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...a ladder to universities for the poor boy and girl of parts, a reservoir for the
10,000 teachers needed for state elementary schools and well-grounded
entrants for the professions.... Sir Robert Morant provided the people of
England with the possibility of what he held they ought to want.
(Petch 1953: 51)
Despite his undoubted achievements, in hindsight he can be portrayed as:
...a destructive force...[who] played an important part in the deliberate
destruction both of the system of school boards ...and of the cardinal ideas on
which it was based.
(Sharp 2002: 99)
Certainly Brian Simon was of the latter opinion. He felt that by replacing the local
School Boards with Local Education Authorities in the 1902 Act, the Government -
prompted by Morant - effectively ended popular influence in state secondary schools.
This policy decision ensured both the survival of church schools and the continued
autonomy of the private sector, those enduring stands in the educational fabric.
(Simon 1974: 21) Similar criticism of Sir Robert’s influence came from a critic of a
different political persuasion:
The outstanding figure in this regard [ignoring the importance of technical
education in favour of a public-school, classics bias] is Sir Robert Morant, the
civil servant who was largely responsible for preparing and implementing the
1902 Education Act, the most important single piece of legislation in the field
before the Butler Act of 1944. Hardly surprisingly [due to his background of
Winchester, then Classics, Hebrew and Christian Union at Oxford], he was to
set out in office not to provide England with education for capability [either
general or technical] that could match that of her rivals, but to demolish what
little had been gradually built up by his time.
(Bamett 1986: 223)
In view of the entrenched nature of the attitudes that Morant personified, it is difficult
to sustain the view that this one individual should be held responsible for the English
aversion to applied learning as a legitimate pursuit. It is a thread that runs constantly
through the fabric of the nation’s educational attitudes, and is still seen as problematic
in the Tomlinson Report of 2004. However, no one disputes that this civil servant
rather than any politician was responsible for drafting the Act.