Norwood Report Research Articles

Postcolonial Bangladesh and neocolonial assimilative literacy practices: the case of private schools and English language programmes

This paper explores the ways in which neocolonial and assimilative literacy practices colonise the psyche of students through private schools and English language teaching programs in Bangladesh. Colonialist education in British India was designed to produce collaborators and not critical thinkers and to create a new breed of Indians who were Brown in the skin but British in the mind. This paper attempts to understand the impact of neocolonial literacy practices in the psychic colonisation of present-day Bangladeshi students. The research involved conducting a critical discourse analysis of pedagogic materials like syllabi, the Norwood Report of 1943 (a key policy document of British colonial educational policy), and seven institutional websites involved with current literacy practices in Bangladesh. This paper shows that schools following British curricula are creating eclectic identities of students whereby they are compelled to contend simultaneously with an embodied ‘superior’ English cultural capital against an ethno-national ‘Brown’ and ‘inferior’ Bangladeshi ethos. Suggesting possibilities for resistance, the paper thus exposes the colonial elements embedded in literacy practices and developing English language proficiency among Bangladeshis.

Fighting for social democracy: R.H. Tawney and educational reconstruction in the Second World War

R.H. Tawney (1880–1962), a leading English economic historian and prominent socialist, was vigorously involved in educational reconstruction during the Second World War. For Tawney, the war was a war for social democracy. His ideals of social democracy formed a basis for his case for Public (independent) School reform and free secondary education for all. Despite this, the connection between Tawney’s ideals and his perspectives on educational issues has not been addressed fully by historians and thus there has been a lack of a proper explanation for his often criticised sympathy for the public schools and his indifference towards the multilateral school. Hence, this paper aims to re-examine the link between them in greater depth. It concludes that, according to Tawney’s ideals of social democracy, the abolition of the public schools was not necessary for the establishment of a democratic educational system. Moreover, Tawney did not launch an attack on the tripartite system proposed by the Norwood Report of 1943 since it was not against his ideal of equality as long as different secondary schools were equal in quality and status. Equality, he believed, must be advanced through the raising of the school leaving age to 16 and the abolition of fees in all secondary schools. Thus, he laid more emphasis on the school leaving age and tuition fees than on the multilateral school. In brief, on various issues pertaining to secondary education, Tawney’s opinions and actions were deeply grounded in his distinctive ideals of social democracy.

Education and the Middle Classes: The Case of the English Grammar Schools, 1868–1944

This paper investigates the history of the education of the middle classes with particular reference to the historical experience of the English grammar schools between 1868 and 1944. It indicates a general neglect of the history of middle‐class education and an opportunity to develop this in greater depth in terms of the range and diversity of provision, the experience of education and the emotions of social class. The historical development of grammar schools from the Taunton report of 1868 and the writings of Matthew Arnold to the Norwood report of 1943 and the Education Act of 1944 is outlined as an example of the characteristics of the education of the middle classes, with lasting implications that help to explain the continuing conflicts over secondary education in the early twenty‐first century.

Cyril Norwood and the English tradition of education

Cyril Norwood, to all appearances, was the quintessential insider of English education in the first half of the 20th century. An outstanding classical scholar, Oxford educated, a successful headmaster before returning to Oxford as president of his college, St John’s, knighted for his services to education in 1938, he was also prominent in national education policy well before his career culminated in 1943 in the Norwood Report on the secondary school curriculum and examinations. Yet he was also an outsider, insecure because of the circumstances of his childhood and upbringing, never fully accepted in the public schools over which he presided, not fully trusted by the officials at the Board of Education or by many of his colleagues despite his decades of public service. This study investigates the paradoxical nature of Norwood’s contribution to and significance in English education, a victim of social class anxieties and insecurities even at the same time that he became the most famous celebrant of the so‐called ‘English tradition’ of education.

Judgement of the Teacher: the Norwood Report and internal examinations

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the intervention of the Norwood Report of 1943 in the debate over secondary school examinations. It emphasises the role of the report in supporting the active involvement of teachers in ‘internal’ examinations, as opposed to external examinations administered by examination boards. It relates this debate to its wider social and political contexts. It also suggests a longer‐term historical framework involving contestation between different interests and ideologies for control over examinations, the ‘professionalism’ of secondary school teachers in relation to their own sphere of activity, and notions such as ‘accountability’ and the ‘market’. The contribution of this historical episode to a ‘social history of education policy’ relevant to unresolved issues and tensions of the 1990s is also discussed.

