Ecology and Nineteenth Century Urban Education

Abstract

THE CONCEPT OF ECOLOGY has experienced some notable mutations, since it was introduced by Ernest Haeckel, the German biologist, in 1869. This paper outlines its growth as a social concept and discusses ways in which an ecological approach can illuminate the study of urban education in the nineteenth century. The first section surveys the development of ecological principles from their prototypical and still implicit use in the empirical social surveys of the nineteenth century, through their more formal attachment to a theory of urban society in the 1920s, as far as the 1970s when, despite all the vicissitudes faced over the previous half-century, they continued to be accepted as somewhat valid in the explanation of urban society. The second section indicates how ecological thinking represents a fairly well-established convergence of interest among sociologists and geographers, specifically urban sociologists and urban geographers, which can provide the basis of an inter-disciplinary perspective on urban educational history. It takes advantage of the fact that nineteenth-century towns and cities constituted the setting to which ecological principles were originally applied. Such a composite methodology would seem a necessary element in any social history which purported to explore connections at the educational grassroots: between schools and the communities they served. The final section briefly applies an inter-disciplinary, micro-ecological framework to the study of links between schooling and the community in a late-nineteenth century dockland slum.