History of education in Wales (1870–1939)

The perceived purpose of education for working-class girls was to prepare them to become domestic servants and later housewives; it was hoped they would become a moral influence on their husbands.

Various factors contributed to this, including outbreaks of childhood diseases, indifferent parents, child labour, and initially fees that were difficult for many households to pay.

[16] A similar institution which existed in this period was Clio, a training ship docked in the Menai Strait, which was designed to prepare adolescent boys from various backgrounds to become sailors.

[17] As the elementary school system developed during this period, ragged schools—which had been established in the middle of the 19th century to cater to the poorest children—experienced some decline.

The upper end of the middle classes would attend "first grade" intermediate schools which would continue until the age of 18 or 19 and prepare the most able for Oxbridge.

For a long time the main curriculum of a majority of intermediate schools was English, Latin, mathematics, history, geography and French.

[31] In a society where the role of women was felt to be mainly in the home, supporters of female education often argued that attendance at intermediate school would make girls more effective, moral housewives.

A feeling had developed in the education department that the inspectorate needed to return to its original role as a supportive advisor for schools rather than punitively judging their results.

Elementary schools were widely understood to be mainly institutions providing a fairly low level of education to those destined for lives of manual labour.

[39] Changes in the 1900s included the end of the pupil-teacher system in which teenagers had been put to work from the age of 13 as trainee teachers, and the creation of local education authorities.

In the heightened religious atmosphere of the 1904 to 1905 Christian revival, this led to a political crisis in Wales, with most local authorities refusing to apply the law.

[23] Edwards disliked the secondary schools' focus on rote learning, exams and lack of lessons in practical skills relevant to the local economy, though he was fighting against the grain of public opinion at the time.

The growing numbers of working-class parents making sacrifices to get their children a secondary education wanted them to escape dangerous manual labour, not to be trained for it.

Maude Morgan Thomas, a Welsh immigrant to the United States, wrote an autobiography intended for American children about her early years in Pontypool during the Edwardian era.

Copy books had to be neatly filled with carefully written words, evenly spaced and shaded properly on each down stroke.

One blot or one imperfect letter would bring the rattan cane stinging down on laboring knuckles... As I look back now, kindergarten[note 3] days were very pleasant.

[27] Around the time of the First World War, the subjects listed on inspection reports as being taught at elementary schools included "English, Arithmetic, history and geography, music and drawing".

Teaching practices did gradually improve during the first half of the 20th century and the curriculum became broader in subjects such as history, geography and nature studies, especially in larger elementary schools.

[59] While participation was starting to decline, chapels remained a significant source of informal religious and cultural education in both English and Welsh.

[59] Demand for secondary education continued to increase in the post-World War I period, and opportunities grew due to a fall in birth rates, even as the financial situation got worse.

[68] In the late 19th century, there was growing desire to make teaching at elementary schools more effective and comfortable for children; there was also increasing willingness in government to implement different policies in Wales from those in England.

[77] The end of payment by results meant Edwards had little power to make schools do anything, but there was a gradual, patchy increase in the use of Welsh in the years after his appointment.

[85] However, the difficult economic conditions of the time focused many people's attention, especially in the more English-speaking areas of Wales, on material concerns.

[95] An occasion in 1898 of male and female students at the Aberystwyth college briefly greeting each other through a window became known in the newspapers as the "Romeo and Juliet" affair.

The woman was stopped from living at the college and the man was suspended from his course for several months, a decision that received a negative reaction from the other students.

[96] Separation of the sexes was a form of reassurance for worried parents and reflective of a wider trend in this period as women were gaining more of a role in public life.

Jones and Roderick wrote that this was due to scepticism towards formal education on the part of industrialists, a level of snobbishness towards vocational training among academics.

It was fairly moderate in its outlook, aiming to develop a sense of democratic citizenship in its students and arguing for a reconciliation between the interests of capital and labour.

The union then contributed to the Central Labour College which existed sporadically for the next twenty years and inculcated Marxist ideas in coal-mining areas.

An intense rivalry developed between the two organisations in the interwar years when the Workers Educational Association gained government funding and increased its appeal to trade unionists.