IN WHICH CENTURY WERE CHILDREN HAPPIEST?

Otago Witness, Issue 2984, 24 May 1911, Page 82

IN WHICH CENTURY WERE CHILDREN HAPPIEST?

By Constance Clyde

It is usual to trace woman's ascent or descent through the generations till each century or group of centuries has a character of its own with respect to its treatment of women. It is not so usual, however, to regard the child from this standpoint. For most of us there exists a hazy idea that children were rather harshly treated up till the last generation, alter which they came into their kingdom. It is not realised, however, that tliey had an earlier kingdom, and that we might place this in, the seventh century.- Old chronicles show the child much happier, in this period than during some that followed. Tne reason of this is plain. No king has ever lest a throne ox statesman established a republic without making a child's lessons either easier cr harder for it in consequence. The Norman Conquest, for instance, oppressed the schoolboy for a hundred years, the little Saxon having to acquire one foreign tongue, NormanFrench, from which to learn another, Latin. It is alleged again that the Wars of the Roses we-e partly responsible for the new severity of discipline towards the rising generation, because the first had felt its own lack of proper education in the disorganised times. The French Revolution again affected the schoolroom, introducing the cult of Reason, vide the "Tales" of Maria Edgeworth, by which a child learnt to avoid trouble, paradoxically speaking, by being allowed to fall into it. The fads and futilities from which the modern child suffers may often be traced to some old battlefield, .either on the physical or mental plane. Iu the seventh century, however, such contests were not in the national memory. Just ahead were the incursions of the Danes, with their disastrous effects on home life and education, but as yet the land was peaceful. Education then had a simplicity strangely unlike the stern classicalism, the concentration on the abstract demanded in later days. It is because of this simplicity, perhaps, that many have the idea of this age as lacking in education; but old chronicles tell & very different tale. In the early mediaeval schoolroom was practised a method of teaching which we have rediscovered only within the last century. "The aim was not to deaden a child's mind with a mass of information, but to rouse his curiosity. Nature was studied, also geography. Certain maps drawn in earlier times showed fewer inaccuracies and fabulous countries than those drawn in some later periods. The belief in education as a draining out rather than as a putting in was as common then as now, only perhaps better practised. As one slight instance, riddles banished in later puritanic times even from the nursery, then held an honoured place in the schoolroom. Drolleries and catches of this sort were held to. sharpen a child's wits, and learned men of the time arranged the riddle bocks—'for books, though necessarily in manuscript, were not quite so uncommon as is generally imagined. One notices great anxiety that a child should be "apt" at reply, and "witty in discourse." Nevertheless., as he must not speak before elders till spoken .to, the seventh century would not likely produce any counterpart to the spoilt American child of to-day. The early middle ages seem to have kept the happy mean between forwardness and backwardness

To flo<r a child for stupidity was almost an article of faith in later tiroes. The Verney parent who thrashed her child for shyness, and the mother of Erasmus's time who thrashed her little girl aged six because she dad not behave like a lady of fashion, represented the real sentiment of the time. A child could reason and behave like an adult if it simply chose to do so! While thrashing was not unknown in earlier times, one notices the frequent exhortations of the monk teachers that it be kept purely for moral delinquencies, and even then only after the child has been exhorted. The teachers of those days were never represented with the tutorial rod, as in later ages, but we read of them with nuts and figs before them as reward's for well-said lessons. The teacher seems to have had a strong desire to win the affection of the children, and we read a pretty story of a little boy, who pleased his tutor very much by desiring: to have breakfast with him. In the "Babies' Book," published later, children ■ are exhorted to be cheerful "especiallv on holy days." What we know of the home life of the early mediaeval child seems to show us that the eighteenth and nineteenth century ideals of hardening a child in any special way were unknown. .There was no Locke to propose compulsory sitting in wet feet, no Cobbett to advise a newborn infant's initiation into gustatory joys bv way of a strip of half-raw meat given him to suck. On the ■ contrary, the treatises of the times which serve as health pamphlets advocated gentle treatment. Traced back to this period again wzs the go-cart. a.n arrangement in which the early Enerlish child learnt to walk without stumbling; another home invention was the black pudding cloth, a piece of wadded material which was bound round his head to soften the blow if he fell. In the eighteenth century he would have been allowed to fall for the cultivation of his reason, and in the seventeenth for the saving of bis soul!