Public or Private Education?

Lessons from History

Richard Aldrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135783730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection of essays, edited by the distinguished historian of education Richard Aldrich, examines past, present and future relationships between the private and public dimensions of knowledge and education. Following the introduction, it is divided into three sections:

* key themes and turning points in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries
* examples from the twentieth century of non formal education with particular reference to girls and women, the care and education of pre-school children, sex education and family history
* an analysis of the private and public dimensions associated with globalization and international education and of examples drawn from Australia and the USA.

This book will become required reading not only in respect of contemporary and historical debates about private and public spheres in education, but also with reference to the wider themes of the creation, diffusion and ownership of knowledge.

PART 1

1
GENDER AND THE PRIVATE/PUBLIC DEBATE ON EDUCATION IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Michèle Cohen

INTRODUCTION

The history of education is central to an understanding of the positioning of males and females as gendered beings since the Enlightenment. That history has generally foregrounded mainly ‘the ideas and activities of men’, though there have been some important contributions to the history of girls’ education, especially in the past few years.¹ What is still lacking, however, is work that places gender at the heart of the analysis. This is the aim of this chapter. By examining an eighteenth-century debate on education, the private/public debate, I hope to show how central gender has been to educational thought and prescription. My argument is that this debate contributed to the articulation of gender difference and the conceptualisation of gendered modes of knowing in the late eighteenth century.

‘What shall I do with my son?’ With these words, John Locke begins a discussion with an imaginary father about the respective merits of a private or public education. How should boys destined to be gentlemen be educated? Privately at home, or publicly at school?² Though for Locke, ‘private’ clearly refers to a domestic education and ‘public’ to education in a grammar or a ‘great school’,³ the meanings of ‘private’ and ‘public’ in the eighteenth century were ambiguous enough for some commentators to feel the need to clarify their terms.⁴ ‘By private, I mean only domestic and solitary education’, noted Vicesimus Knox in a footnote at the start of a chapter on the debate in his Liberal Education.⁵ ‘Private’ could also refer to a variety of small seminaries, though these could also be called ‘public’ to distinguish them from domestic education. ‘Public’ was always used with reference to grammar and great schools. As will be argued later, the terms private and public were more complex when applied to the education of girls.

THE DEBATE

Though the issue of a private or a public education was not new, Locke’s articulation of the debate was a major point of reference for educationists throughout the eighteenth century. This may be because, as Yolton suggests, ‘Locke systematised and made more readable what some of the earlier tracts attempted’.⁶ Locke began his examination of the relative merits of private and public education for gentlemen’s sons by conceding that ‘both sides have their Inconveniences’, but it is clear from the outset that for him the inconveniences of public education far outweighed its benefits.

Two key arguments in favour of public schools were that bringing together large numbers of boys encouraged confidence and fostered emulation. Locke dismissed these arguments, pointing out that the ‘Boldness’ and ‘Spirit’ gained at school were a ‘mixture of Rudeness and an ill-turn’d Confidence’ which were ultimately unbecoming to a gentleman. As for emulation, it might well be an incitement to hard work but, he noted not without irony, ‘Observation and Industry’ were not qualities boys tended to learn from one another. On the other hand, the ‘Waggeries and Cheats’ which schoolboys did teach each other were precisely not what a gentleman’s son needed to learn.

A key disadvantage of domestic education was that it would foster ‘Sheepishness and ignorance of the World’. But, Locke countered, it did preserve a boy’s ‘Innocence and Modesty’, which it was ‘preposterous to sacrifice to the attainment of Confidence and some little Skill of bustling for himself amongst others, by his conversation with ill-bred and vitious Boys’. At home, a boy was ‘in his Father’s sight, under a good Governor’, and would be sure to acquire ‘a genteel Carriage, more manly Thoughts…with a greater Proficiency in Learning into the Bargain’. At school, masters had too many boys to look after, and could not be expected to ‘instruct them Successfully in anything, but their Books’. For Locke, education was above all about virtue: Tis Vertue, then, direct Vertue, which is the hard and valuable part to be aimed at in Education.’ Domestic education was ‘much the best and safest way to this great and main End of Education’.⁷

The popularity of Locke’s treatise may be one reason why the issue elicited such widespread interest.⁸ From the early eighteenth century, most writers on education, whether private tutors or schoolmasters, included a chapter on the issue. Francis Brokesby reckoned that ‘in private Education, the Person may be more closely followed, more carefully observed, more constantly attended, and more amply instructed’, but he wondered whether these qualities would compensate for those ‘defects which cleave to a private, but are discharged from a Publick education’. James Barclay, master of the Academy at Tottenham High Cross, argued that public education suited lively boys, and domestic education milder ones. It was their sons’ ‘tempers and dispositions’ that parents should consider instead of deliberating about the ‘good or bad consequences of private or publick education’. George Chapman, master of the Grammar School at Dumfries, considered that private education was ‘defective… towards rearing children for society’, but that at public school, children’s ‘improvement is retarded and their morals endangered’.⁹

