Institutes of Research in the 1920s and 1930s: a ...



The Institute as Network: the Scottish Council for Educational Research as a local and international phenomenon in the 1930s.

Martin Lawn

Centre for Educational Sociology

University of Edinburgh

Abstract

Established in the late 1920s, the Scottish Council for Research in Education was a highly significant and influential institute for educational research, both in the scope and the methodology of its work, in Scotland and abroad.

It was one of the first of a new kind of institution; it signaled the rise of specialized research institutes, outside the university yet closely connected to academic work and to the governing of education, across the Western world. Research Institutes are a flexible way of managing tasks and influencing policy: they appear to conform to disciplinary procedures and yet they are free to inquire and suggest policy directions.

SCRE did not have a specialized staff of researchers but it did work cooperatively, as a prototype knowledge network, linking together in projects a wide range of Scottish academics, teachers and education managers. Together, they were bound in a movement for reform and experiment.

The Scottish Council for Research in Education in Edinburgh, established in the late 1920s, was a highly significant and influential institute for educational research, both in the scope and the methodology of its work. The context of its creation, the particular shape it took and its connection to the new internationalism in this field are the subjects of this paper. The period studied is the 1920s and 1930s. Research Institutes are a flexible way of managing tasks and influencing policy: they appear to conform to disciplinary procedures and yet they are free from the University contexts and hierarchies of knowledge. For their customers or sponsors, their attraction lies in their freedom to inquire and suggest policy directions yet at the same time, working within recognized disciplinary boundaries. Locating Institutes within their intellectual and financial contexts, particularly the production and consumption of practices of research and policy, is as crucial as any institutional history set within national borders.

The formation of the Scottish Council for Educational Research in 1928 is an important part of the development of the modern Scottish educational system. By the mid 1930s, SCRE had become a leading edge institute for innovative methodologies in educational research and the lynchpin of wider moves to intelligence testing in Scotland. In these two sentences can be summarized the important story of the SCRE in relation to the rise of specialized research institutes, outside the university yet closely connected to academic work and to the governing of education. They also reflect the way in which crucial innovations are embedded within national narratives and excluded from global significance and their inter-connected contexts. SCRE was also part of a distinctive international trend in the rise of specialist scientific institutes, the involvement of private [non state] monies and the arrival of experts. It was part of the rise of specialist policy and evaluation functions in education systems, dependent upon strong data flow upon which to construct systems. SCRE’s early work on assessment methodologies was crucial to the work of the important international study of assessment organized by the International Institute at Columbia University, NY, throughout the 1930s, with research institutes in Europe. The associated Carnegie Foundation funding enabled an ambitious scale and depth to its work. SCRE’s critical role in the development of intelligence testing as a technology was important in the UK and, through this international inquiry, with a wider world. The national and the international are closely coupled in the formation and importance of SCRE.

A National Research Institute

The Scottish Council for Research in Education was the first research institute within the three reference territories within which it existed; Scotland, the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Although it had a precarious financial existence and was very short staffed, it fostered some very innovative and valuable research studies, which had an effect way beyond its borders. It was founded by the Educational Institute of Scotland [the teachers’ union] and the local education authorities in Scotland. The involvement of the EIS, a prime mover in the SCRE, is very significant in the relation between teachers and educational research and it followed on from an early research committee founded within the EIS, some years previously. In the Scottish histories of SCRE, and within current narratives of Scottish education, the EIS is a major force in the development of education, and in this case, in educational research.

There are three useful but short publications about SCRE that provide an illustrative account of its activities and opinion about them [SCRE 1947, Craigie 1972 and SCRE 1978] and upon which the following account is based. Each of these accounts is a retelling of its history and were published by SCRE itself. The agreed story of its creation is that the EIS and the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland founded it jointly in 1927. They had organized a joint conference the previous year on educational research in which the keynote lecturer, a Director of Education, had pleaded strongly

for skilled, scientific, statistical investigation of all problems raised by the [the key school examination] and for the organization of a body of research workers who would think out the problems of method, curricula and teaching technique [Craigie p3]

Both partners appeared to recognize that, post World War One, they were in a new time, a time in which education was restructuring and expanding, and which needed a good flow of data to be managed effectively. Scotland had instituted university degrees for education in 1916.

