Linda A. Ryan's thoroughly researched book provides a valuable contribution to the history of children's education. Exploring John Wesley's beliefs about schooling, Ryan considers how Wesley developed a philosophy which simultaneously rejected and wove together ‘Enlightenment’ ideals about nurturing the individual with eighteenth-century English concerns centred on the moulding of children's religious characters. Ryan illustrates how Wesley incorporated John Locke's belief in the importance of religion to education, but rejected the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Wesley's focus was less on the fulfilment or happiness of each child, but rather on instilling religious values, encouraging obedience and even deference. Ryan's book makes some interesting observations relating to class and gender. She argues that, for Wesley, education was not a tool to be used for social empowerment or to help the poor escape the confines of their poverty, but instead focused rather squarely on the salvation of the soul. An especially strong chapter in the book explores the attempts of Wesley's contemporaries (Methodists alongside those of other Christian denominations) to educate pauper children through initiating the Sunday school movement. Sunday schools allowed children from poor families to receive spiritual education at weekends, enabling then to continue working during the week. The discussion here includes some touching quotations: when Gloucestershire Anglican Robert Raikes visited the houses of poor families, he observed how parents felt that their poverty ‘rendered them incapable of cleaning and clothing their children fit to appear at either school or at church’. The minister replied that all he required of the children were ‘clean faces, clean hands, and the hair combed’ (p. 150). Ryan also explores the attempts of Shropshire Quakers to establish similar schools – illustrating that such discussions did not preoccupy only Methodists. Indeed, the book sheds light on how various denominations moved together and simultaneously on issues surrounding the religious instruction of children (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quakers, Ryan argues, were often more strict and authoritarian than their Methodist counterparts). Wesley believed that the poor and the wealthy should not be educated together, leading him to establish a boarding school for ‘respectable’, wealthy boys. The book illustrates Wesley's overall emphasis on male education – he was not against female education as such, but rather chose not to reflect on it too deeply. Yet, his requirement of mothers and female teachers to educate children, both at home and school, gave women a form of religious and social authority. The book also, perhaps unwittingly, resonates with much contemporary discussion in the UK about the education of children – including, for example, concerns over the role educators should play in teaching children about sex and relationships; the establishment of free schools; the rise in the home education of children; the relationship between schools following Steiner philosophies and their links to anti-vaccination movements; and about the impact of child poverty and the role of class in shaping the capacity for attainment. Ryan's book successfully illustrates that anxieties surrounding the appropriate ways to educate children are not new, although the challenges may change. This is perhaps because, for any society attempting to guide the next generation, the emotional, social and cultural stakes will always, and inevitably, be high.