Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-century FictionReading Victorian Schoolrooms examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates. As Gargano argues, the fiction of mainstream and children's writers such as Dickens, Brontë, and Carroll reflected widespread Victorian anxieties about the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction. As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Yet, Dickens, Brontë, and others did not simply critique or satirize the standardization of school experience. Instead, most portrayed the schoolroom as an unstable site, incorporating both institutional and domestic space. Drawing on the bildungsroman's traditional celebration of an individualized, experiential education, numerous novels of school life strove to present the novel itself as a form of domestic education, in contrast to the rigors of institutional instruction. By positioning the novel as a form of domestic education currently under attack, these novelists sought to affirm its value as a form of protest within an increasingly institutionalized society. The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence thus became central to the Victorian fictive project. |
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... Arnold , such contact constitutes an antibaptism , a washing that soils . Arnold's recoil from the inevitable taint of earth is in keeping with the emphasis he places on the trials of school life . Clearly , both Rousseau and Arnold ...
... Arnold , as for many other contemporary educators , such a correction is not to be accomplished only through the ... Arnold's public school model , boys hone and refine their flawed charac- ters in part by striving with other flawed boys ...
... Arnold is nevertheless a domestic gardener who , like Tom himself , hates " grubbing about in the tough dirt . ” And , as the con- fiding master reveals , Arnold has time not only to redesign the nature of Rugby , but also the ...
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Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-century ... Elizabeth Gargano No preview available - 2012 |