The EIS had had a Research Committee since 1919, chaired by a University of Glasgow lecturer, William Boyd; its main purpose was to stimulate among teachers

An interest in the methods of educational research and keeping them informed, by organizing lectures, and holding weekend schools, of the results of experimentation and investigation. [Craigie p2]

In November, 1919, Boyd invited teachers, in the EIS journal, to communicate with the Committee if they were doing ‘experimental work –however simple or unsystematic’ and promised that the Journal would publish records of research from Scotland and other countries, and the Committee would try to begin ‘classes in Educational Sciences’ [and a summer school] [SEJ November 14, 1919]. In the following year, 6 thousand arithmetic tests were sent out to the teachers who wanted to use them for their own assessment of the Qualifying Examination [for entry to secondary school]. At the same time, 2,500 essays were received to begin work on examining procedures. Boyd argued about the value of educational research, teacher experiments and their value in realizing professional power. In the early 1920s, the Scottish Educational Journal [the EIS Journal] had regular essays and comments about educational research, particularly on the comparison of examinations and testing, trying to face the question ‘Will those who have felt the difficulty of getting reliable marks let us know how the problem has presented itself to them, and what they themselves try to do to ensure satisfactory results?’[SEJ Vol 6 No52 1923 p1000] By 1925, they were offering a prize to teaching college students for an essay of 5,000 words on ‘some aspect of school work involving personal observation or/and experiment’ [SEJ Vol 8 No 41 1925 p1081]. In comparison to England, the teachers Boyd addressed were more likely to be graduates, which is probably the basis for their advanced work and interest in experiment and reform.[i]

So, it is not surprising that the Association of Directors of Education, managing public education in the democratic local authorities, had approached the EIS to explore the possibilities of cooperation in education research. It was agreed that a Research Council should be formed with the purpose of organizing and aiding the work of research in Scottish schools, making grants to approved individuals for research work, and publishing reports. In the same year, discussions took place with the departments of education in the four Scottish universities and with the four training colleges. However, even before it was officially registered as a legal organization [as a limited company in December 1932], it received an invitation from the United States to join in an international research project, a point to which I will return.

The interesting silence in this account is in the lack of place of the universities; they are neither prime movers nor key partners in the formation of the Council. There were four Scottish universities at this time: Edinburgh and St Andrews were the first British universities to have chairs of education, in the late 19thC, but were consistently hostile to educational studies, and Glasgow and Aberdeen steadfastly refused to establish chairs [and they did not appear until post 1945] [Bell 1975 p11/12]. However, individual professors were able to influence educational research: particularly, Thomson and Drever [ a professor of psychology] in Edinburgh and McClelland in St Andrews. Thomson was also Principal of Moray House Training College and McClelland was Director of Studies at Dundee Training College.

SCRE was the first research institute of education in the United Kingdom at a time when there were few departments of education in universities and when the UK government, for example, had very few employees in its central department of state in education. SCRE had a symbolic value as well as a growing scientific production. Not until the late 1940s, did England and Wales achieve its own research institute, the National Foundation for Educational Research, constructed in a similar way, as a form of cooperation between the teacher unions, the local education authorities and the universities. Its emblematic value of the Council may have masked its material existence. The Research Council was formed with one part time Director, Dr Robert Rusk, a secretarial assistant, Dorothy Charlton, and a clerk. [Dr Rusk was a graduate of the University of Jena and was the SCRE Director from its beginning in 1928 until 1958]. Although the Research Council produced a series of publications and major projects, it should be seen as less than a specific site of specialist work than as a nodal point in a network of teachers and academic workers. In 1930, it had no research workers or statisticians of its own although it had close support from its two founding associations in voluntary service and

Its successes were made possible because teachers, in effect, did a large part of the Council’s work for it on a voluntary basis. [Thomasson ‘The SCRE and the Teacher’ in SCRE 1978 p20]

