Kursinformation

The nineteenth century saw the gradual introduction of public schooling in Britain. In this course we will revisit the debates around the idea of a general education and consider the legacy of those debates for how we conceptualise and organise public schools today. As a critical point of departure you may wish to consider Ken Robinson's intervention The Element (2009) which ties our idea of schooling to the industrialization, pointing to the alignment of factories and schools.
We will consider Samuel Whibread's idea of introducing elementary schools, expressed as early as 1807, look at the first grant of 20.000 pounds towards education passed by Parliament in 1833, we will read the Minutes of the Committee of Council of Education from 1846, and we will discuss the Educational Bill of 1857. In our weekly sessions we will study further historical documents depending on where our discussions and questions take us.
The educational movement of the nineteenth century is tied to the rise of English literature as a subject to be studied. Reading and writing skills were taught with the help of canonical texts. In this process, secular reading material increasingly replaced biblical texts. We will reflect on the changes in what schooling and education meant as a result of these curricular shifts. 
Last but not least, we will consider how literary texts reflect on the introduction of public schooling. We will all read Charles Dickens' Hard Times, a text that juxtaposes the mechanistic world of a local school with the creative realm of the circus, and Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays, a fictional account of a school catering for the upper classes based on the author's experience of his days at Rugby School. A third nineteenth-century novel dealing with formal and institutional education will be chosen by us on the grounds of a survey of the field.

In preparation for this course you must purchase a copy of the following two edition:
Charles Dickens. Hard Times. Ed. Paul Schlicke. Oxford World's Classics [ISBN 978-0199536276]
Thomas Hughes. Tom Brown's Schooldays. Ed Andrew Sanders. Oxford World's Classics
[ISBN 9780199537303]

Please make sure that you purchase paper copies of the above editions; no other edition will do, no e-books will do.
Be prepared to read aloud sections from the novels during our weekly sessions.

This seminar is offered in cooperation with the seminar School Days in Victorian Britain: Education, Society, and Literature at the University of Hamburg. Throughout the semester we will exchange ides and observations with students in Hamburg,

Please note: This course is part of a digital detox project. When you sign up for this course you accept that you will not use digital devices for the duration of our weekly sessions! Notes are taken on paper, no tablets or laptops are permissible in the seminar.