Ethnicity and Education

Abstract

The law, in an indirect and cumbersome fashion, may, to some degree, reflect and shape public opinion. Certainly Dicey takes as his starting point, in considering law and public opinion in England during the nineteenth century,1 the ‘close dependence of legislation, and even of the absence of legislation, upon the varying currents of public opinion’, though, as Mannheim points out,2 it is not clear ‘whose opinion Dicey had in mind’, describing him as having a ‘a paternalistic’ concept of public opinion as ‘little more than the views of a sharply limited clan of intellectuals whose writings directly influenced the minds of the nation’s legislation’. In contrast, ‘public opinion’ in this chapter refers primarily to the attitudes and values of the general population, as well as, where relevant, the influential views of pressure groups, practitioners, policy-makers and government committees within the educational world.