Interpreting biography in the History of Education: past and present

Abstract

Epigraph At the time I began work in university, I entered a world which was leisured, privileged and patriarchal, in the United Kingdom at least…. I came from a world in which only 3% of the population aspired to university. I belonged to a world in which, having got where I was through the eleven-plus and ‘A’ levels, there was almost a sense that society owed us a living. (Roy Lowe, 20021) 1Roy Lowe, ‘Do We Still Need History of Education: Is it Central or Peripheral?’ History of Education 31, no. 6 (2002): 492–3. Women were not obviously on the outside when I attended my first conference – a day conference in 1976 at what was then the Birmingham Polytechnic, now University of Central England. Many women attended although in the first years few were keynote speakers. More importantly there was little about women in the history itself except in the meetings of the Women’s Education Study Group where Carol Dyhouse, June Purvis, Penny Summerfield and Gaby Weiner were all dominant. (Ruth Watts, 20052) 2Ruth Watts, ‘Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education’, History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 226. In 1967, aged 11, I moved on from my primary school in south London, and was selected to enter the local grammar school. I left most of my friends behind and began a daily routine of walking nervously through the council housing estates in my school uniform. By the time I left this school, seven years later, it had moved to one of the more prosperous suburbs of London to avoid being turned into a comprehensive. In the early twenty-first century, it is one of the leading academic secondary schools in the country, which it certainly was not in 1967. (Gary McCulloch, 20073) 3Gary McCulloch, ‘Forty Years On: Presidential Address to the History of Education Society, London 4 November 2006’, History of Education 36, no. 1 (2007): 6.