'No mistakes in dictation and four sums right': the political debate over the compulsory curriculum in elementary and private schools, 1922-32

TLDR: The analogy between the national curriculum in place at the end of the twentieth century and its immediate predecessor, the compulsory elementary curriculum which covered most pupils in the years to 1926, is discussed in this paper.

Abstract: Introduction History never repeats itself but it is di cult not to draw an analogy between the national curriculum in place at the end of the twentieth century and its immediate predecessor, the compulsory elementary curriculum which covered most pupils in the years to 1926. Pursuing such an analogy by way of introduction has a dual value. The broad similarities between the two compulsory curricula provide a convenient path for the general reader to gain an understanding of the prescribed curriculum of an earlier age, while the study of the points at which the analogy between the two breaks down enables the professional historian to gain ready access to the peculiarities of historical situations and to the historical controversy surrounding them. By the year 2000, the national curriculumÐafter six major reformulations since its creation in 1988Ðappeared to its author, Kenneth Baker as a dry husk of its former self, having been reduced by the turn of the millennium from his broad ten-subject curriculum to little more than the three-subject `old elementary school programme’ which dominated most of the nation’s schools in the early 1920s. It was, in his view, and that of the Conservative leader, William Hague, no longer defensible, particularly as even in its most vestigial form it impeded local initiative. Hague’s position in 1999 was strikingly similar to that of Lord Eustace Percy, the President of the Board of Education in Baldwin’s Conservative government, 1924±1929, who withdrew his support for the compulsory curriculum on the declared grounds that it interfered with the partnership between central and local government and that in abolishing it he was merely putting the last `few ®nishing touches’ to a process of gradual deregulation and liberalization which had been going on for some time.