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commonly neglect and ill-treatment resulted in the child's death. From the age of two corporal punishment
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seems to have been the staple of the child's educational diet. Schoolmasters ("my system is to whip, and to
have done with it") as well as parents and tutors rarely spared the rod to spoil the child. Punishment,
corporal or otherwise, was generally severe. The time between infancy and gainful employment was
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mercilessly brief; service, apprenticeship or labour in the family began as early as seven, and all children
were put to work before they were twelve or thirteen. Children died in such numbers that they left very
little trace of their lives behind them. Even in the communities on the colonial frontier, where infant
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mortality rates were lower than in the coastal towns or back in Europe, the death of a child — your child —
was a frequent occurrence.
5.This picture of the heartless and cruel world inhabited by children needs some qualification. Nearly all
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of the evidence that appears to demonstrate parental indifference towards the child in fact shows simply that
his individuality was not strongly recognised.
We tend to assume that parental affection cannot flourish
unless children are regarded as individuals. But this is essentially a modern (and Western) assumption that
100 in part stems from our elevation of the bond between the parent (or, at least, the mother) and the individual
child above almost all other forms of attachment. The chief affective bonds of the pre-modern American
and English parent were probably to the family as a whole rather than to its individual members; this does
105 not mean that, they never showed affection to their children, only that they cared for them as a "brood".
6.The "no toy" culture, which scarcely seems to have recognised the special state of childhood, was
gradually but radically transformed between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The most
110 significant changes were the development of a new conception of man, and a parallel recognition of new
processes of human learning. Man came to be seen as a malleable and manipulable creature who entered
the world with a mind that was not printed with evil but was a tabula rasa, like a blank sheet of paper, on
115 which appropriate sense impressions could imprint knowledge and learning. Man, in other words, was
capable of moral improvement provided that he was nurtured in the right environment. This view was
accompanied by the relatively novel theory of the human psyche that emphasised man's innate tendency to
120 eschew pain and pursue pleasure. From this perspective the widespread use of brutal corporal punishment
was clearly counterproductive: by associating learning and pain it was more likely to discourage an interest
in learning than to teach or socialise. Such crude practices it was argued, should be replaced by a much
125 more subtle psychological manipulation of the child, one that used the propensity for play to make learning
stimulating and pleasurable.
7.These educational theories are traditionally associated with the English philosopher, John Locke,
130 whose «Some Thoughts Concerning Education» (1693), which went through numerous editions in several
languages and on both sides of the Atlantic. Locke was not the first philosopher to realise that play could be
used didactically, nor was his psychology unique.
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8. We should not, of course, assume that these ideas swept all before them. Their acceptance varied
from place to place and class to class. They were taken up predominantly by middle-class parents eager to
"improve" their children. But the old attitudes and practices continued: many children were still
140 whipped and flogged, and imaginative learning rarely ousted the more traditional method of rote
memorisation. Indeed, for many childnen the situation deteriorated at the end of the eighteenth century,
when evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic returned to the older view of infant depravity and renewed
the practice of wholesale flogging.
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9. Nevertheless, Lockean theory marks the growing acceptance in North America of the idea that
education was a matter of carrot rather than stick. It also heralds the genesis of the toy both as a plaything
peculiar to children and as an educational device. Locke and his eighteenth-century followers
150 were adamant that play was the key to successful learning. Both play and playthings, which had previously
been regarded either as an obstruction to learning or as matters of no didactic consequence, became crucial
155 to the educational process. As Locke remarked about playthings (in sentiments remarkably similar to those
of Froebel over 100 years later), "nothing that may form adult's minds, is to he overlooked and neglected,
and whatsoever introduces Habits, and settles Customs in them, deserves the Care and Attention of their
160 Governors, and is not a small thing in its Concequences'. Toys and games were recognised as being very
important. Indeed Locke was responsible for popularising one of the earliest "educational" toys, the so
called "Locke blocks", whose role in teaching the alphabet he lovingly describes in his «Thoughts on
Education».
165 10. Locke's theories seem remarkably modern, and certainly they approximate much more closely to
present-day views of learning than to the regime of flogging that he so vehemently opposed. Nevertheless