This relation with teachers, according to Thomasson, ‘gave the Council phenomenal vitality in its earlier years’ [op cit p20]. Nisbet adds that

The reason why SCRE flourished in the 1930s was because of its networks that it could draw on, - not just university people but a number of teachers, head teachers mostly, some directors of education, some university people, but very largely people from [the four] training colleges - In Jordanhill, Moray House, Aberdeen and Dundee. Although we tend to think of universities as the bases for educational research, the real strength of educational research in Scotland, in the early days, in the 30s, came from the training colleges. The Universities were involved .. but the main workers in it were the people in the training colleges. That is one of the main differences between Scotland and England, the colleges contained some quite outstanding research people .. the college people put a great deal of effort in to it.{Nisbet 2003]

The EIS acted as its landlord until 1972. In fact, SCRE acted as a network point and argued that its expertise, as the manager of a network in effect, allowed it to work more ‘intensively and extensively ‘ [Craigie p7] than any one individual was capable of, ensured that a project became a national project, and could undertake long term investigations.

‘The Council helped the lone researcher by affording him expert guidance, supplying him with literature and test material, subsidizing his investigations and publishing his results.’[10th Annual Report, reported in Craigie p7]

Finance was always short at SCRE.

‘For more than 20 years the Council was totally dependent on financial contributions from the EIS and the education authorities. Even as late as the mid ‘fifties, its budget was only £3000 a year, barely sufficient to permit the employment of a part time director and a small staff’ [Thomasson p20 in SCRE 1978]

The EIS supported the Council with a sum of between £500 and £750 per annum; the Education Authorities paid 1/4 d [farthing] per pupil. The average annual income amounted to £1500. However, the shortage of money may not be the real question here. It is argued that

Rusk saw test construction as commercial, and he wanted educational research to be academic, not contaminated by anything like making money. In the 1930s it was possible to maintain that view. People would laugh today [at the idea] that you could do research without money. But you could do it. [Nisbet 2003]

Morris concurs

‘Rusk had always set his heart against the Council being a test producing agency, because he deplored such councils and bureaux in America [Morris 1994 p87]

Within three years, from 1930, the Council had produced ten free short research reports on subjects like individual differences, reading comprehension, arithmetic in school, pupil attainment and school leaving. it had produced project reports on colour blindness, a Curriculum for Pupils 12-15 and Intelligence. It had a loan library for researchers with technical journals; it compiled lists of Scottish theses in education, and tried to assemble a master file of mental and scholastic tests [SCRE 1948 p 14]. It managed major investigations on optimal school size, comparisons with US children [using American tests], on distribution of intelligence, and time allocation to school subjects. In fact, it began a process of classifying pupils, conceptually refining pupil categories, and even influencing class nomenclature [proposing standard names for Scottish classes]. Data flowed out of Scottish schools about how the selection processes of Scottish schools worked, how much time was spent teaching subjects, and how to understand the ‘ability’ of the pupil. This information was to be used in the school system and indeed, formed the system as it began to shape the key categories of it – pupils, ability, time, organization. Although this had cumulative policy effects in the system, through the close and practical relations with the teacher union and the local education directors, it is worth noting that, in the formal sense, the Scottish office, the UK government office for Scotland in this period, did not enter into this innovative relation between professional experts and the effective government of schooling.

The Scottish Office [in the 1930s] took [no part] at all [in the Research Council meetings]. They thought that these researchers were trying to tell ‘us’ what to do, and wanted no part of it. [Nisbet 2003]

Significantly, SCRE acted as the leading edge of the developing expertise about testing. From the outset, it had used Binet tests, and then revised a version of the 1916 Stanford Binet for Scottish use. As early as 1931, the Council determined to devise tests for types of ability to ‘enable pupils to be directed into the appropriate secondary school course’, and did so for English, Modern Language, Mathematics, Engineering, Science and Technical Subjects [SCRE 1948 p 18]. The School Leaving Age was to be raised and tests were seen as a useful way of managing this process of fitting the pupil to the curriculum and teaching. The Council made information about these tests widely available. Copies of the Terman – Merrill Intelligence Scale were also produced by SCRE for use by primary teachers and educational psychologists. By 1936, the Council had been able, by extensive testing of ability and attainment, to promote ‘the best combination’ [Craigie p15] of intelligence tests, examinations and teacher estimates to standardize the forecasting of the post-primary course best suited to the individual pupil. However, although SCRE was heavily involved in the new field of intelligence and ability, a key partner, Godfrey Thomson at Moray House College, actually produced the tests used and sold them profitably[ii].

