Welsh Journals

VOLUNTARY EDUCATION IN THE INDUSTRIAL AREAS OF WALES BEFORE 1870 VOLUNTARY education in England and Wales before the Education Act of 1870 has been regarded as meaning the provision of elementary education by the two leading Voluntary bodies the National Society and the British and Foreign School Society including a brief period, roughly between 1844 and 1854 of Voluntaryism, associated with the nonconformist denominations outside the Anglican church.1 The educational background of this period was inevitably bound up with the many fundamental changes in the social, economic, and political life of the country. Perhaps the most striking feature on the political side was the dilatory attitude and consequent procrastination on the part of the government of the day to legislate on a comprehensive scale for the education of the indigent section of the community, which, by the middle of the nineteenth century comprised the greater part of the population. Nevertheless, in the early years of the century there were signs of a growing interest in popular education both in and out of Parliament. Some continental countries were ahead of Britain and had already organised education on a national basis. After 1789, free, compulsory, State-controlled education had become one of the leading conceptions of continental liberalism. 2 But liberalism of the English kind, while favourable to a general extension of education, distrusted State control as being a political danger to civil liberty. Again, many people voiced the opinion that education was essentially a sphere of religious training and believed in ecclesiastical control. Others still, clung to the view so characteristic of the eighteenth century that education was a charity to the poor, and not a right to which everyone in the realm was entitled. The interaction of these and other opinions delayed for many years the planning of a national system. The years which followed the Napoleonic wars, and the economic and social distress which they saw, brought with them a new awareness of 'educational destitution'.3 The ingenuity of Bell and Lancaster created the mainspring of the voluntary principle in education which expressed itself in the activities of the two Voluntary Societies.4 Indeed, almost all elementary education in England and Wales before 1870 was voluntary. When in 1833 the State took its first step in the field of national education by giving an annual donation of [20,000 (which was considerably increased every year after 1839, when the Committee of Privy Council for Education was set up) in aid of schoolroom building, the two