Abstract

Catharine Macaulay is best known as an English historian. She was also, however, an insightful and articulate author on the topic of the education of young people. This thesis presents Macaulay's views as expressed in her noteworthy work, Letters on Education printed originally in 1787 and in its revised form in 1790. ;In Letters on Education Macaulay articulated her philosophy of education which integrated her metaphysical beliefs and her epistemological views with the pedagogy and practice they implied. Her ultimate hope from the educational process was to yield an educated person who had attained the character, morals, and knowledge that she valued in citizens of both genders. She explicitly denied that differences in intellectual attainment and character development were attributable to non-educational causes such as innate gender or racial inferiority. Macaulay presented education as the remedy to the mistaken beliefs about limited capacities resulting from limited natures. ;Although scholars have published several articles and one biography on Catharine Macaulay, little detailed attention has been given to her philosophical views on education. In this thesis, I intend to elucidate her philosophy of education and to place it among other valuable works about education for the purposes of comparison and contrast. ;The thesis has six chapters: The first chapter is introductory, followed in the second chapter by a biographical view of Macaulay and of the times in which she lived. Chapter three focuses on Letters on Education and details Macaulay's views on curriculum, disciplining practices, characteristics of the teacher, and school policy. Chapter four discusses the foundations of Macaulay's philosophy of education; that is, the relationship between her metaphysical beliefs and her views on human nature and epistemology. Her view of the educated person is also described. In the fifth chapter, I compare and contrast Macaulay's work with that of two of her female contemporary writers on education, Hester Chapone and Stephanie de Genlis, specifically focusing on the three women's different conceptualizations of human nature and the purposes of education. The last chapter is one of retrospection and looking forward.