Comment was not confined to educationists. Essayists, novelists and poets also expressed their views on the subject, attesting to its prominence in the cultural life of the eighteenth century. Writing in the periodical paper, the Spectator, Budgell summarised the arguments of Locke’s ‘celebrated Treatise’ before outlining both sides of the debate for readers’ consideration. In Pamela (1739), Samuel Richardson’s eponymous heroine has read Locke and exclaims: ‘You can’t imagine how these difficulties perplex me, as to my knowing how to judge which is best, a home or a school education.’ Though she points out that the success of Locke’s plan depends almost entirely on finding an ideal tutor, she follows his advice and opts for a home education. Her main worry is finding a way of inspiring the ‘wished-for emulation’ which ‘would be so promotive’ of learning. Mr Allworthy, in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), also chooses a private education with a tutor for Tom Jones and Master Blifil. For ‘having observed the imperfect institution of our public schools, and the many vices which boys were there liable to learn, [he] had resolved to educate his nephew…in his own house’. On the other hand, it is because Peregrine Pickle (1751) is sent to a boarding school that this ‘supposed dunce’ becomes ‘remarkable for the brightness of his parts’, all because his ‘spirit of emulation’ was kindled. Rewarded for his efforts with ‘honorary silver pennies’, he gains popularity and many boys seek his company. Boswell tells us that Dr Johnson was so persuasive in his support of public schooling that he convinced Mr Murray, Solicitor General of Scotland, and Boswell himself, to send their sons to Eton and Westminster.¹⁰ Johnson staunchly opposed domestic education, in part because he believed mothers’ indulgence prevented their sons from achieving their potential, an attitude that recurs throughout the century.¹¹

In the 1780s, a strong new voice emerged in favour of public schools, Vicesimus Knox, master of Tonbridge School.¹² Knox’s importance rests on his attempt to regenerate public schools and restore their reputation, and on the popularity of his educational treatise, Liberal Education (1781).¹³ However, it is Knox’s position on the issue of private or public education that is considered here. I want to argue that his intervention irrevocably altered the meaning of the terms of the debate and opened up the possibility of thinking differently about it. Until Knox, private education’s promise of virtue had been inviolable. Knox claimed rather that private education, far from automatically shielding youths from vice, actually predisposed them to it. Because youths educated at home are under constant surveillance, he reasoned, they are unprepared for future freedoms, and therefore more likely to turn to vice. ‘I have known young men nearly ruined at university who attributed their wrong conduct to the immoderate restraints of a domestic education.’¹⁴ Not only did this subvert the foundation of Locke’s claim for the superiority of domestic education, but discursively shifting the site of vice from the school to the home made it possible to shift the site of virtue from the home to the school. A decade later, educationist Clara Reeve could comment: ‘some have said, that a public education is most likely to produce eminent men—a private, virtuous ones; even this will bear a dispute, as the instances we see to the contrary refute all this kind of reasoning’.¹⁵

At the same time as he denounced domestic education, Knox secured the superiority of public schooling by linking the mechanism of learning and success to the very structure and organisation of the school, using a new vocabulary to articulate the conditions of possibility for this success: ‘exertion’ and the key notion that ‘exertion strengthens the mind’. Knox explained that if a boy has ‘parts’,¹⁶ he will become a better scholar at a school because many circumstances ‘co-operate to force his own personal exertion, on which depends the increase of mental strength, and of course improvement, infinitely more than the instruction of any preceptor whatever’.¹⁷

Liberal Education was published at a time when the reputation of public schools, those ‘nurseries of all vice and immorality’, had reached an all-time low, and education had become ‘one of the main areas of conflict in a changing society’.¹⁸ An article in the London Magazine in 1779 described the ‘gilded youth’ of public schools as ‘a herd of brutes in human shapes who glory in the violation of decency, of the common rules of society, and are the terror of the neighbourhood in which they reside’.¹⁹ There was also continuing dissatisfaction with the public schools’ narrow curriculum, and continuing disquiet with their methods of instruction, what I call the 3 Rs of eighteenth-century English pedagogy: rules, rote and the rod.

Though Knox has been credited with reforming public schools,²⁰ this was merely a step in a more ambitious programme. His aim was to reformulate the national character, by purging the nation of the ‘levity’ of France, an infection connected with ‘luxury, effeminacy and everything ignoble’.²¹ This called for a ‘radical cure’. Knox’s remedy was the study of the classics, inspiring youths to ‘imbibe the spirit, the virtue, the elevation of sentiment and the rational love of liberty, which exalted the polished ancients’. Because the radical cure relied on laying a ‘FIRM AND DURABLE FOUNDATION IN GRAMMAR’, an objective attainable only by ‘a strict, a long and laborious study of grammar at a puerile age’, it is inextricably interwoven with Knox’s arguments for public schooling, and his disparagement of domestic education.²² Ostensibly, there was no reason why his cure could not be administered by tutors to home-educated boys with the same effect, but Knox claimed that the main reason that parents employed private tutors was to avoid the tough discipline of a great school. Tutors, he argued, did not have the authority to ground boys in Latin grammar and often failed to do so. Purging the nation o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1
• PART 2
• PART 3
• Index