The Ragged School Museum is a museum in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The museum was opened in 1990, in the premises of the former Dr Barnardo's Copperfield Road Ragged School. The school opened in 1877 to serve the children of Mile End with a basic education. It closed in 1908, when the London School Boards were sufficiently established to take over the work.
The museum is housed in three canal side warehouses at 46-50 Copperfield Road. The buildings were saved from demolition in the 1980s by local residents, and a trust set up to manage the property in 1990. The museum seeks to record the establishment of the London Ragged School Union, in 1844; and to recreate the experience of how Victorian children would be taught.
The museum features a reconstructed Victorian classroom, and a typical East End kitchen from 1900. Gallery areas also introduce local and cultural history of the East End.
The buildings face Mile End Park.
Famous quotes containing the words ragged, school and/or museum:
“Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the ragged battle of fate, where strength is born.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The first rule of education for me was discipline. Discipline is the keynote to learning. Discipline has been the great factor in my life. I discipline myself to do everything—getting up in the morning, walking, dancing, exercise. If you won’t have discipline, you won’t have a nation. We can’t have permissiveness. When someone comes in and says, “Oh, your room is so quiet,” I know I’ve been successful.”
—Rose Hoffman, U.S. public school third-grade teacher. As quoted in Working, book 8, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)