Popular Education: For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes.

How should the young be taught, and by whom? This guide addresses itself to parents, teachers and students alike, offering principles for the shaping of mind and character in the belief that education is everyone's concern.

What it's about

Popular Education: For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes is a practical treatise on the aims and methods of instruction. Addressed to a wide audience rather than to specialists alone, it considers how learning should be conducted, what qualities the educator should cultivate, and how the young might best be guided toward knowledge and good character. In keeping with the reforming educational literature of its period, it treats education as a broad responsibility shared among family, teacher and pupil, and offers guidance meant to be usable by ordinary readers.

Themes

The book is concerned with the formation of character as much as the transmission of knowledge, and with making sound educational principles available to all rather than reserving them for professionals. The shared duty of parents and teachers, the value of learning for both sexes, and the improvement of society through education run through its pages.

Why it still matters

Works like this one document the era in which education for the many — and for both sexes — was becoming a widely held ideal. As a record of how teaching and upbringing were understood, and of the movement to spread learning beyond the privileged few, it remains an illuminating period piece for anyone interested in the history of education and of ideas about childhood and instruction.

Who it's for

For readers interested in the history of education, students of nineteenth-century social reform, and anyone curious about earlier thinking on how the young should be taught.