Home Education
=‘Home Education’ Series=
By CHARLOTTE M. MASON
_Each Volume_ =3=_s._ =6=_d._ _net_
I. HOME EDUCATION.
II. PARENTS AND CHILDREN.
III. SCHOOL EDUCATION.
IV. “OURSELVES, OUR SOULS AND BODIES.”
This volume is also published in two parts,
=2s.= net each part.
V. SOME STUDIES IN THE FORMATION OF CHARACTER.
-----
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER, & CO., LTD.
DRYDEN HOUSE
43 GERRARD STREET, LONDON, W.
=‘Home Education’ Series=
VOLUME I.
Home Education
By
Charlotte M. Mason
_FIFTH EDITION_ (_Revised and Enlarged_)
(_Eighth and Ninth Thousand_)
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER, & CO., LTD.
DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W.
1906
_The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved_
The Education of Children under
Nine Years of Age
[Illustration: colophon]
“O maraviglia! ché qual egli scelse
l’umile pianta, cotal si rinacque
Subitamente là onde la svelse.”
We read in the _Purgatorio_, Canto I., how Virgil was directed to
prepare Dante for his difficult ascent:
“Va dunque, e fa che tu costui ricinghe
d’un giunco schietto, e che gli lavi il viso
sì che ogni sucidume quindi stinghe:
* * * * *
Questa isoletta intorno ad imo ad imo,
laggiù, colà dove la batte l’onda,
porta de’ giunchi sopra il molle limo.
Null’altra pianta, che facesse fronda
o indurasse, vi puote aver vita,
però che alle percosse non seconda.
* * * * *
Venimmo poi in sul lito diserto,
* * * * *
Quivi mi cinse sì come altrui piacque:
o maraviglia! ché qual egli scelse
l’umile pianta, cotal si rinacque
Subitamente là onde la svelse.”
“Go, then, and see thou gird this one about
With a smooth rush, and that thou wash his face,
So that thou cleanse away all stain therefrom.
* * * * *
This little island round about its base,
Below there, yonder where the billow beats it,
Doth rushes bear upon its washy ooze;
No other plant that putteth forth the leaf,
Or that doth indurate, can there have life,
Because it yieldeth not unto the shocks.
* * * * *
Then came we down upon the desert shore.
* * * * *
There he begirt me as the other pleased;
O marvellous! for even as he culled
The humble plant, such it sprang up again
Suddenly there where he uprooted it.”
(LONGFELLOW’S TRANSLATION.)
Preface to the ‘Home Education’
Series
The educational outlook is rather misty and depressing both at home and
abroad. That science should be a staple of education, that the teaching
of Latin, of modern languages, of mathematics, must be reformed, that
nature and handicrafts should be pressed into service for the training
of the eye and hand, that boys and girls must learn to write English
and therefore must know something of history and literature; and,
on the other hand, that education must be made more technical and
utilitarian--these, and such as these, are the cries of expedience
with which we take the field. But we have no unifying principle, no
definite aim; in fact, no philosophy of education. As a stream can rise
no higher than its source, so it is probable that no educational effort
can rise above the whole scheme of thought which gives it birth; and
perhaps this is the reason of all the ‘fallings from us, vanishings,’
failures, and disappointments which mark our educational records.
Those of us, who have spent many years in pursuing the benign and
elusive vision of Education, perceive that her approaches are
regulated by a law, and that this law has yet to be evoked. We can
discern its outlines, but no more. We know that it is pervasive;
there is no part of a child’s home-life or school-work which the law
does not penetrate. It is illuminating, too, showing the value, or
lack of value, of a thousand systems and expedients. It is not only
a light, but a measure, providing a standard whereby all things,
small and great, belonging to educational work must be tested. The
law is liberal, taking in whatsoever things are true, honest, and
of good report, and offering no limitation or hindrance save where
excess should injure. And the path indicated by the law is continuous
and progressive, with no transition stage from the cradle to the
grave, except that maturity takes up the regular self-direction to
which immaturity has been trained. We shall doubtless find, when
we apprehend the law, that certain German thinkers--Kant, Herbart,
Lotze, Froebel--are justified; that, as they say, it is ‘necessary’ to
believe in God; that, therefore, the knowledge of God is the principal
knowledge, and the chief end of education. By one more character shall
we be able to recognise this perfect law of educational liberty when it
shall be made evident. It has been said that ‘The best idea which we
can form of absolute truth is that it is able to meet every condition
by which it can be tested.’ This we shall expect of our law--that
it shall meet every test of experiment and every test of rational
investigation.
