My aim in this book was to provide a fresh perspective on education and gender by using the lens of pedagogy to compare the instruction males and females received over the course of the Georgian period. Pedagogy is not just about methods for teaching and learning. This book has shown that it is also, as Robin Alexander has argued, ‘a purposive cultural intervention … which is deeply saturated with the values and history of the society and community in which it located.’1 Exploring this cultural intervention brought to light the importance of the relations between pedagogies, their competition and the power struggles which shaped and produced them. It is these relations that have provided the most important insights on the issues of gender this study aimed to investigate.

Vicesimus Knox's pedagogical intervention, redirecting the focus of the study of the classics from literature to grammar, illustrates Alexander's contention and the competitions that ensued. The plan Knox devised in his educational treatise Liberal Education was a model of learning embodied in a long-standing architectural metaphor which he refashioned to his purpose: laying a strong base in Latin grammar at an early age to uphold the superstructure of all learning. While the ostensible motive for Knox's plan was his desire to return to ‘antient’ methods and reform public schools, it was also constructed as both a legitimation of the dominant pedagogical regime of the classics and a response to the threat to that regime from the pedagogies of modern subjects.

The principal goal of Knox's architectural model of learning was gender: the avoidance of effeminacy and the production of masculinity which he encouraged by picturing study as a battle and learning as conquest. This had significant consequences for women's education because it established the conditions for considering girls’ learning as not based on the same intellectual foundations as that of boys. Knox's insistence that the grammar foundation should be taught at a puerile age was consistent with the belief of the time that children's minds were more ‘pliable and ductile’ and that early teaching was therefore most profitable, as Hester Thrale's success with her young children's rote learning attested.