Hints for the Improvement of Early Education.
[Education]. Hoare, Louisa. Hints for the Improvement of Early Education and Nursery Discipline. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1819.
8vo.; faint pencil inscription on title page; top tip of final leaf restored; blue and white paper-covered boards, printed spine label; edges nicked and worn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this seminal work, which remained in print for nearly a century and which has seen renewed critical attention in recent years. Nearly all the chapters are titled for the qualities they examine: Truth and Sincerity; Harmony, Generosity, and Benevolence; Vanity and Affectation; Fearfulness—Fortitude—Patience. Others address specific areas of behavior or instruction, such as Authority and Instruction, Rewards and Punishments, and Religious Instruction and Religious Habits.
Hoare’s text evolved out of her own philosophies of child-rearing, with a firm reliance on her earlier Quaker beliefs. “Despite her eventual resignation from The Society of Friends as a result of a change in her theological outlook,” writes one scholar, “Hoare’s writing retained many of the essences of Quakerism.” With this work she,
aimed to provide parents with a practical guide to ensure the moral and religious development of their children from birth onwards…. Hoare consistently emphasized the importance of early education in determining the moral character and behavior of the adult in later life. Hoare and other women writers of this period argued that this gave a central role to women; for it was mothers who as the earliest care-givers of infants, were the most likely to set up proper or improper associations between sensations and feelings upon which both the ability to reason and moral virtue depended. (“‘Child of reason’: Anna Barbauld and the origins of progressive pedagogy,” by M. Hilton, in Practical Visionaries: Women, Education and Social Progress 1790-1930, by Hilton M., and Hirsch, P., eds., Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., p. 26)
Hoare begins her text with three quotes from Locke which summarize her main tenets:
I think I may say, that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are; good or evil, useful or not, by their education.
To neglect beginnings, is the fundamental error into which most parents fall.
Parents wonder to taste the streams bitter when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.
“In line with Locke’s theory,” writes her biographer,
Hoare argued that parents probably underestimated the age at which a child’s education should commence. She also felt that parents should never forget that they were primarily responsible for the adult personalities of their children. Consequently they were always to guard their personal conduct and to reflect upon that conduct before making any judgement upon the behaviour of their children.
Early childhood education, then, had implications far beyond the nursery.
Hoare … made parents aware of issues of power and authority in educational relationships. It was a power that the parents were not to abuse. She reminded them of the rights of the child and the responsibility that they had as parents to nurture and develop the child’s autonomy. This attitude towards the rights of individuals as autonomous beings is more widely reflected in many Quaker philanthropic ventures and underpinned their work in the anti-slavery campaigns, penal reform and the reform of mental health institutions. (The Quakers, Money and Morals,by J. Walden, London: John Murray Publishers Ltd. Walvin, 1997, p.23)
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