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Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2024

Michèle Cohen
Affiliation:
Richmond: The American International University in London
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Summary

My aim in this book was to provide a fresh perspective on education and gender by using the lens of pedagogy to compare the instruction males and females received over the course of the Georgian period. Pedagogy is not just about methods for teaching and learning. This book has shown that it is also, as Robin Alexander has argued, ‘a purposive cultural intervention … which is deeply saturated with the values and history of the society and community in which it located.’1 Exploring this cultural intervention brought to light the importance of the relations between pedagogies, their competition and the power struggles which shaped and produced them. It is these relations that have provided the most important insights on the issues of gender this study aimed to investigate.

Vicesimus Knox's pedagogical intervention, redirecting the focus of the study of the classics from literature to grammar, illustrates Alexander's contention and the competitions that ensued. The plan Knox devised in his educational treatise Liberal Education was a model of learning embodied in a long-standing architectural metaphor which he refashioned to his purpose: laying a strong base in Latin grammar at an early age to uphold the superstructure of all learning. While the ostensible motive for Knox's plan was his desire to return to ‘antient’ methods and reform public schools, it was also constructed as both a legitimation of the dominant pedagogical regime of the classics and a response to the threat to that regime from the pedagogies of modern subjects.

The principal goal of Knox's architectural model of learning was gender: the avoidance of effeminacy and the production of masculinity which he encouraged by picturing study as a battle and learning as conquest. This had significant consequences for women's education because it established the conditions for considering girls’ learning as not based on the same intellectual foundations as that of boys. Knox's insistence that the grammar foundation should be taught at a puerile age was consistent with the belief of the time that children's minds were more ‘pliable and ductile’ and that early teaching was therefore most profitable, as Hester Thrale's success with her young children's rote learning attested.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Conclusion
  • Michèle Cohen, Richmond: The American International University in London
  • Book: Changing Pedagogies for Children in Eighteenth-Century England
  • Online publication: 10 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805430353.008
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  • Conclusion
  • Michèle Cohen, Richmond: The American International University in London
  • Book: Changing Pedagogies for Children in Eighteenth-Century England
  • Online publication: 10 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805430353.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Michèle Cohen, Richmond: The American International University in London
  • Book: Changing Pedagogies for Children in Eighteenth-Century England
  • Online publication: 10 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805430353.008
Available formats
×