Another point of tension in the role of mother-as-teacher-of-literacy arose
in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, with the concern for mothers’
abilities to raise and educate boy children. Manguel (1996) noted that in early
modern Europe, mothers of the aristocracy, or more accurately their nurses,
were responsible for teaching children the letters of the alphabet at a very
young age. Male teachers were hired to teach boys as soon as they were out of
the nursery because clerics were concerned that boys in particular be educated
away from their mothers, who were considered unsuitable intellectual and moral
role models (Manguel, 1996). Here emerged a tension between mothers’ roles
in initiating children into the teachings of the Church through their domestic
literacy work, and the primacy accorded to male dominated institutions to prepare
boy children for the public world. While contemporary literacy teaching roles
ascribed to mothers extended to both boys and girls, concerns over “whether
a woman can raise a man”
(Ehrenreich & English, 1978, p. 192) persist,
as evidenced in current assertions among educators and social commentators that
boys raised by women are “at risk”
for literacy failure because
they lack male role models (Vancouver Sun, 2003, R5).
In early modern Europe, the Enlightenment brought a renewed focus on the education
of children as future citizens of emerging nation-states. Luke (1989) showed
how this nation-building project coincided with the rise of print, and Protestantism
in Europe, in ways that produced a “discourse of childhood”
that
was deeply embedded in Christian Protestant moral values and the rise of capitalism.
Mothering discourses must therefore be read in the context of this discourse
on childhood, as the two are interconnected. While nation-building and Christianity
were themes in the discourse of childhood, literacy advice drew upon emerging
pedagogic ideals expressed in Locke’s Some thoughts concerning education
(1692) and Rousseau’s Emile (1701). Their philosophies on appropriate
means to educate children were thus among the first of many to implicate (via
their followers who popularized their views through advice texts) new pedagogical
roles for mothers. According to Hulbert (2003), the “stern father figure
of the Lockean
(p. 9). Evidence of this pendulum, as well
as the patriarchal intersections between these educational philosophies, are
found in Lockean and Rousseau-inspired advice texts in the Victorian era, a
topic to which we now turn. “nurture is what counts”
school, the other gentler
Rousseauian proponent of “letting nature take its course”
would
come to characterize the two opposing points of a pendulum of child-raising
advice for centuries to come”