Education
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Education’
The Report of the Newcastle Commission confirmed that there were no Dotheboys Halls among Yorkshire’s private schools.
The Newcastle Commission of 1859 was in large measure a response to allegations of educational malpractice in Charles Dickens’s novel ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ (1838). The Assistant Commissioner for Yorkshire, Mr J. G. Fitch, submitted a wide-ranging and often critical report, but he could not let Dickens’s allegations pass without comment.
Mrs Squeers has lost the school spoon, and is uncomfortably frank about its importance.
Impoverished young gentleman Nicholas Nickleby has accepted a position as junior master at Dotheboys Hall, a remote Yorkshire school managed by Mr Wackford Squeers and his wife. On his arrival, Nicholas is treated to a rapid initiation into the school’s educational vision.
Sir Hubert Parry explained to students at the Royal College of Music that some mistakes are creative whereas others are destructive.
Addressing students at the Royal College of Music in January 1918, Sir Hubert Parry distinguished two kinds of mistake, the mistakes we make when we seize our responsibilities as free men and women a little clumsily, and the mistakes we make when we lazily follow whatever the fashionable thinking may be.
Sir Hubert Parry was delighted to see teachers and pupils pushing each other to do better.
In an address to the students of the Royal College of Music in April 1918, Sir Hubert Parry said they were fortunate that when the College was founded in 1882, teachers were beginning to understand that the young respond better to respect and persuasion than to drill-ground severity.
Sir Walter Scott warned that schoolchildren must not expect to be entertained all the time.
The hero of Walter Scott’s historical novel Waverley, published in 1814, is Edward Waverley, a delicate child plucked from London’s fogs and taken to his father’s country estate for his health. There, the boy was allowed to direct his own education. He had curiosity, which was good, but no staying power; and Scott took a moment to reflect on how fashionable educational theory was not much help in this regard.
A twelve-year-old girl from Lyme Regis made a historic discovery while selling seashells to tourists.
Around the time that the fictional Anne Elliot paid a visit to Lyme Regis in Jane Austen’s novel ‘Persuasion’, in real life a young girl named Mary Anning was chipping away at the nearby cliffs, and had already entered the history books.