English Grammar Schools Research Articles

Learned without Book: English Grammar Schools and the Place of Textbooks in Early Modern Education

Learned without Book: English Grammar Schools and the Place of Textbooks in Early Modern Education

Responding to research evidence in Parliament: A case study on selective education policy

AbstractThis research focuses on how members of the UK Parliament engaged with evidence in relation to the policy decision leading to the Selective Schools Expansion Fund, a policy designed to enable the existing 163 English grammar schools to apply for additional funds to expand their intake. Although a small case study, the narrow focus provides a fertile setting for analysis of the relationship between research evidence, parliamentary debates and policy decisions. The article provides contextual background in relation to the dominant political parties’ (Conservative and Labour) education policy manifesto statements and a discussion on the nature and understanding of evidence. Particular attention is given to how evidence can be used to support claims and the importance of justified warrants. Using NVivo software, we identified the thematic content of 11 parliamentary debates and analysed the findings using descriptive statistics, which we tested with a playful, carnivalesque extrapolation of the data. Argumentative analysis shows that within the debates a number of rhetorical tools are used to avoid empirical evidence, including the deployment of a ‘moral sidestep’ which discourse analysis reveals in this case to be the repeated communication that grammar schools are ‘good’. In this way, Ofsted ratings are conflated with moral goodness, leading to a disproportionate diversion of school funding in their favour. This case study exposes strengths and weaknesses of parliamentary debate, which might be relevant to educational researchers who focus on evidence‐based policy and to the policy makers and other stakeholders who engage with the evidence such researchers offer.

Shakespeare’s Education and What It Teaches Us

ABSTRACT This article investigates the teaching of rhetoric as a discrete discipline within the curriculum of Tudor-era English grammar schools (such as the King’s New Grammar School in Stratford-Upon-Avon, where William Shakespeare is believed to have been educated). It examines more recent attempts to advocate for the value of rhetoric as a unifying principle guiding and informing how and why we educate; it also identifies links between these recent attempts and a Tudor-era understanding of imitatio (one aspect of rhetoric) arguing that these links can inform pedagogical practice and the interpretation of curriculum for today’s English teachers, particularly for the teaching of Shakespeare. Finally, the article argues that a comparison between a Tudor-era understanding of rhetoric and a 21st-century understanding carries significant implications for how we understand and teach for creativity.

System efficiency on mobile learning system user satisfaction at Egerton University, in Kenya

The study was confined to find out the outcome of curriculum implemented in the target schools from1964 to 1985. This study adopted Critical Policy Sociology (CPS) otherwise referred to as Critical Policy Archaeology which was postulated by Trevor Gale in (2001) to excavate the sites and analyze the contents/subjects of the curriculum, how actors enacted policy, and their outcomes at the target sites. The study adopted a historical research design. Data collection involved a critical review of relevant literature; including several curriculum reforms documents and oral interviews. Snowball sampling was adopted to select 12 participants. Data analysis and interpretation were done through internal and external historical criticism. Based on the literature review and documentary analysis, there was overwhelming evidence for Kenya to review education at independence since Kenyan education has its roots in the colonial past. From the findings of this study, the following conclusions were made: First, curriculum reforms/subjects enacted in the target schools were foreign subjects from English Grammar School of UK. They were rather irrelevant to the needs of the majority of Kenyans after independence. Secondly, the State-controlled policy enactment process through MOE, KIE and TSC excluded practitioners’ voices. Hence, the State had power over teachers on policy formulation and implementation. Based on the findings of objective one, there is need to improve our curriculum policy (but caution should be taken especially with imported education policies and ideologies/values. Even when policies are culturally relevant, locally mediated and re-contextualized the result of transfer remains unpredictable.

The Text of theABC of Aristotlein the ‘Winchester Anthology’

AbstractThe Middle EnglishABC of Aristotleis an alliterative abecedary poem that survives in fifteen manuscript copies dating between the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The most eccentric copy, bearing the greatest number of unique textual variants, is in London, British Library, Additional 60577, a commonplace book and miscellany of verse and prose known today as the ‘Winchester Anthology’. The Winchester copy of theABC of Aristotleis distinguished from all others by changes to vocabulary, idiom, and prosody. The result is a unique redaction, illustrating the kind of literary composition that could be expected to grow out of late medieval English grammar schools. The Winchester redaction also expresses a shift in prosodic allegiance. The traditional alliterative line is subtly reshaped into an accentual-syllabic form.

Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell

Reviewed by: Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell Frank Swannack Trudell, Scott A., Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 272; R.R.P. £63.00; ISBN 9780198834663. Recent scholarship has focused on the disparity between what early modern texts signified at the time of composition and postmodern critical assumptions. These studies counter theoretical thinking that considers a progressive literary history at the expense of early modern innovation. Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England discovers critical oversights through privileging 'a bibliographic fantasy' (p. 210). The book reveals how the modern notion of multimedia is already prevalent in early modern England, as poets and playwrights combine music, song, poetry, and theatrical bodies to startling, often puzzling, effect. Trudell challenges critical thinking that regards early modern texts as preserving a rigid historical literary imagination. His book examines how early modern poets and playwrights not only considered different forms of communication, but also the lingering emotional effects of their work on their audience. Thus Trudell finds fresh insights in Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy (1595). His argument highlights Sidney's practical approach to music. Trudell even speculates that Sidney may have been a musician himself, as Sidney conceived poetry by embracing all forms of musical composition and performance beyond a bibliographic circle. The appearance of songs in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Trudell asserts, indicates Sidney's notion of poetry that is not simply [End Page 265] to be read. With the emergence of printed songbooks, Trudell also entertains the intriguing notion of Sidney's poetry being experienced 'in domestic settings across England' (p. 29). He suggests the possibility of illiterate households enjoying Sidney's poetry through music and song. Another overlooked aspect of early modern life is the teaching of drama in English grammar schools. Trudell surmises that because Sidney was a student at Shrewsbury School, he would have been made aware of drama from a young age. The Elizabethan poet even performed in Accession Day tilts. The crux of Trudell's argument is how dramatic performance is ensconced in Sidney's poetic imagination to become fused with literary endeavours. Within the theatre, Trudell tackles pederasty surrounding boy actor-singers. His first important point is to differentiate early modern pederasty from the modern psychological disorder of pedophilia. Rather than being an aberration, pederasty refers to an established practice of eroticizing women, servants, and children. It is a practice, Trudell argues, the theatre uses to capture audiences in pederasty fantasies. The mediation of poetry through a boy's singing and sexualized body objectifies them, conversely, as monstrous receptacles encouraging abuse. Trudell also unearths a musical pederasty in Shakespeare's plays. With Twelfth Night, Trudell implies that the play's music functions like bawdy 'muzak'. Its miscellaneous frivolities create tension by often impinging on the play's action. Trudell's thesis finds a rich source in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The eroticized infantile musical fairies provide historical detail on how childhood could last into an actor's twenties. While contemporary media theory, particularly how information encodes messages deciphered by modern communication systems, is already present through how the disembodied changeling transmits sexual fantasies. A similar analysis of Hamlet's Ophelia leads Trudell to reconsider her mysterious feminized madness as an effervescing multimedia presence. In a fascinating discussion, Trudell asserts that her melancholic songs are derived from the popular anonymous ballad tradition. Her transformative singing and subsequent drowning combine the environment, the sexual violence of Ovid's Orpheus in the Metamorphoses, and music's lingering aftertaste to communicate emotive meaning. Finally, Trudell charts John Milton's love–hate relationship with song. Although present in Milton's work, singers haunt his texts as subdued voices. Ironically, Trudell also identifies Milton's removal from printed songbooks in the late seventeenth century. Milton's conspicuous absence from the period's musical community inspires Trudell's investigation of songbooks featuring the music of Milton's collaborator Henry Lawes. Trudell uncovers 'intriguing echoes' of Milton's A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637 and 1645) in Lawes's songbooks and in three editions...

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

<i>Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages</i>. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

“Fitter to Please the Court Than the School”: Courtly and Paideutic Rhetoric in Elizabethan Poetics

This paper argues that Elizabethan handbooks on poetics enact two coevolving traditions in the history of rhetoric and poetics: one sees poetry as a rhetorical art of stylistic invention, while the other sees it as an object of study, analysis, and ethical training. To show this, I examine George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy and contrast it with William Scott's recently discovered Model of Poesy. Puttenham demonstrates how poetic style works as a tool of rhetorical invention; Scott, on the other hand, treats poetics as a method of literary critical analysis. Scott's poetics, I argue, is derived from a “paideutic” tradition, the aims of which mirror those found in educational treatises that concern the hermeneutic training students received in English grammar schools. Puttenham, writing for courtiers, instead makes a case for poetics as a means of rhetorical adaptation at court—his handbook, in short, shows poetry to be a rhetorical and pragmatic art of verbal performance that exists outside the schoolroom.

