Friday 20th June, Exeter College.
A limited number of places are available for this workshop exploring the role and practice of home education in 18th and 19thc Britain.
Since the seventeenth century, a growing body of advice literature, educational treatises, parenting manuals and policy documents has been encouraging parents to play an active part in the education and instruction of their children. However, the focus of historians of education on institutional forms has meant that the history of these domestic pedagogies, and the educational work done by parents, has been neglected: we know relatively little about how far such practices were implemented and how children responded to them. Yet it is increasingly clear from the work being done by a number of historians, that the education children received at home was a fundamental part of the educational itinerary and socialization of most young people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even as the reach of formal schooling was being extended.
This workshop will discuss recent work by that begins to uncover the neglected history of pedagogy in the home, both as a philosophy and as a practice. It will seek to shed light on eighteenth and nineteenth-century debates and anxieties about the purposes of education, calling into question some of our assumptions about the role of schools in society. A full programme is attached.
Papers will be pre-circulated to participants to allow more time for discussion on 20th June. The cost for attendance is ÂŁ14.50 including lunch.
Anyone interested in attending should email [email protected]
