Letters | 13 July 2017

Technical education

Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the anti-Brexit campaign and the persistent underestimation of the United Kingdom’s strengths (‘Down with declinism’, 8 July). It is ironic that the heirs of the old 19th-century Liberal party, the Liberal Democrats, are among its principal proponents, for declinism goes back even further than the 1880s cited in his article. Fearful of the advances demonstrated at the Paris International Exposition of 1867 by continental countries in engineering (e.g. the giant Krupp cannon) and the sciences generally, the Liberal minister Robert Lowe in 1870 opened the debate on the Education Bill — the first to introduce more or less universal primary education — by lamenting the backward character of British education, especially technical education, compared with France and Prussia. If one thread runs through a long-running debate it is that of concern that the United Kingdom was backward in technical education compared with its major rival.