Dramatic texts in the Tudor curriculum: John Palsgrave and the Henrician educational reforms

AbstractIn 1540, the English humanist scholar, schoolmaster, and royal chaplain John Palsgrave (d. 1554) published a bilingual Latin‐English annotated edition of the Dutch humanist and reformer Wilhelm Gnapheus’ (1493–1568) widely popular play Acolastus (1529). Palsgrave's Acolastus reflects a growing trend in England and on the continent to Christianize Terence for classroom use, to expurgate or simply move away from the morally ambiguous classical playwrights. More importantly, the English edition of Acolastus was meant to form part, as a proposed standardized text, of the educational reforms of the late 1530s initiated by the government in accordance with the Protestant policy to reorganize grammar schools and unify their curriculum. As part of these reforms, Palsgrave elevated the educational function of dramatic texts by selecting a contemporary neo‐Latin play as a model for textual exegesis in class and by making it the main source of Latin language practice. Palsgrave's extensive annotations reveal how dramatic texts were taught, analysed, and applied not only to practical rhetorical training performed on stage, but also to the grammatical and ethical reading of literary texts in the lower forms of English grammar schools. Furthermore, Palsgrave's annotations attest to a much broader pedagogical application of English translations, highlighting a conscious vernacularization within the humanist curriculum that took place considerably earlier in the sixteenth century than has been hitherto assumed.

Reframing the English grammar schools debate

In October 2015 the Department for Education (DfE) permitted a grammar school in Tonbridge, Kent, to open up an annexe in Sevenoaks, 10 miles away. Amidst claims that the annexe was essentially a new grammar school, the decision reignited an old debate about the value of academically-selective “grammar” schools in England. The intensity of feeling is perhaps surprising given that all but a small number of grammar schools have long been replaced by mixed-ability “comprehensive” schools. Yet, the matter taps into longstanding debates around standards, social mobility, opportunity and accessibility. A resurgence of these discussions is now playing out in a changed political and educational landscape characterised by school autonomy, diversity of provision and school choice. This article describes the key shifts that have taken place in English school organisation and policy thinking since the establishment of the tripartite system and the recent emergence of new roles and opportunities for grammar schools. This is followed by a review of the evidence on the effectiveness and wider social impact of selective education. The article concludes by reframing the grammar school debate in light of the evidence and the current system, arguing that issues around system performance and social segregation need to be examined more broadly and that the most fruitful debates to be had are around admissions and accountability mechanisms rather than structures and school types.

The Use of Associative Images (models) for the Development of Comprehension in Sciences Education

Many definitions, explanations of physical, biological, chemical and mathematical processes, as well as formulae with exact designations and units are comprised in the information resources of science which are requisite for students of grammar schools. The multiplicity of the information to be acquired is plumping. Many students learn the new information in a certain mechanical way without comprehending the actual meaning of it. Therefore it is necessary to look for a solution of the problem by choosing such methodical aids which would stimulate the students to understand the information, as well as to link it with the previously acquired knowledge and experience. The student will be able to use only fully understood information for successful learning of the following themes. A simple possible solution for the mentioned problem is originated by a group of teachers from Riga English Grammar School (Latvia) in 2011. It is an alternative approach to the teaching process of science and mathematics. An equalization of complex science systems with processes or phenomena one can observe in everyday life lies in the foundation of this approach. It becomes possible to connect elementary knowledge about the order of the world with the more complicated science information to be acquired just using associations with daily processes. An association created in the framework of the above mentioned approach is called a perception model or just a model. The model can be formed as a drawing, animation, scheme, etc. The models are usually made by the students, the teacher acting as the organizer and guide of the exercise. The mentioned teaching/learning method has been used for teaching chemistry, physics, biology and mathematics in the Riga English Grammar School during already 3 school years. Several methodical approaches have been tested and improved, and very preliminary assessments of their efficiency have been made during this time. Methodical recommendations for teachers, the assessment criteria for the students’ models as well as work sheets for students were originated as the result of these activities. Our experience has confirmed that the origination of the associative images (models) stimulate students for better understanding the essence of ideas, processes and phenomena of science and mathematics. The exploitation of associative images in the teaching/learning process of science and mathematics is discussed in the present communication with an objective to acquaint interested people with the method and to stimulate the dissemination of it in grammar schools. The very first positive results are shown in it about the application of the discussed method in the mastering of science concepts. The communication is trying to answer the question about an easy possibility to stimulate the penetration of students in the essence of a subject to be acquired by the assistance of associative images (models) and the translation of the text of models into a foreign language. The communication can be deemed as a methodological recommendation to teachers. The introduction of the discussed simple method into the everyday practice of grammar schools might allow to achieve the mastering of students’ thorough knowledges and skills in a shorter time.

