‘No subject … more neglected’: Victorian elementary school history, 1862–1900

Abstract

The appropriateness of history in primary schools is yet again questioned in the Rose Review (The Times, 8 December 2008). This age‐old debate was in part silenced with the subject’s inclusion for all pupils in the National Curriculum, but is raging once more. The Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) has cautioned that history is becoming endangered in all key stages and the President of the Historical Association has warned that its dilution in a skills‐led curriculum is a cause for social, as well as educational alarm. It is therefore opportune to investigate the rationale for its teaching, not in a new analysis of the well‐trodden twentieth‐century curriculum, but in the largely neglected Victorian period, using the evidence of Her Majesty’s Inspector (HMI) reports. The paper is divided into two sections, the first analysing the Victorian rationale for studying the subject in elementary schools and the second investigating the numbers of children actually studying history and the extent of this study. It shows the avid debates on its appropriateness, particularly for the poor, although the vociferous concerns of many HMI finally led to it being brought into the mainstream classroom by the beginning of the twentieth century.