Sadler Commission

Michael Ernest Sadler
Sir Michael Ernest Sadler photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1914
Born	1861 Barnsley
Died	1943 Oxford
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	British
Subject	Education

Sir Michael Ernest Sadler, KCSI (3 July 1861 – 14 October 1943) was a British historian, educationalist and university administrator. He worked at the universities of Manchester and was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. He also was a champion of the English public school system.

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.