Prosopopoeia, Pedagogy, and Paradoxical Possibility: The “Mother” in the Sixteenth-Century Grammar School

In sixteenth-century male writers’ descriptions of the English grammar school program, mothers were imagined as impediments to boys’ learning. Yet these same writers paradoxically turned to a “mother” figure, prosopopoeia, as the rhetorical device through which they imagined and brought into being a humanist-inspired education. By embedding maternal narratives, bodies, and language in their explanations of grammar school and its “mat(t)er,” the writers of rhetorical manuals, grammar school textbooks, and pedagogical handbooks position the mother at the center of early modern thought, which has implications and consequences for actual mothers and their participation in early modern rhetorical education.

William Caxton’s and Richard Pynson’s Editions of the Janua Grammar

William Caxton’s and Richard Pynson’s editions of the Janua grammar are not widely known to scholars of the English Middle Ages. The fragments that have survived contain a Latin grammar that must have been used in English grammar schools at the end of the fifteenth century. This article examines the fragments more closely and provides extensive bibliographical information. It also demonstrates features of the Janua that are different from Donatus’ Ars minor.

“Rehearsing Continually the Part of the Past”: Lamb’s Elia Essays and the Classical Curriculum at Christ’s Hospital

IN ON FAMILIAR STYLE, WILLIAM HAZLITT COMPARES CHARLES LAMB'S Elia Essays in the London Magazine to Erasmus's Colloquies or a fine piece of modern Latin, linking the archaic diction and syntax of Lamb's persona to the Latin exercises taught in English grammar schools. (1) Hazlitt also associates Elia's style with the classically educated authors of the Renaissance like Sir Thomas Browne. Elia's classicism complements the subject matter of the essays because he celebrates defunct institutions like the South Sea House and memorializes the old familiar faces of his youth. Through this seemingly obsolete classical style, Lamb creates a magazine persona by repurposing his training from Hospital, the London charity grammar school that he attended from 1782 to 1789. In this essay, I argue that the classical rhetorical practices of Hospital are crucial to understanding Lamb's Elian performances. Elia is a sophisticated schoolboy declaimer who repurposes classical writing exercises, ceremonial school oratory, and a ludic counter-curriculum in his essays. As Elia, Lamb translates these older rhetorical practices to address the middleclass readers of the London Magazine and playfully challenge their values. This reuse of classical rhetoric ties the seemingly apolitical, whimsical Elia to a history of classical education and enables him to make literary interventions in contemporary political debates. Lamb, through his comic persona, transforms stale school rhetorics into fresh literary performances that demonstrate the importance of classical rhetoric as a strategic resource for Romantic authors. My reading of classical rhetoric in the Elia essays extends recent efforts to recover Lamb's participation in Romantic-era political and cultural debates. Since the 1970s, critics have historicized the ways Lamb ironiz[es] conventional responses for new ends. (2) Scholars like Gerald Monsman, Karen Fang, Felicity James, and Mark Parker have discussed the veiled political commentary of the Elia essays in the context of Lamb's participation in 1790s Dissenter circles, the London Magazine, and the East India Company. (3) Simon Hull most recently has illuminated the political dimensions of the Elia essays in the London Magazine. Expanding on Jeffrey Cox's Cockney School, Hull places Lamb at the head of a metropolitan group that includes Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and Hazlitt. This group, an 1820s counterpart to the Lake School, promotes an alternative model of Romantic authorship rooted in political engagement, periodicals, and urban sociability. (4) Yet despite the recent recovery of Lamb's work, few have discussed classical rhetoric in his performances as Elia. With the exception of Richard Clancey, who reads the essays alongside Horace's Epistles, most who discuss Lamb's education at Hospital focus on Lamb's Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago (LM, November 1820) and his non-Elia piece On Hospital and the Character of Hospital Boys (Gentleman's Magazine, June 1813). (5) They discuss the content of these essays, such as the class politics of the charity grammar school, rather than examine how this institution's practices are refracted in the rhetorical moves of Lamb's essays. While Lamb contributes to early-nineteenth-century debates about charity grammar schools, Hospital provides him with an impressive set of rhetorical tools with which to argue his stance, play with conventions, and establish his authorial position. By tracing how Lamb repurposes the rhetorical curriculum of Hospital, I suggest that he practices what Jerome Christensen calls hopeful anachronism, or the reuse of outdated practices in response to uncertainties regarding innovation, standardization, and competition. (6) Christensen argues that Romantic authors and contemporary literary scholars participate in the re-creation of the given in response to the cultural and political upheavals of their respective eras. …

Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline Elizabeth D. Harvey (bio) Keywords Enterline, Shakespeare, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Passions, Body, Gender, Queer Theory Lynn Enterline. Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 208 pages. $45. How do early pedagogical practices become precipitates—shards of early impressions—that as fragmentary forms continue to catalyze imagination and being? Answering this question is the archaeological endeavor that motivates Lynn Enterline’s brilliant new book on the Renaissance schoolroom training that shaped Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She argues that, for some early modern writers, the youthful, formative experience of the English grammar school left an indelible imprint that marks the literature and theater of the period. My choice of the word archaeological to describe her method is meant to invoke Freud, for Enterline could not have approached her task with such results had she not joined her impressive archival and hermeneutic skills with a deft and sophisticated grasp of psychoanalytic principles. In a sense, her study is to early modern culture what childhood is to the individual subject; she investigates the cultural origins of the English (male) psyche through her examination of grammar school culture. Her analysis performs psychoanalytic work by attending to originary, sometimes traumatic, experiences that lie at the psychic root of the Renaissance human subject. She traverses terrain well-mapped by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Laplanche, since the chronological moment of childhood she probes necessarily implicates language acquisition, early sexual fantasy and experience, the movement from a maternal or imaginary realm into a paternal or symbolic order, and perhaps most evocatively, rhetorical and pedagogical encounters with classical texts that were saturated by an intense physical experience of the passions. The book is organized into five chapters, each of which investigates different configurations of rhetoric and the passions. The first two chapters lay the groundwork for Enterline’s arguments by exploring a series of pedagogical texts [End Page 166] that range through early modern educational treatises (Erasmus, Ascham, Vives), schoolroom exercises that formed the humanist curriculum, popular plays and skits representing pedagogical practices, accounts of daily schoolroom life, and rhetorical and grammatical manuals (Lily’s Grammar, Cicero, Quintilian, Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata), both classical and early modern. As a learned classicist, Enterline’s ability to navigate the intricacies of the Renaissance double translation system allows her to recognize the jokes and subtleties at work. As the author of two influential books on poetics and the body, she illuminates here in often surprising ways the insistent presence of the somatic in these pedagogical practices. The effect of her analysis is to defamiliarize, to craft highly original readings of well-known plays or poems. She begins, for instance, by excavating the layers of Peter Quince’s exclamation to Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Thou art translated!” (3.1.119), in order to reveal not only the passage from human to animal, from Mechanical to aristocrat, from emotion to fleshly embodiment of affect, from one register of perception to another, but also the literal foundation that many members of Shakespeare’s audience would have appreciated with visceral pleasure: the sixteenth-century practice of translating a Latin text to English and back again. Her evocation of these scenes of instruction informs her treatments of the Shakespearean texts or cluster of texts that she makes central to the final three chapters: Venus and Adonis, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, The Rape of Lucrece, and The Taming of the Shrew. Her arguments include by implication many works that she does not cite or has time to mention only briefly (The Tempest and Titus Andronicus are especially notable in this category); it is the mark of a groundbreaking book that it reaches out to enfold authors (Spenser and Milton, among others) outside its immediate purview, changing in important ways the landscape of interpretation. This book does just that by continually revealing the institutional forces that “trained up” boys to become masculine subjects and gentlemen. This is the most historically anchored of Enterline’s books. Whereas The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing and The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare both took Ovid, the...

