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Playfair later became so concerned with this issue that he took the extraordinary step of embarking on his own private inquiry into technical education in Europe. He financed this investigation himself and combined his experiences and conclusions in Industrial Education on the Continent, which he also had published. He suggested that technical education should form part of the curriculum in most schools. This was a radical proposition; as yet no national system of education in England and Wales existed. What was available was “neither free, compulsory nor universal and the question of whether to send children to school was considered to be solely for parents to decide.”45 The Church and charities were the main agencies who delivered education that was rigidly divided on social lines. Upper-class education focused mainly on the acquisition of social graces and skills appropriate to a leisured ruling elite. Middle-class education tended to mimic the education of the aristocracy. Working-class education, for those who were able to take advantage of it, largely comprised basic schooling in literacy, numeracy, and religion.46 The only technical education available in England at that time, unlike the situation in Belgium, France, and the German states,47 had grown from an initiative started by George Birkbeck in 1800.48 Birkbeck recognized that there was a need to provide scientific training for artisans in subjects related to their trade, and he started a series of lectures with this theme at the Anderson Institute in Glasgow. This gave rise to the Mechanics’ Institutes movement, which copied and carried Birkbeck’s idea across the whole country.49 However, the lack of basic literacy and numeracy among the working population meant that by the 1850s, Mechanics’ Institutes were unable to service the needs of the group they had originally been designed to help. They had evolved into places in which those with time to spare and enough basic education could receive lectures on a variety of subjects that were not necessarily scientific. Despite evidence, an article published in The Economist soon after the exhibition closed suggested that scientific and technical education was already better understood and better practiced in England, “judging by the results, than by any nation of the continent of Europe.”50 This was a reflection of the range of interpretations applied to the phrase “technical education” rather than a boast of a poorly informed commentator. To the majority who believed that technical education was best delivered through practical activity, it was a legitimate statement. They argued that the workshops and the offices of the United Kingdom were the