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Teaching Britain examines teachers as key agents in the production of social knowledge. Teachers in nineteenth century Britain claimed intimate knowledge of everyday life among the poor and working class at home, and non-white subjects abroad. They mobilized their knowledge in a wide range of media, from accounts of local happenings in their schools' official log books to travel narratives based on summer trips around Britain and the wider world. Teachers also obsessively narrated and reflected on their own careers. Through these stories and the work they did every day, teachers imagined and helped to enact new models of professionalism, attitudes towards poverty and social mobility, ways of thinking about race and empire, and roles for the state. As highly visible agents of the state and beneficiaries of new state-funded opportunities, teachers also represented the largesse and the reach of the liberal state - but also the limits of both.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Becoming Teachers
- 1: Education Policies
- 2: Pupil Teaching
- 3: Rules and Rule Breaking
- 4: 'A Home for Poets'?
- Part II: Out in the World
- 5: The Job Market
- 6: Seeing Britain and the World
- 7: Everyday Stories
- 8: The Over-Pressure Controversy
- Conclusion
About the author
Christopher Bischof received his PhD from Rutgers University and is currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Richmond. He is a social and cultural historian of modern Britain and the world.
Summary
Teachers in nineteenth century Britain claimed intimate knowledge of everyday life among the poor and working class at home, and non-white subjects abroad. This knowledge enabled them to help to enact new models of professionalism, attitudes towards poverty and social mobility, ways of thinking about race and empire, and roles for the state.
Additional text
Bischof's work is a useful addition to a literature that has often in the past focused on the role of the teacher as a dependent ... as opposed to the independent albeit constrained profession that Bischof masterfully conjures.His ultimate success is avoiding presenting teaching as black and white, either as endlessly put-upon drudgery or a romanticised storybook profession. He shows a world where teachers had very much the same aspirations and motivations as they have today and puts to bed the oft-stated desire of those seeking an imagined world of order and function to 'go back to the Victorian age', as the same problems existed now as then.
Report
The book, as a whole, does a good job in revealing the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which teachers' lives, activities, and reflections were intertwined both with the everyday lives of the communities they served and with the wider historical developments working to transform British society in the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular, the expansion of the state into new areas of social and domestic life. Bischof makes a convincing case for viewing some teachers as interstitial negotiators, communicating across social and class boundaries, while, at the same time, helping to remake and reshape those boundaries. Heather Ellis, Journal of Modern History
