Recent years have seen a remarkable improvement in the conditions of
child life. In all civilized countries, but especially in England,
statistics show a decrease in infant mortality.
Related to this decrease in mortality a corresponding improvement is
to be seen in the physical development of children; they are
physically finer and more vigorous. It has been the diffusion, the
popularization of science, which has brought about such notable
advantages. Mothers have learned to welcome the dictates of modern
hygiene and to put them into practice in bringing up their children.
Many new social institutions have sprung up and have been perfected
with the object of assisting children and protecting them during the
period of physical growth.
In this way what is practically a new race is coming into being, a
race more highly developed, finer and more robust; a race which will
be capable of offering resistance to insidious disease.
What has science done to effect this? Science has suggested for us
certain very simple rules by which the child has been restored as
nearly as possible to conditions of a natural life, and an order and a
guiding law have been given to the functions of the body. For example,
it is science which suggested maternal feeding, the abolition of
swaddling clothes, baths, life in the open air, exercise, simple short
clothing, quiet and plenty of sleep. Rules were also laid down for the
measurement of food adapting it rationally to the physiological needs
of the child's life.
Yet with all this, science made no contribution that was entirely new.
Mothers had always nursed their children, children had always been
clothed, they had breathed and eaten before.
The point is, that the same physical acts which, performed blindly and
without order, led to disease and death, when ordered _rationally_
were the means of giving strength and life.
* * * * *
The great progress made may perhaps deceive us into thinking that
everything possible has been done for children.
We have only to weigh the matter carefully, however, to reflect: Are
our children only those healthy little bodies which to-day are growing
and developing so vigorously under our eyes? Is their destiny
fulfilled in the production of beautiful human bodies?
In that case there would be little difference between their lot and
that of the animals which we raise that we may have good meat or
beasts of burden.
Man's destiny is evidently other than this, and the care due to the
child covers a field wider than that which is considered by physical
hygiene. The mother who has given her child his bath and sent him in
his perambulator to the park has not fulfilled the mission of the
"mother of humanity." The hen which gathers her chickens together, and
the cat which licks her kittens and lavishes on them such tender care,
differ in no wise from the human mother in the services they render.
No, the human mother if reduced to such limits devotes herself in
vain, feels that a higher aspiration has been stifled within her. She
is yet the mother of man.
Children must grow not only in the body but in the spirit, and the
mother longs to follow the mysterious spiritual journey of the
beloved one who to-morrow will be the intelligent, divine creation,
man.
Science evidently has not finished its progress. On the contrary, it
has scarcely taken the first step in advance, for it has hitherto
stopped at the welfare of the body. It must continue, however, to
advance; on the same positive lines along which it has improved the
health and saved the physical life of the children, it is bound in the
future to benefit and to reenforce their inner life, which is the real
_human life_. On the same positive lines science will proceed to
direct the development of the intelligence, of character, and of those
latent creative forces which lie hidden in the marvelous embryo of
man's spirit.
* * * * *
As the child's body must draw nourishment and oxygen from its external
environment, in order to accomplish a great physiological work, the
_work of growth_, so also the spirit must take from its environment
the nourishment which it needs to develop according to its own "laws
of growth." It cannot be denied that the phenomena of development are
a great work in themselves. The consolidation of the bones, the
growth of the whole body, the completion of the minute construction of
the brain, the formation of the teeth, all these are very real labors
of the physiological organism, as is also the transformation which the
organism undergoes during the period of puberty.
These exertions are very different from those put forth by mankind in
so-called _external work_, that is to say, in "social production,"
whether in the schools where man is taught, or in the world where, by
the activity of his intelligence, he produces wealth and transforms
his environment.
It is none the less true, however, that they are both "work." In fact,
the organism during these periods of greatest physiological work is
least capable of performing external tasks, and sometimes the work of
growth is of such extent and difficulty that the individual is
overburdened, as with an excessive strain, and for this reason alone
becomes exhausted or even dies.
Man will always be able to avoid "external work" by making use of the
labor of others, but there is no possibility of shirking that inner
work. Together with birth and death it has been imposed by nature
itself, and each man must accomplish it for himself. This difficult,
inevitable labor, this is the "work of the child."
When we say then that little children should _rest_, we are referring
to one side only of the question of work. We mean that they should
rest from that _external_ visible work to which the little child
through his weakness and incapacity cannot make any contribution
useful either to himself or to others.
Our assertion, therefore, is not absolute; the child in reality is
not resting, he is performing the mysterious inner work of his
autoformation. He is working to make a man, and to accomplish this it
is not enough that the child's body should grow in actual size; the
most intimate functions of the motor and nervous systems must also
be established and the intelligence developed.
The functions to be established by the child fall into two groups:
(1) the motor functions by which he is to secure his balance and
learn to walk, and to coordinate his movements; (2) the sensory
functions through which, receiving sensations from his environment,
he lays the foundations of his intelligence by a continual exercise
of observation, comparison and judgment. In this way he gradually
comes to be acquainted with his environment and to develop his
intelligence.
At the same time he is learning a _language_, and he is faced not only
with the motor difficulties of articulation, sounds and words, but
also with the difficulty of gaining an intelligent understanding of
names and of the syntactical composition of the language.
If we think of an emigrant who goes to a new country ignorant of its
products, ignorant of its natural appearance and social order,
entirely ignorant of its language, we realize that there is an immense
work of adaptation which he must perform before he can associate
himself with the active life of the unknown people. No one will be
able to do for him that work of adaptation. He himself must observe,
understand, remember, form judgments, and learn the new language by
laborious exercise and long experience.
What is to be said then of the child? What of this emigrant who comes
into a new world, who, weak as he is and before his organism is
completely developed, _must_ in a short time adapt himself to a world
so complex?
Up to the present day the little child has not received rational aid
in the accomplishment of this laborious task. As regards the psychical
development of the child we find ourselves in a period parallel to
that in which the physical life was left to the mercy of chance and
instinct--the period in which infant mortality was a scourge.
It is by scientific and rational means also that we must facilitate
that inner work of psychical adaptation to be accomplished within the
child, a work which is by no means the same thing as "any external
work or production whatsoever."
This is the aim which underlies my method of infant education, and it
is for this reason that certain principles which it enunciates,
together with that part which deals with the technique of their
practical application, are not of a general character, but have
special reference to the particular case of the child from three to
seven years of age, _i.e._, to the needs of a formative period of
life.
My method is scientific, both in its substance and in its aim. It
makes for the attainment of a more advanced stage of progress, in
directions no longer only material and physiological. It is an
endeavor to complete the course which hygiene has already taken, but
in the treatment of the physical side alone.
If to-day we possessed statistics respecting the nervous debility,
defects of speech, errors of perception and of reasoning, and lack of
character in normal children, it would perhaps be interesting to
compare them with statistics of the same nature, but compiled from the
study of children who have had a number of years of rational
education. In all probability we should find a striking resemblance
between such statistics and those to-day available showing the
decrease in mortality and the improvement in the physical development
of children.