Perhaps they know best.
Next to the personal power of the teacher to influence children in learning lessons comes an essential condition to make it possible, and that is a simple life with quiet regular hours and unexciting pleasures.
Amid a round of amusements lessons must go to the wall, no child can stand the demands of both at a time.

All that can be asked of them is that they should live through the excitement without too much weariness or serious damage.

The place to consider this is in London at the children's hour for riding in the park, contrasting the prime condition of the ponies with the "illustrious pallor" of so many of their riders.
They have courage enough left to sit up straight in their saddles, but it would take a heart of stone to think of lesson books.

This extreme of artificial life is of course the portion of the few.

Those few, however, are very important people, influential in the future for good or evil, but a protest from a distance would not reach their schoolrooms, any more than legislation for the protection of children; they may be protected from work, but not from amusement.