Victorian Education

Victorian Education is the subject of two recently published scholar books with some Brontë connections:

1. Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Gargano, Elizabeth

ISBN: 0415980348
Hardback (August 2007)
Routledge

Reading Victorian Schoolrooms examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates. As Gargano argues, the fiction of mainstream and children’s writers such as Dickens, Brontë, and Carroll reflected widespread Victorian anxieties about the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction.
As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Yet, Dickens, Brontë, and others did not simply critique or satirize the standardization of school experience. Instead, most portrayed the schoolroom as an unstable site, incorporating both institutional and domestic space.
Drawing on the bildungsroman’s traditional celebration of an individualized, experiential education, numerous novels of school life strove to present the novel itself as a form of domestic education, in contrast to the rigors of institutional instruction. By positioning the novel as a form of domestic education currently under attack, these novelists sought to affirm its value as a form of protest within an increasingly institutionalized society. The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence thus became central to the Victorian fictive project.

2. Our Victorian Education
Dinah Birch (University of Liverpool)
Blackwell Publishing (November 2007)
Series: Blackwell Manifestos

This groundbreaking book combines a historical interpretation of Victorian educational debate with a critical overview of contemporary educational thought.
* Traces the roots of contemporary educational practice in the values of Victorian thinking
* Combines detailed consideration of Victorian sources, literary and non-literary, with reflections on their legacy in the 21st century
* Reflects on questions of social class, religion, and gender as the Victorians defined them in relation to educational ideals
* Suggests challenging connections between literary and social history and contemporary dilemmas

In the Table of Contents, we find an explicit Brontë section:

Chapter 3. Teaching Women

Gender and Education
A Generation of Schoolmistresses
Literary Case Studies
The Educated Heart: Charlotte Brontë
Teaching Independence: Ellen Wood
Practical Faith: Elizabeth Sewell
"School-Time": George Eliot
Finding the Way

Categories: Books, Charlotte Brontë, Scholar, Victorian Era