Enlist the changes that emerged in 19th century with regard to education.
Answers
Answer: In the 19th century education greatly improved for both boys and girls. In the early 19th century there were still dame schools for very young children. They were run by women who taught a little reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Answer:
Western Education In The 19th Century
The social and historical setting
From the mid-17th century to the closing years of the 18th century, new social, economic, and intellectual forces steadily quickened—forces that in the late 18th and the 19th centuries would weaken and, in many cases, end the old aristocratic absolutism. The European expansion to new worlds overseas had stimulated commercial rivalry. The new trade had increased national wealth and encouraged a sharp rise in the numbers and influence of the middle classes. These social and economic transformations—joined with technological changes involving the steam engine and the factory system—together produced industrialism, urbanization, and the beginnings of mass labour. At the same time, intellectuals and philosophers were assaulting economic abuses, old unjust privileges, misgovernment, and intolerance. Their ideas, which carried a new emphasis on the worth of the individual—the citizen rather than the subject—helped to inspire political revolutions, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful. But, more importantly, they worked to make it impossible for any government—even the most reactionary—to disregard for long the welfare of common people. Finally, there was a widespread psychological change: people’s confidence in their power to use resources, master nature, and structure their own future was heightened beyond anything known before, and this confidence on a national scale—in the form of nationalism—moved all groups to struggle for the freedom to direct their own affairs.
All these trends influenced the progress of education. One of the most significant results was the gradual acceptance of the view that education ought to be the responsibility of the state. Some countries, such as France and Germany, were inspired by a mixture of national aspiration and ideology to begin the establishment of public educational systems early in the 19th century. Others, such as Great Britain and the United States, under the spell of laissez-faire, hesitated longer before allowing the government to intervene in educational affairs. The school reformers in these countries had to combat the prevailing notion that “free schools” were to be provided only for pauper children, if at all; and they had to convince society that general taxation upon the whole community was the only adequate way to provide education for all the children of all the people.
The new social and economic changes also called upon the schools, public and private, to broaden their aims and curricula. Schools were expected not only to promote literacy, mental discipline, and good moral character but also to help prepare children for citizenship, for jobs, and for individual development and success. Although teaching methods remained oriented toward textbook memorizing and strict discipline, a more sympathetic attitude toward children began to appear. As the numbers of pupils grew rapidly, individual methods of “hearing recitations” by children began to give way to group methods. The monitorial system, also called the Lancastrian system, became popular because, in the effort to overcome the shortage of teachers during the quick expansion of education, it enabled one teacher to use older children to act as monitors in teaching specific lessons to younger children in groups. Similarly, the practice of dividing children into grades or classes according to their ages—a practice that began in 18th-century Germany—was to spread everywhere as schools grew larger.
The early reform movement: the new educational philosophers
The late 18th and 19th centuries represent a period of great activity in reformulating educational principles, and there was a ferment of new ideas, some of which in time wrought a transformation in school and classroom. The influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was profound and inestimable. One of his most famous followers was Pestalozzi, who believed that children’s nature, rather than the structure of the arts and sciences, should be the starting point of education. Rousseauist ideas are seen also in the work of Friedrich Froebel, who emphasized self-activity as the central feature of childhood education, and in that of Johann Friedrich Herbart, perhaps the most influential 19th-century thinker in the development of pedagogy as a science.
Explanation: