Political Leadership and the Late Victorian Public School

Abstract

ETWEEN about I870 and the First World War the Public KSchools developed many of the features that make them a controversial topic today. Yet, in the flood of literature that they have inspired, there have been few objective attempts to assess the Victorian Public Schools in terms of their own ends. Even those critics who have charged the schools with defending social inequality and stifling individualism have not generally questioned the schools' efficiency at producing the kind of product they wanted to produce. What, then, was this product? It is the argument here that behind the goal of 'Character-building' the Victorian Public Schools' prime purpose however tacit and unofficial was a state purpose, the output of capable public servants.l From this point of view, therefore, the best way to judge the Victorian Public School is to ask what qualities of the public servant it seemed to foster. Before we ask this question, however, we should first establish that the schools were indeed bent on the performance of a government 'supply function', directing their students towards government careers.