Rebecca Harding Davis - Education

Education

During the earlier part Davis' childhood, public schools in her hometown were not yet available. Her education was mainly undertaken by her mother, with occasional instruction from tutors. While being home-schooled, Rebecca read such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, sisters Anna and Susan Warner, and Maria Cummins, which initiated her interest in literature. When Davis was fourteen, she was sent to Washington, Pennsylvania to live with her mother's sister, and attend the Washington Female Seminary. She graduated as class valedictorian in 1848, at the age of seventeen. Rebecca described the school as "enough math to do accounts, enough astronomy to point out constellations, a little music and drawing, and French, history, literature at discretion". After returning to Wheeling, she joined the staff of the local newspaper, the Intelligencer, submitting reviews, stories, poems, and editorials, and also serving briefly as an editor in 1859.

Read more about this topic:  Rebecca Harding Davis

Famous quotes containing the word education:

    “I think the most important education that we have is the education which now I am glad to say is being accepted as the proper one, and one which ought to be widely diffused, that industrial, vocational education which puts young men and women in a position from which they can by their own efforts work themselves to independence.”
    —William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

    “What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)