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Integrating Education

Integrating Education

Bluestocking members highly valued a strong and sensible education – it was perceived as the best possible foundation for a useful and productive member of society. In order to develop well-rounded and informed vantage points, the Bluestocking members conducted literary salons as a way to engage in intellectual “conversations” with each other that would sharpen their wits. In Hannah More’s “Bas Bleu: Or, Conversation”, she explains the importance of this communication and its positive effect on those who participate:

Range--study--think do all we can
Colloquial pleasures are for man.
Yet not from low desire to shine
Does Genius toil in learning's mine;
Not to indulge in idle vision,
But strike new light by strong collision.
Of CONVERSATION, wisdom's friend,
This is the object and the end,
Of moral truth, man's proper science,
With sense and learning in alliance,
To search the depths, and thence produce
What tends to practice and to use.
And next in value we shall find
What mends the taste and forms the mind.
If high those truths in estimation,
Whose search is crown'd with demonstration;
To these assign no scanty praise,
Our taste which clear, our views which raise.
For grant that mathematic truth
Best balances the mind of Youth;
Yet scarce the truth of Taste is found
To grow from principles less sound.
O'er books the Mind inactive lies,
Books, the Mind's food, not exercise! [ln. 318-342]