Joseph Priestley and Education - Personal and Institutional Teaching

Personal and Institutional Teaching

Priestley was a teacher in one way or another throughout his entire adult life. Once he discovered how much he enjoyed teaching, he consistently returned to this calling. At the school he established in Nantwich, Cheshire, he taught a wide range of topics to the town's children: Latin (and perhaps Greek), geography, mathematics, and English grammar. Unusually for the time, he also taught natural philosophy. Following the success of this school, he was offered the position of tutor of modern languages and rhetoric at Warrington Academy. In later years, when he lived in Leeds and Birmingham, he created classes for the youth of his parishes; in Birmingham his three classes totaled 150 students and he helped organize the New Meeting Sunday schools for the poor.

Having received an excellent education at Daventry, a Dissenting academy, and convinced that education was the key to shaping people and the world's future, Priestley continued to support the Dissenting academies throughout his life. For example, he advised the founders of New College at Hackney on its curriculum and preached a charity sermon on the "proper Objects of Education" to help raise money for the school. After emigrating to America in 1794, Priestley continued the educational projects that had always been important to him. He attempted to find funding for the Northumberland Academy and donated his library to it, but the academy did not open until 1813 and closed soon after. He communicated with Thomas Jefferson regarding the proper organization of a university and when Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, it was Priestley's curricular principles that dominated the school. Jefferson also passed Priestley's advice on to Bishop James Madison, whose William and Mary College also followed Priestley's maxims.

Wherever Priestley went, he also instructed people in natural philosophy. In Nantwich, he bought scientific instruments, such as a microscope, for the school, and encouraged his students to give public presentations of their experiments. In Calne, where he was a tutor to the son of Lord Shelburne, Priestley convinced his patron to buy expensive equipment with which to teach his son the fundamentals of natural philosophy. He wrote in his Miscellaneous Observations relating to Education (1778), published during these years, that children should not only be educated in the ancient subjects of rhetoric and grammar but should also become acquainted with science early in their lives since scientific understanding underpins the progress of the human race.

After Priestley moved to Birmingham in 1780, he encouraged the town's children to play with his apparatus and ask questions about his laboratory: the Priestley home became a place of scientific education for the town's children. Priestley's rain gauge and "perambulator" (a wheelbarrow for recording distances) delighted them. The boys often played with his air-gun, aiming at a wig of Priestley's which he had fastened to a post. Priestley designed magic lantern shows for them and shocked them with his electrical machine.