The Fall of the Majority: The Politics of Educational Gatekeeping in Victorian England for Working-Class Britons

• In Event: Reckoning with the Impact of Policy to Understand the Present

Abstract

This paper investigates how Victorian educational policy in Britain used race-class logics to regulate and contain its internal majority—the White working class. Through a Foucauldian genealogy of schooling reforms between 1861 and 1880, I trace three enduring gatekeeping mechanisms—moral domestication, curricular tracking, and occupational pragmatism—that transformed mass education into an instrument of social sorting. Drawing on inspectorate reports, I show how the state racialized poverty within Whiteness to justify the containment of poor children’s intellectual horizons. Contemporary achievement gaps among low-income White British pupils echo this legacy, challenging policy narratives that frame underperformance as recent or cultural. Instead, this work reveals the colonial residues embedded within England’s national curriculum and its imagined citizenry.

Author

• Faith D. Northern, New York University