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one another..." (Quoted in Green 1990: 254). This attitude inevitably shaped the
nation’s educational provision:
...The most distinctive feature of British education has been its voluntary
character. Both in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this voluntary
approach was held to be morally, and educationally, superior to compulsory
schooling schemes in continental Europe. These were associated with despotism
and subservience, in contrast to the freedoms enjoyed by British citizens, which
were seen as being essential to the British character. Voluntarism...meant
freedom for pupils from compulsory attendance, and freedom for schools from
state interference.
(Green 1990: 70)
The preference for voluntarism has remained a strong strand in English educational
reforms. From the Forster Act of 1870, which endorsed the existing patchwork of
elementary provision rather than establishing a uniform national system, through to
the introduction of comprehensive education in the 1960s, change has been suggested
rather than imposed.
When the 1944 Education Act finally established a free, national, secondary education
system up to age 15, the new Minister, ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, approved the Ministry
Circular 73 “commending the tripartite secondary organisation to local authorities..."
(Maclure 2000: 54). Even such a passionate supporter of educational opportunity for
all did not go so far as to ‘require’. The result was that the intended system was never
fully realised; the technical schools flickered into existence in some areas, then faded
into comprehensive schools, while the ‘modem’ schools attended by the vast majority
of pupils were frequently housed in poorly adapted elementary schools. Expecting
rather than demanding meant also that change was slow: the school leaving age was
not raised to 16 until 1972, and the last all-age elementary school was not reorganised
until 1971. (Barber 1996: 49)