Sheila Cordner traces a tradition of literary resistance to dominant pedagogies in nineteenth-century Britain, recovering an overlooked chapter in the history of thought about education. This book considers an influential group of writers—all excluded from Oxford and Cambridge because of their class or gender—who argue extensively for the value of learning outside of schools altogether. From just beyond the walls of elite universities, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing used their position as outsiders as well as their intimate knowledge of British universities through brothers, fathers, and friends, to satirize rote learning in schools for the working classes as well as the education offered by elite colleges. Cordner analyzes how predominant educational rhetoric, intended to celebrate England’s progress while simultaneously controlling the spread of knowledge to the masses, gets recast not only by the four primary authors in this book but also by insiders of universities, who fault schools for their emphasis on memorization. Drawing upon working-men’s club reports, student guides, and educational pamphlets, as well as recent work on nineteenth-century theories of reading, Cordner unveils a broader cultural movement that embraced the freedom of learning on one’s own.

Connections to Contemporary Education

·      Higher education is seeing a resurgence of the culture of learning on one’s own with students pursuing an education through self-directed online courses, MOOCs, and study abroad programs.

·      Universities today try to cultivate a diversity of learning styles through experiential learning, study abroad, service learning, and other high impact teaching practices. Although we often consider this to be a new trend in education, the nineteenth-century writers who were excluded from universities—and the culture of “cram” that came along with them—celebrated these multi-modal learning practices. They anticipate contemporary educational theory that values multiple learning styles and active learning.   

·      Cordner’s book traces the steady resistance to the advent of standardized testing and “cram”; in many ways, this nineteenth-century story forecasts the many critiques of what we would now call “teaching to the test.”

Approach

The author conducted extensive research at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, as well as at the first women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The book includes rare material such as the satirical publication about Oxford that Jane Austen’s brothers founded; the poetry and memoirs of the first women’s college students at the University of Cambridge, who turn the tables on the men who previously excluded them; and materials from the National Home Reading Union, which offered an annual summer program offering courses to individuals pursuing an education on their own.

Sheila Cordner's Teaching Philosophy

Relentless about pursuing his education, Thomas Hardy’s eponymous hero in Jude the Obscure conjures up a way to study the dictionary while driving a cart selling baked goods, “fixing open” the book “by means of a strap attached to the tilt.”  I encourage my students to become more like Jude: he rejects the boundaries between his academic lessons and experiences, and insists on living the life of the mind. 

I want my students to not only read about the world of the Victorian class system but to feel it for themselves.  When I teach Charles Dickens’s Hard Times in the context of the Industrial Revolution and the shifting class system, I send students to the Gibson House Museum, a preserved Victorian mansion in Boston.  I instruct them to take notes on markers of class: how does the house separate classes?  Where do different classes mingle?  How is class disguised?  Students write papers drawing upon their firsthand observations as well as their analysis of Dickens’s depiction of class in his novel.  The society inhabited by characters such as Josiah Bounderby, Stephen Blackpool, and Mrs. Sparsit becomes less distant; as a result, students are able to write more thoughtful literary analysis of Dickens’s text.

I often invite students to think critically about their personal experiences in relation to texts from other time periods.  When I teach Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel Changes: A Love Story, which depicts university-educated women in postcolonial Ghana, I ask students to write for five minutes about their own educational experiences.  I prompt them to write not only about what they have gained from their education, but also whether they have sacrificed anything as a result of it.  When we turn to Aidoo’s text, students can more easily relate to her characters, becoming more attuned to the nuances in her critique of postcolonial society.  By starting with such a simple task—a few minutes of personal writing—I facilitate students’ understanding of unfamiliar literature.  This opens the way to my primary emphasis on close reading of texts.

In addition to short in-class writing prompts, I incorporate exercises that allow students to use the personal knowledge they bring to my class and apply it to our scholarly discussion of literature.  To introduce lessons on poetry in translation, for example, I ask groups of students to translate the lyrics of a popular hip-hop song into language that their grandparents could understand.  I want them to think critically about what it means to translate a poem.  Their task is to preserve the meaning, sounds, and rhythm as much as possible while making it accessible to a new kind of audience.  We compare translations.  What is compromised?  How do the translations exhibit different interpretations of the original lyrics?  This brief activity, drawing on their own insight about music and family, paves the way for an in-depth study of the assigned poems in translation.   

At the end of the semester I often develop a capstone community-engaged learning project inviting students to experience firsthand the link between their study of literature and an engagement with the outside world.  After witnessing middle school students’ passion for learning at 826 Boston, an urban after-school writing program for youth, one of my students reached a new understanding of the intellectually hungry Jude.  She wrote a sophisticated final paper analyzing Hardy’s portrait of motivation and family circumstances in Jude and his son Father Time.  Inspired by nursing home residents’ strong desire to learn, another student wrote a provocative paper about unconventional education in William Wordsworth’s poems and Margaret Edson’s play Wit—his most rigorous work all semester.  Other students have participated in programs such as the Prison Book Program and ESL Adult Conversation Circles at the Boston Public Library.  These experiences remind my students that there exists no barrier between their studies on campus and the learning that happens—like Jude’s—outside of university walls.