User Profile

nerd teacher [books]

whatanerd@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 2 months ago

Anarchist educator who can be found at nerdteacher.com where I muse about school and education-related things, and all my links are here. My non-book posts are mostly at @whatanerd@treehouse.systems, occasionally I hide on @whatanerd@eldritch.cafe, or you can email me at n@nerdteacher.com. [they/them]

I was a secondary literature and humanities teacher who has swapped to being a tutor, so it's best to expect a ridiculously huge range of books.

And yes, I do spend a lot of time making sure book entries are as complete as I can make them. Please send help.

This link opens in a pop-up window

nerd teacher [books]'s books

Currently Reading (View all 13)

Picture Books (View all 130)

Middle Grade (View all 26)

2024 Reading Goal

72% complete! nerd teacher [books] has read 36 of 50 books.

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

What made them especially attractive to the propertied classes, however, was that they were always cast in a limited framework—the envisioned "improvement" of the people was never so dramatic as to challenge the social order. The end was a better-fed, more industrious, more productive and consequently more prosperous people, but a people who remained distinct from and inferior to those who offered to improve its prospects. As such, the proposals for a utilitarian reform of education reflected the milieux and the times from which they emerged—their authors were educated, propertied, activist, and hopeful, despite their anxieties. They embody the ideals of a class which sensed a potential for improvement of the human lot, and which was often involved in schemes to increase economic productivity, but which nonetheless had a vested interest in the preservation of the social hierarchy as it was.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 45)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Within this broad stream of thought in a great many circles throughout Europe in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, there were many versions of the argument that schools could channel children into appropriate social roles. Friedrich von Rochow, for example, felt he was being quite practical in establishing schools in his villages, and he saw his educational efforts as complementary to his activities as director of the Patriotic Society for Agriculture in the Mark Brandenburg at Postsdam. Only educated peasants, von Rochow believed, could cooperate intelligently with their landlords in projects for improving agrarian techniques. "Only through a revolutionary change in the parish schools which lay in his properties," von Rochow felt, "was he to expect an improvement in the yields of his agricultural undertakings."

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 44)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

But schools were regarded as more than institutions for the moral improvement of the people. Utilitarians assigned specific social functions to them as well. Harvey Chisick's social history of the French philosophes' ideas about education establishes the main areas of agreement among the advanced thinkers of the day. These shared assumptions reveal much about the society that produced these thinkers and, as Chisick argues so well, that ultimately limited their concrete policies and their very ideas themselves.

Chisick carefully analyzes the proposals on education that appeared in increasing numbers in France beginning around 1760. These proposals, despite their faith in the power of education to improve human potential, were, Chisick argues, all in the end limited by an underlying belief that proper early socialization would always have to help maintain social stability and the social hierarchy in a situation of scarcity. The proposals about popular education nearly all assumed that the chasm which divided "the people" from their social and political superiors would remain. Indeed, for many of these writers—themselves products of and linked to the propertied classes—one of the prime functions of education was precisely to assure that each individual had the skills and the frame of mind appropriate to his or her station in life. "To make the people love its lot. That is the true goal of the education of the people," was the way that the philosophe Philippe de Madeleine put it. And Chisick argues that de Madeleine's views, if somewhat baldly stated, were nonetheless typical of his milieu. The implication, of course, was that even if the early training of people was to be encouraged, that training had to be limited so as not to kindle undue aspirations.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 43)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Without discrediting the role which a proper home environment could play in a child's moral development, the Mannheim report nonetheless made a direct argument that poor were simply incapable of providing this proper home environment. Not only did their children need schooling, but they needed to be separated from children from better homes so as not to contaminate them. It is interesting to note that perhaps the fullest expression of this association between deficient home life and popular immorality would come with the discussion of the children of the new class of factory workers that began to appear throughout Western Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 42)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

That writers all over Europe had begun to draw conclusions about the power of education from the new sensationalist epistemology is clear. The late seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke was quick to draw the educational implications from his insights about the workings of the human mind and the learning process. After formulating his famous thesis that the mind was like a blank slate—a passive absorber of facts presented by the world around, he also went on to describe the ideal educational methods. Later educational theorists drew heavily on the ideas of Locke and his followers. Perhaps the inference drawn by the notorious French materialist philosopher Helvetius—"L'éducation peut tout!" (Education can do anything!)—went farther than most people were prepared to go. But William Godwin's restatement at the end of the century—"If education cannot do everything, it can do much"—reflected a widespread opinion. Faith in the power of the proper childhood socialization fed into an educational reform movement that gradually supplanted official indifference or hostility toward education.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 40)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

