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Religion, the State, and Education in England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2017

James Murphy
James Murphy*
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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It was inevitable that from the beginning of the Christian era in England education would rest in the hands of the Church, so that “from the first, education was the creature of religion, the school was an adjunct of the church, and the schoolmaster was an ecclesiastical officer.” It was the mission of the Church to teach, and only by doing so could it widen its authority or, indeed, perpetuate itself. Its Influence gradually spread throughout the country, and many of its servants had the necessary leisure to give instruction not only in all that concerned religious doctrine but in reading, the study of Latin, and Whatever was necessary to ensure that the missionary, liturgical, and administrative needs of the Church were met. By a natural process the study of Latin would in suitable circumstances lead on to the Study of secular works, to which a knowledge of Latin provided the key. Of course there were fields of education outside the scope of the Church, but in a relatively uncomplicated society such acquirements as skill in arms, the social graces of aristocratic life, or knowledge of crafts could be learned from their practitioners. King Alfred, who had himself been taught, as he said, “by Plegmund, my archbishop, and Asser, my bishop, and Grimbold, my mass-priest, and John my Inass priest,” naturally asked for the Church's help to bring it about “as we can very easily do … that all the youth of our English freemen who can afford to devote themselves to it should be set to learning.”

Type
Church, State, and Education
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , Spring 1968 , pp. 3 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 by New York University 

References

Notes

1 Leach, Arthur F., Educational Charters and Documents 598 to 1909 (Cambridge: University Press, 1911), p. xii.Google Scholar

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3 Ibid. Google Scholar

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8 Ibid., p. 52.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 53.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., p. 57.Google Scholar

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26 Ibid., pp. 77–78. It has been suggested that this proposal “may have been the parent of the Connecticut Act of 1650 and inspired the minds of the early legislators of Massachusetts in that scheme of State education which was founded in 1695,” de Montmorency, J. E. G., op. cit., p. 104.Google Scholar

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32 See, e.g., the charge of the Bishop of Chester to the clergy of his diocese quoted in Murphy, James, “The Rise of Public Elementary Education in Liverpool,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, CXVI, 171.Google Scholar

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34 Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., IX, col. 1,177.Google Scholar

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37 Ibid., col. 1,306.Google Scholar

38 For a full account of the plan and of the attitudes of the churches at this time, see Murphy, James, The Religious Problem in English Education: The Crucial Experiment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1959).Google Scholar

39 Rescript of His Holiness Pope Gregory XVI, to the Four Archbishops of Ireland, in Reply to the Appeal to the Holy See on the Subject of the National System of Education in Ireland (1841).Google Scholar

40 Murphy, , The Religious Problem in English Education.Google Scholar

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43 The Irish Christian Brothers refused to accept government inspection in Liverpool, Burke, V., Catholic History of Liverpool (Liverpool: Tin-ling, 1910), p. 106.Google Scholar

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56 The Education of the Adolescent (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1926).Google Scholar

57 Apparently as the result of an administrative oversight, two very small Roman Catholic school departments were accorded “controlled” status.Google Scholar

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59 Pamphlet on Free Church Federal Council Education Policy Committees (London, 1959), p. 1. See also Murphy, James, “Church and State in Education: England and Wales,” The World Year Book of Education 1966 (London: Evans Brothers, 1966), pp. 19–38.Google Scholar

60 When it was claimed in 1959 that there might be “200 or 300 single-school areas,” the Minister for Education pointed out that there had been “some 4,000” in 1944, and he indicated that neither the State nor the Church of England would be likely to encourage the establishment of new denominational schools where this would create new single-school areas. (Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., 608, cols. 488, 494, 495, 498.)Google Scholar

61 Leonard, G. D., Church Observer (London, October 1959).Google Scholar

62 Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., 724, cols. 918, 923.Google Scholar