This thesis adopts a historical point of view to analyze Wordsworth¡¦s concept of education in relation to nineteenth-century English educational reform. In the nineteenth century, mass education, following the pace of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, became an indispensable social issue. Among the diverse educational reform movements, Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell¡¦s monitorial system was most prominent in that they provided a pedagogy that utilized teaching assistants to achieve efficiency and sufficiency in a large classroom and thus fulfilled the need of large-quantitative education of the age. Featured by efficiency, sufficiency, and materialism, the monitorial system best embodies the spirit of the Industrial Age. On the other hand, Wordsworth insisted on a community-based educational philosophy that urged people of his age to cherish old moral concepts such as harmonious, affectionate, and cooperative communal spirit inherent in traditional rural communities. The poet, representing the eighteenth-century rural tradition, observed with anxiety those children raised in an materialistic atmosphere. He delineates in his major works, especially The Excursion, a social vision that provides the best environment for the development and education of a spiritually mature man in which nature, man, and society are incorporated into a harmonious unity. This insistence on the old rural tradition distanced Wordsworth from his contemporary educational reformers and caused him to withdraw from his original support of the monitorial system.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0822101-145855 |
| Date | 22 August 2001 |
| Creators | Huang, Yu-han |
| Contributors | Tien-en Kao, Yu-san Yu, Shu-Fang Lai |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0822101-145855 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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