Such have been the continuing, and the changing, characteristics of education for leadership in twentieth-century education. Plato has been much more influential than Marx in English secondary education. Attempts to revise what was still often described as the ‘English tradition’ had an important bearing on the character and direction of educational change. Assertions of the values of community, character, morality and citizenship with which they were associated, represented significant responses to contemporary problems. There is no doubt, though, that the efforts of the revisionists met most commonly with failure and disappointment. With the overall decline of the classic nineteenth-century ideology, and the general failure of attempts to revive and revitalise it during this century, we need now to ask whether we have lost anything in this gradual process, and how to explain the character of our modern ‘guardians’.

POLITICS AND CULTURE

Decline and dispersal have been central themes in this book. The public school ideology, at the peak of its authority in the late nineteenth century, has been undermined by changing political, social and cultural expectations. Even though it retained much of its former influence, and the public schools themselves by and large survived these changes, their rationale as the exclusive source of future leaders was contested and effectively lost. By the 1960s it was a role to which only the critics of the public schools referred. Attempts to transfer their ideals and traditions to the new state system of secondary education and the mass of the population were largely frustrated.