Not having received the tables of our law, we fall back upon Froebel
or upon Herbart; or, if we belong to another School, upon Locke or
Spencer; but we are not satisfied. A discontent, is it a divine
discontent? is upon us; and assuredly we should hail a workable,
effectual philosophy of education as a deliverance from much
perplexity. Before this great deliverance comes to us it is probable
that many tentative efforts will be put forth, having more or less of
the characters of a philosophy; notably, having a central idea, a body
of thought with various members working in vital harmony.
Such a theory of education, which need not be careful to call itself
a system of psychology, must be in harmony with the thought movements
of the age; must regard education, not as a shut-off compartment, but
as being as much a part of life as birth or growth, marriage or work;
and it must leave the pupil attached to the world at many points of
contact. It is true that educationalists are already eager to establish
such contact in several directions, but their efforts rest upon an
axiom here and an idea there, and there is no broad unifying basis of
thought to support the whole.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; and the hope that there may
be many tentative efforts towards a philosophy of education, and that
all of them will bring us nearer to the _magnum opus_, encourages
me to launch one such attempt. The central thought, or rather body
of thought, upon which I found, is the somewhat obvious fact that
the child is a _person_ with all the possibilities and powers
included in personality. Some of the members which develop from this
nucleus have been exploited from time to time by educational thinkers,
and exist vaguely in the general common sense, a notion here, another
there. One thesis, which is, perhaps, new, that _Education is the
Science of Relations_, appears to me to solve the question of a
curriculum, as showing that the object of education is to put a child
in living touch with as much as may be of the life of Nature and
of thought. Add to this one or two keys to self-knowledge, and the
educated youth goes forth with some idea of self-management, with some
pursuits, and many vital interests. My excuse for venturing to offer a
solution, however tentative and passing, to the problem of education
is twofold. For between thirty and forty years I have laboured without
pause to establish a working and philosophic theory of education; and
in the next place, each article of the educational faith I offer has
been arrived at by inductive processes; and has, I think, been verified
by a long and wide series of experiments. It is, however, with sincere
diffidence that I venture to offer the results of this long labour;
because I know that in this field there are many labourers far more
able and expert than I--the ‘angels’ who fear to tread, so precarious
is the footing!
But, if only _pour encourager les autres_, I append a short
synopsis of the educational theory advanced in the volumes of the
‘Home Education Series.’ The treatment is not methodic, but incidental;
here a little, there a little, as seemed to me most likely to meet the
occasions of parents and teachers. I should add that in the course of
a number of years the various essays have been prepared for the use
of the Parents’ Educational Union in the hope that that Society might
witness for a more or less coherent body of educational thought.
“The consequence of truth is great; therefore the judgment
of it must not be negligent.”
WHICHCOTE.
1. Children are born _persons_.
2. They are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for
good and evil.
3. The principles of authority on the one hand and obedience on the
other, are natural, necessary and fundamental; but--
4. These principles are limited by the respect due to the personality
of children, which must not be encroached upon, whether by fear or
love, suggestion or influence, or undue play upon any one natural
desire.
5. Therefore we are limited to three educational instruments--the
atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the
presentation of living ideas.
6. By the saying, EDUCATION IS AN ATMOSPHERE, it is not meant that a
child should be isolated in what may be called a ‘child environment,’
especially adapted and prepared; but that we should take into account
the educational value of his natural home atmosphere, both as regards
persons and things, and should let him live freely among his proper
conditions. It stultifies a child to bring down his world to the
‘child’s’ level.
7. By EDUCATION IS A DISCIPLINE, is meant the discipline of habits
formed definitely and thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or body.
Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structure to habitual
lines of thought--_i.e._, to our habits.
8. In the saying that EDUCATION IS A LIFE, the need of intellectual
and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds
on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.