The 1932 Mental Survey was a considerable achievement by the young research Institute, a model of extensive fieldwork, a research partnership with teachers and an exemplar of policy focused research work.

‘The 1932 Mental Survey arose out of a proposal to hold an investigation into the incidence of mental deficiency in Scotland to match one in England on which a report has been submitted to the Board of Education and the Board of Control. It was early realized, however, that the amount of mental deficiency in the country could be assessed even approximately only if the distribution of intelligence was known for a whole age group.’ Craigie 1972 p 17

The proposal came from the Professor of Psychology at the University in Edinburgh, James Drever, and the test used was a Moray House test, produced by Godfrey Thomson, a Professor of Education at Edinburgh and Principal of Moray House from 1925 to 1951, a key writer on intelligence in the 1930s. So, the scientific resources for this test were already contained in the university at Edinburgh but the SCRE offered a consolidating network of teachers and administrators and a flexibility of operation, which the university could not. All pupils born in Scotland in 1921, nearly one hundred thousand pupils in state or private schools or ‘institutions’, were tested on a Monday morning in 1932.This was a remarkable logistical feat, undertaken by an inexperienced Council with its new network of voluntary support from the teachers and local authorities. The tests were administered and marked by the teachers. It has been argued that the key to understanding the logistical efficiency and effective management of the testing programme on intelligence was due to

.. a widely diffused dedication to, and understanding of, empirical research in the Scottish profession [Hope in SCRE 1978 p23]

This point is echoed in the SCRE report in 1947, talking about the support from the teachers union, the EIS; it refers to the ‘active cooperation of its members’ and the

.. offers of help from teachers in applying tests or supplying data are never lacking [p38]

Hope further argues that the reason why Scotland was the first country to undertake large scale testing of intelligence was the

‘The most ambitious attempt made by the Council to apply intelligence tests, and so far the only nation wide survey ever undertaken, was the application in 1932 of a group test especially prepared for the purpose to a complete age-group [SCRE 1947 p25]

The consequence of this involvement with mental testing meant that SCRE became a major source of expertise on mental testing and promoted their use in the training of teachers and in the armed forces. Inferences were drawn about intelligence and occupation and housing.

The sophisticated techniques which Thomson, Kennedy-Fraser and their colleagues employed in the Intelligence of Scottish Children 1933 placed them in the forefront of social research’ [Hope, K in SCRE 1978 p24] [The Intelligence of Scottish Children was the published report of the Mental Survey.]

and

But for sheer hard thinking, lucidity of research design, and credibility of findings there is really nothing in modern survey work which comes up to the standard of these studies [Hope, K in SCRE 1978 p24]

Nisbet argued that many of the standard research procedures used since were pioneered in Council projects [SCRE 1978 p7] including the standardization of research instruments, such as the wide range of tests for ability and attainment. It was easy for a Director of SCRE to state that

Throughout its existence, the Council has had a distinguished record of research. The authors of the Council’s early publications make up a Who’s Who of the greats in this field – Drever, Vernon, Thomson, McLelland and Boyd. These people influenced educational thinking throughout the world. [SCRE 1978 p10]

It is very interesting that he then said that

Newton, Darwin and Einstein shaped the way people thought and still think. So with education, the research carried out by SCRE over the last half century has both provided a technology and set a climate of opinion [SCRE 1978 p11]