The particular constellation of social crises and ideological ferment by the second half of the eighteenth century had reached the point where discussion of educational issues came to the forefront. Its relevance was clear. If the human mind and human behavior were malleable because of the nature of the early learning process, then directing the process could change its nature and that of human behavior. If educational processes were brought out of the private sphere of the family and the private tutor, and made more public and more rational, then the problems associated with haphazard or inappropriate upbringing could be avoided (although on this issue there was much debate). Finally, the unfortunate results of miseducation or overeducation could be avoided.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 40)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Still, obscurantists of the most recalcitrant sort were losing ground during the ancien régime. Their simple-minded program of denying education to the poor seemed increasingly impractical even to those who shared many of the obscurantists' fears. For one thing, the growing economic, fiscal, and demographic crises whose manifestations were clear, even if their causes were not, called for a more active and determined program. Simply leaving the poor to their own devices meant abandoning any effort at all to shape their direction, and ran the risk of letting the ambitious among them become a real threat. The emergent epistemology based on sensation, so central to Enlightenment thought, emphasized the role of early experiences in the shaping of human ideas and human behavior. This suggested that influence over youth were too valuable a form of power to be left to chance. "The people" were learning one way or another; it was certainly better for the leaders of the state and civil society to take popular education into their own hands and direct it, in their own self-interest as well as that of the people.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 39)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Whatever the degree of satisfaction or disinterest felt by consumers—the parents of the children who went to the little schools of the ancien régime—from other quarters came criticism of these institutions and development of experimental alternatives. Innovations in both pedagogic theory and practice came at the instigation of state governments, and from influential members of civil society as well. Indeed, at a time when in most European states concern with schooling was minimal and largely theoretical, the situation of the schools was determined more by local governments and churches. And in these, the role of local notables was paramount. Their attitudes about schooling could affect the allocation of their own personal resources, or those of the communities or churches in which they were an influence. There are some cases, of course (for example, in the Alpine regions of France and Switzerland), where community governance retained a democratic cast. But by and large, village affairs throughout Europe were run by the better-off landholders—in some cases petty, in others aristocratic. In the towns, the notables included property-owners, rentiers, merchants, professionals, officials, and the like, who by the late ancien régime had secured control over town politics and exercised oligarchic power. In towns where the new industries were established, entrepreneurs were a critical force. And it was the attitudes of people like these that helped to shape both public disbursement and private bequests for the support of schooling. The beliefs about education held by these elites thus were central in the history of schooling.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 37)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Closely connected with economic restructuring was a dramatic growth in population—this was the era of the first "vital revolution," during which populations in most Western European countries broke out of the constraints imposed by the system of peasant production and bounded upward at rates that in most places would only slow down toward the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, there were shifts in law, custom, and morality: The traditional moral economy and estate society was challenged by the new conditions. The emergent capitalist order demanded a new kind of labor force, indeed, a new human psyche. Schools, along with a variety of other institutions, could help to create it.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 36)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

In the process of transformation of Europe into an industrial capitalist society, roughly between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, the social structure and the character of social relations changed, and with it the place of the school in the social system. Throughout Europe, the chasm between "the people" and their social and political superiors became more problematic. Whether referred to as the menu peuple in France, as das Volk in Germany or as any of the many other terms employed in other languages, the common people were distinguished by criteria of occupation, property, culture and power and kept at a distance by barriers of both a material and an ideological sort from the dominant classes who worried over and analyzed them. The popular classes included artisans, peasants, small shopkeepers, landless laborers, streethawkers, domestic servants, beggars as well as the still miniscule factory proletariat - in short, individuals of widely varying conditions. No hard-and-fast distinction such as that which would later distinguish between the buyers and sellers of labor formed the division. Still, everyone understood that the popular classes and their "betters" constituted a social and political division rarely challenged, a barrier rarely crossed even if individuals from both sides of the divide were linked with one another through a dense network of asymmetrical patronage relations. And despite the challenges of the French Revolution and the tumultuous opposition movements so characteristic of the early and mid-nineteenth century, indeed because of them, the need to construe "the people" as "other'' and to create institutions especially for them profoundly marked writing, thought and legislation about popular education in this era. Concern with new ways of securing social barriers and reinforcing the cultural distance between the ruling classes and the popular classes, as well as with reshaping the character of "the people" to meet new political and economic needs, was central to the school reform program.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 35)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

To be sure, there are some social historians who interpret the expansion of schooling as the result of rising popular demand for skills which would have found institutional expression with or without upper-class intervention. But for many of the new social historians, the significance of schooling history lies in its centrality to an evolving system of social relations. For the historian concerned first and foremost with the evolution in social relations, school reform usually appears as a harbinger of a new program to impose a different, subtler, and more effective style of discipline upon the working population.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 34 - 35)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Where parents had no say in hiring a teacher, or where their resources were too meager to attract a qualified one, their children must often have put up with mediocrity or even brutality. What is surprising and telling about the history of school reform in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, is that the impetus for reform did not come from parents. On the contrary, even if many parents throughout Western Europe silently acquiesced to the reform of the school, the records of popular response to educational innovation suggest that these reforms often met with a great deal of active or passive resistance. Efforts to repress unlicensed schooling, to introduce new textbooks, or to force full-time school attendance, as well as efforts to impose new standards of teacher training and qualification often generated irate complaints and noncooperation on the part of local communities. Whatever misgivings parents may have had about the quality of instruction available to their children, it was not from them that the urge to reform the schools came.

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 34)

Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) No rating

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

It was no doubt true that early modern parents often found occasion to complain about the instruction their children were receiving. Where the teacher had been hired directly by parents, they could always remove their children and look for another teacher. Where an official teacher held a monopoly, of course, things were not so easy. In communities where the teacher was hired by the municipal council for a year's term, pressure could be brought to bear to hire someone else. But the problem could be especially severe where the teacher was hired and supported by outside church authorities or by a local school patron. In these regions, parents had little recourse but to complain or petition, and records of parental complaints about teachers, and petitions to higher authorities to make the improvements which parents could not make themselves, are testimony of at least occasional parental dissatisfaction. For example, parents from the Catholic community of Schriesheim in the Electoral Pfalz in Germany complained to church authorities in 1750 that their children were not learning anything in school because of the teacher's incompetence. As a result, the parents had simply stopped sending their older children to school. "Little children," the complaint argued, "are sent to the school but only with the idea of keeping their noise out of the house for a few hours a day; as for the older ones, no matter how unlearned they are, we are better off setting them to handicraft work than letting them waste their time going to school."

Schooling in Western Europe by  (Page 33)

@seanderson13 Likely a piece of writing later on, I think. Though, a lot of this is also pulling for excerpts that will help me develop some potential questions-to-discuss for a group discussion with the Anarchist Pedagogies Collective. (We were doing podcasts, but that's been put on hold for now... because I can't stand listening to myself as I edit... and I'm the only person in the collective who can do it, lmao.)