Conclusion: Elementary Education: ‘An Arena of Struggles, Practical and Theoretical’

Periodicals were the main intellectual engine that drove debates about social, political, economic, cultural and religious issues that concerned the Victorians. Periodicals, given their importance, reach and circulation, contributed significantly to the education debate in nineteenth-century England. The ‘conflicts,’ ‘controversies’ and ‘struggles’ associated with pedagogical theories and practices were played out in the cultural space created by the print media. Although periodicals attracted diverse reading audiences, debates about elementary education in the periodical press represented a discourse mainly among members of the literate middle class. The working classes were excluded from participation in discussions about the nature and purpose of elementary education that featured so prominently and persistently in those publications. The defining characteristics of debates about elementary education were being shaped by new discourses in a print-mediated cultural space. Discourses that signalled a paradigm shift in how education was conceptualised by contributors to secular, religious and teachers’ periodicals as they promoted progressive pedagogies for working-class and middle-class children. Periodicals were crucially important in promoting and facilitating education in the home, which has been a neglected source of evidence in determining the extent of the democratisation of elementary education in the Victorian period.