Education In The Victorian Era

George Washington Carver once said, “ Education is the key to the golden door of freedom.” The education that we receiveThus we see that education does not simply shape our teenage years, but rather has the ability to follows us into the business world, where we are often categorized by our degrees of higher education. More often than not, our education may be the magical key that determines our social mobilitycan either fit the lock to our social mobility or break it. Our current educational system stems back to Victorian England, where it affected English society through the change of education over time, levels of education, and women’s roles in the school system. Throughout the Victorian era, education changed and grew in thoroughness …show more content…
Each school was orientated towards a different social class. Sunday schools were the most basic level of instruction and taught poor children and adults the Bible at church. They deemed everything else to be “dangerous” and too “thought-provoking” (Gillard). Their logic was that life on Earth was only to prepare for life in Heaven, so all other knowledge was superfluous. Given that many of their students were manual laborers, the Church also believed that further education would be wasted on them, as it would never be useful. As a result, many unprivileged families were never able to receive adequate education. A prototype of the Victorian elementary school was the monitorial school, which taught children in large groups of up to 100 with monitors and constant repetition. Boys were taught agriculture, cobbling, and tailoring, while girls were taught to spin lace, bake, sew, and knit in order to create “ideal wives”. In the late 1870s Shuttleworth modified the monitorial school by lowering the student-to-teacher ratio and created the predecessor to both later Victorian education and modern education. Following the modification of Victorian education, infant and elementary institutions were created. Infant schools were designed for children under the age of 6 to develop their playing skills. They also taught basic knowledge in order to prepare them for elementary school. Elementary schools were divided into 2 sections: 2-6 years and 6-14 years.Victorian elementary schools were modelled after Swiss schools, which followed a similar format (Long, 1034). Many middle-class families were consigned to such schools, which often met standard education requirements, but rarely went above and beyond. Boys from upper class families were encouraged to either be sent abroad for