Tom Brown's Schooldays

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Reformer

abstract A classic of Victorian literature, and one of the earliest books written specifically for boys, Tom Brown’s Schooldays has long had an influence well beyond the middle-class, public school world that it describes. An active social reformer, Hughes wrote with a freshness, a lack of cant, and a kind, relaxed tolerance which keeps this novel refreshingly distinct from other schoolboy adventures. This edition is the only one available, and comes with the outstanding 1869 illustrations by Arthur Hughes.

Textbook Popery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Public School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Female Teachers ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
School Movement

By the 1840s, convent narratives gained more middle-class, respectable readers, moving away from descriptions of sex and sadism and focusing instead on convent schools and the education of young women. Popular works such as Protestant Girl in a French Nunnery described "tricks" used by nuns to convert female pupils and lure them into convents. Such literature warned that as neither wives nor mothers, nuns could not train the right kind of women for America. The focus on convent schools converged with the common or public school movement. At the same time, teaching became an acceptable occupation for women, prompting more women to seek opportunities for higher education. This chapter compares the approach to education among nuns and other female teachers alongside the caricatures of convent schools in anti-Catholic print culture. I seek to answer why convent schools faced such heightened animosity even as teaching became feminized.

‘A very Moloch of a baby’

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-106
Author(s):  
Tamara S. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Rescue Work ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Infant Behaviour

Dickens’s portrayal of babyhood comprises comical creations as well as complex symbols and infants as victims of social injustice, yet, especially his funny babies are often overlooked. The first chapter explores how Dickens satirizes the growing commodification of babyhood in Victorian Britain and, in playing with readers’ expectations, produces comical scenes that strengthen rather than undercut his social criticism. His exposure of failed middle-class projects of child rescue urges his readers to reconsider prevailing ideas of charitable intervention, while he uses comically exaggerated infant behaviour to render working-class practices of child care mundane and familiar without sentimentalizing them. His representation of working-class baby-minding, a practice that Victorian philanthropists notoriously misunderstood, exemplifies how Dickens could combine comedy and social criticism to draw attention to topical issues, upend clichés, and at the same time create individualized infant characters. His Christmas book for 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, produces a grotesquely comical image of a baby, minded by a small boy, as ‘Moloch’, a deity demanding child sacrifice. While Baby Moloch becomes central to a reassessment of emotional attachment, the narrative complicates middle-class rescue work. The simultaneity of the comical baby and infants as symbols of suffering is then further developed in Bleak House (1853), whereas in Our Mutual Friend (1865), the failed rescue of an orphaned toddler dramatizes pressing issues involving paid child-minding and unregulated adoption. The analysis of Dickens’s fictional infants simultaneously reveals the different narrative roles of the comical baby in Victorian literature.

Teachers of the Culturally Disadvantaged

1966 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-88
Author(s):  
Arnold B. Cheyney
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Training Programs ◽  
Good Judgment ◽  
Sense Of Humor ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
Culturally Disadvantaged ◽  
Slum Areas

The personal qualities emphasized as desirable in teachers of the disadvantaged begin with respect for the pupil and include patience, understanding, sensitivity, good judgment, and a sense of humor. Teachers of the disadvantaged usually have middle class backgrounds, values, and attitudes which are in conflict with those learned by the children living in the slum areas. There is a need to develop training programs for teachers of the disadvantaged at university and public school inservice levels.

My Story

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeannette Brown
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Good Education ◽  
Research Teams ◽  
Pharmaceutical Firms ◽  
White Schools ◽  
White Neighborhood ◽  
Washington Heights ◽  
Middle Class Blacks

