Welsh Journals

'LEARNING SUITABLE TO THE SITUATION OF THE POOREST CLASSES': THE NATIONAL SOCIETY AND WALES, 1811-1839 HISTORIANS of education describe the years to 1870 as the 'voluntary period' in education. Yet the period after 1839 saw the state assuming an ever increasing role. Indeed, it can be argued that there never was a time in the nineteenth century when the state was wholly unconcerned, for there were parliamentary select committees on education from the earliest years, two parliamentary returns of school provision, in 1818 and 1833, and legislative measures dealing with the education of pauper and factory children. But even the most important single inter- vention of the pre-1839 period, the inception of Treasury grants in 1833, pre-dated the establishment of a state structure, and although those grants to assist the National and British Societies in building their schools were subsequently renewed and increased, educational developments up to 1839 took place within a basically voluntary frame- work.1 In the wider social context, massive changes were taking place, including an increasing concern about the effects of the country's rising population. Abject poverty was a major feature, as was the burden of local taxation to try to relieve it. Deprivation and discontent led to outbreaks of disorder in industrial and rural areas of England and Wales, all of which played their part in ending the long Tory hegemony in 1832. The first legislative and administrative responses to the developing social crisis of the period included the new Poor Law and the Treasury grants to education, both manifestations of the increas- ingly powerful utilitarian mentality that was beginning to dominate political thought. But it was not until the 1840s, under the influence of 1 For the background to state education, see A. S. Bishop, The Rise of a Central Authority for English Education (Cambridge, 1971), and M. Cruickshank, Church and State in English Education (London, 1964).