0:11 hi I'm Ruth Goodman and we're going to
0:13 be talking today about what it was like
0:15 in a Victorian
0:18 school it was in the Victorian period
0:20 that school shifted to becoming a more
0:23 Universal experience we'll be talking
0:25 about the Ragged School movement the
0:27 social Mobility that schooling offered
0:29 and how the classroom was a different experience
0:30 experience
0:39 [Music]
0:43 girl in 1837 when Queen Victoria came to
0:47 the throne about half the population of
0:50 Britain could read and write in
0:54 1901 when she finally left
0:58 us pretty much everyone could read or
1:02 write it is a major social change one
1:05 that has far reaching
1:07 ramifications but how did it come
1:11 about I'm stood here in a Victorian
1:14 school this one was built in
1:19 1842 and look at it it's one huge great
1:22 room 300 children could be taught in
1:27 this one space all at once and that is
1:31 the key on a practical front
1:34 how on Earth could one find the
1:36 resources to educate
1:40 everyone well a chat called Lancaster
1:43 had come up in about 1797 somewhere
1:45 around there the very end of the 18th
1:49 century with this new idea how one adult
1:52 teacher just one at the front there
1:58 could handle three or even 500 children
2:00 each paying a tiny
2:02 towards their education and because it
2:05 was Tiny he felt pretty much everybody
2:07 could afford it and the system he came
2:10 up with was what he called monitors what
2:12 later became called pupil teachers
2:15 slightly older children who were a
2:18 lesson or two ahead who brought the
2:21 others with them so in a room like this
2:24 with one adult at the front you've got a
2:26 series perhaps eight or
2:30 10 teenagers who are looking on after
2:34 little groups of children you start when
2:36 you're a tiny when you first come to the
2:38 school at the front desks with a tray of
2:41 sand and there your little teenage
2:44 teacher helps you to make the letters
2:46 when you've mastered that you move back
2:50 a row and the next teenage teacher Weeks
2:52 Later starts teaching you how to put
2:56 those letters together and so it goes on
2:59 the teacher at the very front gives a
3:01 sort of General
3:05 lecture to everybody and also teaches
3:07 the pupil teachers teaches the monitors
3:10 so that they can pass on the learning to the
3:11 the
3:15 others it was a revolutionary idea to
3:18 make education cheap enough for the
3:21 masses and many many philanthropic
3:24 groups took hold of that idea and
3:27 started turning them into reality to
3:30 begin with the biggest was a set of
3:33 non-conformist churches who began to
3:35 roll it out Across the Nation then the
3:37 Church of England gets in on the ACT and
3:38 it has it it won't join with the other
3:42 churches it has its own set of schools
3:44 rolled out Across the
3:47 Nation but this didn't cover everybody
3:50 even though it spread education much
3:51 much further than it had ever gone
3:53 before nonetheless there were all sorts
3:56 of groups that somehow got lost there
3:59 were those for example who had no money
4:02 at all to spare for Education even the
4:05 penny was too much and their clothes
4:06 were in such a state that they couldn't
4:09 be seen in a respectable place like a
4:11 school so another bunch of
4:13 philanthropists these people coming
4:15 mostly from the sort of ordinary trades
4:18 people um set up something called ragged
4:21 schools on much the same idea and these
4:22 were schools in which it didn't matter
4:24 how bad your clothes were and they were
4:27 offered free of charge to those at the
4:30 very bottom [Music]
4:34 [Music]
4:36 now the Ragged School movement is a
4:38 particularly interesting one because
4:40 whereas things like the you know the
4:42 non-conformist schools and the church of
4:44 England schools were set up by people
4:47 that you might think of as at the top or
4:50 at least at the upper middle of society
4:52 the Ragged schools were the brainchild
4:55 of a cobbler and a tailor and really
4:58 sort of moved within that area of
5:01 society for long time this was a
5:05 movement by trades people ordinary
5:09 working people to spread the advantages
5:11 of Education which they might have had
5:14 themselves to those around them to those
5:17 who had even less than they started out
5:20 with here was a set of people who knew the
5:21 the
5:24 Practical value of Education from their
5:26 own lives this is how they had picked
5:27 themselves up with their bootstraps and
5:30 got on and they wanted to give other
5:32 kids particularly the most disadvantaged
5:36 kids the same chances so for a long time
5:38 the Ragged School movement was quite a
5:40 lot of little small schools of people
5:42 giving up their own time these were very
5:44 ordinary working people giving up their
5:46 own time to teach
5:49 others and then it becomes a fashionable
5:52 cause people like Lord Shaftsbury get
5:54 involved and suddenly there is money to
5:58 help make this happen on a bigger scale
6:00 but nonetheless at its heart heart it
6:02 remains a social movement that is
6:11 [Music]
6:13 people in
6:18 1880 a law is passed and suddenly
6:21 schooling becomes
6:23 compulsory now it's not a matter of will
6:25 I send my kid to school now you have to
6:27 send your kid to
6:29 school yes there's plenty of these big
6:31 schools set up but there still not quite
6:33 enough and there's a bit of a flurry and
6:36 an attempt to sort of plug the gaps at
6:40 that point and then later on realizing
