‘Therefore we must elect as ruler and guardian of the city him who as boy and youth and man has been tested and has come out without strain, and render him honours in life and after death, giving him the highest rewards of public burial and other memorials. The others we must reject.’ In this way Plato began to elaborate his thesis of ‘education for leadership’ in the fourth century bc. It was to become a key theme in the humanist scholarship of the sixteenth century, and later, in the nineteenth century, assumed the status and trappings of an English tradition. To a large extent it has fallen from favour in twentieth-century Britain. Nevertheless, there have been several attempts during the present century to adapt the notion to meet changing social, political and cultural demands and opportunities. This book is chiefly concerned with the characteristics, implications and ultimate fate of these more recent efforts.

The historiography of nineteenth-century English education has rightly emphasised the theme of leadership and its social and political implications, especially in relation to the public schools. Historians such as Rupert Wilkinson, J.A. Mangan and Mark Girouard have vividly depicted an ideology that asserted the necessity to train a cohesive, enlightened elite to rule nation and Empire. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the development of the ideal since 1914.