Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Health lectures for the people. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
211/220 page 201
![surmised by those who had not made observations on the subject, and that is ominous of disaster. Medical men are, and ever have been, the consistent advocates of education. None knew so well as they the hygienic value of training and development of knowledge, intellectual resources, and self-control. But what they desire is education in its larger sense and not mere schooling. Without under estimating the utility of the schoolmaster, it must be maintained that the least im- portant part of education is that which is obtained under his auspices. He cultivates a corner of human life, and makes it yield useful produce ; but its wide expanse teems with luxuriant and varied growth that he has never evoked, but that he may do much to blight and stunt. All nature.—sky, earth, flood, field, and flower—all the forces of the universe —the stars in their courses, the summer lightning, the winter's frost, the dancing atoms, the mysteries of hate and love—are ceaselessly busy in teaching the child ; and shall we allow a dull man with a ferule in his hand to take the credit of the result ] If we do, and, accepting his exaggerated notions of his own mission, permit him to encroach too largely on the domain of the primordial teachers, pinning infants to benches when they should be roaming free, stuffing them with grammar when they should be quaffing sunshine, we, or those who come after us, will bitterly repent it. We shall become an island full of round-backed, blear-eyed bookworms, poor of heart and small of soul, instead of a nation of men and women strong of limb, graceful in movement, nimble- handed, quick-sighted, clear-headed, tender, and true—a nation such as we should all wish the English to become. The penalties of educational over-pressure of every kind fall much more heavily on the children in urban than in rural districts. Their nervous systems are more unstable to begin with, and they lack the benefit of those mighty correctives— fresh air, sunlight, and freedom—which country children enjoy. But on children of all classes the rage for precocity which animates those who have the regulation of educational methods is telling more or less. The screw is applied too severely, and it is applied far too fast. It should have been remembered that the great mass of children gathered or driven into board schools have no inherited aptitude for learning, and can only crawl painfully along the path that better-born children tread lightly. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman, it takes at least half a dozen to make a scholar; and to force sickly and underfed children, handicapped by a load of inherited pathological tendencies, to keep pace with the strong, the well-nourished, the soundly constituted, is both cruel and wasteful. School boards had better rouse themselves to a sense of the true situation at once ; if they do not, they will be awakened to it by the voice of the country in somewhat peremptory and ungracious tones before long.—Medical Times,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21057655_0211.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