Virtues in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Grammar Schools

This article examines the role and place of virtues in early modern English grammar schools (ca. 1558 – 1640). It argues that schoolboys were exposed to the questions of moral philosophy and virtues throughout their time in the grammar school. From their elementary classes in Latin grammar to moral philosophy and rhetoric classes in the uppermost forms, students received training in the four cardinal virtues. The training took place, however, in an overwhelmingly linguistic and rhetorical context. It follows that early modern schoolboys learned that virtues were not so much intrinsic values of morality as much as instrumental values of rhetoric. This has important consequences for our understanding of early modern educational and intellectual culture.

"Trying all things": Romantic Polymaths, Social Factors, and the Legacies of a Rhetorical Education

"Trying all things":Romantic Polymaths, Social Factors, and the Legacies of a Rhetorical Education Catherine E. Ross There is perhaps no practical art which may not be acquired, in a very considerable degree, by example and practice, without reducing it to rules . . . practice, joined with rules, may carry a man on in his art farther and more quickly, than practice without rules. —Thomas Reid, A Brief Account of Aristotle's Logic, with Remarks (1774, 1778), 414-15 In the summer of 1810 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing in the eighteenth of the sixty-seven commonplace books he kept during his lifetime. Trained in the classical tradition at both Christ Hospital School and at Cambridge, Coleridge filled his commonplace books with ideas, bits of facts, and lines of argument that he might use in his writing. In the book he kept in the summer of 1810, Coleridge describes his notes as "Hints & first Thoughts. . . . cogitabilia . . . a me." These writings, he claims, were not necessarily his "fixed opinions," though he would often use them in his lectures and published works; they were, instead, "acts of obedience to the apostolic command of Trying all things."1 The willingness to "try all things," that is, to think, write, and discourse publicly about a wide variety of topics from poetics to politics, mathematics to medicine, was more common among intellectuals of the Romantic period than it is today, cable television pundits notwithstanding. Furthermore, many Romantics did more than just scribble or chat about diverse domains of knowledge; they were "devoted to the pursuit of knowledge" and sought or possessed "great or varied learning"; in short, they were philosophical polymaths as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, Romantic-era polymaths took all of knowledge as their province, regardless of formal training, and published and often worked in various fields, either professionally or avocationally. To be a polymath in a time when disciplines were less advanced and specialized might seem like less of an accomplishment than it would be today; nevertheless, the term—and the accomplishment it implies— [End Page 401] accurately characterizes many of the Romantics, with the added differences that most Romantic polymaths were almost entirely self-taught and most considered it their duty to pass on their knowledge in what I call the "educational impulse" of the age.2 Romantic-era writers' intellectual curiosity and endeavors to create a "commonwealth of learning" have inspired numerous interdisciplinary studies, such as Heringman's work on literature and geology (2004), Cantor et al. on the literary periodicals and science (2004), Caldwell on literature and Romantic-era medicine (2004), and the collaborative effort of Fulford, Lee, and Kitson on "bodies of knowledge" in the Romantic period (2004). Broader studies have fruitfully explored aspects of the development and relationships of intellectual disciplines; among these are Siskin's The Work of Writing (1999), Valenza's Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680- 1820 (2009), and a recent volume of Critical Inquiry on disciplinarity, with contributions by W. J. T. Mitchell, Judith Butler, James Chandler, and other distinguished scholars (January 2009). In this essay I have begun to map an area of investigation that has largely been neglected: the educational attitudes and practices that helped to train a group of writers notable for the breadth of their intellectual reach and the audacity of their aspirations. I offer a glimpse of the social frameworks and institutional conditions that made it possible for so many Romantic thinkers to be polymaths and that inspired them in their impulse to educate. In the first half of this essay, I document the ubiquity of Romantic polymathy with evidence from the private lives, social activities, and periodical reading of individuals from all social strata. In the second half of my essay, I locate one of the primary sources of the Romantics' polymathic and educational impulses in the principles and pedagogies of the English grammar school tradition, with its deep roots in classical learning and rhetoric. Though the English grammar school system of the long eighteenth century had many flaws, and though it was poised to shift radically from its classical orientation to the scientific one still in place today, grammar school...

