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Section 8: Women and Teaching

(8.1) Rev. John Maurice, the founder of the Christian Socialist movement, was a great supporter to women’s education. In 1848 he became the first head of Queen’s College in Harley Street, a new training school for women teachers. The first group of students included Dorothea Beale, Sophia Jex-Blake and Frances Mary Buss. In his inaugural lecture he explained his ideas on teaching.

The vocation of a teacher is an awful one… she will do others unspeakable harm if she is not aware of its usefulness… How can you give a woman self-respect, how can you win for her the respect of others… Watch closely the first utterances of infancy, the first dawnings of intelligence; how thoughts spring into acts, how acts pass into habits. The study is not worth much if it is not busy about the roots of things.

Miss Beale is a young lady of high moral and religious character, sober-minded and discreet. Her parents have been careful to avoid party views, and I have no doubt Miss Dorothea Beale is free from them. She certainly is a conscientious person, with a deep sense of her religious responsibilities. I feel certain that her influences will always be good.

The school intends to provide an education based upon religious principles which, preserving the modesty and gentleness of the female character, should so far cultivate a girl’s intellectual powers as to fit her for the discharge of those responsible duties which devolve upon her as a wife, mother and friend, the natural companion and helpmeet for man.

The true meaning of the word education is not instruction… It is intellectual, moral, and physical development, the development of a sound mind in a sound body, the training of reason to form just judgements, the disciplining of the will and affections to obey the supreme law of duty, the kindling and strengthening of the love of knowledge, of beauty, of goodness, till they become governing motives of action.

The few months during which I was under your tuition more than fifty years ago were an epoch to me. Young as I was, I ever afterwards judged teaching by the standard set by yours, and very seldom indeed, I may truly say, has it been subsequently reached. The fifty years that have since passed, full as they have been, have never effaced the impression they received, both of your teaching and of something more comprehensive than your teaching, which contact with you engendered, and which impels me to take this opportunity – late in the day as it is – to express and to thank you for.

English parents, who are apathetic and irrational enough about the education of their boys, are much more so when the education of their girls… Fashion has stamped its approval upon certain external accomplishments and graces. The period during which social triumphs can be achieved is short and fleeting… Mothers say that their little daughters must not be troubled with the halfpennies and farthings in her arithmetic, because, "it will not help her to get married"… How to deal with these difficulties in the case of parents is the standing perplexity of teachers. We must confess that we see no hope for immediate reformation. It is only by the greater extension of education itself that education will come to be rightly valued, and in this way the task of the teachers of the next generation will be far easier and pleasanter one than that of teachers of today.

I was nearing the prescribed age at which the pupil-teacher training then began… On the strength of my writing they took me in for a trial period; and I satisfied them as to my ability to learn as well as demonstrating an unsuspected capacity to control a class of forty girls only a year or two my juniors and to awaken in them new interest in their English and history, subjects which I had fed my hunger even then for years.

I had to find lodging in the neighbourhood. First I paid 7 shillings a week for a room and bought and cooked my own food… The first-year teaching certificate was achieved while I was there and the second in due course. For another £5 a year I moved to Ardwick School… I needed the extra fiver because my way of life meant a continuous expenditure on books and footwear. In those days I walked everywhere. Looking back I see myself, shabby, happy and absorbed, swinging away into town to evening classes, having already done the walk between school and lodging twice on days on which I carried my lunch, or four times when I returned to cook it for myself there.

I was making my living by teaching in a Catholic school. I had to observe the routine of the Catholic way of life. I had to teach it to children. Only by conforming could I persist in my life effort to find security… in a grim way I was compelled to endanger my soul for my day-to-day earthly salvation. I argued with myself that this was no crime, no sin… I alone was responsible for keeping myself alive.

I held myself guilty in accepting love and confidence from my mother without confessing to her that I was an agnostic, believing no longer in any church or creed, nor in a God, as she knew God.

It was a long interview, and it ranged to and fro until the position was quite clear. I could not accept the duty of imparting to the young as guidance the moral standards of the Old Testament and the authoritarian interpretations of the New Testament. I found myself compromising in such teaching, putting a gloss upon the actual stories, a humanist-ideal explanation rather than an orthodox Christian one.

There were conscience clauses in the Education Acts for the parent and children, why not one for the teacher? Could I be moved or my work in schools so re-arranged that I would no longer have to teach scripture. This was too much for the officer. His composure disappeared. I was making an extraordinary request – one unheard of – one which might create much disturbance in the community… had I forgotten the tax resistance of the non-conformists as a possible indicator of what in their turn the Roman Catholics and the Church of England might do?

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