It is worth emphasizing again the way in which SCRE worked at this time which was, in its own words, ‘an adventure in cooperative research[ SCRE 1938]. In Dundee, a triumvirate of McClelland, Margaret Young, Lecturer in Experimental Education, in Dundee Training College, and Douglas Macintosh, Assistant to the Director of Education, County of Fife undertook a major study on entry examinations to secondary school. They organized a large, disciplined group of people to undertake this research, about 400 students from the College, about 80 Teachers in local schools, 6 local Headmasters, and 14 College staff; in total they gave voluntarily about 13,000 hours of labour. It is worth quoting the report in which their organization was described-

All of these [ assistants] had previous instruction in mental and scholastic testing but they were specially trained by Miss Young for the application of the particular tests. Similar teams, trained and supervised by Miss Young and Mr McIntosh, undertook the laborious task of correcting the mental and scholastic tests, calculating the intelligence and educational quotients and tabulating the results.

.. Throughout the sessions 1936-7 and 1937-8 this group met one or two evenings a week from 6 to 9pm. Practically all members have helped with the investigation from the start, and they have become highly skilled workers who can handle most of the essential techniques involved. They have been a most faithful and reliable group, whose only reward, apart from their keen interest in the research, has been a cup of tea in the middle of the evening’s work…. A large amount of the grid making and other mechanical parts of the working up of the results was undertaken by large groups of students who gave us their help in free periods during the college session. From time to time specially qualified and interested students have been trained to act as a group leaders, and these have helped to ease the burden of the organization and supervision of the various teams. Many of the have become interested in special aspects of the investigation and have undertaken to work up the results of these independently… At the moment we have about 20 of these helpers who work largely at home, but come up to the evening meetings from time to time to discuss their methods and obtain help in any difficulties which they have encountered. [SCRE/ IEI 1938 p12]

To undertake this research, a big undertaking, teachers were made the core of the process, in effect, they would be a resource as educational testers and researchers across Scotland for the next generations.

In fact, SCRE was an early scientific knowledge network in education, linking together professional and lay expertise across the country in such a way that it acted as single, consistent disciplined effect. It enabled this small country to develop a model of genius. So, Scotland produced SCRE and SCRE produced Scotland.

The story of SCRE, within its own official histories of this time, is of a very Scottish institution. Very little reference is made to external events or an international context. It is a clearly bounded story in which a country, its education and institutions, and its territory, constitute the case, to which SCRE becomes the local solution. The ‘outside’ appears only as a useful source of assistance or resource. This is the most common way, especially in the early decades of the last century, to describe a nation’s progress in education; it is an internal series of events, with its own landmarks. In an apt eulogy for SCRE, after its first fifty years, Bryan Dockrell, its Director in 1978, wrote

When the first meeting of the Scottish Council for Research in Education took place on 23rd June 1928, a pioneering work was begun. There were no similar organizations anywhere in the world so no precedents could be followed. Instead, SCRE became a model. Within two years, the Australian Council for Educational Research was established and a little later, the New Zealand Council for Educational Research was founded. Both consciously followed the Scottish model. Nearly twenty years later, a parallel organization, the National Foundation for Educational Research, was established for England and Wales. [SCRE 1978 p10]

SCRE appears to have been the first research institute with its particular features, yet the USA had semi-governmental statistics bureaux, which had similarities to SCRE and had been founded some time before. Also, the model for the South African Bureau, founded in 1929, had actually been published by Malherbe [its subsequent Director and ex-Columbia student] in 1921 [Fleisch 1995 pp201-203]. SCRE was not the prototype but a unit, which was part of its time, not only in Scotland but, especially through American influence, across the world. It had a particular shape and context but it was part of a recording and collection expertise, gradually integrated within the government of education systems [Johnson 1993, Larson 1984].

The National in International Networking.

From the moment of inception, it is clear that SCRE became part of an international network of institutes and part of an international movement of scientific testing and survey research. Indeed, it appeared to be created and internationalized at the same moment. This was not incidental or even a question of scientific ideas moving swiftly across borders. It is a reflection of the new purposes of research institutes: they had to describe and shape, mainly through numerical information, their national systems for the new purposes of efficiency and performance in education. Moreover it was part of a deliberate policy by wealthy private foundations and powerful, world leading American institutions to project their ideas into a wider world space, synonymously with an awaking of American global interests and declining British and European hegemony. One of the interesting elements in this account is the parallel relation between some of the core network members, who, while they studied at Jena before 1915, moved into ambitious internationalism in the 1930s via New York, a symbolic shift from a European sciences of education tradition to American pragmatism in educational research.

