Compare and contrast constructions of education (formal and/or informal option)
This question invites you to consider how education is imagined and valued in your choice of texts. Part of setting up a really successful essay will involve choosing your texts carefully and setting up strong and telling contrasts between your texts so as to allow you to develop your argument. You are advised to choose an exemplary passage or episode illustrating education from each of the texts you choose, to maintain a close focus upon the text, avoid plot summary, and engage explicitly with at least some of the relevant critical material from EA300.
Questions that you might usefully ask yourself in selecting your texts and planning your essay include:
What does ‘education’ mean within a given text?[unique_solution]
Do child protagonists strive to learn, and, if so, what do they learn and why?
Who do they learn from?
Who tries to teach them, what do they teach, and is this teaching regarded as valuable, unnecessary, or actually undesirable?
Under what circumstances is a refusal to learn permitted, and perhaps even regarded as necessary or virtuous rather than subversive?
Might it be possible to think about children’s fiction entirely in terms of the sorts of education it models and the sorts it discards?
What are the child protagonists educated into?
Essays
Kelly McDowell’s essay on subversive ‘child agency’
Roll of Thunder in Reader 2
Anna Bogen’s remarks on Ransome