Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

co-operative store. This cannot, however, simply be labelled 'social control' and dismissed. Phillips's activities, like those of Lady Charlotte and Sir John Josiah Guest at Dowlais, represent at once an elaborate system of social control and a serious and sustained paternalism; and it is doubtful whether any real distinction can or ought to be made between them as motives for the foundation of schools. It was not a distinction con- temporaries easily made. The erstwhile school inspector, H. S. Tremenheere now an inspector of mines, reported in 1856: the spirit actuating the very great majority of the employers of labour in the great mining district of Monmouthshire and Glamorgan in reference to their responsibilities to the labouring populations is unquestionably now of a very much higher kind than was visible when I was first called upon to report on the condition of these districts. After the Chartist outbreak of 1839, Company after Company and employer after employer has in successive years taken steps towards providing for their people better means of moral and religious and general instruction, and towards facilitating the physical comforts and decencies of life among those large and rapidly collected populations. In addition, whatever planning for social control there was, was relatively unsophisticated. Although they built schools, very few proprietors attempted to compel attendance, either directly or indirectly. Again, very few of them attempted to link the more advanced teaching with particular skilled jobs in their works, although the Cwmavon and Neath Abbey ironworks schools represented notable exceptions to this. Parental attitudes are more difficult to establish and assess. Dr. Wynne Evans indicates that the average child's day school life was both short and irregular. But the explanation for this was not simple indifference to education in all its forms. As H.M.I. Joseph Bowstead wrote in 1854: South Wales must be recognised as a land of Dissenters and the schools intended for its benefit must be such as to command the confidence of men who hold nothing so precious as perfect religious freedom. The right of the parent to be the sole director of his child's religious training must be held sacred; and the idea that men zealously attached to one denomination can be content to leave the education of their offspring at the mercy of the ministers of another, must be altogether abandoned. Dr. Wynne Evans records disputes between masters and men about the denominational affiliation of the works schools at Blaenavon, Ystalyfera, and Abercrave; while at Dowlais, at the request of the men, the works schools were disaffiliated from the Anglican National Society and attached to the undenominational British and Foreign School Society, and a special Roman Catholic school was also established. Bowstead concluded the report already quoted by stressing that the workmen attach the highest value to religious instruction; but they prefer obtaining it for themselves and their families by means of the Sunday school. The day school is wanted for another purpose; and though they require in it a religious character, they do not wish to employ it in direct religious teaching. The implication of all this is that Welsh working men distinguished quite clearly between the religious and cultural dimension of education, and its vocational and career aspects. It seems probable that they con- sidered the former more important than the latter, especially when the spectacular and continuing successes of the Sunday schools are set beside the poor attendance at day schools. Given the absence of any relationship