The international context is part of the standard histories of SCRE, usually via a vain but fairly struck note about its archetypal existence, a model of possibilities for other societies. It could be argued to be the first of its type. However, there is another aspect to its existence, which is not so prominently featured. Reference was made to financial support for a project on assessment financed from the USA. There is another element in the stability and growth of SCRE, which connects it to the global growth of research institutes, and that is its involvement, from the early days, in international research studies with private foundation funding. The Carnegie Foundation, an American philanthropic foundation, which worked closely with the International Unit at the University of Columbia, NY, financed SCRE in a sizeable way and it became a significant catalyst in the foundation of research institutes elsewhere [Berman 1983, Lageman 1989, Sealander 1997]

The histories of the Council always make reference to its ‘founders as the EIS and the AEA [Association of Education Authorities]’ yet there was another major source of income which is treated as a useful income stream but not as a crucial element in the continued existence of SCRE and a major reason why it was able to mount innovative large scale surveys. Within a year of its creation, the Council received a letter from America

… the first contribution to the new Council from philanthropic sources appears to have come from New York, in 1930, in the form of a solitary invitation from the Carnegie Corporation for SCRE to become one of the five European participants in an international study of examinations.' [Watson in SCRE 1972 p14]

In the earlier history, it was described in this way

The Council was at an early stage recognized abroad as a body of national and international standing, and in 1931 was invited by the International Institute of Teachers College, Columbia University, New York to undertake for Scotland investigations into various aspects of examinations for the International Examinations Inquiry [SCRE 1947 p10]

Without funding from Carnegie/Columbia, it was unlikely that the Council could have undertaken what was to be its major contribution to educational research, the 1932 Mental Survey. Between 1931 and 1941, the Council received £5157 from New York, approximately £500 per annum, for its work on the International Inquiry. Its income from the EIS and AEA probably amounted to £1000 per annum in this period [source - SCRE 1947 p 11 – ‘the average annual income of the Council amounts to some £1500’].

In 1931, the [Carnegie Corporation] of America paid direct to the Council the sum of £723 towards the cost of the Examination Enquiry and a further £4334 through the agency of the International Institute, Teachers’ College, Columbia University towards the same end. [Craigie 1972 p8]

So, Carnegie was the third partner in SCRE during the 1930s, something that is not fully acknowledged in the national narrative around the groundbreaking institute. In reality, Carnegie Foundation, NY, has to be recognized alongside the EIS and the Directors of Education as one of the founders of the SCRE. Indeed the IEI and its funding was used to develop a range of Scottish studies and it was essential to the 1932 Mental Survey [of every child in a single year group across Scotland and the 1935-7 Survey]. The 1947 report makes this clear

Without these generous subsidies [from Carnegie] the major investigations of the Council could not have been undertaken [SCRE 1947 p11]

Morris [1994] highlights this problem for SCRE, which is not represented in its histories, and which is overlaid by talk of its international standing [within two years of its foundation]. Morris argues that in early 1932, ‘the Council had reached a plateau. Finance was critical and the absence rate of members at committees was exceeding fifty per cent’ [Morris 1994 p86] And, luckily, on the 14th January, they received a letter from Prof Paul Monroe, the Director of the International Institute, Teachers College, Columbia, offering them $2500, paid through the Carnegie Corporation, for SCRE to join the International Examinations Inquiry. Carnegie could not help them outright, like it was doing with Australia, because Scotland had its own Carnegie Trust, but Monroe was a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation and overcame this problem. Professors Thomson and Drever followed up the letter with Monroe: this may explain why Drever is regarded in the official history as proposing the Mental Test Survey. Morris concludes by suggesting that ‘the Council’s acceptance saved it from possible liquidation’ [Morris 1994 p86]. This can’t have been easy: the Director, Rusk, was opposed to the test producing bureaus of the USA and even though the secondary school entry exam [the Qualifying Examination] was causing problems throughout Scotland and the new problem of the secondary school examination was the subject of the IEI, it was the financial inducement that pushed them along. [Morris 1994 p87]. Interestingly, Monroe had been made a fellow of the EIS, a sponsor of the SCRE, in 1925, so past contacts probably are at work behind this offer of support.

