how was jane eyre and her friends educated?

Answer 1

Should be "how WERE". This is the sort of elementary mistake that Jane Eyre would never have made.

Answer 2

A boarding school called Lowood.

Answer 3

"Jane Eyre provides an accurate view of education in nineteenth-century England, as seen by an 1840s educator. The course of Jane's life in regard to her own education and her work in education are largely autobiographical, mirroring Charlotte Bronte's own life. Jane's time at Lowood corresponds to Charlotte's education at a school for daughters of the clergy, which she and her sisters Maria, Elizabeth and Emily left for in 1824. Jane went on to attend Miss Wooler's school at Roehead from 1831 to 1832, and returned to teach there for three years in 1935, just as Jane became a teacher at Lowood. Both Charlotte and Jane became governesses.


The Lowood School is an accurate representation of a Charity School in the 1820s . The bad health conditions follow the conditions of the school the Brontes went to. The monitorial system of teaching it operates on coincides with the systems created by Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell. Lowood's system of a master teacher, under teachers, and monitors is consistent with Bell's complicated system. In addition, the brand of discipline implemented by Mr. Brocklehurst is much like that of Lancaster. Jane's horror at the harsh punishments at Lowood are meant to prompt similar reactions in the reader. Jane at first thinks she could not bear such punishment and is mortified when she must stand on a stool and is accused of being a liar. The disciplining of Jane was completely unfounded, the result of an accident. Most of the punishments at Lowood seem to be for minor and unavoidable infractions such as having dirty nails when the wash water was frozen. Jane sees these punishments as generally just being mean, and thinks that such mean people do not deserve courtesy or to be obeyed. Jane explains to Helen Burns her view that obeying mean people encourages them to be mean"

For more, please see the first link.

"Victorian attitudes toward education differed considerably from those prevalent in modern America. For one thing, the level of one's schooling was determined by social class and also by gender. At all levels of society and in virtually all levels of the education system, boys and girls were taught separately. The children of poor or workingclass families were taught in local schools, such as the one in which Jane Eyre is a schoolmistress. Such children would rarely progress beyond learning basic skills; most learning was by rote. Most of these children would have left school by their early teen years to work on farms or in factories; boys would often leave to join the army or navy. Upperand upper-middle-class families, on the other hand, sought to enroll their sons in exclusive private schools (known paradoxically as public schools). In truth, however, conditions in these schools were often as harsh as those in schools for orphans and the poor such as Lowood Institution in Jane Eyre. But a public school education would serve as an entree into good society; the graduates of public schools staffed the higher ranks of government and the professions. Virtually all young men who went on to university (i.e., college) first attended public schools. Women were excluded from universities until the 1870s. The first women did not graduate from an English university until 1874, when four women received degrees from Cambridge University.

Young children in upper-class and upper-middle-class families — both boys and girls — would often receive their earliest education from governesses. Governesses were women who were hired to serve as live-in tutors; they provided their charges with ongoing lessons in a variety of subjects until the child was old enough to be sent away to school. For the most part these women were daughters of the middle classes and the professional classes who had attained a certain level of education. Although the profession of governess was not financially rewarding, it was respectable. Working conditions for governesses varied, depending upon the particular family for which a governess might work. Some parents treated their hired governess with respect, as a professional, while others considered governesses little more than servants who were expected to keep in their place.

In the traditional curriculum of the time, girls and young women did not study such "serious" subjects as mathematics, science, or classics. However, they were taught grammar, history, geography, and French. Art, music, and sewing or embroidery were also considered appropriate subjects, and young women were all expected to have a knowledge of the Bible and basic Christian teachings. These subjects were taught both by governesses and at school. Jane Eyre may not be a typical governess, but clearly she has an excellent command of most of these subjects. By the middle of the nineteenth century, some twenty-five thousand women in England worked as governesses."