Educating Girls

 It's that time of year when my head is full of choosing books for school for the next academic year and working out what we're going to be studying. I'm also reading a biography of Hannah More who was an educator, writer, reformer and abolitionist in the 18th century. It has been fascinating reading about the evolution of girls' education and I'm very thankful it has changed from back in the 1700s! Here is an extract from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential educational treatise:

Men’s morals, their passions, their tastes, their pleasures, their very happiness also depend on women. Thus, the whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honored by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and sweet—these are the duties of women at all times, and they ought to be taught them from childhood.

 Rousseau’s views on female education mirrored the prevailing attitudes of the time.

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And here is Anna Letitia Barbauld's concern about a friend’s proposal to begin a girls’ academy:

 Young ladies ought only to have a general tincture of knowledge as to make them agreeable companions to a man of sense, and to enable them to find rational entertainment for a solitary hour.

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More's biographer, Karen Swallow Prior, says:

The Monthly Review complained in a 1763 review, “intense thought spoils a lady’s features.” Even a century later, an American doctor published research claiming women could not be educated in the same manner as men without causing significant harm to their reproductive organs and their nervous systems.

Protestantism’s emphasis on the need for individuals to read the Bible for themselves rather than having scriptures mediated through a priest meant that women as well as men should be provided enough education to be literate.

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Hannah More:

Ladies, “is it not better to succeed as women, than to fail as men? . . . to be good originals, rather than bad imitators?”

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I found the following interesting about the establishment of Harvard University. This is taken from our history course, Mystery of History, Volume 3:

The purpose of this early Christian college was: “Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17: 3) and therefore lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning."

Education was, in fact, so important to the Puritans that it was required. By 1642, parents were required to teach their young children to read so they could know the Scriptures. By 1657, if a town had at least 50 families, it was required to hire a teacher for the students. The purpose of teaching was to learn the Word of God and defeat Satan, who was the deluder (meaning the liar). So the law to teach was called the “Old Deluder Satan Act.”

(Linda Lacour Hobar)