From Uniformity to Reform: Education in the Very Long Eighteenth Century (1660-1870) (review)

This event, convened by Michele Cohen (Richmond), Mark Burden (Oxford) and Mary Clare Martin (Greenwich), enabled participants to explore, develop and celebrate the increasingly reinvigorated field of the history of eighteenth-century education. It grew out of an ongoing series of interdisciplinary IHR seminars, 2008-13, which are broadening the study of eighteenth-century education by investigating under-researched teaching and learning practices, pedagogical, literary and scientific texts and new research methodologies.

The day began with a plenary lecture by Jill Shefrin and ended with another by Mary Hilton. Shefrin's paper discussed the use of printed images in the education of children in the long eighteenth century, placing it in the context of the broader visual culture of early modern and Enlightenment Britain. Developing themes present in her award-winning study of a family publishing firm prominent in the early production of children's books (The Dartons: Publishers of Educational Aids, Pastimes & Juvenile Ephemera, 1787-1876: a Bibliographic Checklist, Los Angeles, 2009), Shefrin demonstrated the importance of printed material and commercial publications such as ephemera and educational pastimes as ways of 'leading children to a relish for knowledge'. Hilton's paper examined the commodification of education in relation to the monitorial method in early nineteenth-century England, showing how missionaries in Bengal used this commodification to transplant a whole 'package' of scientific and religious belief into an alien culture. She argued that the nineteenth-century shift in scientific and religious thought from inductive reasoning (which, in practice, encouraged learning facts) to the promotion of deductive thinking (focusing on play and reason) eventually brought about the end of the monitorial method.

Between the plenaries were eight twenty-minute papers, which ranged from discussions of educational theory and practice to the social history of education. Among the former were presentations on the early Newtonian tutor John Theophilus Desaguliers (Audrey Carpenter), and on Henry Baker's methods for teaching students with speech and hearing impairment (Clare Morgan). Susan Skedd's paper on boarding-schools for girls used recently uncovered archival evidence to suggest that proprietors emphasized their schools' private nature in a bid to reassure parents. The regional implementation of the 'national education' movement in the 1810s was examined by Alys Thomas in order to complicate the traditional picture of denominationally-determined schools. Jane Hamlett used a series of case studies to remind us of the mixture of loyalty and brutality engendered by the public-school house system in the mid nineteenth century. The workshop also encouraged discussion about the relation between intellectual history, literary studies and the history of art. One paper, by Rebecca Davies, used close textual analysis to distinguish between competing concepts of genius and originality among late eighteenth-century women writers; another contribution, by art historian Suzanne Conway, provided an innovative examination of Rousseau's mère éducatrice to reinterpret several late eighteenth-century French paintings.

A similarly wide-ranging one-day conference, 'Politics and Education in the Long Eighteenth Century (1660-1860)', is planned for 17 March 2013. Proposals for papers for this workshop, or for the regular seminar series, may be directed to Michele Cohen or Mark Burden.