Elementary Education Beyond the Schoolroom

Periodicals were instrumental in promoting and facilitating elementary education beyond the schoolroom. By concentrating on home education among middle-class and working-class children, the chapter investigates the following fundamental question: how important were domestic pedagogies as an alternative to formal, institutionalised elementary education? The rationale for the selection of periodicals is based on the different interpretations that they articulated on complex educational issues involving an interrelationship between home, childhood, parenthood, class and gender. Periodicals and literary works as indices of interest in home education and autodidactism are explored mainly through the following: John Cassell’s Quiver (1861–1926), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Harriet Martineau’s Household Education (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Jayne Eyre (1847) and Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (1907). Periodicals provide additional perspectives on domestic pedagogies that supplement a reliance on manuscript sources and, thereby, extend our understanding of education in the private sphere. In doing so, they take forward our knowledge of home education among people who were neither aristocracy nor gentry. The chapter also explores the rhetoric of a new discourse which emerged in the periodical press on the status of governesses and women teachers as professionals.