented moment for social
Mobility for making something of
yourself for moving
beyond and they grabbed it people
grabbed it with both
hands next time we'll be looking at
Health in Victorian Britain from the
slow adoption of germ Theory to the move
towards cleaner water supplies and
antiseptics in the hospital and home [Music]
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