Beale, Dorothea (1831–1906)

Reforming head teacher who helped revolutionize education for middle-class girls in England. Pronunciation: BEEL. Born Dorothea Beale on March 21, 1831, in London, England; died in Cheltenham in 1906; daughter of Dorothea Margaret (Complin) Beale and Miles Beale; taught at home by governesses; attended boarding school and a finishing school; enrolled as a student at Queens College, London, 1849; never married; no children.

Awards:

Officier d'Academie (1889); Societé des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes (1890); Tutor Durham University (1896); corresponding member of the National Education Association of the United States (1898); on advisory board of the University of London (1901); Freedom of the borough of Cheltenham (1901); Honorary LL.D, Edinburgh University (1902).

Student and tutor at Queens (1849–57); named head teacher at Casterton (1857); served as head teacher at Cheltenham Girls School (1858–1906); gave evidence to the Taunton Commission (1865); was joint founder of Association for Headmistresses (1874); sat on Bryce Commission (1894); elected president of Association for Headmistresses (1895).

Selected publications:

The Student's Textbook of English and General History, Self-examination, and Work and Prayer in Girls' Schools.

Dorothea Beale was born at a time when educational provision for middle-class English girls was of poor quality. Most were taught at home by governesses, a few went to boarding schools. When they reached adolescence, girls were sent to finishing schools to complete their education. At the end of this expensive schooling, they were able to play a few tunes on the piano, to sing, to dance the Minuet, to draw a simple sketch, to sew a delicate sampler and sometimes speak a little French. These accomplishments helped them fulfil the Victorian ideal of a perfect woman: a decorative, poised, and often empty headed, companion to their future husband. Dorothea Beale was one of a number of women who sought to change this model of education.

Dorothea Beale was born in London in 1831. She was the fourth of eleven children of

Dorothea Margaret Beale, a lady of Huguenot descent, and Miles Beale, a doctor interested in educational issues. Dorothea Beale grew up in an intellectually charged atmosphere, but her formal education was meager. Like most girls of her time, Beale wasted precious years on trivial preoccupations. Educated by a rapid succession of inadequate governesses, she and her sisters were taught very little. Beale wrote in her autobiography: "My mother advertised and hundreds of answers were sent. She began by eliminating all those in which bad spelling occurred…. I can remember only one really clever and competent teacher."

When Dorothea Beale was sent to a boarding school in Essex, it offered no better education than the multitude of governesses. Subjects were ingested parrot fashion without understanding. In an attempt to encourage a superficial polish and sophistication, the girls were expected to communicate in French at all times. This, according to Beale, was a foolish idea "because our thinking power was hindered from developing by intercourse with one another, because we were required to speak in a tongue in which we could indeed talk, but in which conversation was impossible; and the language we spoke was one peculiar to English boarding-schools."

At the age of 13, Beale was removed from school because of poor health. For the next three years, she shared lessons in classics with her brothers and was given access to the London Institution and Crosby Hall libraries. She read and read. She then taught herself mathematics, geometry, and algebra. "I borrowed a Euclid … and read the first six books, carefully working through the whole of the fifth, as I did not know what was usually done."

In 1848, Beale's parents sent her to a finishing school on the Champs Élysées in Paris which enjoyed a favorable scholarly reputation. Unfortunately, the French system of education was little different from the English. After years of independent learning, Beale was crushed by the mechanical teaching methods, the narrow curriculum, and the repressive school regime. "Imagine our disgust at being required to … learn even lists of prepositions by heart…. I felt oppressed with the routine life; I, who had been able to moon, grub, alone for hours … was now put into a cage and had to walk round and round like a squirrel. I felt thought was killed." Fortunately for Beale, the 1848 French revolution interrupted her Parisian education. Concerned about the increasing level of violence, her parents demanded she return to England. Back home, she taught her younger sisters and superintended her brothers' Latin. It was the beginning of a long teaching career.

Less than a year later, at age 18, Dorothea Beale enrolled as a student at Queens College which had recently opened to upgrade the academic qualifications of governesses and practicing teachers. She soon became one of its star pupils. At the end of her studies, she was awarded certificates in mathematics, English, French, German, geography, and Latin. More important, in the middle of her studies, she was offered a job, the first teaching post held by a woman at Queens. For seven years, Beale instructed at Queens. She began teaching mathematics, then became Latin tutor and lastly head teacher of the school attached to the college. She enjoyed teaching and had a strong sense of her own destiny. A profoundly religious Christian, she believed that she had been called by God to the teaching profession. Despite this, Beale resigned from the college because women were given little or no responsibility.

