"In Mrs Tilscher's Class," like much of Carol Ann Duffy's work, describes growing up in Britain during the mid-twentieth century. The education detailed in the poem is fairly typical of that time and place, marked by gold stars, class pets, and blackboards. Ideas about how young children should be taught have shifted over the course of history, often igniting controversy and serving as a site for broader debates about morality, politics, and development. Here, focusing especially on Britain—Duffy's own setting—we'll discuss some major changes in mainstream attitudes around elementary education.
Broadly speaking, prior to the nineteenth century, education in Britain was unsystematic, exclusive, and usually private. Over the course of the nineteenth century, ideas about how children should spend their days shifted, as did the legal and economic conditions dictating their lives. Whereas it had once been relatively common for children to work with adults, either on farms or in industrial settings, new anti-child-labor legislation (especially laws passed in 1833 and 1842) limited the ages at which children could begin working, and the settings in which they were allowed to do so. Accompanying these limitations came a flourishing of education for even non-elite children. Though a third of English and Welsh children in the 1860s did not attend school, over the following decades a series of laws made elementary education compulsory. By the start of the twentieth century, children twelve years old and under were legally required to attend school, and a network of tuition-free state-run schools had been established.
These late-Victorian and Edwardian schools largely lacked the play-oriented, stimulating atmosphere usually associated with elementary schools today: teachers tended to be regarded as more distant authority figures and corporal punishment was common. At the same time, schools offered a practical refuge for poor children, with 1906 and 1907 bills ensuring that children would receive meals and access to medical care at school. The arrival of two world wars—which prompted increases in child labor as well as large amounts of migration as children and families fled to safety—disrupted what had become an increasingly robust public education system. Meanwhile, in the period after World War I and continuing into the mid-twentieth century, progressive education reformers advocated for changes in schooling, inspired by the disciplines of psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. Broadly speaking, they promoted play and creativity and decried rote learning under strict hierarchies.
The post-war era, in which Duffy's poem takes place, was marked by an influx of state funding for schools and a focus on equality among students. Achievements in the field of sociology brought about an awareness of the ways in which educational inequity could bring about and entrench inequality long after students had left school. New, empirical research into education suggested that "streaming," or the dividing of students into various educational levels and settings at a young age, could cause more harm than good to working-class families. This was a period of widespread reform in education, with innovative methods across a variety of subject areas growing popular. This prompted a conservative backlash in favor of more traditional methods, as well as more religious content, towards the end of the 1960s, so that educational debates came to reflect widespread political and cultural divides in the United Kingdom.
Over the following decades, the schooling of young children in Britain continued to change. As British society grew more multicultural, conservative and centrist governments advocated against both the centralization and the funding increases that had characterized education reform during the early part of the twentieth century. In particular, the conservative policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s ignited a furious backlash. "In Mrs Tilscher's Class" was originally published in 1990. While it describes an earlier, midcentury educational system, it was written and read in a very different political, and thus educational, context. In some ways, the poem can be regarded not only as describing one childhood, but as describing a lost culture surrounding childhood and schooling.
