he history of education in Cardiff has little to relate before the year 1875. It begins more abruptly than do most narratives of the kind, for in the middle of the last century first a flourishing town and then a great city arose where the community before had been of the dimensions of hardly more than a large village. The place, though of great antiquity, sprang into being as a centre of importance in a fashion more familiar to the New World or to Australia than to Britain, and like Colonial cities, it is almost without those endowed charities which are to be found in older places. One or two comparatively unimportant educational funds (conditioned by such customary picturesque details as blue bonnets for boys and distinguishing badges for girls) there were, but in the main, public education in Cardiff did not exist apart from the great national movements. But these, whether English or Welsh, left their mark on the local Schools.
The building of Schools
The first great landmark date in Cardiff educational history may be said to be 1875, when a School Board wras elected and began at once to build Schools, the first of which was opened in 1878. At the same time the Managers of 44 Voluntary Schools (which by this time generally meant the National Society, representing the Church of England, or the representatives of some other religious body, such as the Roman Catholics or the Wesleyans) also began to build.
During the first twenty years of its existence the School Board built fourteen large 44 Board Schools,” besides a Higher Grade School, whilst during the same period nineteen4 Voluntary Schools ” (generally much smaller in size) were opened. Six of the latter were for Roman Catholics, the Irish population being large.
In most instances there were included in each of these 33 Schools three quite independent departments, each with its own head teacher, respectively accommodating boys, girls, and infants under seven years of age, so that in 1896 there were in effect nearlv 100 Schools.
They were almost all in new buildings, and these were (for that period) of good type, the structures being airy and commodious, but their large class-rooms stereotyped what has been perhaps the worst blemish in our elementary educational system, viz., the classes of 60 or 70 pupils. Even at the present time in the majority of cases, the number in class is reduced little below 50. Each lustrum gave better facilities to the teachers for college training and witnessed a higher standard of work demanded by the public and attained by their own ambitions. The qualifications, therefore, of the staffs of men and women secured as teachers rapidly improved, but their number in each School was entirelv insufficient. The Elementarv Schools were at their inception, and continue to this day to be grossly understaffed, and so far as failure has been justly charged against the education they give (there is a large amount of success to put against it), it has mainly arisen from the mechanical methods, and absence of individual cultivation. [87-88]
Bibliography
Cardiff records; being materials for a history of the county borough from the earliest times by Cardiff, Wales. Records Committee.. Matthews, John Hobson, ed. 1898. Internet Archive online version of a copy in the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center. Web. 15 November 2018.
Last modified 31 March 2022