Pupil Teaching

Abstract

Chapter two, ‘Pupil Teaching’, tells the story of those boys and girls who secured pupil teaching apprenticeships starting around age thirteen. These paid apprenticeships enabled boys and girls who would usually otherwise have had to go to work to continue their studies for five years—even to delve into subjects like Latin, French, literature, and physics. They had to balance these studies with their work teaching younger children, however. They both learned from and worked under head teachers, whose poignant accounts and painstaking work with their young charges testifies to the bonds they formed with pupil teachers. Like apprenticeship in its classic form (and emerging ideas about adolescence), pupil teaching involved working and learning, growing freedom but continued supervision, an institutionalized and paternalistic relationship. Teachers and the state together revived, but also modernized apprenticeship—though as much in tension with one another as in cooperation.