No Humbug

He held these appointments at a time of great social upheaval, when new secular schools were breaking away from centuries-old religious domination and the narrow focus on ‘classics’ was being displaced by a wider range of new ‘liberal’ subjects. Hawthorne was at the forefront of these changes but more than this, Hawthorne introduced a new way of looking at education, modelled on the ideas of Thomas Arnold of Rugby school. For Hawthorne, schooling was not just classroom lessons; rather, the whole student was to be educated through the way of life of the school.