Excerpt from Secondary Education in the Nineteenth Century The period of which we commonly think when we hear or speak of the nineteenth century began in 1789 and ended in 1918. The landmarks of educational history coincide very conveniently with those of wider history. The year 1918 might well be chosen as our terminus by reason of the passing of Mr Fisher's bill even if it had not been the year of the Armistice. Even if the years from 1789 to 1815 had not witnessed the Napoleonic wars, they might have been chosen as our starting-place because they saw the foundation of the monitorial schools and the reawakening of our ancient universities. These two disconnected sources of educational energy for a long time distributed power over distinct areas; it was not till the middle of the century that even a "ladder" was suggested as a means of ascent from the region served by the one to that served by the other; it was not till the Act of 1902 that elementary and higher education were treated as parts of a single whole; and it was not till the Act of 1918 that universal education from fourteen to eighteen - the years which the children of the wealthy had throughout the nineteenth century spent at a public school - was brought into sight. Here then the work of the preceding century has reached a definite landmark. The history of twentieth century education will not naturally fall into two divisions. That of the nineteenth century does. In the one story the universities are the centre from which activity radiated. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.