Education

The spread of education was central to whig-liberals' hopes for spiritual regeneration and social stability. After 1867, their assessment of the chances of securing a proper spiritual education for every child dictated, more precisely than did any other consideration, the degree of optimism with which they regarded the political future.

Although whig-liberals were agreed that education must propagate true religion and a sense of social and moral obligation, a broad distinction may be drawn between the priorities of the more latitudinarian and more evangelical schools. The former asserted the doctrine that the ‘minority of the minority’, the clerisy, must moralise the masses through education. It must ‘cultivate the imagination’ of the working-man, in order to make him appreciate the importance of correct ethical and social behaviour. If he was to be prevented from engaging in strike action or in other ‘materialistic’ habits, he must understand the tenets of morality and of political economy alike: he must become tolerant, and his aesthetic faculties must be developed. This sort of education, it was believed, was needed as urgently by the ‘materialistic’ and ‘utilitarian’ business classes, which, unlike their counterparts in Germany, possessed neither cultural breadth (and the tolerance that stemmed from it), nor sound economic principles, nor a proper grounding in the natural sciences – and thus a reverence for the wisdom and power of the ‘Creator’.