Education
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Education’
For Jane Austen, the best education a father can give to his child is to befriend her.
Sir Thomas Bertram has lost both his daughters to unhappy marriages, and now has the unwelcome leisure to reflect on where he went wrong. He gave them a progressive education, he laid down the law; but what he should have done was to get to know them, and to win their trust.
A long-lived annual of riddles, rhymes and really hard maths aimed specifically at Georgian Britain’s hidden public of clever women.
The 18th century was deluged with popular magazines, almanacks and annuals filled with tidbits, extracts and riddling rhymes, but few could rival John Tipper’s “Ladies’ Diary” for longevity or circulation – or for sheer hard maths.
At fifteen John Dalton was a village schoolmaster in Kendal; at forty he had published the first scientific theory of atoms.
John Dalton (1766-1844) and his contemporary Sir Humphrey Davy could not have been less alike. Davy was a gifted communicator with an international profile; Dalton was tongue-tied and uncomfortable south of Cheshire. But both made historic discoveries, and where Davy left us Faraday, Dalton gave us Joule.
Philosopher and social activist John Stuart Mill discusses the most liberating kind of education.
J.S. Mill was educated at home by his eminent father, and the experience was a bruising one. He wished that his father had been more patient, but he was profoundly grateful that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he had not merely been trained to meet conventional school targets, but empowered throughout his life to set his own.
It is not educational institutions and methods that advance science or the arts, but people.
Holding a degree or some other officially-recognised paper qualification is not really a guarantee of very much; as Samuel Smiles repeatedly observed, there is no substitute for hands-on experience, the quirks of an interesting personality, and sheer determination.
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.