Our Victorian Education

As Victorian philanthropy evolved into public policy, a cultural unease developed between attempts to assimilate the fractured legacies of Romanticism and Christianity with the push for education. For some, education represented a denial of the autonomous ‘inner life’ that so richly defined Romantic and Christian thought. This troubling divergence between ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’ shaped attitudes towards education throughout the nineteenth century.

This groundbreaking volume combines an historical interpretation of Victorian debates on teaching and learning with a fresh overview of contemporary educational thought. Written for a diverse audience, the book explores the roots of modern educational anxieties in nineteenth-century thinking and reflects on questions of social class, religion and gender in relation to Victorian educational ideals.