After leaving Queens, she was appointed to a post at the Clergy Daughters' School in Casterton, a small village in Westmoreland in the north of England. It was an unwise decision. At Casterton, she was thrust into taking charge of an isolated school in the middle of the bleak English countryside. When she took up the post on January 6, 1857, the school's reputation was poor. A combination of inadequate diet and bad air had affected the physical health of the pupils. Typhoid, scrofula, scarlet fever and consumption were common. The school's educational health was equally impoverished. Since it was understaffed, Beale was expected to teach arithmetic, history, geography, English grammar and literature, French, German, Italian, Latin and Scripture. Objecting, she demanded a reduced timetable, believing that no one, however intelligent and assiduous, could prepare ten curriculum subjects with appropriate care. Discipline was equally problematic. It was maintained by punishment, rewards were few. Once again, Beale criticized the regime at Casterton. Discipline, she believed, was maintained by rewarding good behavior and hard work. Such ideas were considered too innovative and radical for the conservative-minded establishment at Casterton. In 1857, less than a year at her post, she received a letter of dismissal:

On your last interview with the Committee you implied an intention of resigning in case certain alterations should not be made by the Committee.

The Committee are of opinion that under the circumstances it would be better that your connection with the school should cease after Christmas next, they paying you a quarter's salary in advance.

This was a humiliating experience for the previously successful Dorothea Beale. She returned home discouraged and disappointed. Luckily, she did not need to teach for a living; her parents were sufficiently prosperous to support her. Beale, however, did not waste her time. She taught part-time at a school in Barnes, near London, and wrote two books, The Student's Textbook of English and General History, an overview of world history, and Self-Examination, a book which rested on a theme of duty towards God and one's neighbor.

When the post of principal became vacant at Cheltenham Ladies' College, Dorothea Beale applied. In 1858, aged 27, she was appointed. Cheltenham Ladies' College had opened four years previously as a day school. By the time Beale arrived, attendance had dropped significantly. Rebuilding the college was to be her life's work. Little by little, Beale transformed the school into one of the most prestigious in England. Gradually, mathematics, science, Latin and Greek made their way into her prospectus. New teaching methods were adopted. Textbooks were discouraged in case they were memorized by the students without understanding. One of her many gifts was to inspire teachers to make their students think. At a speech to the Social Science Congress in 1865, Beale outlined her educational principles:

I think that the education of girls has too often been made showy, rather than real or useful; that accomplishments have been made the main thing, because these would … enable a girl to shine and attract, while those branches of study especially calculated to form the judgement, to cultivate the understanding, and to discipline the character have been neglected.

Convinced that sport was wasteful of educational time, Beale discouraged it, but under pressure from staff and parents she bought a large field and built hockey pitches and tennis courts. Field hockey, played from about 1890 at Cheltenham, was a sport that Beale found hard to understand; she was said to have remarked, "The children will hurt themselves if they all run about after one ball. Get some more balls at once." Competitive team sport was anathema to Beale so she refused to allow Cheltenham pupils to play other schools. Dorothea Beale disapproved of competition in any form. Prize days, the mark of the English educational system, were never held because she disapproved of contests in which the success of one person involved the failure of others.

Beale changed Cheltenham Ladies' College in other ways. Unlike many English schools, there were no uniforms: girls were free to dress as they wished. Discipline was imposed by unusual methods. Silence was strictly enforced throughout the school. From the moment pupils entered the building—during lessons, in the corridor, at meal times—an awesome silence descended. High academic standards were also expected. Written work was marked with a "G" by the side if it was good, or comments such as "a penny a line" or "words, words, words" if it was found to be unsatisfactory. Each week, marks were read out and commented upon in front of the entire class as an incentive to work hard.

Miss Buss and Miss Beale Cupid's darts do not feel How different from us Miss Beale and Miss Buss

—Anon.

At first, Dorothea Beale encountered the same prejudices and resistance she had found at Casterton. Both the parents and governors disapproved of her innovative approach. "My dear lady, if my daughters were going to be bankers, it would be very well to teach arithmetic as you do, but there is no need" said one father, who then yanked his daughters out of the school. Beale also failed to attract new pupils. A year after her appointment, only 65 pupils remained. Slowly, but systematically, she was able to persuade parents that her educational philosophy was appropriate for middle-class girls. By 1880, she was inviolable. Numbers had increased to 500, new buildings were erected, and parental support was secured, all of which put the school, and Dorothea Beale, in a strong position.

