Peace and Justice Post

There is no such thing as a value neutral educational process.
(Richard Shaull, Foreword to Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

After the initial attempts by a section of Christian-bourgeois souls (Dickens, Carlyle, Chadwick, Mayhew, Mrs.Gaskell, even the honourable, although not Christian, Benjamin Disraeli who first enunciated the thesis that England was infact not one nation but two—the rich and the poor), to seek reformative state interventions on behalf of the new urban poor who now swamped the industrial towns, towards the middle of the nineteenth century the inevitable exhaustion of goodwill followed

Where a Dickens had made visits to Yorkshire schools ( captured unforgettably in Nicholas Nickleby) in the thirtees and returned to raise a cry for amelioration, such sentiment expressed from outside the lived experience of the suffering classes, was to wear thin in a growing fright at the spread of what was to be christened “mass culture.”

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