Spiritual Development: the Impetus from Arnold of Rugby (1795‐1842)

Abstract

Thomas Arnold was a Victorian for scarcely five years but his major national influence continued into mid‐Victorian times and beyond. Arnold worked in a climate in which the state was trying to keep out of direct involvement with education and the churches were concerned to raise money to overtake their rivals in developing their schools. It was left to individuals to develop the vision that would enable education to start to cope with a rapidly changing, increasingly industrial society. Arnold was eager to engage in this. He was a hyper‐active controversialist. Though not acting alone, he was the energising leader in a process that raised the profile of spirituality in the public schools and, by subsequent cascading, among their imitators. Insofar as spiritual, moral, social and cultural development ('SMSC) were apprehended by Victorian educators, Arnold must be given much of the credit for highlighting the centrality of them, within for him an unquestioned but liberal Christian context. These values were already implicitly or notionally in all denominational schools; Arnold made them explicit high‐profile core values that were intended to penetrate the whole of school life at Rugby. He did not entirely achieve this. His views and practice were so bound up in his persona that in the end he could not be imitated by other people in different times, but for all that he left a discernible historic legacy for ‘spiritual development’ as a concept and intention in UK education.