"Girls Aloud"; Dialogue as a Pedagogical Tool in Eighteenth-century French Children's Literature

Abstract

The development of children's books in France is inseparable from the debates about education that took place throughout the eighteenth cen- tury. Some 180 books, articles, projects, and treatises on education were published in the course of the century and their substance and impact has been well-documented (Leith 14). The debates were generated to a large extent by the influence of John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which was quickly translated into French, and Francois Fenelon's treatise De l'education des filles (1687) and renewed by the impact of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, ou de l' education (1762), an extended case study of a fictional child living in isolation from society with his tutor. They focused on issues such as the nature and capabilities of children, the relative merits of a public or a private (domestic) education, the content of the curriculum, and the question of what children should read. An increasingly important question, stimulated particularly in France by Fenelon's work, was the education of girls. De l'education des filles rejected the conventional superficial aristocratic education that provided only religious training and a degree of literacy and social accomplishments and outlined a new scheme of upbringing for girls that taught the skills that they would need as wives, mothers, and useful members of society (some mathematics, household economy and, above all, the cultivation of reason). Like most educational theorists of his time, however, Fenelon disapproved of too much intellectual study for girls and of indiscriminate, and hence potentially pernicious, reading. Many of his ideas, which were motivated by his desire for aristocratic reform, were to become fundamental principles for educationalists in the eighteenth century with respect to the education of children of both sexes (Hunter 83-94). Moreover, like Locke,