Home lessons after school hours / by Sir Joseph Fayrer.

  • Joseph Fayrer
Date:
[1884]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Home lessons after school hours / by Sir Joseph Fayrer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    is no escape from the conclusion that interference is demanded, not only by parents and guardians but by the legislature itself! I am aware that this question, like others, has more than one aspect, and that high authority and earnest persons deeply interested in education have pronounced the outcry devoid of foundation, and the charge of over-pressure to be exaggerated, if not altogether untrue. It is a difficult question to decide, for there are complications and disturbing elements in dealing with it which may render it hard to furnish statistical proof of that which is still so thoroughly impressed on the minds of many, by personal observation and experi- ence, that it would be futile to deny there is substantial ground for alarm, inquiry and reform. It would be unfair, I think, to hold the teachers as altogether or solely responsible. The natural desire to extend intellectual culture, and the stimulus of competition, so severely the rage in the present day, together with imperfect know- ledge, or at all events imperfect recognition of the physio- logical bearings of the question, tend to intensify a struggle in which immature brains and bodies are striving for pre-eminence, and in which it is asserted that many suffer, and some altogether break down ! The object of this communication is to show that this over-pressure, especially in young children, is wrong in principle and hurtful in practice, and that it tends, by the injury it may inflict on the general health, rather to retard than to advance education ! Charles Kingsley, a true philanthropist and friend of children, whose keen sympathy and knowledge of their nature and their needs makes all he says about them worth reading, evidently had this subject in his thoughts when he wrote in one of his charming stories:—“ There were as pretty little children as you could wish t6 see, and might have been still if they had only been left to grow up like human beings, but their foolish fathers and mothers, instead of letting them pick flowers and make dirt pies, and get birds’ nests, and dance round the gooseberry-bush, as little
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