Children and Education during the Industrial Revolution and the impact on our lives today.

The industrial revolution had brought upon many impactful inventions and changes that have dramatically shaped the world we live in today from the lightbulb to compulsory school for children. Many things we use in our daily activities were originally an invention from those times that may have evolved over time. With the new inventions of machinery, there was a higher demand in mines, mills, and factories as there needed to be more ‘expendable’ workers to operate the machines. Unwealthy parents were willing to do anything for money at the time, so they sent their children to work. This sparked the beginning of child labour during the Industrial Revolution.

During the 1800s the industrial revolution had spread throughout Britain. The use of steam-powered machines led to massive increases in manufacturing in factories, mills, and mines, although it was particularly common in textile factories and mills. From countryside to town, as the number of factories grew, many people from the country had started to move into cities and towns in search of jobs and higher wages due to the effects of the agricultural revolution, the wage farmers were earning started to decrease due to the inventions of farming machinery that did not require people to run, because of this, thousands of people from the farmlands moved into the cities and towns and most of them were employed to work in factories or in other labouring jobs. Many of those workers were young children trying to help support their families.

There was a high demand for workers who could fit into tight spaces that adults could not help operate the machines, children were deemed to be the best fit for the job because of their small and thin physique. Poor people at the time were in desperate need of finding work in the city and earning money to pay for basic necessities such as food, clothes, and their household bills, so many poor families sent their children as young as 5 years old to work in the dangerous factories, mills, or mines to help support their family, even orphan children were sent to work by their orphanage, they were given no pay at all. Children were only paid very little, in fact just twenty cents to the adult’s dollar, that only paid for a small ration of food, that could be taken away from their superiors for disobeying the rules or getting injured from the machinery. Sometimes their pay had consisted of a voucher from the company they worked for so the money they earned would be given back to the company anyway.

Nearly all the children working in these harsh conditions had developed respiratory diseases caused by fumes and polluted air from the steam-powered machines by the time they were 16, which led to lifelong illnesses and/or death. The children also endured many types of abuse from their superiors such as financial, physical, and verbal and most of the time it was for doing little to nothing wrong. The shifts that the children had to work in were almost 10-12 hours long and in those hours, they had to endure hours of long and back-breaking work and not to mention they were working with heavy and unprotected machines with no sort of protective equipment or safety regulations and many children had died in such horrific ways due to getting stuck in machinery or slipping and falling, this was all linked back to how sleep-deprived and how malnourished they were. If children were injured in the workplace, they would not receive compensation and be fired as they were deemed unfit to work anymore and would get replaced almost immediately.

In 1833 the government in Britain had introduced the new Factory Law in which children from ages 13 to 18 were now only allowed to work for no more than 12 hours a day and were banned from working during the night and they were to have at least 2 hours, from 2 pm to 4 pm, of school a day to improve the number of uneducated people living in Britain. Although for higher class children in the 1800s, boys and girls were going to school together although in most of their subjects they were separated as the boys would be learning more of the MESH subjects and girls would be learning how to be a “proper housewife” for their husbands in the future.

After a couple of years and many different Acts and Unions taking part in the sponsoring of improving the schools in Britain, they found their economy was working better with more educated people working on bettering the country, it also found that adults worked better in jobs if they had an education and because of this discovery they decided that to create better lives for the people in the next generation, a more constant educational system had to be invoked.

In 1880 it was the beginning of compulsory 8-hour schooling for 7 days a week for children under 10. Schooling was now being discovered as a very important part of life and nearly the entirety of the children in Britain was being educated, and the country was improving and developing in power and strength with new inventions and theories being made daily and more people were starting to understand things about the world.

In 1902 the ‘education act’ was founded and therefore creating a secondary school for children to advance their schooling careers even more. With more children being educated and a whole generation of smarter and more intellectually advanced people, society in Britain had started to improve drastically, with new architecture, infrastructure, and medicine had improved along with it and many more jobs had been created with the change.

The industrial revolution led to significant and long-lasting changes to children lives and education as we know it. The industrial revolution gave children the opportunity to move away from a life in the harsh conditioned workplace to a more secure learning environment in school in which they can be shown ways to better the economy and therefore create a better world for themselves and everyone else.

Children now have the ability to have more significantly impactful and wealthier earning jobs and careers, it is banned for children to work in any sort of factory. The industrial revolution was the beginning of the participation and level of skills we see children have today, children are now healthier and smarter and better off than when children were working in mines and factories.