Featured
Harriet Smith’s school gave her a grounding in good sense that even Emma Woodhouse could not quite overthrow.
‘Emma’, like Jane Austen’s other novels, is essentially about the effects of bad education, that is, an upbringing from which good role-models have been absent, and in which theory is an accepted substitute for results. Here, she describes Harriet Smith’s school - the one she attended before ‘handsome, clever, and rich’ Emma Woodhouse tried to improve her.
Thomas Huxley believed that if schools did not ground their pupils in common sense, life’s examinations would be painful.
In an address to the South London Working Men’s College in 1868, new Principal Thomas Huxley attempted to define a liberal education. As befitted a friend of Charles Darwin, he spoke in terms of Nature’s university. She has enrolled us all in it, but she provides no lectures; so if we want to pass her stern examinations, we had better find out what to expect.
Persian scholar Al-Ghazali feared for any country where morals were lagging behind brains.
Al-Ghazali, known in Medieval Europe as Algazel, was a Persian scholar roughly contemporary with Anselm of Canterbury. In 1095, feeling compromised by political and academic expectations, Ghazali abruptly left his prestigious teaching post and embarked on a ten-year pilgrimage to Damascus, Jerusalem and Mecca. The Revival of the Religious Sciences was the fruit of his soul-searching, and one of the most important Islamic works after the Quran itself.
When William Cobbett told his son James to be conscientious about his grammar lessons, he was drawing on hard-won experience.
In one of his letters on English grammar written to his son James, William Cobbett recalled his own quest to learn French many years before. It is not enough, he said, when learning a language to flick casually through a textbook. It is necessary to take each lesson and learn it by heart with absolute precision. The labour would be well rewarded.
Like the ideal Christian, the ideal teacher is one who spreads joy in everything, great or small.
Alexander Haddow, who taught at Jordanhill College of Education, Glasgow, between the wars, was known for his conviction that poetry-reading must bring joy or it must not be attempted. “I would have only those who wish to read, try,” he said, “and I would have you deal gently with all who really try.” In On the Teaching of Poetry (1925) Haddow went so far as to liken the vocation of the teacher to that of the Christian.
If Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli really wanted a better-educated public, he must tackle the high cost of living.
As the 1860s progressed, calls grew for a Government shake-up of the education system. But in February 1868, John Bright MP, one of the country’s leading Liberals, told his Birmingham constituents that local communities would handle the three Rs without any help from fancy theories, if Government policy hadn’t made daily living into such a desperate scramble to survive.
In January 1807, newspapers breathlessly reported that Napoleon Bonaparte’s rampage across Europe was at an end — but was it true?
In January 1807, as Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies swept across the Continent building his French Empire, British newspapers printed a cheering story about how the Russians had inflicted a calamitous defeat on Napoleon. William Cobbett didn’t believe a word of it, and expressed his doubts in a masterly metaphor which made ‘red herrings’ into a household proverb.