author
Thomas Arnold
1795–1842
Best known for transforming Rugby School, this influential English educator helped shape the ideals of nineteenth-century public-school education. He was also a historian and a prominent voice in the Broad Church movement within Anglicanism.
2 Audiobooks
The Christian Life: Its Course, Its Hindrances, and Its Helps
by Thomas Arnold
Address to the Inhabitants of Rugby about the Cholera Morbus
by Thomas Arnold
About the author
Born on June 13, 1795, on the Isle of Wight, Thomas Arnold became one of the most influential schoolmasters in Britain. He is chiefly remembered as headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, where his reforms gave the school a reputation that reached far beyond its own students.
Arnold aimed to make education a training of character as well as intellect. Accounts of his life consistently describe his emphasis on moral seriousness, religious life, and academic standards, and many later schools borrowed ideas associated with his time at Rugby. He was also an English historian and an early supporter of the Broad Church movement in the Church of England.
His influence lasted well beyond his lifetime, both through the model of schooling linked with Rugby and through his family, which included the writer and critic Matthew Arnold. He died on June 12, 1842, in Rugby, Warwickshire.