Thread by @antonhowes

In the early 19thC, the state essentially spent its money on two things: war, and paying off the debt from previous wars.

Yet by the end of the century, it was involved in public health, sanitation, education, museums, design, and more.

How? A thread extracted from my book:

Take Britain and state education. Since the 1820s, a handful of radical and utilitarian members of Parliament like William Ewart had tried to persuade the government to fund new schools, museums, and public libraries.

But their success was limited.

From the 1830s, the rather obscure-sounding Committee of the Privy Council on Education gave grants for building schools. In 1836, the government also created schools of design - all the better to compete economically with the French!

And there were a few other small victories.

Yet a whole new opportunity for reform was provided by the Great Exhibition of 1851.

As an international exhibition of industry, in the days before GDP statistics it functioned as an audit. It and later world's fairs showed how Britain was doing relative to its economic rivals.

The industrial exhibitions thus showed where Britain was ahead, but also where it was behind. It provided an opportunity for would-be reformers to expose worrying weaknesses and thus justify their reforms.

Especially when it came to state education.

The organisers of the exhibition - Henry Cole and fellow members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (now @theRSAorg) - exacerbated fears of Britain's impending decline.

The narrative gave them an excuse to create the systems they desired.

They identified two areas of worry: science and design.

Although Britain had many eminent scientists and artists, the Great Exhibition seemed to show that the skills were not widely diffused among the workforce.

To keep up, Britain would need to improve the education of workers

The reformers' scare tactics worked.

In the aftermath of the exhibition, Cole was put in charge of a new government Department of Science and Art. He soon oversaw the agglomeration of various museums & cultural institutions to South Kensington.

Yet this was just the beginning.

Cole and his allies then oversaw a dramatic expansion of the state into education through the use of examinations.

The biggest barrier to state education was that schools were mainly run by religious orgs. The schools were thus split between the Anglican church and dissenters.

So when state schools were proposed, they were bitterly opposed. The fear for dissenters was that kids would become indoctrinated to Anglicanism. And naturally the gov could not teach dissenting religions.

As for a compromise to teach no religion at all, that was even worse!

So utilitarian reformers came up with a workaround.

By holding examinations, and then paying teachers based on the outcomes of the tests, they could incentivise the teaching of certain subjects while leaving schools free to teach whatever religion they pleased.

The tactic was initially applied to adult education. The Society of Arts would first trial out exams without payments.

And then Cole's Department of Science and Art would take them over, first for drawing, and later for science, using their budget to fund payment-by-results.

It worked spectacularly well. By 1862, when the government wanted to improve teaching in schools, at Cole's suggestion it adopted payment-by-results too.

So what followed was a repeating cycle of international exhibitions, calls for education in new subjects, and then exams.

Overall, the strategy was successful. Eventually, in 1899, Cole's department merged into the first Board of Education - later the Department of Education.

The utilitarians had won.

For more + a discount on my book for having read to the end, see here: antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-inven…