The British Slave Trade &amp; Public Memory , and: India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display , and: Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (review)

Reviewed by: The British Slave Trade & Public Memory, and: India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, and: Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum Peter H. Hoffenberg The British Slave Trade & Public Memory. By Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. By Saloni Mathur. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum. By Stephanie Moser. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). Europe continues to be haunted by the ghosts of its past, whether those are memories of the Shoah, slavery and the slave trade, and, among other nightmares from which it has yet to awake, overseas conquest and colonial rule. Tony Judt recently noted that post-1945 Europeans lived in a “House of the Dead” after the horrors of Fascist and Communist rule, genocide and the two World Wars, a continent dominated by Hannah Arendt's twin focal points of memory and evil.1 That remains the case today for many reasons on both sides of the English Channel and the Elbe, and whether one walks the streets of Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, or Sarajevo. But reactions to such ghosts vary among and within generations, nations, and classes. Whereas only a few years ago French school teachers were required to teach about the virtues of French imperialism, their colleagues in Germany are prevented by the law from denying the Holocaust. Monuments to the murderers of local Jews are raised in some of the Baltic States while no English grammar school’s curricula is complete without lesson plans on the “Middle Passage.” It is as if William Faulkner were as correct about the Europe and Britain of today as he was about his beloved and tragic South half a century ago: the past is not even in the past and some people have too much history. Or, as German historians would add, where in Europe have men and women truly mastered or come to terms with their past, as the Germans continue to struggle with their own Vergangenheistbewaltigung? Apparently not in England, where its own “History (if not Culture) Wars”' continue to be fought, as they have, perhaps, been for several centuries. The trinity of well-written and provocatively-argued monographs under review are each in their own way about England’s struggle to master its own and others’ pasts, as well as that struggle on the part of those living in independent countries formerly under England’s informal, or formal hubristic grasp. Readers will better understand how English men, women, and students wrestle with their histories, as well as how South Asians, Americans, and Egyptians, among others, grapple with similar if not the same living ghosts. In the cases of these three books, those pasts continue to resonate in various sites of memory about slavery and the slave trade, British rule in South Asia, and the preservation, if not outright theft, and display of Ancient Egypt’s material culture. Such discussed sites of memory include the British and South Kensington Museums, major department stores, popular monuments and festivals, guided walks and, among others, the visual and performing arts. They can even include the televised version of a prominent eighteenth-century novel. Each in their own way addressed and continues to address the powerful and contested relationship to a constantly moving past, if not an equally dynamic present. That was the case with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeologists and “the antiquities” of Ancient Egypt; it is also true today with museums displaying the artifacts of the slave trade. Readers interested in topics such as the politics of display, tourism, memory and representation will not be disappointed; nor will those more attracted to the study of the ideas and practices of race and, for want of a better term, “Orientalism.” The three books contribute to not only how the English thought about and represented other people, but also, not surprisingly, how and what they thought about themselves. As slavery was an often distorting mirror reflecting English liberty; traditional India was a complementary mirror for modern Britain. As Saloni Mathur reminds us, such mirrorings overflow with powerful and at times tragic ironies. Mathur’s India...

John La Rose (1927 2006)

John La Rose was a political and cultural activist, poet, writer, publisher and Chairman of the George Padmore Institute and Archive. His life and work had impacts on several continents, but it is arguably in Britain that he had his greatest influence. La Rose was born in 1927 into a middle-class family in Arima, one of colonial Trinidad's small but long-established towns. He was educated, like most from his background, at Roman Catholic schools. On completion of his secondary education at Trinidad's St Mary's College, one of a handful of prestigious secondary schools modelled on the English grammar school, La Rose became a teacher there, before moving on to work for Colonial Life Insurance Company, the first black-owned insurance company in Trinidad. La Rose early developed an interest in culture, both the ‘high’ arts of classical music, painting and poetry, and the ‘popular’ cultural forms of Trinidad: the carnival and calypso. Notwithstanding its location in a tiny colonial territory, Port of Spain in the 1940s was home to several literary, musical and other artistic societies, and La Rose was active in these. Despite his secure upbringing he was early aware of the racialized class distinctions in colonial Trinidad, but his transformation into an insurgent intellectual and activist would be spurred by study of Marxist and anticolonial literature, much of which was banned in Trinidad at that time. Trinidad saw ferment against the colonial order in the 1930s and again in the 1940s, as the colony was affected by international capitalist restructuring. This period saw the development of an organized and articulate movement for independence from Britain, one that cut across class and ethnic lines. It was this movement that provided La Rose with a space in which he could develop radical ideas and put them into practice. In 1948 the Marxist study group of which he was a member joined with the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association to form the Workers Freedom Movement – an organization dedicated to struggle for an improved standard of living for the working class. La Rose further deepened his involvement in anticolonial politics when he became an activist in the West Indian Independence Party, formed in 1952, which agitated for a federal, self-governing Anglo-Caribbean, and for a democratic socialist society. He would pay a heavy price for his socialist politics. After a 1953 trip to Eastern Europe, as a delegate to the World Federation of Trade Unions congress, he found himself blacklisted as a dangerous subversive back home: the cold war affected even the tiny English colony of Trinidad. That 1953 trip was to prove another important turning point in La Rose's life. After travelling throughout Eastern Europe with his friend Lennox Pierre, a left-wing lawyer, he came to realize that what they saw there was not the socialism that had shaped their political vision. This realization motivated him to rethink the socialist project and to develop an ‘autonomous socialism’, a conception of which stayed with him throughout his life.

