Mini-lecture 20: "Education"
Scope: At the beginning of the Victorian era, more than half the British population could not read or write. By the end of it, nearly everyone had sonic elementary literacy. The spread of the vote (in the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884) underlined the need for an educated electorate. Parliament legislated to promote elementary schooling for all in 1871 and made it compulsory in 1880. Until then, a wide variety of educational practices had prevailed in a highly decentralized environment, from the simple rural danie school at one extreme, to the famous”public” (i.e.. private) schools, Eton and Harrow, at the other. Corporal punishment was integral to education at all levels and some of the public schools followed what now look like sadomasochistic practices. The high-minded reform of the public schools was led by Dr. Thomas Arnold at Rugby and fondly commemorated by his pupil Thomas Hughes in Torn Brown ‘s Schooldaj’s (1857). By the late Victorian era, sports, especially cricket, were emphasized more highly than the academic curriculum was. By 1900, most of the elite schools regarded their principal role not as an intellectual one but as the producers of Christian gentlemen. University education broadened in the Victorian era from the training of clergymen to a cautious embrace of the new sciences and humanities. The first colleges for women appeared at Oxford and Cambridge, but the students were subjected to strict chaperonage.
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Outline
I. Education was highly localized and varied in quality depending on location.
A. Dame schools gave rural children the elements ofan education.
1. Learning was almost entirely by memorization and recitation.
2. Masters and mistresses enforced discipline with a cane.
B. The Education Act of 1870 introduced universal education for children up to the age of thirteen.
1. Recent wars in America and Germany appeared to give the advantage to the more educated population.
2. Extension of the franchise (1867) made the need for wider education urgent.
3. The government hoped to economize and maintain local initiatives but found religious obstacles difficult to circumvent.
4. Further legislation of 1880 made attendance compulsory and cost-free.
C. The Secondary Education Act of 1902 created universal secondary schooling.
II. The famous British public schools were transformed in the Victorian era.
A. They were not public in the American sense, but private boarding schools.
1. Eton and Harrow were the most distinguished.
2. Keate and other headmasters practiced brutal flogging, but punishment was theatrical and ritualized.
3. Other public schools were scandalously brutal and negligent.
B. These schools experienced an era of reform following Thomas Arnold’s transformation of Rugby from 1827.
1. Arnold wanted to help boys conquer the evil in their nature and become Christian gentlemen.
2. Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) is a thinly fictionalized account of Arnold’s Rugby.
C. The cult of sports, especially rugby and cricket, was emphasized more strongly than the academic curriculum.
III. Britain gradually recognized the need for an improved higher educational system.
A. The Anglican monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge students ended in the 1850s.
B. Non-Anglican fellows (teachers) were also permitted after 1871.
C. Outstanding teachers, such as Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College. Oxford, began to seek out brilliant but poor students.
D. New universities began to teach science, which Oxford and Cambridge had neglected.
IV. A few Victorian women also began to seek educational opportunities.
A. London University admitted women in 1848.
B. The first women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1868 (Oxford) and 1869 (Cambridge). Women were excluded from degrees until 1920.
V. Education at home remained a popular alternative to schooling.
A. John Stuart Mill (1806—1873) was educated at home by his father, James Mill, beginning at the age of three.
1. Mill’s father was incredibly attentive to his son’s progress and held him to the highest standards.
2. Mill undertook very difficult work from the earliest age and claimed anyone else could do it, too.
3. As an eight-year-old, lie was also required to tutor his younger brothers and sisters in Latin.
4. He believed that the education lie had experienced could have been enjoyed, with profit, by any child.
B. Bertrand Russell (1872—1970) was educated first by his brother, then by tutors, and finally, at Cambridge University.
Essential Reading:
John Chandos. Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800—1864.
G.F. Lamb. The English at School.
Supplementary Reading:
John Stuart Mill. Autobiography.
Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, Volume I.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why did the Victorians acquiesce to so much physical punishment of children?
2. What was the motive behind Victorian educational reforms and improvements?
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