Michael Sadler (educationist) - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Michael Ernest Sadler, born into a radical home in 1861 at Barnsley in the industrial north of England, died in Oxford in 1943. He is the father of Michael Sadleir.

His early youth was coloured by the fact that one of his forebears, Michael Thomas Sadler, was among the pioneers of the Factory Acts. His early memories were full of associations with the leaders of the working-class movement in the north of England. Remembering these pioneers, Sadler recorded: ‘I can see how much religion deepened their insight and steadied their judgement, and saved them from coarse materialism in their judgement of economic values. This common heritage was a bond of social union. A social tradition is the matrix of education’.

Sadler’s schooling was typical of his times. It gave him a diverse background, which was to be reflected throughout his life in his interpretation of the process and content of education. When he was 10 years old, he was sent to a private boarding school at Winchester where the atmosphere was markedly conservative. Sadler recalls:

Think of the effect on my mind of being swug from the Radical West Riding…where I never heard the Conservative point of view properly put, to where I was thrown into an entirely new atmosphere in which the old Conservative and Anglican traditions were still strong.

From this preparatory school he moved to Rugby in the English Midlands, where he spent his adolescence in an atmosphere entirely different from that of the Winchester school. His masters were enthusiastic upholders of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution. The young Sadler soon found himself in critical revolt against the Cavalier and Anglican traditions.

He went to Trinity College, Oxford in 1880. There he soon came under the spell of leading historians such as T.H. Green and Arnold Toynbee. But it was John Ruskin who completely overwhelmed the undergraduate. Sadler has left on record how, in his second year at Trinity, a short course of lectures was announced, to be given in the Oxford University Museum by Ruskin. Tickets were difficult to get because of the popularity of the speaker. After a warm description of Ruskin’s picturesque appearance, Sadler articulates a favourite conviction when he writes:

Nominally these lectures of Ruskin’s were upon Art. Really they dealt with the economic and spiritual problems of English national life. He believed, and he made us believe, that every lasting influence in an educational system requires an economic structure of society in harmony with its ethical ideal.

That belief persisted to the end of Sadler’s life and is recurrent in his many analyses of foreign systems of education. When, in July 1882, the examinations lists were issued, Sadler had gained a first-class degree in Literae Humaniores. A month earlier he had become President Elect of the Oxford Union, a field of public debating experience that has produced many an English politician.