Emulation, Edification, and Labor in English Working Schools, 1670–1725

Abstract: English merchants and projectors in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century proposed schemes to found “working schools” that would teach youths, often poor children, how to work in textile manufacturing. This article analyzes why commentators advocated the establishment of these schools as a matter of political economy, and why it was a religious voluntary society that erected them. It argues that their pedagogical design to provide examples of “emulation” and “imitation” away from the home appealed both to economic interests in moving production outside the domestic sphere and to missionary efforts concerned with the failures of “family religion.”