The links with Carnegie were fortuitous for SCRE. Without Carnegie funding, its ability to develop its expertise and undertake large scale research would have been very limited in the 1930s. It had the time and could link the personnel but not the organizational resource costs it needed. The general impression gained by SCRE’s official histories or reports is that Carnegie was just philanthropic and recognized a body of international standing when it looked for one. Yet, in this wonderfully naïve view, there is little room for an analysis of Carnegie’s motives and mission: its Trustees interest in the ‘Anglo-Saxon tradition’ {Glotzer 1995 quoting Keppel], in modernizing the Empire and governance by expert, were either ignored or were a commonplace shared by the key SCRE professionals.

The International Inquiry in Education was to involve key experts from at least ten countries over a ten year period: apart from the USA, they were all in Europe – Switzerland, Germany, France, England, Scotland, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Holland. Major academics, such as Michael Sadler, Edward Thorndike, Paul Monroe, Percy Nunn, Pierre Buvet, Robert Ulich, Celestin Bougle, Godfrey Thomson and Isaac Kandel, were closely involved as individuals or through embryonic institutes, with this network. The advantages that SCRE had, apart from the considerable expertise of Thomson and Drever, was a cohesive organization, extensive support from the teachers in the EIS and local authority managers, and an experience of working together. This gave it an advantage over other societies which were not yet ready to create specialist institutes. SCRE began to establish the dominance of a Scottish tradition of experimental investigation in education

Thus by 1930, the scientific approach to educational research was firmly established …[it] saw research as a specialized activity, based largely on psychology and statistical analysis, requiring extended training, producing findings which were supposed to tell teachers and policy makers what to do’ [Nisbet 1999 p9]

Social scientists in the UK and the USA have always taken a strong interest in the development of their subject, particularly its financing and sponsorship [Lageman 2000, Fisher 1978, 1980, 1983, Bulmer 1984] something which their counterparts in history of education and educational research may one day emulate. Jennifer Platt, an expert on the rise of sociology, stated (1996:142): "The institutions which fund research are an important part of its social context." Another way of approaching this question is to ask ‘ which institutions are created and funded to do research’? The relation between funding and purpose has been crucial to the financing of significant institutes and to their research and publications, especially since the 1930s. Often this research work has been treated as part of a national narrative about the development of systems of education or within histories of national organizations. In the case of SCRE, as a new model of research institute, funding by a powerful teachers union and the local education managers is significant; it shows how the professional users in education needed a flow of information about what was happening in the system and what works or could work in it. SCRE was the source of data about the system and a specific problem, the demand for secondary education. The way it began to conceptualize this problem – as a question of intelligence – was a modern idea. Not ruling elites but honest meritocrats would result from effective inquiry by mental testing. Carnegie, the other funder, had an interest in ‘race’ and advancing the interests of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ lineage and the approach of eugenicists – a preference for action ’dominated or backed by white, Anglo Saxon, Protestant descent’ [Lagemann 1989 p30]. Even within a loose and contextualized definition of ‘intelligence’ and eugenics, Carnegie trustees

‘worried about and financed projects that were intended to help preserve the racial purity of American society’ [Lagemann 1989 p81]

In a very natural way that is without conflict or politics, SCRE found itself acting as a major source of expertise into systems of education, distribution of intelligence and technologies of assessment, which were simultaneously modern and imperial. They became part of a wider network of Empire institutes of educational research, funded by Carnegie, in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. [White 1997, Glotzer 1995, 2000, Fleisch 1995] and part of a wider association of expertise on testing and selection [Hoffman 1962, Chapman 1998]

