Grammar Schools and the Games Ethic in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras

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Reform of the English grammar school system in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries owed much to the prestigious public schools of England. Institutional instruments of cohesion, control and status, proven in the public schools, were admiringly adopted. The evolution of the grammar school involved in large measure, imitation of its upper class superiors and segregation from its working class inferiors. In an accurate reflection of public school priorities, games and games fields were the expensive symbols of emulation, distancing, ambition, and success. The reason is not hard to find. Technological competence in an industrial era was less valued than an image of gentility in a strongly hieriarchical social system. The deferential absorption by grammar schools of the athletic mores of the public schools reveals a significant cultural hegemonic process at work. A bewildering variety of autocratic headmasters of differing persuasions and backgrounds served as agents of this diffusion, assimilation, and implementation of philathletic public school values. This fact, in conjunction with support at the higher administrative level of government for extension of the public school ideal of education into state secondary schools, ensured that the model for secondary education in the first half of the twentieth century was the late nineteenth century games-orientated public school rather than the technically-orientated late-eighteenth century dissenter academy.