A great controversy has been raging in the Standard as
to the quantity of education now given in Board Schools. Corre- spondents, usually female, report that the hours are too long, that the work to be done at home is too heavy, that payment by results induces forcing, and that the children, consequently, look sickly, puny, and careworn. The Inspectors, as a body,
deny these charges, and attribute them to the dislike of all Con- servatives and of most women to any extension of education. We have very little belief in the story of overwork, knowing the perfect protection English children derive from their armour of -stupidity, but we have a doubt sometimes about sanitation. The effect of cooping up numbers of children in London rooms in summer weather is not good, even when the children are much better fed than the children of the poor often are. It is the want of milk and meat from which sharp scholars suffer much more than from the learning, and it is very difficult even to think of the remedy. The State cannot feed all the -children, or the philanthropists either. We wish some one of -the latter, though, would try the effect of milk in some one rather -crowded school, and report thereupon, and ensure that in hot weather the tired mites should have good water to drink at will. 'There cam be no reasonable difficulty about the latter.
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