This book, first published in 1987, attempts to take fresh stock of a man who made a great impact on nineteenth-century English Secondary Education. A quasi psycho-biographical approach is adopted from the beginning so that Thring, the man, is examined from the perspective of his paradoxes, personality and the pervasive influences on him. Specia
Edward Thring features prominently in all the educational histories of his period, and is seen as the foremost figure in independent schools in the generation after the famous Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby. This book draws on new material and letters discovered in an archive. And archive it was assumed had perished in a fire; it shows just how ground-breaking his reforms really were; how sound or otherwise his methods of financing Uppingham were, and why he polarized people between passionate supporters and strong opponents. This biography also includes the bitter battle over who should be his literary executor.
The traditional picture of a Victorian public school assumes that it was founded on Thomas Arnold, Tom Brown's Schooldays and Rugby football. A Rifle Corps, Oxbridge Blues on the teaching staff, and an ethos of esprit de corps were all part of the system. The cult of athleticism reigned supreme. This was not the case at Uppingham School during Edward Thring's headmastership from 1853 to 1887. Here a balanced physical education of gymnastics, athletics, games, swimming and country pursuits flourished within a sane but revolutionary educational framework. Thring's Uppingham, however, was an Athens surrounded by Spartan strongholds. The Spartans were kept at bay during Thring's lifetime, but, after his death, they closed in and even claimed Thring as one of their own. His ideals were hijacked by the sportsmen and then perverted by the militarists. Thring's theory and practice of physical education lived on outside the traditional public schools, was adopted by the progressive school movement, and eventually found acceptance in all good schools. Its legacy can be found in the first National Curriculum for Physical Education and in all schools that value physical education as a vital ingredient of holistic education. This book will inform trainee teachers, practising teachers and teacher trainers of the men and women who have strived since 1800 to secure a place for physical education in the curriculum for all pupils. Historians of education, gender, society and sport will find new material to illuminate their fields of study.
Explores public health strategy and central-local government relations during the mid-nineteenth-century, using the experience of Uppingham, England, as a micro-historical case study. This study compares the sanitary state of the community with others nearby, and Uppingham School with comparable schools of that era.
