The cultural role of Christianity in England, 1918-1931: An Anglican perspective on state education

As in the case of the United States, England has endured controversy regarding the teaching of religion in the nation's schools. For England most of this controversy occurred between 1870 and 1944, in educational history the period known as the dual system because both the state and the various denominations provided primary and secondary schools. The state system consisted of provided, or Council, schools because they received financial aid from the government, and the denominational part consisted of non-provided, or voluntary, schools because they did not received government funding. The controversy was derived from rivalries between the two types of schools and that one taught dogmatic religion and the other did not.; Since the Church of England had by far the most voluntary schools, this dissertation chose the Anglican perspective to study what English educationists called the religious question. By the 1920s, as the state began to build more schools after World War I, the number of Church schools, for lack of sufficient funding, began to decline. This troubled many Anglicans because at the same time Church attendance also began to decrease. These changes indicated for some Anglicans that "secularism shall be the future creed of England."; For the period, 1918-1931, my dissertation considers whether and to what extent that assessment was true. Since the school has as its purpose the socialization of the next generation, that national education system is an appropriate institution to examine to determine whether England was abandoning its Christian heritage during the early twentieth century. The year 1918 is a suitable point to begin because in that year Parliament passed another important education bill. This legislation along with a major government report on the school system in 1926 promoted educational reform, in particular plans for four years of secondary education, which the Church struggled to implement. In the future it seemed that Church schools would drop out of the nation's school system, leaving education to state schools which did not teach dogmatic religion. However, the Depression stalled any major reforms in 1931, and that date, then, serves as a convenient end point for the dissertation.; The debate which ensued in Parliament and the educational journals provides the resources used in this dissertation. They offer ample information not only on the administrative reforms, themselves, but also reveal some of the cultural arguments concerning the religious condition of England's schools and English society. An analysis of these in my dissertation allows me to present and evaluate the Anglican concern that England was becoming a post-Christian society.