On the overworking of young children, by Henry Calloway
An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this essay, published in a magazine in 1883, a doctor gives his views on the education of young children in wealthy families.
There has lately grown up among the comfortable classes a fashion which I cannot regard without alarm. It is the fashion for the clever child. A mother who would blush to be seen with an ill-dressed son will boast at her own table that he reads Latin at six, and a father who would not dream of putting a colt to the plough before its bones were set will sit his little daughter at a desk for six hours a day and call it a kindness.
I speak as a physician, and I speak of what I have seen. In the last twelve months I have been called to nine children under the age of eleven whose sole complaint, when every other cause was set aside, was overwork. They were pale, they slept badly, they started at a sudden noise. One boy of eight, the son of a clergyman, could recite the kings of Judah in order but could not climb a stile, and had wept, his mother told me with some pride, because he had come second in a spelling examination. I prescribed for him what I prescribe for all of them: no books for three months, a garden, and a dog.
It will be said that I would have children grow up in ignorance. I would not. I hold that reading, writing and the simple rules of arithmetic are the right of every child in the land, and I have nothing but praise for the new schools that are bringing them to the poor. Nor do I deny that some children have a natural appetite for learning which it would be cruel to starve. But an appetite is not improved by forcing food upon it, and it is the forcing that I condemn.
What, then, should a child of six be doing? He should be out of doors for the greater part of the day. He should be digging, and building, and getting wet. He should be learning the names of birds from the birds, and not from a book. He should be bored now and then, for boredom is the mother of invention. He should be asking questions to which his elders do not know the answers, and finding the answers himself.
I am aware that this advice will be received in many households as the eccentricity of an old man who has no children of his own. That I have none is true. But I have been a child, and I remember it; and I have sat at the bedsides of many children since, and I do not remember a single one who was the worse for having played too much.
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.