The overstrain in education / by R.A. Armstrong.

  • Richard A. Armstrong
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The overstrain in education / by R.A. Armstrong. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ON entering the Dome Saloon of the New Capitoline Museum, at Rome, the visitor may see on his left- hand. side the tombstone of one Q. Sulpicius Maximus. The subject of this monument was no hero of the camp or of the Senate, but a little fellow not twelve years old whose title to fame was the defeat of fifty-two competitors in the improvisation of Greek verses. Specimens of his pretty skill are graven on the marble. But the pathetic epitaph relates that death was the price of the over-stimulation of the boyish brain. Such, so far as I know, outside China, was the first case of death from competitive examination. When will be the last? No Englishman can fail to feel some pride in the extra- ordinary advance which the last quarter-of-a-century has seen m the education of the English people. The purpose of this article is to show that that advance has not been wholly in the right direction, and that it has not been without grave drawbacks. But he would indeed be a one sided critic who should not confess that great and good things have been done. The average number of children in attendance at primary schools in Great Britain in mv? ™ 026,696 ; in 1881 it was 3,278,601. In other wordslhe™ znTimJo'”1,6 gr°Wth in was but an addition of one-third. In 1857, one in thirty-five and a-half of the population was at a primary school in 1881 one 1.1 nine Whatever else this means, it me“ns an readihu™ * 0n °f the Pnmal'y arts of civilisation— eading, writing, arithmetic; it means also a vast con .version of savagery into orderly decorum. At the same
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