Comprehensive School Reform and the 1945 Labour Government

When he says that Ellen Wilkinson opposed comprehensive schools, we can assume David Rubinstein' is using an historian's conventional shorthand, and would accept its limitations as considered comment on either the Labour government's educational policy or Ellen Wilkinson's career as a whole. Billy Hughes2 loyally reminds us of Ellen Wilkinson's strong commitment to socialism in word and deed during the 1930s, but this approach also has its limitations for it is the 1945-1951 period which concerns us, and the policy of a Party which declared itself specifically socialist. It is in this broader frame that we have to assess the comprehensive education issue and, in particular, to ask whether in implementing the 1944 Education Act along selective rather than comprehensive lines, the 1945 Labour government was failing to act as a socialist party might be expected to have acted at this time in history. If there was a failure, it might be hard to recognize in retrospect because this same Labour government was relatively so successful in implementing specifically socialist policy in other government departments, and also because the education ministry was so successful in implementing its policy. Billy Hughes gives clear evidence of ministry success, including Lord Alexander's opinion that more teachers were trained and schools built during Ellen Wilkinson's years at the ministry than at any other time in British history. Billy Hughes also says that Ellen Wilkinson fought opposition to get the school leaving age raised. In more recent times another woman education minister, Margaret Thatcher, also raised the leaving age amid opposition and presided over a department which was busy expanding school building. The policy Billy Hughes was describing was in the main an agreed one of expansion and reconstruction after a world war. In all probability it would have been carried out in much the same way, even if at not quite the same pace, by Liberals or Conservatives, either of whom almost certainly would also have agreed to implement the 1944 Act much as Labour did: by accepting the ministry's own strategy as set out in its 1943 Norwood Report.3 The Norwood Report said that children can be divided with certainty into three separate mental -types at eleven, and that separate development in segregated schools was therefore right for Britain's new post-war secondary system. Norwood's 'tripartitism' is discredited today, and its unscientific and expedient pronouncements, fitting children to schools rather than the reverse, were rejected by historians4 long before Cytil Burt, its moving influence, had his own research on hereditary influence discredited.5 That Norwood's philosophy was alien to Labour Party principle, and its policy contrary to Labour's policy, was pointed out from 1942 onwards by many socialists and teachers in the Labour Party, particularly when the ministry published A Nation's Schools in 1945, a month before Ellen Wilkinson was made minister of education. This laid down a tripartite system as the way for local authorities to develop the new secondary schools, and discouraged comprehensive education. Her reputation raised hopes that she would agree to repudiate this publication, but, according to the combined

The Future of Music in Education

It is inevitable that the passing of the Education Act, 1944, and the production of the Norwood report on ‘Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools’ and the McNair report on ‘Teachers and Youth Leaders’ should raise the question as to the position which music is to occupy in schools of the post-war period to which we are all so eagerly looking forward.

Recruitment and Training of Teachers: Primary and Secondary School Teachers

WHEN the president of the Board of Education presented the now famous White Paper in July of last year, he made some reference to the coming need of a teaching profession which should be adequate, both in numbers and in quality, to a radically reformed system of education. At that time he found it inconvenient to say much more on the subject, except that there were "some things so patently wrong with the present system that an expert inquiry is long overdue". Again, the Bill which five months later followed the White Paper made no explicit reference to teachers, except that, which achieved notoriety as Clause 82. In every other sense the turn of the teachers to stand in the limelight was still to come. So far back as March 1942, Mr. Butler appointed a committee, with Dr. (now Sir) Arnold McNair as chairman, "to investigate the present sources of supply and the methods of recruitment and training of teachers and youth leaders and to report what principles should guide the Board in these matters in the future". The long —and perhaps rather impatiently—awaited report has now been published, and will be known as the McNair Report. The delay is partly due to tho appearance meantime of the White Paper and of the Norwood Report, but partly also, there is little doubt, to a difference of opinion which, so far from resulting in a mere minority report, split the Committee into two precisely equal groups.

The Norwood Report and the teaching of Spanish

BSS Subject Index: EDUCATION ABOUT SPAIN — ITS LANGUAGES, HISTORY, LITERATURE, CULTURE & SOCIETYHISPANIC STUDIES/HISPANISM