A form of education for adolescents became necessary in all
societies that had an alphabet and engaged in
commerce. In Western Europe, formal secondary education can be traced back to the
Athenian educational reforms of 320BC. Though their civilisation was eclipsed and they were enslaved, Hellenistic Athenian teachers were valued in the
Roman system. The Roman and Hellenistic schools of rhetoric taught the seven liberal arts and sciences –
grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and
astronomy – which were regarded as a preparation for the study at a tertiary level of theology, law and medicine. Boys would have been prepared to enter these schools by private tutors at home. Girls would have only received tuition at home. England provides a good case study. When Augustine of Canterbury brought
Christianity there in 597, no schools existed. He needed trained priests to conduct church services and boys to sing in the choir. He had to create both the grammar schools that taught Latin, to enable the English to study for the priesthood, and song schools (choir schools) that trained the 'sons of gentlefolk' to sing in cathedral choirs. In the case of
Canterbury (597) and
Rochester (604), both still exist. Bede in his
Ecclesiastical History of the English People (732) tells that the Canterbury school taught more than the 'intended reading and understanding of Latin', but 'the rules of metric, astronomy and the
computus as well as the works of the saints' Even at this stage, there was tension, as the church was worried that knowledge of Latin would give the student access to non-Christian texts that it would not wish them to read. Over the centuries leading to the
renaissance and
reformation the church was the main provider of secondary education. Various invasions and schisms within the controlling church challenged the focus of the schools, and the curriculum and language of instruction waxed and waned. From 1100, With the growth of the towns, grammar schools 'free' of the church were founded, and some church grammar schools were handed over to the laïty. Universities were founded that did not just train students for the priesthood.
Renaissance and Reformation Whereas in mainland Europe the
Renaissance preceded the
Reformation, local conditions in England caused the Reformation to come first. The Reformation was about, among other things, allowing the laïty to interpret the Bible in their own way without the intervention of priests, and preferably in the vernacular. This stimulated the foundation of free grammar schools - who searched for a less constrained curriculum.
Colonialisation required navigation, mensuration, languages and administrative skills. The laïty wanted these taught to their sons. After
Gutenberg in 1455 had mastered moveable metal type printing and
Tyndale had translated the Bible into English (1525), Latin became a skill reserved for the catholic church and sons of conservative nobility. Schools started to be set up for the sons of merchants in Europe and the colonies too- for example
Boston Latin Grammar School (1635).
Comenius (1592–1670), a
Moravian protestant proposed a new model of education- where ideas were developed from the familiar to the theoretical rather than through repetition, where languages were taught in the vernacular and supported universal education. In his
Didactica Magna (Great Didactic), he outlined a system of schools that is the exact counterpart of many western school systems: kindergarten, elementary school, secondary school, six-form college, university.
Locke's
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) stressed the importance of a broader intellectual training, moral development and physical hardening. The grammar schools of the period can be categorised in three groups: the nine leading schools, seven of them boarding institutions which maintained the traditional curriculum of the classics, and mostly served 'the aristocracy and the squirearchy'; most of the old endowed grammar schools serving a broad social base in their immediate localities which also stuck to the old curriculum; the grammar schools situated in the larger cities, serving the families of merchants and tradesmen who embraced change.
Industrialisation During the 18th century their social base widened and their curriculum developed, particularly in mathematics and the natural sciences. But this was not universal education and was self-selecting by wealth. The industrial revolution changed that. Industry required an educated workforce where all workers needed to have completed a basic education. In France,
Louis XIV, wrestled the control of education from the Jesuits,
Condorcet set up
Collèges for universal lower secondary education throughout the country, then Napoleon set up a regulated system of
Lycee. In England,
Robert Peel's
Factory Act 1802 required an employer to provide instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic during at least the first four years of the seven years of apprenticeship. The state had accepted responsibility for the
basic education of the poor. The provision of school places remained inadequate, so an Order in Council dated 10 April 1839 created the
Committee of the Privy Council on Education.
Universal education There was considerable opposition to the idea that children of all classes should receive basic education, all the initiatives such as
industrial schools and
Sunday schools were initially a private or church initiative. With the
Great Exhibition of 1851, it became clear just how far behind the English education system had fallen. Three reports were commissioned to examine the education of upper, middle and labouring class children. The
Clarendon Commission sought to improve the nine Great Public Schools. The
Taunton Commission looked at the 782 endowed grammar schools (private and public). They found varying quality and a patchy geographical coverage, with two thirds of all towns not having any secondary school. There was no clear conception of the purpose of secondary education. There were only thirteen girls' schools and their tuition was superficial, unorganised and unscientific. They recommended a system of first-grade schools targeted at a leaving age of 18 as preparation for upper and upper-middle-class boys entering university, second-grade targeted at a leaving age of 16 for boys preparing for the army or the newer professions, and third-grade targeted at a leaving age of 14 for boys of small tenant farmers, small tradesmen, and superior artisans. This resulted in the
Endowed Schools Act 1869 which advocated that girls should enjoy the same education as boys. The
Newcastle Commission inquired "into the state of public education in England and to consider and report what measures, if any, are required for the extension of sound and cheap elementary instruction to all classes of the people". It produced
1861 Newcastle Report and this led to the
Elementary Education Act 1870 (
33 & 34 Vict. c. 75) (Forster Act). The school boards set up by the Elementary Education Act 1870 were stopped from providing secondary education by the
Cockerton Judgement of 1899. The school leaving age at this time was 10. The Judgement prompted the
Education Act 1902 (Balfour Act). Compulsory education was extended to 12. The new
local education authorities (LEA)s that were formed from the school boards; started to open
higher grade elementary schools (ISCED Level2) or county schools to supplement the endowed grammar schools. These LEAs were allowed to build second-grade secondary schools that in the main became the future
secondary modern schools. In the "
1904 Regulations for Secondary Schools", the
Board of Education determined that secondary schools should offer : a four year subject-based course leading to a certificate in English language and literature, geography, history, a foreign language, mathematics, science, drawing, manual work, physical training, and, for girls, housewifery. The
Education Act 1918 (Fisher Act) extended
compulsory full-time education to 14, and recommended compulsory part-time education from 14 to 18. The
Hadlow report, "Education the Adolescent" (1926) proposed that there should be a break point at eleven, establishing primary schools and secondary schools. The
United Nations, founded in 1947, was committed to education for all but the definition was difficult to formulate.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) declared that elementary and fundamental education, which it did not define, was a right to be enjoyed by all. The
Education Act 1944 (Butler Act) made sweeping changes to the funding of state education using the tripartite system, but was not allowed to tackle private schools. It introduced the GCE 'O'level at 16, and the 'A' at 18, but only raised the school leaving age until 15, making the exam inaccessible to the majority. But one year of ISCED Level 3 (Upper) secondary education was mandatory and free. In 1972 the school leaving was raised to 16. The
Education and Skills Act 2008, when it came into force in the 2013 academic year, initially required participation in some form of education or training until the school year in which the child turned 17, followed by the age being raised to the young person's 18th birthday in 2015. This was referred to as raising the "participation age" to distinguish it from the school leaving age which remains at 16. Thus the UK is following the ISCED Level 3 (Upper) secondary education guideline. ==Right to a secondary education==