Rules of Use by Lamb Julian

Author:Lamb, Julian.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472531773
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Training

The first third of the Elementarie continually makes reference to the work which Mulcaster published a year earlier, Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children, and the pedagogical system Mulcaster envisions there is part of the context for the orthographical rules he was later to formulate. The pedagogical reforms proposed in Positions are put into the service of a general argument for a uniform public education which would include a rigorous elementary curriculum open to all classes.60 Although he does recognize that not all students were to progress from the elementary to the grammar school (fewer still would, from the grammar school, further their studies at university), Mulcaster explicitly states that talent, not class or wealth, was to be the criterion of preferment.61 The student who entered the grammar school merely on the basis of their nobility was a ‘usurper’.62 However, we should heed William Barker’s warning against reading Mulcaster’s proposals as being motivated by ideals of class equality; they are first and foremost designed to utilize the available talent in order to ensure the best result for the nation.63 David Cressy has yet more powerfully shown the ways Mulcaster, throughout Positions, ‘seems to be poised on the brink of a meritocratic argument, but quickly backs away to safety. Whatever the theory might wish, the practical educator was faced with the reality of a strictly hierarchical social structure and a severely unequal distribution of wealth’.64 Even when public or private funds were made available expressly to finance the education of the disadvantaged, in reality the deployment of these funds was not always easy to monitor, and it was difficult to ensure that they would be deployed effectively.65 Cressy has also shown that the presence in the same school of students with different fee-paying arrangements meant that schoolmasters always risked favouring wealthier, full fee-paying students.66 All these factors give the lie to any claim that Mulcaster’s educational system was based solely on merit.

However, we ought to remember that the tensions and inconsistencies which compromise these meritocratic ideals only arise as a result of a proposal for an elementary system which brought students from all social strata together in the same classroom. We ought therefore to examine what motivated Mulcaster to champion a public schooling which (he hoped) would eventually assimilate the private education of the nobility. Given that education ought to prepare the individual for a life in society, Mulcaster thought that private education was a contradiction in terms:

Education is the bringing up of one, not to live alone, but among others, (bycause companie is our naturall cognisaunce) whereby he shall be best able to execute those doings in life, which the state of his calling shall employ him unto . . . [A]nd yet we restraine education to private, all those circumstances which be singular to one. As if he that were brought up alone, should also ever live alone, as if one whould say, I will have you to deale with all, but never to see all: your end shalbe publike your meane shalbe private.

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