Description
This book is the first publication to devote serious attention to the history of home education from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It brings together work by historians, literary scholars and current practitioners who shed new light on the history of home-schooling in the UK both as a practice and as a philosophy. The six historical case studies point to the significance of domestic instruction in the past, and uncover the ways in which changing family forms have affected understandings of the purpose, form and content of education. At the same time, they uncover the ways in which families and individuals adapted to the expansion of formalised schooling. The final article - by philosopher and Elective Home Education practitioner and theorist Richard Davies - uncovers the ways in which the historical analysis can illuminate our understanding of contemporary education. As a whole, the volume offers stimulating insights into the history of learning in the home, and into the relationship between families and educational practice, that raise new questions about the objectives, form and content of education in the past and today. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Oxford Review of Education.
Table of Contents
Introduction - Home education 1750–1900: domestic pedagogies in England and Wales in historical perspective 1. The home education of girls in the eighteenth-century novel: ‘the pernicious effects of an improper education’ 2. The pedagogy of conversation in the home: ‘familiar conversation’ as a pedagogical tool in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England 3. Children’s literature, the home, and the debate on public versus private education, c.1760–1845 4. Education in the working-class home: modes of learning as revealed by nineteenth-century criminal records 5. Charlotte Mason, home education and the Parents’ National Educational Union in the late nineteenth century 6. Self-education, class and gender in Edwardian Britain: women in lower middle class families 7. Home education: then and now
