Early Nineteenth Century School Space and Ideology

Abstract

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in response to the problems of the early industrial revolution and the consequent rapid urbanisation, a variety of school types arose to offer some kind of education to urban workers' children. The chief types were the Sunday, monitorial, infant and workhouse schools. The illustrated paper describes how, in each of these, space was organised to produce relations between individual children, groups of children and teachers based on a strong ideological base of religion, order, surveillance, discipline, hierarchy, competition and the limited formation of solidarities. The school in fact became in microcosm a model of the class structure of the new industrial and social system. The role of space in this social production is shown to be crucial