DOMUS Seminar - Competing pedagogies in long 18th century education

This seminar will develop the main ideas that Michele Cohen developed in a recently completed book that aimed to provide a fresh perspective on issues of gender and education in the long 18th century by using the lens of pedagogy to compare male and female experiences.

With speaker Michele Cohen, Emeritus Professor at Richmond American International University an Visiting Professor at UCL, Institute of Education

This paper will present the main ideas developed in the book Michele has just completed.

The aim of the book is to provide a fresh perspective on issues of  gender and education in the long 18th century by using the lens of pedagogy to compare male and female education in relation to classical and modern school subjects. Michele had long felt that common assumptions about male and female education were made without primary evidence about what each gender actually learned and how they learned it. To challenge these assumptions, she researched the rudiments of one classical subject (Latin), one modern subject (Geography), and one modern method, textual conversations or 'familiar format'.

The paper will discuss the results, mostly unexpected, of her investigation of these pedagogies and will argue that the most significant one concerns the competition between pedagogies which eventually established Latin as the hegemonic pedagogy in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Biography

Michèle Cohen is an eighteenth-century historian focusing on education in long eighteenth-century England. She has published widely on education, including Fashioning Masculinity, ‘A Habit of Healthy Idleness: Boys’ Underachievement in Historical Perspective’ and ‘The Pedagogy of Conversation in the Home: ‘Familiar Conversation’ as a pedagogical tool in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England’, and has recently completed a monograph on gender, education, and pedagogy. She is Emeritus Professor at Richmond American International University, and currently visiting professor at the UCL Institute of Education.

This talk will be followed by Q&A with Professor Jane Martin (Director of DOMUS).