The Public/Private Debate

Throughout the eighteenth century, both school and home education for boys had their advocates and their critics, but it is hard to find advocates of school education for girls. From conduct book author Anglican cleric John Bennett, who declared that ‘whatever elegant or high-sounding schools may be sought out for a girl, a mother seems the only governess intended by nature’, to radical Mary Wollstonecraft, who thought a mother's education at home was best ‘to prepare a woman to fulfil the important duties of a wife and mother’, home education was almost unanimously recommended for girls. Vicesimus Knox, who strongly supported female education, explained why he advised girls to be educated at home.

This was a recurring argument, even though as F. M. L. Thompson pointed out, grammar and great schools did not actually prepare boys for their future destination. Army officer and author Alexander Jardine considered a ‘private domestic education’ as ‘generally the best’, because even if some schools were ‘conducted by excellent women’, they could never ‘sufficiently resemble families, which are the foundation of society and the materials of which it is formed’. For John Bennett, a principal reason for preferring a domestic education for girls was that when parents are instructors, girls are ‘kept under their … immediate inspection’, ensuring that their reading will be regulated and controlled. All novels and romances must be shunned, Bennett insisted, because they ‘corrupt all principle’ and seduce girls away from the path of virtue.