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The adult school movement starting in the late 1790s, while for most of the time only small in numbers, was a significant element in the making of adult education in Britain.
Basically what was happening was that the Bible had been translated into English about a century before and because the protestant religion focused on a person's individual relationship with God, they needed to be able to read the bible and take their own opinions from it. So the government set up schools to teach people to read
The massive growth of Sunday schooling from the 1780s onwards, while having an orientation to the instruction of children did, in some areas such as Northern England and Wales, encourage adult participation. Sunday school workers such as Hannah More also put a considerable amount effort into work with adults and the provision of cheap repository tracts. However, in all these efforts work with adults arose 'as subsidiaries to the teaching of children'
In England two of the best known figures in promoting local education were sisters Hannah and Martha More.
In the 1790s they undertook summer campaigns in Mendip villages to establish Sunday schools, day and evening schools, benefit clubs, distribute bibles - and undertake various other good works so that the lower classes may be formed 'to habits of industry and virtue'. Hannah had been worried by the arguments of Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man and sought to reconcile the poor to their fate.
'Modern' understandings of informal education owe much to the work of Rousseau (in Emile, and The Social Contract)
By the late 1780s, to counter the radical political literature that was freely circulating, Sunday Schools were established for the poor, their major purpose being to indoctrinate pupils in the principles of religion and the duties of their state in life. Here, if you were lucky, it was possible to learn reading, writing, elementary arithmetic, and the catechism. However, due to the teachers' concern for the health and welfare of their pupils they unwittingly `created thought in the unthinking masses'
Slavery
The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade set up in 1783 was an exclusively male organization. Some leaders of the Society, such as William Wilberforce, were totally opposed to women being involved in the campaign. One of Wilberforce's concerns was that women wanted to go further than the abolition of the slave trade. Early women activists such as Anne Knight and Elizabeth Heyrick were in favour of the immediate abolition of slavery, whereas Wilberforce believed that the movement should concentrate on bringing an end to the slave trade.
Rousseau & children
Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education (Paris, 1762); philosophical novel/educational treatise; presents new model of childhood and education; Rousseau can be said to have invented modern conception of childhood:
Nature wants children to be children before being men. If we want to pervert this order, we shall produce precocious fruits which will be immature and insipid and will not be long in rotting. We shall have young doctors [docteurs – learned men] and old children. Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling which are proper to it. Nothing is less sensible than to want to substitute ours for theirs, and I would like as little to insist that a ten-year-old be five feet tall as that he possess judgment. (Emile, edited and translated by Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979), p.90).
Rousseau on children's reading:
if nature gives the child's brain the suppleness that fits it to receive all sorts of impressions, it is not in order to engrave on this brain the names of kings, dates, terms of heraldry, globes and geography, and all those words without any sense for the child's age, ... with which his sad and sterile childhood is burdened. ... The kind of memory a child can have does not, without his studying books, for this reason remain idle. Everything he sees, everything he hears strikes him, and he remembers it. He keeps in himself a record of the actions and speeches of men, and all that surrounds him is the book in which, without thinking about it, he continually enriches his memory while waiting for his judgment to be able to profit from it. (Emile, p.112)
How can people be so blinded as to call fables the morality of children? They do not think about how the apologue [fable], in giving enjoyment to children, deceives them; ... Fables can instruct men, but the naked truth has to be told to children. ... I say that a child does not understand the fables he is made to learn, because, no matter what effort is made to simplify them, the instruction that one wants to draw from them compels the introduction of ideas he cannot grasp; and because poetry's very skill at making them easier for him to retain makes them difficult for him to conceive, so that one buys delight at the expense of clarity. (Emile, pp.112-13)
Romantic views of childhood and children's reading
'Natural' childhood important for Romanticism: see Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and first two books of Prelude (1805); 'Rural childhoods with minimal schooling are standard in the radical novels of the 1790s, such as Holcroft’s Adventures of Hugh Trevor or Hays’s Emma Courtney’ (Richardson, p.14).
‘Transcendental’ Romantic view: 'the transcendental child is informed by a divine or quasi-divine nature which renders it superior to adults, and the new-born child can be figured as a prophet or angel’ (Richardson, p.11); found particularly in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807/1815).
In Book V of Prelude, Wordsworth attacks 'rational education' and its product ('infant prodigy'), and celebrates natural childhood and imaginative tales for children:
Actual experiences of childhood in Romantic period varied according to class
[Working class children] worked twelve to fifteen hour days in small scale and domestic industries, especially at hand-looms and at lace making, and put in similar hours (under particularly brutal conditions) in mines and collieries. Although factory work was frequently less arduous than other forms of ‘indoor labour’, the long hours at awkward positions nevertheless left child workers as what one observer called a ‘mass of crooked alphabets’. Even the landmark Factory Act of 1819 stipulated only that no child could work in cotton mills or factories under the age of nine. Working-class children too small for employment were often left unattended (as their mothers put in long hours of their own) or fitfully watched, lulled into docility by opiates sold under names like ‘Mrs. Wilkinson’s Soothing Syrup’
Rise of political radicalism in 1790s, hand in hand with rise of politicised working class reading, created a ‘literacy crisis’ in the state - made literacy and children's literature crucial political issues
Writers such as Blake and Wordsworth concerned to represent lives of working-class children
Variety of Romantic - and non-Romantic - views of childhood can be seen in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789, 1794).
Compare 'Introduction' to Innocence with 'Introduction' to Experience; or 'Infant Joy' with 'Infant Sorrow'.
Do Songs of Innocence assume a 'poetics of innocence'?
Paine
- Rights of Man written as defence of the French Revolution and its principles.
- Was in Europe when revolution broke out.
- Rights of Man was more than answer to Burke
- Also statement of philosophy of all democratic movements
- In two years it sold over 200,000 copies
Rights of Man
- In Part 1 Paine made distinction between absolute monarchy & constitutional monarchy.
- In Part 2 he maintained all traditional forms of governments were “creatures of imagination” relying on the “romantic and barbarous distinction of making men into kings and subjects”.
- Advocated abolition of all monarchy and the establishment of democratic republics based on universal manhood suffrage.
- Also social measures for young, sick and old
- Demanded removal of legislation restricting wages of workmen
Comments
These notes are aimed at A Level English Literature students at A2 level.
Originally written by RosiRox on TSR Forums.
