Editing Maria Edgeworth (section)

===Education===
[[File:Practical Education 1798.jpg|thumb|200px|First edition title page to ''Practical Education'', 1798]]
In her 1798 book ''[[Practical Education]]'',{{sfn|Edgeworth|Lovell|1798}} she advanced a scientific approach to education, acknowledging the difficulty of doing such research which was "patiently reduced to an experimental science". She claimed no adherence to a school of thought, no new theory and purposefully avoided religion and politics. In the book's 25 chapters, she presages modern improvements to age-related educational materials, for example: in geography, maps bordered with suitable illustrated biographies; in chronology, something "besides merely committing names and dates to memory"; in chemistry, safe chemical experiments that children might undertake. She maintained that unnecessarily causing fatigue should be a great concern of educators.<ref name=Sobe /> To help illustrate the care that must be taken in teaching children and to emphasise the necessity of properly directing and managing their attentiveness, Maria Edgeworth drew several comparisons with non-European peoples.<ref name=Sobe>{{cite journal|author=Noah Sobe|title=Concentration and Civilization: Producing the Attentive Child in the Age of Enlightenment|journal=Paedagogica Historica|date=February 2010|volume=46|issue=2|pages=149–160|doi=10.1080/00309230903528520|s2cid=145231412}}</ref> In making the point that any mode of instruction that tired the attention was hurtful to children, her reasoning was that people can pay attention only to one thing at a time, and because children can appear resistant to repetition, teachers naturally should vary things.<ref name=Sobe /> However, educators should always be mindful of the fact that, "while variety relieves the mind, the objects which are varied must not all be entirely new, for novelty and variety when joined, fatigue the mind" as Edgeworth states.<ref name=Sobe /> The teaching of children needed to follow carefully considered methods, needed to evidence concern for appropriateness and proper sequencing, and needed to be guided by consideration from forms of teaching that would be empowering and enabling, not fatiguing or disabling.<ref name=Sobe /> In Edgeworth's work, the attention of the child appears as a key site for pedagogical work and interventions.<ref name=Sobe />