And just as I was thinking they ought to bring the Trinidadian Marxist historian and cricket writer C.L.R. James into the discussion, they did just that. You'll find James's views on the importance of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, of Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, and of W.G. Grace in his Beyond a Boundary.
Incidentally I blogged about Rugby, Tennessee, back in 2009 - see the interesting comment from David Heath.
The programme got me thinking about an alternative school of children's school of children's literature that I prefer: the holiday adventure story.
The ur-text for this is school is Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies, though it was first published as a three-volume novel for adults and only later tricked out with the apparatus (a map on the endpapers; illustrations by E.H. Shepard) of a children's classic.
Then come Arthur Ransome, Malcolm Saville and Denys Watkins=Pitchfod ('BB'). I suppose we'll have to let Enid Blyton in too.
This is already a pretty disparate group, but I think you can claim that if school Stories are in part about winning battles against adult authority, then both that authority and adults tend to disappear altogether in adventure stories.
And I'd also suggest that, while school stories are generally of necessity about children of one class, adventure stories are more likely to see a mixing of the classes.
As to the material base of adventure stories, I shall quote again the observation of Victor Watson, in his Reading Series Fiction. They grew out of the agricultural depression at the end of the 19th century, which made the countryside a playground for middle-class children, and were killed off by EEC farming subsidies and Dr Beeching's cuts.
Now read my post on the 1971 BBC adaptation of Tom Brown's Schooldays.
