Scarica Education in Victorian Britain and Victorian Compromise e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Education in Victorian Britain One of the most important transformation of the Victorian age was about the education. At the beginning of the century the education for lower orders was viewed with suspicious. After two factors encouraged the spread of literacy and learning: • The new economy system searched more people with basic literacy. • The authorities begun to fear about the ignorance in the urban masses. An utterly different society was created by the changing urban order, the development of the education system and the technological revolution in printing. Publishing became an highly lucrative business. Books were read by more and more people from all the social classes thanks to lending libraries and new cheap editions. In 1787 Raikes and More created the Sunday school to “train the lower classes in habits of industry and piety” and the Church, which controlled the most part of educational facilities in England, was involved in this important transformation. Factory owners were obliged by the Legislation to teach their young apprentices, but they often ignored that. In 1870 was published the Education Act. It was one for the most important result of the time. It established the right of all the children to schooling. After that, in the 1880, all children between the age of 5 and 10 were obliged to attend school. The teaching profession began to be a highly trained occupation. The syllabus was slowly reformed to permit children to develop an interest and intelligence and to learn a real substantial knowledge. The public schools begun to flourish in this time. They took boys from the industrial and commercial classes to give them educational and social ideals. They incorporated the new ideals of manliness, physical, sporting endeavour, of valuing team above self, of learning to play without worry about who win. Sport fields and pavilion became as important as classroom. Team games begun to be considered important for the encouragement of discipline, obedience and collective endeavour. These sport’s ideals begun to spread around the world. The children didn’t learn only the facts of empire, but to glory in it too. They had to be proud of their homeland, often in terms that were suffused with racial superiority. The Victorian compromise It was a complex and contradictory era: it was the age of progress, stability, great social reforms but it was also characterised by poverty, injustice and social unrest. The Victorians promoted a code of values that reflect the world as they wanted it to be, not as it really was, based on personal duty, hard work, respectability and charity. In this period was very important to work hard for improve the society. Respectability was a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards. It implied the possession of good manners, the ownership of confortable house with servants and a carriage, regular attendance at church, and charity activity. This idea distinguished the middle from lower class. Philanthropy was a wide phenomenon: the rich middle class exploited the poor ruthlessly and at the same time managed to help “stay children, fallen woman and drunk men”. The husband represented the authority and the key role of woman regarded the education of children and the housework. Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms, and prudery in its most extreme manifestations led to denunciation of nudity in art, and the rejection of words with sexual connotation from everyday vocabulary.
