R. H. Tawney - Public Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

View all R. H. Tawney Quotes
The organization of education on lines of class, which, though qualified in the last twenty years, has characterized the English system of public education since its very inception, has been at once a symptom, an effect, and a cause of the control of the lives of the mass of men and women by a privileged minority. The very assumption on which it is based, that all that the child of the workers needs is "elementary education" — as though the mass of the people, like anthropoid apes, had fewer convolutions in their brains than the rich — is in itself a piece of insolence.

R. H. Tawney
Democracy a society where ordinary men exercise initiative. Dreadful respect for superiors. Mental enlargement…Real foe to be overcome…fact that large section of the public like plutocratic government, and are easily gullible. How shake them!

R. H. Tawney
The full comedy of the situation was revealed in 1900, when, nearly a century after France and Germany had laid the foundations of a public system of secondary education, the Court of Appeal virtually decided that there was no Public Authority in England with legal power to establish and maintain secondary schools.

R. H. Tawney
It is still possible for the largest education authority in the country to propose to erect inequality of educational opportunity into a principle of public policy by solemnly suggesting, with much parade of philosophical arguments, that the interests of the community require that the children of well-to-do parents, who pay fees, should be admitted to public secondary schools on easier intellectual terms than the children of poor parents who can enter them only with free places, and that the children who are so contemptible as to be unable to afford secondary education without assistance in the form of maintenance allowances shall not be admitted unless they reach a higher intellectual standard still!

R. H. Tawney
The number both of pupils and school places in 1922 is... all too small. But, inadequate as they are, they represent something like an educational revolution compared with the almost complete absence of public provision which existed prior to 1902.

R. H. Tawney
England has not yet imitated the example set by America and by most of the British Dominions in making public secondary education free.

R. H. Tawney