Changing Pedagogies for Children in Eighteenth-Century England

In this incisive, original and elegantly written study of eighteenth-century pedagogy, Michele Cohen makes us rethink almost every aspect of education during the Enlightenment. Astutely sensitive to the class and especially gendered assumptions that shaped teaching, learning and knowing, she re-fashions our views on public and private education, the grand tour, Latin pedagogy, the role of modern subjects such as geography, the paradoxical nature of accomplishment (about which she is especially brilliant), and the values attached to conversation. Her insights resonate into the present and show how fundamental the education of boys and girls was to the construction of eighteenth-century society and culture. -- John Brewer, Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of History and Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University
This study provides fascinating insights into the struggles over pedagogy in the long eighteenth century and the competing discourses used to justify different approaches. Central to the argument are the gendering of Latin as a subject for boys, embedded in a pedagogy of difficulty, discipline and punishments; versus geography and the modern sciences as subjects for girls, built round a pedagogy of interest and engagement. Michele Cohen shows how these different approaches played out in pedagogic texts written at the time, long before the state became involved in education and fixed the sequence in which knowledge should be taught. The book is a timely reminder of how much we take for granted in what and how we teach now, and how little we should trust what we think we know. -- Gemma Moss, Professor of Literacy, UCL