ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth century in Britain, various key societal changes were starting to take place, increasing the spread of knowledge and political enfranchisement and, in doing so, transforming democracy. The most significant nineteenth-century development in curriculum terms, however, was the development of secondary education for girls on the same basis as that offered to boys, in turn contributing to codifying the ideological basis for a liberal education. In Dorothea Beale's works, the subject matter of this chapter, we see movement from the intellectually undemanding curriculum of what were known as ‘Dame Schools’, with their focus on basic literacy, numeracy and accomplishments such as needlework, to institutions modeled on the major boys' ‘public’ schools (public in the sense that they were run by boards of governors rather than by private proprietors for profit). The new girls' schools offered a broad, subject-based curriculum that was intellectually rigorous. This was something that had been previously considered too demanding for girls, so the idea that girls were not only capable of studying in the same way and to the same level as boys, but that this should be expected of them, and indeed that this should be their duty, was highly controversial. It links eighteenth-century ideas of the Enlightenment with the ‘psychoanalytical turn’ taken in progressive education at the beginning of the twentieth century, from received to organic knowledge.
