Abstract

THE SECONDARY MODERN SCHOOL IN FICTION by M . MATHIESON AND M . T . WHITESIDE, Lecturers in Education, University of Leicester lthough schools and educators have appeared in fiction with increasing frequency since the nineteenth century, coinciding with the expansion of education and the growth of the reading public, their treatment in most novels, until the post-war period, has been too limited to justify close attention as educational comment.1 In the work of Dickens and D. H. Lawrence only, the school has figured importantly as a microcosm of wider society and the teacher been examined in any detail as a highly significant product, or victim, of that society whose evils the school embodied. Dickens' novels contain sharp insights into the anxieties for which the ambiguity of the teacher's status was responsible,2 and Lawrence, in The Rainbow, takes us beyond questions of power and conflict in the school into the personal dilemmas of an adult in the classroom situation. I n the early part of the nineteenth century, the teacher was a neglec- ted figure in fiction; his lowly status failed to qualify him for inclusion in novels about fashionable society, or his appearance was limited to the superficial