Labour and childhood / by Margaret McMillan.

  • McMillan, Margaret, 1860-1931.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Labour and childhood / by Margaret McMillan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    builders, sailors, carpenters, weavers, miners, foresters, iron-smelters, engineers, IS education. A strange sleep, an absence of mind, comes to even the brightest looking people who have never at any period of their lives engaged in it. Their intellectual life is strangely barren. And no wonder ! For in common work humanity was evolved, and purely as the result of such work the human brain was developed, and furnished with new chambers! How then can we say that those who still engage in it are the un¬ educated. Ignorant some of them may be, and degraded even by the later forms of toil; but they are still near the source of education, since they have never ceased to work for the necessaries of life. The schools, then, are not alien places to them— that is to say if the education given there is worth anything. For in its earlier stages education should recall earlier forms of work. But when the stage of later forms is reached the children should not be with¬ drawn hastily as they are withdrawn to-day. They should be allowed fearlessly and eagerly to follow the path of human progress. That is to say, they should be allowed to grow up. They must become masters of the new tools, or be mastered by them. There is no other alternative. Until this is done there can be no lasting social