Dame school

Before the Education Act of 1870, many young children were taught by unqualified women in their own homes. The dame schools were privately supported and fees were charged. The curriculum was narrow and concentrated on reading and writing.

Dame School, a type of school transplanted to some of the American colonies from England, usually conducted by a woman in her home. Young children of the neighborhood were taught the alphabet, the Horn-Book, elements of reading, and moral and religious subjects. In New England, such schools prepared boys for admission to the town schools, which would not receive them until they could "stand up and read words of two syllables and keep their places." The "dame school" pre-figured women's central role in the public school system and the professionalization of Education in the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Monaghan, E. Jennifer. "Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England." American Quarterly 40 (March 1988): 18–41.

Sugg, Redding S. Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978.

—Edgar W. Knight/A. R.

"A New England Dame school in old colonial times". 1713. Bettman Archive

A Dame School was an early form of a private elementary school in English-speaking countries. They were usually taught by women and were often located in the home of the teacher.

Dame schools were quite varied - some functioned primarily as day care facilities, overseen by illiterate women, while others provided their students with a good foundation in the basics. The inadequacies of Dame schools in England were illustrated by a study conducted in 1838 by the Statistical Society of London that found nearly half of all pupils surveyed were only taught spelling, with a negligible number being taught mathematics and grammar. Dame schools became less common in Britain after the introduction of compulsory education in 1880, whereafter schools that were found to be below government-specified standards of tuition could be closed.

The first school in Australia, started in 1789, was a Dame school in which children were taught basics by a convict, Isabella Rossen.

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