Free Vindication by Lyndall Gordon

education for girls, summed up two years later in her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (her title looks back to Burgh’s, as Burgh’s looks back to Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Burgh had held that a girl should know just enough arithmetic to do household accounts, and just enough geography to converse with her husband and his friends. Boys were generally trained to block tenderness as a form of weakness. The only emotion Burgh had encouraged was patriotism–no different, in this, from most educators. The schoolmaster writing so busily had not seen that the education he had meant to extend and refine had been skewed to feed the very materialism he deplored, that of a predatory nation moulding an elite of fighters and colonisers.
    Mary Wollstonecraft refused to shape her pupils to fit predetermined forms; she asked herself what girls learnt that left them lisping like infants and parading themselves in clothes whose ‘unnatural protuberances’ bore no relation to the shape of the female body. Ever since Bath and Windsor, she had deplored the triviality of female accomplishments: the tinkling on the harpsichord, and pride in landscapes touched up by a drawing master. It infuriated her to hear ladies bleating received opinions: ‘I am sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton, the elegance and harmony of Pope, and the original, untaught genius of Shakespear.’ Such bleaters knew ‘nothing of nature’ and ‘could not enter into the spirit of those authors’. Her cure was simple: ‘I wish them to be taught to think.’
    As a thinker herself, Wollstonecraft stressed the ungendered possibilities of the mind–the ‘mind’, she repeats, wondering how it might come into its own. The answer came from her own history of self-education: agencymust be transferred from teacher to pupil. The teacher can’t ‘create’ a child’s mind, she said, though ‘it may be cultivated and its real powers found out’. Basically, ‘it must be left to itself’. She was speaking as a disciple of Rousseau, who had enraged Burgh in the 1760s when he proposed that a child should follow nature, unwarped by formal education till the age of twelve. Mary Wollstonecraft did not put this literally into practice–it would have made her school redundant–but did grasp the crux of Rousseau’s theory when she urged pupils to look into ‘the book of nature’, and banned rote learning: ‘I have known children who could repeat things in the order they learnt them, that were quite at a loss when put out of the beaten track.’ Instead, she taught them to combine ideas, comparing things similar in some ways and different in others. Then too, where Burgh stuffed his language with Greek and Latin tags, Wollstonecraft cut through to the heart of matter, dismissing ‘words of learned length and thund’ring sound’ designed to cow the common reader: ‘A florid style mostly passes with the ignorant for fine writing; many sentences are admired that have no meaning in them.’ Milton had established a verbal league table with Anglo-Saxon monosyllables at the bottom and Latinate words at the top; the graver the subject, the more sonorous the language. Though Wollstonecraft did read Milton, her own practice favoured Enlightenment ideals of simplicity and clarity.
    Her primary aim as a teacher was to elicit an authentic character in place of sameness. The same things, she thought, should not be taught to all: ‘Each child requires a different mode of treatment.’ Nor were pupils urged to display uniform manners. In place of affectation, she encouraged naturalness: ‘Let the manners arise from the mind, and let there be no disguise for the genuine emotions of the heart.’ Other schools had a fixed code of manners, not for the good of the pupil but to promote an image of the school. Mary, on the contrary,