The Guardian of Education
The Guardian of Education was the first periodical dedicated to reviewing children’s literature in Britain. It was edited by 18th-century educationalist, children’s author, and Sunday school advocate Sarah Trimmer. The journal offered child-rearing advice and assessments of contemporary educational theories. Trimmer was a staunch monarchist and opponent of the French Revolution.
About The Guardian of Education in brief
The Guardian of Education was the first periodical dedicated to reviewing children’s literature in Britain. It was edited by 18th-century educationalist, children’s author, and Sunday school advocate Sarah Trimmer. The journal offered child-rearing advice and assessments of contemporary educational theories. Trimmer’s reviews influenced publishers and authors to alter the content of their books, and greatly affected the sales of children’s books. The Guardian also offered the first history of children’s literature; establishing a list of landmark books, which scholars still use today. In its pages, Trimmer denounced the Revolution and the philosophers whose works she believed were responsible for it, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She argued that there existed a vast conspiracy, organized by the atheistic and democratic revolutionaries of France, to undermine and overthrow the legitimate governments of Europe. She intended to combat this conspiracy by pointing parents towards properly Christian books. As a high-church Anglican, she was intent on protecting Christianity from secularism as well as evangelicalism as manifested in Methodism. The first issue of the Guardian appeared in June 1802; from then until it ceased publication in September 1806, it was issued quarterly. There were 28 issues in all. Matthew Grenby, the foremost expert on Trimmer, estimates that the Guardian’s circulation was between 1,500 and 3,500 copies per issue.
Trimmer herself wrote all of the essays listed under her name and all. of the reviews, but she was not the author of the texts she extracted. The issues did not always consist of the same sections; for example, beginning in 1804 Trimmer started including an “Essay on Christian Education” and in 1805 occasionally reviewed “School books”. Beginning a tradition that persists to this day, she divided the books she reviewed by age group: “Examination of Books for Children” and “Books for Young Persons”. Trimmer was a staunch monarchist and opponent of the French Revolution and French Revolution, particularly manifested itself in the latter as manifested by the latter’s Methodism and secularism. She also agreed with Rousseau and other progressive educational reformers on many issues, such as the damaging effects of rote learning and the irrationalism of fairy tales. To do so, she evaluated the educational theories of Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Madame Joseph Bell, and Andrew Lancaster. In 1804 she proposed her own comprehensive educational program, subsequently published separately as a pamphlet. As it came it came to be that any books that were valuable in this new genre constituted a set of distinct and identifiable criteria.
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This page is based on the article The Guardian of Education published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
