ABSTRACT
Education was a central concern and project of the Enlightenment, as is testified by ‘a staggering 200 educational treatises [that] were published in English between 1762 and 1800’ (Porter, 343).1 The enormous number of eighteenth-century educational treatises can be appreciated as part and parcel of an attempt to gauge the nature of the child by trying to develop theories that are most adequate to children’s physical, intellectual and psychological conditions. The following chapter starts from the opposite assumption, namely that educational theories do not simply adapt to a child’s nature but shape one’s perception of childhood. To view childhood through, say, Puritan or Evangelical lenses, without a doubt generates a different image of the child than the one that can be perceived through the framework of Lockean or rousseauan philosophy.2 I shall therefore examine how and where children were positioned in different educational discourses in the eighteenth century, and how periodicals and prints actively participated in this framing process.