Jeannette Brown’s career has included accomplishments in industry, academia, and publishing. Her claim to fame is working in two different pharmaceutical firms, where she was able to contribute her skill to the research teams who produced several marketable drugs. She was also able to mentor minorities to encourage them to enter the field of chemistry, both as part of a corporate effort and as a volunteer. Jeannette Brown was born May 13, 1934, in Fordham Hospital in the Bronx, New York. She was the only child of Ada May Fox and Freddie Brown. She was born in the middle of the Depression, and times were tough. Her father worked a number of jobs in order to feed his family, including shining shoes on the street. Finally, when Jeannette was five, her father got a job as a superintendent in a building in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. This section of Manhattan was just becoming a home for middle-class blacks moving up from Harlem. Since her father was a super, he had a basement apartment in the building. One of the tenants in the house was Dr. Arthur Logan, who became Jeannette’s doctor when she became very ill. Jeannette was in and out of the hospital many times, and she remembers asking Dr. Logan how she could become a doctor. He told her that she would have to study science. Jeannette was only five or six at the time, but that conversation impressed her and she immediately decided to become a scientist. When Jeannette started school at the age of six, she went to the neighborhood public school, which all children did at the time. The children in the school were mostly black, and some of them taunted her because she was interested in being a good student. Her father decided that the only way that she was going to get a good education was for him to try to get a job as a superintendent in a white neighborhood so that Jeannette could go to the mostly white schools.

Public School Elites in Early-Victorian England: The Boys at Harrow and Merchant Taylors' Schools from 1825 to 1850

1982 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward A. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Public School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The One

Historians agree that the public schools played a central role in the creation of Victorian society and that in particular they were seminal in the construction of that “mid-Victorian compromise” which made the mid-century an era of “balance,” “equipoise,” and accommodation. There is further agreement that the cadre of boys produced by the newly reformed public schools became that mid-Victorian governing and social elite which was at once larger, more broadly based, more professional and, to many, more talented than the one which preceded it. The importance of the public schools in this regard was, as Asa Briggs affirms, twofold. They assimilated the “representatives of old families with the sons of the new middle classes,” thereby creating the “social amalgam” which, in Briggs' view, “cemented old and new ruling groups which had previously remained apart.” Secondly, the singular expression of that amalgamation was an elite type, the “Christian Gentleman”—the result of an “education in character” administered under the influence of Dr. Arnold. Arnold was able to do this because he “reconciled the serious classes” (that is, the commercial middle class) “to the public schools,” sharing as he did “their faith in progress, goodness, and their own vocation.” At first, the schools “attracted primarily the sons of the nobility, gentry and professional classes.” Later, it was the “sons of the leaders of industry” who were, like earlier generations of boys, amalgamated with “the sons of men of different traditions” in a broadened “conception of a gentleman.”

scholarly journals A parental school choice misery: Middle class parents’ dilemma in choosing a primary school in Berlin’s multi-ethnic neighborhoods

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-57
Author(s):  
Tanja Mayer ◽  
Viktor Geist ◽  
Vera S. Pohl ◽  
Judith Schwarz ◽  
Thomas Koinzer
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Primary School ◽  
Private School ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Migrant Background ◽  
Parental Strategies

AbstractTo follow up on research conducted in several countries, in this paper, we look at the dilemmas middle-class parents face of being “good parents” by choosing the “best” school with a milieu-related environment for their child versus being “good citizens” by choosing a “local” public school with a large proportion of students from a working-class or migrant background. Analyzing semi-structured interviews with parents, the paper explores whether and how parents in Germany’s capital city of Berlin refer to this dilemma concerning primary school choice and how they resolve it and justify their decision. The parents interviewed applied strategies in deciding to be “good parents” or “good citizens” or at least to make it easier to solve the dilemma. All the strategies presented in other studies can be found in our sample as well. In addition, we identified two more parental strategies: the strategy of downward comparison and the strategy of choosing a private school. It is notable that the perceived proportion of children with a migrant background in the neighborhood played a major role in relation to the dilemma and the strategies chosen.

From East London (1899)

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Besant
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Walter Besant

In East London, novelist and social reformer Walter Besant (1836–1901) offers middle-class readers fictional portraits of social ‘types’. While none are intended to represent actual persons, Besant attempts to make them as realistic as possible, based on his own contacts with London’s poor....

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