Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (review)

Reviewed by: Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices Deirdre Baker (bio) Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin, editors. Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices. Ashgate. 2009. x, 244. US $114.95 This collection of essays is the outcome of ‘Education and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century,’ a conference held at Cambridge University in 2005. As the editors state, this was an opportunity for ‘scholars from such diverse disciplines as the history of education, religion, science and childhood, of literary and book history, biography, material culture and of feminist and gender studies to exchange ideas on the history of education and to integrate their work.’ The resulting articles offer a subtle, illuminating adjustment to many previous default approaches to the history of education. They do this partly through the close reading and integration of previously unexamined eighteenth-century manuscript and print sources and partly through approaching familiar texts, such as John Locke’s and Hannah More’s writings on educational theory, in new ways. Generally, as the editors argue, we see ‘the ideas, practices and institutions involved in the teaching and learning of various groups of the young and ignorant in nation and empire come into view as far more complex than merely as one facet of the wars of ideas between major ideological opponents.’ Sophia Woodley explores how the political, religious, and ideological aspects of the debate between private and public education played out, practically, in what amounted to progressive pedagogical experiments in what we would now term ‘homeschooling.’ In this context, she argues, girls’ homeschooling was more academic and rigorous than current histories of education would have it. Anne Stott points out Locke’s influence on Hannah More’s ideas of pedagogy, arguing that in encompassing both sexes and all social classes, More’s program was not ‘oppressive, [End Page 742] antifeminist, and backward-looking,’ as it is often depicted to be, but rather open, experimental, and liberal-minded. Similarly, using Mary Bosanquet’s manuscript autobiography and other sources, Mary Clare Martin shows that Wesleyan Methodist girls’ schools were both more progressive and more child-centred than most received opinion avers. Carol Percy shows that the social class, virtue, linguistic facility, and industry associated with learning grammar allowed women teachers of grammar professional authority and, refreshingly, sometimes resulted in girls and boys competing academically on equal footing. Family conversation as a mode of teaching comes under scrutiny by Michèle Cohen: she uses women’s letters and diaries, prescriptive texts for female education, instructional dialogues, and novels to show that ‘familiar conversation’ was intellectually substantial and far-reaching, anticipating and inculcating a high degree of knowledge and acuity. Turning to boys’ education, Jennifer Mori examines evidence for how young men were educated in cosmopolitan sociability through a ‘Grand Tour,’ and Maurice Whitehead argues for the advanced science education offered in the English Jesuit schools abroad – and also for the resilience with which English Jesuit schools flourished despite repeated waves of anti-Catholic legislation. Deirdre Raftery points out the ‘mind-colonizing’ anti-Catholic, anti-Irish approach the English took to educating the Irish poor in using works by English, Protestant upper/middle-class writers as texts for monoglot Irish children. The popularity of classroom aids in the form of Rudiment boxes, pictures, and other printed materials used in the education of the English poor are the subject of Jill Shefrin’s article on the Darton family of booksellers. Finally, M.O. Grenby, with a delicate, buoyant touch, argues that through an imaginative bringing together of all possible sources, prescriptive, fictional, and pictorial – educational treatises, conduct books, novels, children’s books, pictures, inscriptions, and juvenile marginalia (among other things) – we may be able to go beyond prescriptive sources and glimpse how children’s books were actually used. In toto, this volume is refreshing and inventive, successful in engaging previous scholarship and, especially, in throwing light into hitherto shrouded and disregarded corners of educational theory, practice, and children’s experience. Deirdre Baker Department of English, University of Toronto Copyright © 2012 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

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