Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

nations’ and also, importantly for our story, as the father of modern education. Poor old Comenius, an orphan, chased out of several countries, spending years as a homeless refugee roaming Europe, was invited to England to open a new school but had to leave again when Civil War broke out, lived in caves,huts and even hollow trees, narrowly missed death on at least one occasion, had various manuscripts burned, lost one wife and two children to the plague, another wife to the stresses and strains of being constantly on the run and finally died at the age of 78 in Amsterdam in 1670.
    During his hard life he was also a prolific scientist, writer and teacher and developed what was, for the age, the radical view that the education of children could be done in a way that didn’t involve the traditional rote memorization of Latin texts followed by cold baths and a sound beating. He also firmly believed that education was the right of every child, not just the ones with the money and influence to appear to the world more clever than they really were.
    ‘Not the children of the rich or of the powerful only, but of all alike, boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and towns, villages and hamlets, should be sent to school,’ he wrote. 4
    Although a profoundly religious man, for him God in the classroom was about opening children up to the world, not closing them down, and it is for these views that he has become synonymous with a European education ideal of equality and access for all children. Having an ideal and making it work, though, are two different things and anyone with one foot in the classroom and one hand on their heart will tell you, we’re not there yet.
    From seventeenth century Europe to nineteenth century Scotland, we see the earliest attempts at providing education for children as young as two, although the main reasons seemed ostensibly to be to allow the parents to continue their work in the cotton mills of New Lanark. Here, pioneer Robert Owen established an Infant School for children from the age of two and upwards whose instruction was to be ‘whatever might be supposed useful that they could understand, and much attention was devoted to singing, dancing, and playing’. This model caught the eye of a group of Radicals and Whigs who transported the whole concept, teacher and all, to London in 1818. Here the concept was further developed by an English educational pioneer by the name of Samuel Wilderspin whom we met briefly in chapter 15 and who, in his book,
The Infant System for Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, from One to Seven years of Age,
noted that until that point:
    Schools for infants then existed, but what were they? Simply dame-schools, with the hornbook for boys and girls, and perhaps a little sewing for the latter. Their sign was ‘Children taught to read and work here’, and their furniture the cap and bells, the rod in pickle, and a corner for dunces.
    ( www.gutenberg.org/files/10985/10985–8.txt )
    Wilderspin put forward the idea that children would achieve ‘a higher state of physical, mental, and moral health’ if infant education followed four clear rules:
    First, to feed the child’s faculties with suitable food; Second, to simplify and explain everything, so as to adapt it properly to those faculties; Third, not to overdo anything, either by giving too much instruction, or instruction beyond their years, and thus over-excite the brain, and injure the faculties; and, Fourth, ever to blend both exercise and amusement with instruction at due intervals, which is readily effected by a moderate amount of singing, alternating with the usual motions and evolutions in the schoolroom, and the unfettered freedom of the play-ground.
    ( www.gutenberg.org/files/10985/10985–8.txt )
    In fact, he is credited with the invention of the playground (and, showing a certain entrepreneurial bent, also ran a company providing play apparatus). Play was a cornerstone of his educational philosophy and he firmly believed that, ‘Physical health is essential to mental vigour if it is to come to manhood.’
    There was also a social aspect to his ideals, addressing a feeling of the time that a life of crime and malice was something that would be instilled in young children unless education did something to prevent it:
    If the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual constitution be properly acted upon, fed, and trained, it adds to the happiness of