User Profile

The pupil of the Birbeck school was reciting the new catechism. The teacher was probably better trained, the classroom brighter and cleaner than its predecessor of the century before. But it would be difficult to argue that the reforms that produced the modern pedagogy of the nineteenth century were an unmixed blessing for the children who warmed the school benches. Some of the reforms were, no doubt, welcome—the self-constraint and distance that now characterized the teacher protected pupils from the arbitrary violence so often the basis of such discipline as there was in the early modern classroom. And the comfort of the better schools protected children from the elements and often from adult harassment probably better than did their own homes.

But it seems that in practice the new pedagogy was usually as intellectually stultifying as the old had been—and it was more intrusive. The teachers may have sympathized with their pupils and even shared some of their values, but they were caught between their sympathies and the pressures inherent in their duty to transform their pupils—to lure them away from the habits and loyalties of their families and communities, toward a new set of values championed by reformist officials and, to some extent, shared by the teachers themselves. The reformed school was in its very character contradictory—a point of contact between the ruling classes and the ruled, an institution often having roots in the people's life and culture but rendered alien to them by the process of reform, a place and a process shaped by teachers who had a foot in both worlds.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 80)

The changing content of textbooks in this period is shown in Peter Lundgreen's content analysis of German reformist textbooks of the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Lundgreen examines the most popular texts of the two periods in order to determine specifically whether or not changes he finds in this early industrial period reflect changes in the economy and social structure of Germany. The world of textbooks around 1780, Lundgreen found, was a static world. People did receive rewards for their industriousness, but they did not become socially mobile. Schooling brought profit, but within a well-defined and unmoving set of social relations. "The usefulness of learning was exemplified by Rochow in the character of Hans, who could neither read or write, and who came upon a man who duped him into making out an IOU. When Hans became aware of the deception, he said, 'Ach, if only I had learned to read and write.' and he makes sure that his own children are schooled." Lundgreen's analysis of the schoolbooks used about 1840 shows some interesting changes. Ambition and mobility are now recognized to exist, but they are persistently downgraded. These texts deliberately teach both industry and "satisfaction". Their message is work hard, "get by,'' but don't expect to accumulate. (This message was particularly clear in textbooks prepared by pedagogic supporters of the conservative movement of the 1840s and particularly in the reactionary post-1849 period.)

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 79)

It is interesting to note, however, that in both France and England the monitorial schools quickly rose to popularity, but almost as quickly disappeared. There are several reasons for its disappearance. In France, at least, the monitorial schools suffered from their association with liberal and Protestant sponsorship. But it is also significant that the promise of rapid instruction which they offered may well have appealed only to those who thought of schooling primarily as a way of teaching skills. For those who felt, on the other hand, that schooling was intended to socialize, to discipline the children and withdraw them from home and street, there was no virtue in brevity.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 77)

The "monitorial school" was perhaps the most dramatic pedagogic reform of the epoch. Teaching with the help of student monitors was developed simultaneously by Bell and by Lancaster in England, and quickly applied in France and elsewhere on the Continent, and in North America as well. This method shared with the Brothers of the Christian Schools on insistence on simultaneous instruction and the replacement of spoken commands with rigidly defined signals that regimented the children in the class throughout their school day. Its two most innovative aspects were, first, the use of pupil-monitors to teach what they had been taught to their less advanced peers; second, the simultaneous teaching of reading and writing to even the youngest pupils.

The monitorial school movement in Britain had its heyday in the first three decades of the nineteenth century; that is, prior to the intervention of the state in schooling there. In France, the methode mutuelle provided anticlerical proponents of popular education with a feasible alternative to the poor schooling provided by the religious orders. Generally advocated by progressive factions of the middle classes, most often in urban industrial centers, the method clearly appealed to them by virtue of its ability to provide inexpensive and orderly instruction.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 76 - 77)

Furthermore, the very growth in class size that accompanied the school reforms because of their emphasis on universal daily schooling made the simple keeping of order a major part of the teacher's task. Ratios of pupils to teachers in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century were startlingly high. In a sample of communities of various sizes in Baden, the ratio grew from around seventy to one at the turn of the nineteenth century, to a hundred to one in 1836. In individual communities where population growth was especially rapid, the numbers of children in one school taught by a single teacher could be even higher. For example, the Reformed Girls' School in Schriesheim had 120 pupils in 1818 to one teacher, and 190 in 1831. The Reformed School in Handschuhsheim, with its single teacher, grew from 140 pupils in 1800 to 200 in 1820 as a result of population growth and stricter enforcement of compulsory schooling laws. In southern France, ratios were lower but rose impressively during the same period. In a sample of communities in the Vaucluse, the average rose from twenty-five pupils per teacher around 1800 to seventy in the late 1830s. In England, class sizes in Board and Charity Schools of between 70 and 120 pupils were apparently common in the late nineteenth century, although in all areas of Western Europe increased investment in public schooling resulted in lowered ratios toward the very end of the century.

Under these circumstances, particularly given the new emphasis on the creation of an orderly environment in the classroom, new styles for controlling the masses of children had to be applied. Teachers everywhere abandoned the traditional individual method of teaching in favor of one of the alternative "simultaneous" methods. Pupils were all taught at once. All those in one section were expected to follow a lesson together, while those of other sections worked at some prescribed lesson. The pupil's time was "filled" so as to preclude the idleness that could provoke disorder.

The Brothers of the Christian Schools, who had been the pedagogic innovators of the eighteenth century, provided the model for the new schools. Even for those who did not follow their exact method, the use of lesson plans, signals, and simultaneous instruction answered some of the demands of the new pedagogy. That such a discipline could not meet the needs for spontaneity and individuality which the more humanistic pedagogy required was overlooked in the drive to pull more and more children into the classroom and to keep them orderly and occupied.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 76)

Although they proceed from a variety of different perspectives, the social-historical analyses of the evolution of teaching to lead to some important generalizations. Throughout Western Europe, the period of school reform transformed the teacher from a member of the community in which he or she taught, as a part of it, into a figure of authority and moral superiority separate from it. The reforms also at first masculinized the occupation as the part-time, casual, and unlicensed teachers, often women, were excluded or harassed, and the new normal schools recruited predominately males. The reformed teacher was everywhere in a peculiarly contradictory position. Underpaid in comparison to local notables, and more highly regulated by religious and lay superiors, he was nonetheless supposed to display independence and authority in dealings with the people of the community. Drawn from "the people," the teacher was no longer one of them. It is hardly surprising that teachers were, during this period, a discontented lot. In the political character of the teachers it trained, as in so many other respects, the contradictory nature of the reform revealed itself.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 71 - 72)

In all, the thrust of the professional reforms of teaching left the teachers in a new and improved, but hardly enviable position. In practice the reform certainly severed their ties with the local community all over Western Europe. If salaries were rising and the work of the teacher taken more seriously, if classrooms were fuller and teachers equipped with a new kind of training and new credentials, all this came at a high cost. Teachers were left in a peculiarly contradictory position—caught between the needs of the communities they served, the demands of their secular and religious superiors, and their own sense of self in part at least shaped by the training they were now receiving. Teachers who made strenuous efforts to enforce the new regulations about school attendance or teaching standards often paid for their efforts by losing the goodwill of the peasant families who found the older style of teaching more compatible with their needs. In their frustrations with dealing with an often unappreciative local community, teachers sometimes resorted to a kind of partnership with liberal notables nearby or in the state hierarchy, attaching themselves often to opposition movements seeming or even claiming to be in sympathy with popular needs, but often in fact divorced from the people they had to serve.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 70)