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from Part V - Social Structures and Social Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2023
Defoe’s views on education were conditioned by – and part of – his broader views on the early eighteenth-century social order. Coming from a commercial family, and as a Dissenter from the Church of England, Defoe did not, himself, have access to the most socially prestigious forms of education offered by the elite grammar schools and English universities. In various writings, Defoe advocates a form of education prioritizing ’useful’ knowledge (of languages, geography, mathematics, the natural sciences, and history) over the esoteric mastery of Latin and Greek learning that was the domain of ’mere Scholars’. Defoe thought that education should give students knowledge not simply of words, but of the world, and that it should suit them to act in the world. This model of education, for Defoe, was one suited for merchants as well as ’gentlemen’, and (with some differences of emphasis) for women as well as men.
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