Schools, Pedagogy and Teachers

How and why debates about elementary education actually took shape into a coherent and meaningful movement in Victorian England has its origins in late-Regency reviews. Education is examined in relation to ideas and controversies in the early nineteenth century which mushroomed into further complex issues involving religion, politics, economics, literature and journalism. Periodicals were the catalyst for a greater awareness among the public of intellectual discourses and fictionalised representations about schools, pedagogy and teachers. Contributors to the education debate in periodicals included poets, novelists, educators, politicians, journalists, school inspectors and the general public. Prominent among this wide spectrum of society who feature in the chapter are Charles Bray, Lord Henry Brougham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Reverend W. Hodgson, James Simpson, Robert Southey and William Wordsworth. Individual voices engaged in reassessing the nature and purpose of elementary education combined with pedagogical periodicals to bring about a turning point in the education debate by the 1840s. A watershed moment epitomised by the College of Preceptors (1846), an innovative teaching and learning organisation, and its associated periodical, the Educational Times (1847). Education emerges as a subject worthy of academic study as the 1840s witnessed a turning point in the professionalisation of teaching and progressive pedagogies.