Classics

Classics Christopher Stray University of Wales, Swansea A textbook can be classified as such in different ways: authorial intention, publisher's planning, conventional markets, pedagogic function, and so on. But the modern notion of 'textbook' as a book designed for a teaching situation, often with an adapted or specifically targeted text and/or with pedagogic additions (questions and answers, vocabulary, exercises, notes) seems to have solidified around 1830.3 Before the nineteenth century a 'text book' was usually a book containing an important text – often a religious one, though it might be a secular text to be discussed in a teaching context. By 1900 the spelling had generally (though by no means universally) shifted from 'text book' through 'text-book' to 'textbook', and this perhaps indicates a reification and commodification of the category. It may be significant that the period around 1830 also saw a moveto safer markets by some publishers after the commercial alarms and publishing crashes of the mid-1820s (John Taylor and John Murray both made such moves); but it was also the beginning, as Simon Eliot has suggested, of a distribution revolution which was accelerated in the 1840s by the penny post and the railways.4 The rural boarding schools which relied on access by rail for pupils were also sent books by the [End Page 263] same route. Earlier innovations had included lithography, which spread rapidly in the first two decades of the century, and which facilitated the flexible printing of 'exotic' (i.e. non-roman, including Greek and Hebrew) and mathematical texts. It also made possible cheap, short-run, in-house printing of teaching material, much of which has probably disappeared.5 It is important to remember the existence of this kind of material, complementing or even replacing conventional books, since little survives. The same is true for some kinds of manuscript material: for example, the teaching texts assembled by mathematical coaches in Cambridge in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6 Almost all of this material will have escaped the clutches of copyright deposit libraries, though traces can be found in institutional archives. Classics offered a dual tradition: Greek and Latin. In 1800 a previously central Latin exemplar (Augustan Rome) was being upstaged by romantic hellenism, but Latin was embedded not only as the language of Rome but as the language of learning: both Latin and Greek grammars, for example, were usually written in Latin.7 Teaching in the lower forms of the English public and grammar schools was dominated by memorised grammar; after that by literary texts, mem-morised, parsed and translated. The pedagogical canon was restricted, though some schools had their own books of extracts covering a wider range. Language and literature were all, there being no formal teaching of history or archaeology. In 1800 the grammar was the centraltextbook: not only because grammar and syntax were so prominent in secondary school curricula, but also because it often included literary quotations which turn up again and again in literature (e.g. in thematic chapter headings in Trollope). The Eton Latin grammar (1758), an adapted version of a grammar dating back to the early sixteenth century, was the market leader and from the 1790s had spawned numerous piracies and 'editions', some translating the Latin text into English. The use of English notes or translation was a contentious issue in the 1820s and 1830s. It was variously deplored as untraditional, inefficient, or threatening to the semi-religious world of the classical languages and hence potentially to religious faith. An underworld of translations grew up in mid-century, the series being best remembered: for instance Henry Bohn's Classical Library (116 volumes, c.1847–1913) and Kelly's Keys to the Classics (roughly the same period; continued in the twentieth century by such firms as Brodie, Gill and Cornish). The growth of an informal but distinct public-school community through the century, and of the proprietary school sector from the 1840s, created an identifiable market especially important...