Scarica essay: education during victorian age e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Claudia De Luca ESSAY EDUCATION During the first part of Victorian Age the education was accessible only for nobles and rich. Due to the Industrial Revolution the workers moved from the countryside to the city, where the poors with their families lived in difficult conditions, in badly built houses without sanitary conditions and without light. AIl the family had to work from the age of six. A few children of working class received education. Despite the law, introduced in 1870, decreed that all the children between five years old and ten years old were supposed to go at school, a lot of families, the poorest one, cannot afford the cost of 1 penny per day and cannot afford to lose moneys that children gained if they had worked-exploited. Different fate had rich boys that went in private prestigious school. In this school the teachers were too strict: they used the method of putting in the head of the schoolers a lot of information. The children were seen like a pots to be filled and they read the lesson and repeated it until they learned it perfectly by heart. This condition is described by C. Dickens in his novel Hard Times of 1854, in particular in the chapter the definition of an horse. Thomas Grandgrind, the main character, represent the utilitarianism. His teaching method led to depersonalisation of contents, led the negation of all forms of imagination. The children of his class were treated as they were objects so they were called girl number twenty, so they hadn't an identity. But we know that child’s mind must be stimulated. Instead the girls were educated at home or by their parents or by the governess and learned to be a good wives and a good mothers. They learned what they need to be a prestigious ornamental object to show during the dinners. This was a consequence of a patriarchal society. In fact, despite the governess had a good education, se had good manners, she was like a slave. Those aspects were treated in Charlotte Bronte's novel, Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre wasn't conventional: she fight and resist to men. In this novel there was a character, mister Brocklehurst, (Protestant priest, he is the principal and treasurer of the Lowood School) that holds his own views on discipline and lifestyle, and intimidated girls by telling them they will go to hell for their sins, allowing them suffer the hunger. The school in the 215 century was too far from the school in the Victorian Age: starting from the obligation to go to school up to sixteen years old to the teachers figures to the technological progress. In contraposition with the exemplar figures described before, the teachers guide the students in their own learning process with their experiences and their culture. They help you if you need. I think that both of them are necessary: today the benevolence of teacher was misunderstood and the students makes fun of them. We should never confuse confidence with respect, because the thread that separates them is very thin. So they should be a little bit strict.