Cheltenham Ladies' College never was—and Dorothea Beale never meant it to be—a school which favored social equality. It remained highly exclusive. High fees and selection procedures debarred the majority of girls in Cheltenham. Only the daughters of "independent gentlemen" or professionals were accepted. Cheltenham Ladies' College refused to admit any girl who was in a "lower" class of society. Daughters of tradespeople were refused admittance even when they could afford the fees. Nevertheless, Cheltenham Ladies' College provided inspiration to others. It proved that girls could reach and maintain high educational standards.

Although Beale supported women's suffrage, she believed that women should play a subordinate role. She argued that "the habits of obedience to duty, of self restraint … the humility which a thoughtful and comprehensive study of the great works in literature and science tends to produce, these we would specially cultivate in a woman, that she may wear the true woman's ornament of a meek and quiet spirit." At first, she advocated separate examinations for girls and boys. But experience changed her mind, and her girls were entered for the Cambridge exams and the London Matriculation alongside boys. Regardless of disagreements, Beale worked well with other women educationalists. On December 22, 1874, she chaired a group of nine head mistresses formed to exchange educational ideas and act as a pressure group. This became the influential Association for Head Mistresses.

Dorothea Beale's educational influence extended beyond that of Cheltenham Ladies' College. Three different institutions—all called St. Hilda's after her favorite saint Hilda of Whitby —were founded with Beale's financial and practical support. The first, St. Hilda's College Cheltenham, was opened in 1885 to train secondary teachers. Students remained at St. Hilda's for four years, studying for the Oxford University exams and practicing their theory at the school. In 1893, a new house was bought near Oxford which became St. Hilda's College, part of the university. The third St. Hilda's was built in Shoreditch, East London, to educate working-class women.

In recognition of her contribution to women's education, the government sought her advice. In 1864, the Schools' Enquiry Commission, called the Taunton Commission after its leader Lord Taunton, was set up to examine the state of the nation's endowed schools. Dorothea Beale welcomed the commission, gave evidence to it and edited the 20-volume assistant commissioner's reports. When it released its findings in 1869, the commission presented a pessimistic picture of education for girls: "We find, as a rule, a very small amount of professional skill, an inferior set of schoolbooks, a vast deal of dry, uninteresting task work, rules put into the memory with no explanation of their principles, no system of examination worthy of the name." When another Royal Commission, the Bryce Commission, was established in 1894, Beale was one of the first women to be appointed to such a body. The recommendations of the Bryce Commission, embodied in the 1902 Education Act, transformed secondary education in England.

In the latter part of her life, Dorothea Beale received a number of prestigious awards for her remarkable achievements. In 1889 in Paris, she was made Officier d'Academie; in 1890, she was elected to the Societé des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes; in 1896, Durham University made her Tutor; in 1898, she was corresponding member of the National Education Association of the United States; in 1901, she was placed on the advisory board of the University of London and given freedom of the borough of Cheltenham; in 1902, she received an honorary LL.D from Edinburgh University.

Given the contributions made by Dorothea Beale to educational reform, it is not surprising that she remained single. Career and husband were incompatible for women in 19th-century England so Beale declined her many offers of marriage. Cheltenham Ladies' College, she said, was her true spouse. When she died, aged 75, in 1906, the school was one of the most famous in England. By this time, the genteel, ill-educated governess was a thing of the past. In its place stood an academic profession in which female teachers enjoyed an enhanced social status and were ready to provide a challenging education for girls—a process begun by the indefatigable Dorothea Beale.

sources:

Bryant, Margaret. The Unexpected Revolution. London: University of London Institute of Education, 1979.

Hunt, Felicity, ed. Lessons for Life. London: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Kamm, Josephine. How Different From Us: A Biography of Miss Buss and Miss Beale. London, 1958

Raikes, Elizabeth. Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham. London: Archibald Constable, 1909.

Steadman, F. Cecily. In the Days of Miss Beale. Edited by J. Burrow. London, 1931.

Paula Bartley , University of Wolverhampton, Dudley, United Kingdom, author and joint editor of "Women in History" series, Cambridge, University Press