6:42 that they're still missing a few
6:46 children eventually education becomes
6:49 free the government starts giving money
6:51 to schools so that they can carry on
6:53 even if the kids can't afford to pay for
6:56 it and we finally have a universal
7:01 education system right across the board [Music]
7:05 [Music]
7:07 so when you arrived in school at the
7:10 tender age of five or six maybe even
7:12 younger for some children you started at
7:14 the front of the class on what we call
7:17 the sand desks and you had one of these
7:21 this is a box a tray with sand in it I
7:25 mean it really is just sand in a box but
7:27 this is what you've started practicing
7:29 on so you would Shake It Out so you've
7:31 got a nice flat surface and then they
7:33 give you something like a nail or a bit
7:35 of stick or whatever and this is how you
7:40 practiced your letter forms so
7:43 learning to make the shapes once you've
7:45 made it give it a shake it's gone you
7:50 again cheap
7:53 cheap simple
7:54 simple
7:57 effective when you've mastered making
7:59 the shapes in the sand they are allowed
8:02 you to move back a little bit in the
8:05 classroom and you moved on to a
8:08 slate like this now they're a little
8:11 more expensive to produce and you got a
8:13 stick or a chalk to do something with
8:16 and obviously it requires a little bit
8:19 more dexterity to make the
8:23 shapes but in sence it's
8:26 still something that can be WIP clean
8:36 again brilliant for providing a cheap
8:39 way for children to learn and practice
8:41 and only once you have completely
8:44 mastered the use of the chalk and the
8:53 pen and this is what you were faced with
8:56 a dip pen this is for filling the ink
8:59 Wells so each child would get a a little
9:03 tiny pot full of ink which would have to
9:06 be topped up every morning so you would
9:09 fill each one with ink there'd be an ink
9:11 Monitor and each one would then go out
9:14 to the little well on the desk you can
9:20 see them here ready to take somebody's
9:23 ink dip your pen in and then you can
9:25 write on
9:29 paper it's not easy and if you blot it
9:32 or splattered or spilt your ink you
9:33 could definitely expect a clip around the
9:43 year now although all children were
9:45 educated in the same space didn't mean
9:46 everybody had exactly the same
9:50 experience of school for a start boys
9:54 and girls were carefully separated Boys
9:57 on one side girls on the other now some
9:59 of their classes were the same BAS basic
10:01 reading and writing tended to be the
10:05 same however as soon as a curriculum was
10:09 established girls were segregated off to
10:12 learn sewing and knitting for a large
10:15 portion of the school week the boys
10:18 meanwhile got additional maths and maybe
10:28 geography but there are a couple of
10:30 things about this model of having one
10:32 adult teacher and a bunch of teenage
10:37 helpers how on Earth can you control a
10:40 space this big with that many kids in it
10:42 well there is only one way isn't there
10:46 and that is absolute
10:49 discipline these places were ruled with
10:53 a rod of iron and they had to be how
10:57 else could you cope total silence total
11:00 obedience discipline was extreme and
11:03 harsh and that punishments were frequently
11:05 frequently very
11:14 physical I'd like you to think about
11:15 what it must have been like to be the
11:18 first person in your family who could
11:21 read or write imagine how much
11:22 difference that
11:25 made and I'd also like you to think out
11:28 how Little Resistance there was to this because
11:30 because
11:32 people actually wanted their children to
11:35 be educated in general they could see
11:37 that this was a way of having a better
11:41 life of moving forward of earning more
11:43 perhaps in the future people at the top
11:46 saw it in terms of an educated Workforce
11:48 would be able to produce more they would
11:52 be more productive more able to do a
11:54 wider range of things people at the
11:57 bottom saw it as an opportunity to get
12:00 on and get up and what about about those teenage
12:02 teenage
12:06 helpers now for them this offered a
12:08 truly astonishing
12:10 opportunity children from workingclass
12:13 backgrounds who could stay on at school
12:15 because they received a tiny wage okay
12:18 it was only tiny but they were receiving
12:20 a tiny wage so many families could
12:22 afford to not put them into some other
12:24 job they could afford them to let them
12:26 stay here at school partly teaching the
12:29 younger children and partly
12:32 learning from the head
12:35 teacher this gave a really dedicated I
12:37 the kids had to be really dedicated a
12:39 really dedicated hardworking
12:42 workingclass youngster the chance of
12:44 moving out of the working class
12:47 entirely with a system like this a
12:49 workingclass kid could become a people
12:52 teacher could become a teacher they
12:55 could move into the middle classes and
12:57 it wasn't just boys that this
13:01 opportunity was open for girls could too
13:04 for a small group of the population this
13:07 was an unprecedented moment for social
13:09 Mobility for making something of
13:12 yourself for moving
13:15 beyond and they grabbed it people
13:17 grabbed it with both
13:19 hands next time we'll be looking at
13:22 Health in Victorian Britain from the
13:25 slow adoption of germ Theory to the move
13:27 towards cleaner water supplies and
13:32 antiseptics in the hospital and home [Music]
