Educating The Child In Enlightenment Britain

Posing a challenge to more traditional approaches to the history of education, this interdisciplinary collection examines the complex web of beliefs and methods by which culture was transmitted to young people in the long eighteenth century. Expanding the definition of education exposes the shaky ground on which some historical assumptions rest. For example, studying conventional pedagogical texts and practices used for girls' home education alongside evidence gleaned from women's diaries and letters suggests domestic settings were the loci for far more rigorous intellectual training than has previously been acknowledged. Contributors cast a wide net, engaging with debates between private and public education, the educational agenda of Hannah More, women schoolteachers, the role of diplomats in educating boys embarked on the Grand Tour, English Jesuit education, eighteenth-century print culture and education in Ireland, the role of the print trades in the use of teaching aids in early nineteenth-century infant school classrooms, and the rhetoric and reality of children's book use. Taken together, the essays are an inspiring foray into the rich variety of educational activities in Britain, the multitude of cultural and social contexts in which young people were educated, and the extent of the differences between principle and practice throughout the period.

Scholars have historically associated John Wesley’s educational endeavours with the boarding school he established at Kingswood, near Bristol, in 1746. However, his educational endeavours extended well beyond that single institution, even to non-Methodist educational programmes. This book sets out Wesley’s thinking and practice concerning child-rearing and education, particularly in relation to gender and class, in its broader eighteenth-century social and cultural context. Drawing on writings from Churchmen, Dissenters, economists, philosophers and reformers as well as educationalists, this study demonstrates that the political, religious and ideological backdrop to Wesley’s work was neither static nor consistent. It also highlights Wesley’s eighteenth-century fellow Evangelicals including Lady Huntingdon, John Fletcher, Hannah More and Robert Raikes to demonstrate whether Wesley’s thinking and practice around schooling was in any way unique. This study sheds light on how Wesley’s attitudes to education were influencing and influenced by the society in which he lived and worked. As such, it will be of great interest to academics with an interest in Methodism, education and eighteenth-century attitudes towards gender and class.

Offering a unique approach to the study of late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century education, this book explores the life and motivations of a strong-minded, self-educated and enlightened English gentlewoman, Mrs Margaret Chinnery, who put Madame de Genlis’s educational ideas into practice with marked success. Beginning with a brief outline of Margaret’s own childhood and her adolescent efforts to educate herself, drawing largely on readings recommended by Genlis, the book continues through to her marriage, her children’s early and adolescent education, and ends with the benefits that the children gained in adulthood from their education. This book is not limited to a biography, as each section on the daily business of education is interspersed with a discussion and comparison of contemporary education authors and other writers, the values they espoused, which ones Margaret followed and why. It also draws on valuable surviving Chinnery documents which trace the Chinnery children’s education, Margaret’s correspondence with Genlis and a comprehensive catalogue of the Chinnery library. The book offers a unique opportunity to follow a real family from cradle to grave, and provides an intriguing illustration, at an individual level, of a female-crafted education embedded in Enlightenment values. This book will be of great interest to postgraduate students and scholars researching the history and philosophy of education as well as women in the Enlightenment.

Examining writing for and about education in the period from 1740 to 1820, Rebecca Davies’s book plots the formation of a written paradigm of maternal education that associates maternity with educational authority. Examining novels, fiction for children, conduct literature and educative and political tracts by Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Martin Taylor and Jane Austen, Davies identifies an authoritative feminine educational voice. She shows how the function of the discourse of maternal authority is modified in different genres, arguing that both the female writers and the fictional mothers adopt maternal authority and produce their own formulations of ideal educational methods. The location of idealised maternity for women, Davies proposes, is in the act of writing educational discourse rather than in the physical performance of the maternal role. Her book contextualizes the development of a written discourse of maternal education that emerged in the enlightenment period and explores the empowerment achieved by women writing within this discourse, albeit through a notion of authority that is circumscribed by the 'rules' of a discipline.

The collection's focus is on girls' secondary education, and hence the gendered cultural expectations of the middle classes and upper classes, will provide the dominant narrative, given the relatively recent democratization of European educational systems.

A Cultural History of Education in the Age of Empire presents essays that examine the following key themes of the period: church, religion and morality; knowledge, media and communications; children and childhood; family, community and sociability; learners and learning; teachers and teaching; literacies; and life histories. The period between 1800 and 1920 was pivotal in the global history of education and witnessed many of the key developments which still shape the aims, context and lived experience of education today. These developments included the spread of state sponsored mass elementary education; the efforts of missionary societies and other voluntary movements; the resistance, agency and counter-initiatives developed by indigenous and other colonized peoples as well as the increasingly complex cross border encounters and movements which characterized much educational activity by the end of this period. An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students in history, literature, culture, and education.

Taking up a little-known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavor, Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner focus on the experiences of very young ’native’ children in three British colonies. In missionary settlements across the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, Upper Canada, and British-controlled India, experimental British ventures for placing young children of the poor in infant schools were simultaneously transported to and adopted for all three colonies. From the 1820s to the 1850s, this transplantation of Britain’s infant schools to its distant colonies was deemed a radical and enlightened tool that was meant to hasten the conversion of 'heathen' peoples by missionaries to Christianity and to European modes of civilization. The intertwined legacies of European exploration, enlightenment ideals, education, and empire building, the authors argue, provided a springboard for British colonial and missionary activity across the globe during the nineteenth century. Informed by archival research and focused on the shared as well as unique aspects of the infant schools’ colonial experience, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods illuminates both the pervasiveness of missionary education and the diverse contexts in which its attendant ideals were applied.

This book is the first publication to devote serious attention to the history of home education from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It brings together work by historians, literary scholars and current practitioners who shed new light on the history of home-schooling in the UK both as a practice and as a philosophy. The six historical case studies point to the significance of domestic instruction in the past, and uncover the ways in which changing family forms have affected understandings of the purpose, form and content of education. At the same time, they uncover the ways in which families and individuals adapted to the expansion of formalised schooling. The final article - by philosopher and Elective Home Education practitioner and theorist Richard Davies - uncovers the ways in which the historical analysis can illuminate our understanding of contemporary education. As a whole, the volume offers stimulating insights into the history of learning in the home, and into the relationship between families and educational practice, that raise new questions about the objectives, form and content of education in the past and today. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Oxford Review of Education.