Education in Manliness: The Legacy of Thring’s Uppingham

Education in Manliness explores the central educational ideal of the Victorian and Edwardian public school. The book traces the formulation of what Edward Thring, the most celebrated headmaster of the era, termed ‘true manliness’, noting the debt to the Platonic concept of the whole man and to Christian example, before examining the ideal’s best holistic practice at Uppingham and other mid-Victorian schools.

The central chapters follow the tilting of manliness to the physical by the muscular Christians in the 1860s, its distortion to Spartanism by the games masters and sporting dons from the 1870s, and its hijacking by the advocates of esprit de corps during the remainder of the century. The book lays bare the total perversion of the ideal by the military imperialists in the years up to the Great War, and traces the lifeline of holistic education through the progressive school movement from the 1880s to the 1970s. It then brings this up to date by comparing true manliness with the ‘wholeness’ ideal of schools of the new millennium.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the fields of history of education and the theory and practice of teaching, as well as school and university teachers, teacher trainers and trainee teachers.