Introduction

Education is a protean discipline, which forms and is formed by ideas, practices, and institutions. Alan Richardson has pointed out that as a thematic site for rethinking culture outside conventional disciplinary boundaries, ‘education is particularly promising: it forms a conceptual space where politics, social history, ideology, and literary representations of all kinds meet, interpenetrate, and collide’.1 The recent emergence of cultural history offers scholars the opportunity to bring together a disparate mass of scholarship broadly defined as the history of education, allowing a new cultural synthesis of issues involving élite, middle, and poor childhood, religion, sociability, literature, artefacts and pedagogies. This emerging synthesis has stimulated a fresh approach to the education of children and adolescents in the period of the British Enlightenment.