Originally published 1968, the book examines the ways in which the definitions of education held by different groups with power have changed since 1800 and traces which social institutions exercised the preponderant influence on the growth of the English educational system during the seminal period in which the state system was founded and grew to its present position. Especial attention is given to the influence of the ideologies of the various social classes, to the growing demands of the economy on the educational system and to changes in the structure of the family.

Teachers are, and always have been seen as agents of respectability in our society, but today this role is far less easily defined than it once was. Now, for most teachers, the whats and hows of moral behaviour, guidance and instruction have become debatable issues. In this book the author gives us a readable and original sociological consideration of the teaching oughts and ought-nots which, by providing a valuable analytic framework within which to view moral education, should help the thinking of those who are concerned with some of the most intractable problems of contemporary...

Originally published in 1985. This is a fascinating account of the life cycle of a minor literary genre, the boys school story. It discusses early nineteenth-century precursors of the school story didactic works with such revealing titles as "The Parents Assistant" and goes on to examine in detail the two major examples of the genre - Hughes s "Tom Brown s School Days" and Farrar s "Eric." The slow development of the genre during the 1860s and 1870s is traced, and its institutionalisation by Talbot Baines Reed in, for example, "The Fifth Form at St Dominic s," is described.

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