Conclusion

Kandel, the comparativist who played such a key role in the deliberations of the IEI, described national education systems as being determined by the ‘cultural, social and political traditions’ of the people they are designed for [Kandel 1936 p52]. This was the view taken by the historians of SCRE, who have tended to treat SCRE as a bounded Scottish phenomenon, created out of the genius of its theorists, blessed by the skills and willingness of a well trained teaching force, supported by its local education managers: in addition, in a small country they had an opportunity to network together and a silence from the four Scottish universities who were generally either indifferent or hostile to educational studies and education professors [Bell 1975 pp12-13]. Without question, SCRE was a highly significant agency in the institutionalization of the new technologies of selection and differentiation in Scotland. It was a prototype knowledge network, with its Director, institutional contacts and key professors acting as nodal points in the modernizing and reforming movement in education, an aim set for it years before by the EIS, concerned about the lack of radical reform.

SCRE can be seen as a specific fusion of two research traditions; firstly, the older Germanic tradition of experimental research, always attempting to rationally and pragmatically engage with ‘problems’, was melded with the contemporary American influence and experience on testing and measurement [part of a general approach to practical action, described as a ‘functional reality’ Nisbet 1999 p6].

Scotland was a meeting place of that Germanic experimental tradition and the American measurement tradition and the way that it differed from England was that there these matters did not arise - the content and methods of education were to be decided by authority, by people who could write about it like Percy Nunn. A whole lot of English writers, who influenced English education, did it as philosophical writing in which they went to first principles and tried to decide what should be done. In Scotland, an empirical approach, linked to the Scottish enlightenment of the 18th Century, .. . directly drew from the Germanic tradition, because Thomson and Rusk and all the others went to Germany for their doctoral studies. [Nisbet 2003]

This ‘meeting of minds’ would surely have helped the way that SCRE acted as an indispensable agent in the internationalizing of American education and its methods and concerns [Smith and Hamilton 1980]. It was part of the expansion into new markets of the American experience with testing and surveying. It was sustained in part by American Foundation finance, provided with international contacts by it and treated as a skilled and resourceful partner by much more powerful forces than itself. Its histories only broadcast the myths of Scottish excellence, which serve to weaken the very real successes it had. Like all myths of course, they reflect real circumstance as well as imagined qualities. Although it was not intended to be a testing bureau, its lack of finances, as well as a Scottish interest in new ways of selection in its meritocracy, forced it to act like one, selling on converted American tests. It became part of, what can be discerned in retrospect as, an American sphere of influence, concerned with educational efficiencies, differentiation and the new technologies of research in a new internationalism.

SCRE was part of an early international movement across national education systems, which connected adaptable and expert individuals and institutes. Experts were drawn from the university sector but usually supported by flexible organizations, able to organize national projects. Through its early history, its partners in the International Examinations Inquiry, its close relations with the new Commonwealth institutes pf research, and the continual presence and support of the Carnegie Foundation [and the enormous international influence and contacts of the International Institute at Columbia], one can see the emergence of an international organization in education based upon networks and institutes. They drew upon academic and professional support, and even state support, but they acted on issues, which were financed by independent contract or from private income. They produced work that could be used by policy makers or system managers, and in doing so, tended to produce statistical or survey based quantitative data or actual materials [tests and related information]. Without Carnegie support, much of the research would not have happened in the effective way that it did, as its scope was costly to manage.

So, SCRE was a ‘Scottish’ research institute, and possibly a kind of prototype organization for educational research, one which transformed the subjects and modes of inquiry of research, and which acted as a new form of governance, connecting research and policy. It was more than a site or a cluster of experts, it was an early knowledge producing network, which while later replaced by professional experts, looks increasingly modern in structure. It is argued here that it was a major lynchpin for an internationalization process in educational research which is the forerunner of its formal postwar institutionalization in international agencies.

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[i] Graduates in Teaching

Scotland England

1920

Men 49% 15.5%

Women 12% 5.3%

1938

Men 70% 16%

Women 32% 14%

Source- Wake 1984 p81

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