In recent years the study of the history of education has flourished and expanded. It has moved from being a specialist interest to one that concerns economic and social historians, who see that education has played a central part in the discussion of industrial development and the formation of the social structure. In this study, revised and updated throughout, Dr. Sanderson reviews the history of education in the nineteenth century and the academic debates surrounding it. He examines the discussion surrounding literacy, its trends and significance in the creation of an industrial labor force, and considers the successful development of a middle-class scientific culture in the eighteenth-century and the relative failure to develop technical education in the nineteenth.

CONTENTS:
1. Literacy and the mass elementary education
   Before 1830: conflicting trends
   1830-1870: the drive to mass literacy
2. Was there a technical education?
   The eighteenth-century scientific culture
   The mechanics’ institutes
   South Kensington and after
3. A "middle-class" education
   The private schools, grammar schools and social change
   The rise of the public schools
4. The universities
   Oxford, Cambridge and liberal education
   Provincial reflections
   A radical alternative
5. Aspirations and ideologies
   Political radicals
   Feminism and the education of women