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The Institute of Education is by far the most important non-government educational institution in Britain.Its influence on the education service and policy thinking has been immense. Its centenary is undoubtedly worth marking with this history written by our leading educational historian.
Richard Aldrich has a few faults - he’s a Charlton Athletic fan, for example - but his knowledge of educational history in the 20th century and of the institute are not among them. He has written a rich and excellent history.
The story he tells is one of sustained commitment to students, influence over teacher education, a growing contribution to policy thinking, international connections and, as ever with academic institutions, a bewildering array of buildings and locations. During the Second World War, for example, the institute was evacuated to Nottingham, where the director apparently urged the male students to “circulate among the girls . . . to take their minds off the war”.
More remarkable than the buildings, though, are the serious thinkers who have made the institute what it is. Sidney Webb was a founding father. He was present at the inaugural meeting, when John Adams, the institute’s first professor, proving that the good sound-bite is not a new invention, said: “There are two ways in which the public can pay for the training of its teachers: it can pay in money or it can pay in children.”
In the Twenties and Thirties, Cyril Burt, the most influential psychologist in British educational history, was the institute’s dominant research figure. His legacy may have been baleful - the idea that intelligence is general, inherited and fixed - but his impact is beyond question.
During the war, the great Fred Clarke led the institute. His contribution was to internationalise the organisation, setting it on a road to global influence from which it has never looked back. He also made a major contribution to the 1944 Education Act and the post-war settlement. Incidentally, it is a measure of the National Union of Teachers’s influence at that time that, following his spell as director of the institute, Fred Clarke became the union’s education officer.
Full review in this week’s TES Friday magazine
