In recent years the study of the history of education has flourished and expanded. It has moved from being a specialist interest to one that concerns economic and social historians, who see that education has played a central part in the discussion of industrial development and the formation of the social structure. In this study, revised and updated throughout, Dr. Sanderson reviews the history of education in the nineteenth century and the academic debates surrounding it. He examines the discussion surrounding literacy, its trends and significance in the creation of an industrial labor force, and considers the successful development of a middle-class scientific culture in the eighteenth-century and the relative failure to develop technical education in the nineteenth.
