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  • The German Example: English Interest in Educational Provision in Germany Since 1800 by David Phillips
  • James C. Albisetti (bio)
The German example: English Interest in Educational Provision in Germany since 1800, by David Phillips ; pp. viii + 230. London and New York: Continuum, 2011, £70.00, $130.00.

After a quarter century of researching various aspects of German education and its impact on the United Kingdom, David Phillips, Professor of Comparative Education at Oxford, has produced a synthetic study of the “ways in which the example of education in Germany (at all levels) has been used by those concerned with policy making and by other interested observers in England over the past two hundred years” (1). He makes clear that for much of this period there were both admirers and disparagers of German practices; but only during the First World War and the Third Reich did the negative views predominate. English educators and policy makers did look elsewhere for models as well, but Phillips is certainly correct to stress that Germany received more attention over the long haul than any other country.

Phillips is sensitive to the shifting meaning of “Germany” over time. For English travelers of the early nineteenth century, it usually meant only the Rhine and Hanover. By the middle third of the century, especially with regard to education, Prussia came to be the dominant German state; yet some commissioned inspectors did go to Saxony and Bavaria as well. It appears that nothing in Austrian education roused any interest in Britain before Austria’s exclusion from the German Confederation in 1866.

Phillips organizes the book according to six broad periods of English educational history, addressing for each the ways in which major figures and commissions viewed and made use of German examples. Despite the mention of education “at all levels,” the focus is strongly on secondary schools, with some attention to the elementary level. A brief chapter entitled “Excursus: Aspects of the German University” covers the entire two centuries, suggesting that Phillips ultimately had little interest in examining tertiary education.

Although some minor figures find mention in the book, the focus is clearly on long citations from famous names and well-known commissions. For the Victorian era these include Sarah Austin, who publicized Victor Cousin’s study of Prussian elementary schools; the House of Commons Select Committee of 1834; William Howitt; the Newcastle, Clarendon, and Taunton reports of the 1860s; and Matthew Arnold. For later periods, familiar figures such as Michael Sadler and milestones such as the Bryce [End Page 516] Commission, the Education Acts of 1918 and 1944, and the reforms carried through under Margaret Thatcher dominate.

Phillips makes several intriguing points. One is that, despite the extent to which the tripartite scheme at the core of the 1944 Education Act closely mirrored earlier German models, no one spoke of this in the midst of World War II. In the postwar era Germany began to look backward in its resistance to comprehensive schools, although British observers ultimately developed strong interest in the vocational training programs in the Federal Republic. In this context, Phillips pays too little attention to the German Democratic Republic, commenting only that “some observers” were intrigued by its single-track ten-year schools with no private or denominational competition (163).

Scholars of the Victorian era may object that the focus on inquiry commissions and major reform acts omits alternative forms of British interest in German education. Phillips notes, for example, that Howitt moved to Heidelberg in 1840 “for the sake of his children’s education,” but does not explore why (53). This was far from an isolated case: Richard Cobden sent his only son Dick to a school in Wiesbaden in the mid-1850s (where he died of scarlet fever). The eldest daughter of Cobden’s close friend Julie Schwabe, Harriet, attended the Grand Duchess’s School in Mannheim, a popular destination for upper-class Victorian girls, at the same time. The future physician Sophia Jex-Blake also taught at that girls’ school in the early 1860s.

In similar fashion, Phillips notes that Richard Monckton Milnes “had spent some time at the University of Bonn” but does not pursue the topic (76). The...

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