The Politics of ‘Indirect Rule’: Conflict, Contradiction and Control in Education Policy, 1922-9

Abstract

The 1920s have not been in vogue with historians of education since the 1980s, when the questions being asked – of curriculum control, teacher professionalism, and the role of trade unions – were seen to have particular contemporary significance. As a result, scholarship in this area now feels somewhat outmoded, chiefly because of the dominance of a ‘top-down’ model of control in much of the analysis. This article attempts to gain a new perspective on one of the key issues of this period, the radical politicisation of teachers, through a comparison of stated government policy and the experiences of teachers themselves. This reveals perspectives that complicate and challenge the dominant narrative of the exercise of control in the education system in this period and suggests further avenues for research using a biographical methodology.