User Profile

The pupil of the Birbeck school was reciting the new catechism. The teacher was probably better trained, the classroom brighter and cleaner than its predecessor of the century before. But it would be difficult to argue that the reforms that produced the modern pedagogy of the nineteenth century were an unmixed blessing for the children who warmed the school benches. Some of the reforms were, no doubt, welcome—the self-constraint and distance that now characterized the teacher protected pupils from the arbitrary violence so often the basis of such discipline as there was in the early modern classroom. And the comfort of the better schools protected children from the elements and often from adult harassment probably better than did their own homes.

But it seems that in practice the new pedagogy was usually as intellectually stultifying as the old had been—and it was more intrusive. The teachers may have sympathized with their pupils and even shared some of their values, but they were caught between their sympathies and the pressures inherent in their duty to transform their pupils—to lure them away from the habits and loyalties of their families and communities, toward a new set of values championed by reformist officials and, to some extent, shared by the teachers themselves. The reformed school was in its very character contradictory—a point of contact between the ruling classes and the ruled, an institution often having roots in the people's life and culture but rendered alien to them by the process of reform, a place and a process shaped by teachers who had a foot in both worlds.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

The pupil of the Birbeck school was reciting the new catechism. The teacher was probably better trained, the classroom brighter and cleaner than its predecessor of the century before. But it would be difficult to argue that the reforms that produced the modern pedagogy of the nineteenth century were an unmixed blessing for the children who warmed the school benches. Some of the reforms were, no doubt, welcome—the self-constraint and distance that now characterized the teacher protected pupils from the arbitrary violence so often the basis of such discipline as there was in the early modern classroom. And the comfort of the better schools protected children from the elements and often from adult harassment probably better than did their own homes.

But it seems that in practice the new pedagogy was usually as intellectually stultifying as the old had been—and it was more intrusive. The teachers may have sympathized with their pupils and even shared some of their values, but they were caught between their sympathies and the pressures inherent in their duty to transform their pupils—to lure them away from the habits and loyalties of their families and communities, toward a new set of values championed by reformist officials and, to some extent, shared by the teachers themselves. The reformed school was in its very character contradictory—a point of contact between the ruling classes and the ruled, an institution often having roots in the people's life and culture but rendered alien to them by the process of reform, a place and a process shaped by teachers who had a foot in both worlds.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

The changing content of textbooks in this period is shown in Peter Lundgreen's content analysis of German reformist textbooks of the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Lundgreen examines the most popular texts of the two periods in order to determine specifically whether or not changes he finds in this early industrial period reflect changes in the economy and social structure of Germany. The world of textbooks around 1780, Lundgreen found, was a static world. People did receive rewards for their industriousness, but they did not become socially mobile. Schooling brought profit, but within a well-defined and unmoving set of social relations. "The usefulness of learning was exemplified by Rochow in the character of Hans, who could neither read or write, and who came upon a man who duped him into making out an IOU. When Hans became aware of the deception, he said, 'Ach, if only I had learned to read and write.' and he makes sure that his own children are schooled." Lundgreen's analysis of the schoolbooks used about 1840 shows some interesting changes. Ambition and mobility are now recognized to exist, but they are persistently downgraded. These texts deliberately teach both industry and "satisfaction". Their message is work hard, "get by,'' but don't expect to accumulate. (This message was particularly clear in textbooks prepared by pedagogic supporters of the conservative movement of the 1840s and particularly in the reactionary post-1849 period.)

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes