The Politics of Childhood: Wordsworth, Blake, and Catechistic Method

Abstract

It is not coincidental that authors of eighteenth century's two most influential educational treatises-Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Rousseau's Emile-were also major political theorists of their age. The interrelation between political and educational discourses-the constitution of state and construction of its citizens-runs back at least to Plato's Republic, which Rousseau called the most beautiful educational treatise ever written, but during modern era Europe, with schooling less and less confined to an elite and with informal spread of literacy among an increasingly mobile population, education and indeed childhood itself were politicized as never before.' The ongoing debate on uses and dangers of literacy and popular (if not yet mass) education became during later eighteenth century what Raymond Williams has called most central issue in history of our culture.2 And as concept of childhood became defined (if not fact produced) by education, new children's literature and literary representations of childhood, including Romantic idealizations of child, reflected no less than did contemporary education theory politics of literacy.3 As education broadened later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its methods and function shifted significantly. The Renaissance emphasis on dialectical argument, related to rise of an entrepreneurial class requiring intellectual flexibility, yielded to mechanical production of set answers, obedient behavior within educational setting, and (for lower classes) passive literacy.4 Catechism replaced dialectic as exemplary mode of a process which Michel Foucault describes as disciplining of society, as school became a machine for learning analogous its functions of regulating and observation to prison and factory.5 While this shift affected even schooling for elite-eighteenth-century grammar schools, for example, emphasized formal training by drill and repetition, and oral

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