Key Arguments

• Children are too exhausted to benefit from night schools
• Employers do not shorten hours to allow for schooling
• Education without reduced labor leads to physical and mental wreck

Source Quotes

‘Do they make any attempt of the kind’ (for providing instruction) ‘by having schools at night?’ ‘There are few collieries where night schools are held, and perhaps at those collieries a few boys do go to those schools; but they are so physically exhausted that it is to no purpose that they go there’ (n. 454).

‘Should you say that the colliers generally improve their education; have you any instances of men who have, since they began to work, greatly improved their education, or do they not rather go back, and lose any advantage that they may have gained?’ ‘They generally become worse; they do not improve; they acquire bad habits; they get on to drinking and gambling and such like, and they go completely to wreck’ (n. 211).

The mining workers want a law for the compulsory education of their children, as in factories. They declare that the clauses of the Act of 1860 which require a school certificate to be obtained before employing boys of 10 and 12 years of age are quite illusory. The ‘painstaking’ cross-examination conducted by the capitalist investigating magistrates on this subject is positively droll.

Key Concepts

• they are so physically exhausted that it is to no purpose that they go there
• they go completely to wreck
• They declare that the clauses of the Act of 1860 which require a school certificate to be obtained before employing boys of 10 and 12 years of age are quite illusory.

Context

Discussing the failure of the 1860 Act's education clauses in the mining districts