ABSTRACT

This chapter considers relations among intended pupil performance, pedagogy, and politics in the work of three teachers between 1766 and 1806. The first, Hester Thrale, is an upper-middle-class wife and mother teaching her children at home and recording their progress in an album. The second, Anna Letitia Barbauld, is a celebrated poet who has taken up schoolteaching as a profession and who then writes innovative and very well received elementary teaching books. The third, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, is a young doctor in Napoleonic France who is presented with a rare scientific opportunity, the challenge of educating a feral child, and whose reports to a government ministry document his efforts.