Benefits Bestowed? Education and British Imperialism edited by J. A. Mangan, and: The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience edited by J. A. Mangan, and: The Making and Shaping of the Victorian Teacher: A Comparative New Cultural History by Marianne A. Larsen (review)

With Catherine Robson’s Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (2012), Mary Ellis Gibson’s Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore (2011), and numerous essays and books by Tricia A. Lootens, scholars of literature are turning to the Victorian and imperial classroom with renewed attention to the ways in which cultural forms circulate and are transmitted via institutions of the state. Likewise, as Marianne A. Larsen notes, recent reforms in the American and British education systems bring to the fore the ways that our “contemporary policy-0makers are not unlike the English Victorians”; “No Child Left Behind” and its complicated assessments blur to resemble the much loathed Revised Code of 1862, with what were called its “Payment by Results” schemes (5). Just as Victorian England responded to the success of the Prussian education system, so, too, does the United States education system end up in the news whenever the Associated Press reports that we have fallen, once again, far behind other first-world countries in international education rankings. One strength of Larsen’s informative book, The Making and Shaping of the Victorian Teacher, is its attempt to provide a comparative approach to Victorian education reforms, citing the ways that the Prussian education system, following the theories of Swiss reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, inspired the British to nationalize and centralize their education system in the 1860s and 1870s. Though Larsen’s book, like many other histories of the Victorian education system, is bogged down by details about the variety of competing educational movements, societies, commissions, councils, methodologies, and orthodoxies, she traces a clear path through the muck of education history by following the expectations placed on the Victorian teacher—the overwhelming responsibility for the success or failure of the national system—and takes pains to show the ways in which these expectations created disciplinary and institutional control over teachers.

The first section, which lays out the historical context for the study and retreads familiar theoretical approaches that have now become commonplace, reminds us of the immense amount of discourse surrounding educational practices in the first half of the nineteenth century. The second section, “Discourses of the Victorian Teacher”—particularly chapters 4, “Discourses of Crisis and Derision: Targeting the Poor and the Teacher,” and 5, “The Discourse of the Good Victorian Teacher: The Modern and Moral Teacher”—was the strongest part of the book and deserves mention because of the way it sheds light on how little has changed in our current educational landscape. The book provides a welcome range of source material about the daily life of teachers once England decided to begin institutionalizing teacher training. Thinking of teachers as students themselves—encouraged to cultivate good morals, self-reflection, and curiosity—might dispel some of the more abstract concepts of dry-as-dust pedagogues in the nineteenth century, replacing these with the ideal (perhaps seldom achieved) teacher who was not merely a disciplinarian but “a learner, a thinker, and a scholar” (76).

Overall, Larsen’s account does not overturn many widely held assumptions about Victorian teachers. Schoolmasters were associated with more rigor and were more likely to discipline students; schoolmistresses were likely to be associated with maternal nurturing and to focus more on moral...