UR Scholarship Repository

Title

[Introduction to] Teaching Britain: Elementary Teachers and the State of the Everyday, 1846-1906

Authors

Christopher Bischof, University of RichmondFollow

Files

Description

Teaching Britain examines teachers as key agents in the production of social knowledge. Teachers claimed intimate knowledge of everyday life among the poor and working class at home and non-white subjects abroad. They mobilized their knowledge in a wide range of mediums, from accounts of local happenings in their schools’ official log books to travel narratives based on summer trips around Britain and the wider world. Teachers also obsessively narrated and reflected on their own careers. Through these stories and the work they did every day, teachers imagined and helped to enact new models of professionalism, attitudes towards poverty and social mobility, ways of thinking about race and empire, and roles for the state. As highly visible agents of the state and beneficiaries of new state-funded opportunities, teachers also represented the largesse and the reach of the liberal state—but also the limits of both.

ISBN

9780198833352

Publication Date

2019

Publisher

Oxford University Press

City

Oxford

Keywords

history of education, teachers, Victorian Britain, social investigation, social mobility, professionalism, expertise

School

School of Arts and Sciences

Department

History

Disciplines

Education | History

Comments

Read the introduction to the book by linking to the Download button above.

Recommended Citation

Bischof, Christopher. Teaching Britain: Elementary Teachers and the State of the Everyday, 1846-1906. First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.