SOCIAL THEORY AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND: THE EMERGENCE OF AN EDUCATIVE POLITICS

This study is about a particular aspect of Victorian social theory and its relation to English educational politics. It concerns the development of an "educative politics" which is seen as a response by "advanced liberals" to a mounting sense of political and cultural insecurity. It grounds this response in an ambivalence which lies at the conceptual and existential heart of liberalism and links its elaboration to the reception of essentially conservative social theories from the Continent, notably French Positivism.;The essence of educative politics was crystallized by J. S. Mill in his thoroughly Comtean recommendation of a state in which the uninstructed shall defer to the authority of the instructed in politics and morals just as they do in the physical sciences. This idea, and others associated with it, is viewed as having exerted a powerful influence on reformist thinking in education from Mill through to the Fabians.;The need to integrate the working class into society, while at the same time preserving established institutions, issued in two related varieties of educative politics. The first, more optimistic version sought the rational society through the creation of the rational individual. However, as the threat of democracy loomed larger a more "defensive" move held to the importance of strongly grounded feelings and beliefs. Education became very much bound up with the organization of public opinion through which it exercised a "restraining discipline", a "moral force." Both responses articulated new directions in social organization with the guiding role of an educated elite.