From 30 January 1933 onwards the English had had to deal with a German government whose leader poured public scorn of the utmost brutality on the fun… - Correlli Barnett

Nor, except in the garden or allotment or on the sports field, did Britons generally evince an eagerness for strenuous effort. A journalist with the British Army advancing into the heart of Germany in April 1945 noted: "It occurs to me that the Germans are a menacing race by reason of their docility and their ability to toil. No man ought to love work as they do – it's indecent, certainly uncivilised. We English don't love work in this slavelike way, and thank God for it." And a week later the same journalist, J. L. Hodson, confided to his notebook that the reason why the British were unable to maintain hatred for long was their temperament was "too lazy, too indifferent, too good-natured".

So the new or re-vamped public schools did not set out to equip their pupils to lead great industrial enterprises or a great industrial nation, but to turn them into Christian gentlemen able to govern the Empire and ornament the ancient professions like the Church and the Law. The eighteenth-century dissenting academy tradition of blending the arts and science into a practical preparation for a working life withered away. The prestige of the public schools as an avenue into gentility and the upper class seduced businessmen and engineers alike into sending their children to them. The public schools not only failed to educate a technical élite, they served to starve industry of the nation's highest available intellectual talent and the socially most prestigious groups. Industry and technology became what modern research confirms it still is in Britain—low in status, and hence, in a continual vicious circle, low in reward and low in human calibre compared with our rivals. By the 1850s an immense gulf had opened, from both sides, between industry and such education as there was—between the "practical man" despising education on the one hand, and the public schools on the other concentrating on the classics, religion and games.

The approach of European countries to industrialisation and the role of education was different from Britain's from the start, and it sprang from a fundamentally different concept of the role of the state itself. Even in the pre- or post-industrial area of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, European monarchies had regarded it as their function to promote commercial and industrial progress by interventionist measures, including the setting up of training schools for particular crafts and professions. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, it became entirely natural for European governments to follow their older traditions and seek to guide and foster their countries' industrialisation. In particular they saw that the state alone could bring about a structure of national education at all levels which would feed industry with well-educated and trained personnel.