Text

theses

This dissertation explores how male and female, English and Scottish elementary teachers embodied and intervened in social and cultural debates which were central to the making of modern Britain. Teachers represented the largesse of the liberal state and the reach of its power, but also the limits of both. A state-funded scholarship ladder allowed working-class boys and girls move up in the world, making teaching the first form of institutionalized, meritocratic social mobility in modern Britain. The state charged teachers with gathering information about their pupils and neighborhoods – and later with enforcing mandatory attendance policies and implementing social welfare schemes. However, teachers adapted state policies to fit local circumstances and used official records to critique the way the state sought to know and govern its subjects. They offered alternative narratives about local communities, class relations, gender, and ideas about childhood. The travel narratives they wrote in the wake of their remarkable summer travels evinced a similar drive to know and to narrate conditions in the empire. Both through their actions and through the stories they told, teachers shaped how the British state came to know its subjects – and how Britons came to know their state. Making Good” taps a wide range of sources from policymaking documents and Parliamentary reports to the records kept by individual teachers. Most important were the more personal sources: the poems, memoirs, travel narratives, and other sources which teachers infused with their frustration, excitement, hope, anger, and even their love. Teachers’ everyday actions and the stories they told help to humanize the history of the institutions like teacher training colleges and schools. Playful defiance and intense emotion coexisted with the serious imperatives of political economy in the project to make a modern state and society through elementary education.

ETD_5478

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Christopher Robert Bischof

doi:10.7282/T3X065B9

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.