| The English Civil War period serves as a missing link between the two main historical narratives of literacy in the Reformation and Industrial Revolution. While the terms “literacy” and “illiteracy” came into currency with compulsory education in the late nineteenth century, pleas for mass education and universal literacy have notable but generally unrecognized precedents in early modern England. Specifically, it was in the English Civil War period that contemporaries began to regard literacy as not merely the ability to read and/or write, but as the foundation for an increasingly democratic citizenry—one of the many senses of literacy whose popularity persists today, but whose specific historical thread remains untraced.;Utilizing Bourdieu's and Althusser's theories of power, this project reclaims the centrality of educational systems as key material and ideological sites for early modern subject formation and for the development of technologies of both inculcation and resistance. With the consolidation of power following the Tudor accession, the “humanist” educational system was adopted to inculcate dominant civic attitudes and rhetorical skills. Pedagogically, humanism worked not only to legitimate, but to naturalize, classicize, and idealize the English state. As such, the humanist educational system arose as an early form of the “ideological state apparatus” in tandem with the powerful state emerging in early capitalist England.;If humanism became an ideological bastion of the state in sixteenth-century England, the remainder of the dissertation examines humanism's fate when the monarchical constitution of the state is contested and, finally, overthrown—as in the English Civil War. Wartime proposals for universal, state-regulated education pit humanism against an experiential curriculum. On the one hand, these experiential protocols provided contemporaries with new coordinates for imagining political agency, social mobility, economic and vocational citizenship; on the other hand, insofar as these reforms preserved distinctions in class and gender, such theoretical proposals, had they been enacted, would have crafted an even more perfect educational state apparatus than the Tudor humanists imagined. Certain groups of women and clusters of Quakers thus developed counter-institutional “literacy tactics” that undermined state surveillance, religious conformity, and patriarchal authority. |