9. But the mind is not a receptacle into which ideas must be dropped,
each idea adding to an ‘apperception mass’ of its like, the theory
upon which the Herbartian doctrine of interest rests.
10. On the contrary, a child’s mind is no mere _sac_ to hold ideas;
but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual _organism_,
with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with
which it is prepared to deal, and which it can digest and assimilate
as the body does foodstuffs.
11. This difference is not a verbal quibble. The Herbartian doctrine
lays the stress of education--the preparation of knowledge in enticing
morsels, presented in due order--upon the teacher. Children taught
upon this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with
little knowledge; and the teacher’s axiom is, ‘What a child learns
matters less than how he learns it.’
12. But, believing that the normal child has powers of mind that fit
him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, we must give him a full
and generous curriculum; taking care, only, that the knowledge offered
to him is vital--that is, that facts are not presented without their
informing ideas. Out of this conception comes the principle that,--
13. EDUCATION IS THE SCIENCE OF RELATIONS; that is, that a child has
natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we
must train him upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science
and art, and upon _many living_ books; for we know that our business
is, not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid
as many as may be of--
‘Those first-born affinities
That fit our new existence to existing things.’
14. There are also two secrets of moral and intellectual
self-management which should be offered to children; these we may call
the Way of the Will and the Way of the Reason.
15. _The Way of the Will._--Children should be taught--
(_a_) To distinguish between ‘I want’ and ‘I will.’
(_b_) That the way to will effectively is to turn our
thoughts from that which we desire but do not will.
(_c_) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think
of or do some quite different thing, entertaining or
interesting.
(_d_) That, after a little rest in this way, the will
returns to its work with new vigour.
(This adjunct of the will is familiar to us as _diversion_,
whose office it is to ease us for a time from will effort,
that we may ‘will’ again with added power. The use of
suggestion--even self-suggestion--as an aid to the will,
is to be deprecated, as tending to stultify and stereotype
character. It would seem that spontaneity is a condition of
development, and that human nature needs the discipline of
failure as well as of success.)
16. _The Way of the Reason._--We should teach children, too, not to
‘lean’ (too confidently) ‘unto their own understanding,’ because the
function of reason is, to give logical demonstration (_a_) of
mathematical truth; and (_b_) of an initial idea, accepted by the
will. In the former case reason is, perhaps, an infallible guide, but
in the second it is not always a safe one; for whether that initial
idea be right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable proofs.
17. Therefore children should be taught, as they become mature enough
to understand such teaching, that the chief responsibility which rests
on them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of initial ideas. To
help them in this choice we should give them principles of conduct and
a wide range of the knowledge fitted for them.
These three principles (15, 16 and 17) should save children from some
of the loose thinking and heedless action which cause most of us to
live at a lower level than we need.
18. We should allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual
and ‘spiritual’ life of children; but should teach them that the
divine Spirit has constant access to their spirits, and is their
continual helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life.
* * * * *
_The ‘Home Education’ Series is so called from the title of the
first volume, and not as dealing, wholly or principally, with ‘Home’
as opposed to ‘School’ education._
Preface to the Fourth Edition
My attempt in the following volume is to suggest to parents and
teachers _a method of education resting upon a basis of natural
law_; and to touch, in this connection, upon a mother’s duties to
her children. In venturing to speak on this latter subject, I do so
with the sincerest deference to mothers, believing that, in the words
of a wise teacher of men, “the woman receives from the Spirit of God
Himself the intuitions into the child’s character, the capacity of
appreciating its strength and its weakness, the faculty of calling
forth the one and sustaining the other, in which lies the mystery of
education, apart from which all its rules and measures are utterly
vain and ineffectual.”[1] But just in proportion as a mother has this
peculiar insight as regards her own children, she will, I think,
feel her need of a knowledge of the general principles of education,
founded upon the nature and the needs of all children. And this
knowledge of the _science of education_, not the best of mothers
will get from above, seeing that we do not often receive as a gift
that which we have the means of getting by our own efforts.
I venture to hope that teachers of young children, also, may find
this volume of use. The period of a child’s life between his sixth and
his ninth year should be used to lay the basis of a liberal education,
and of the _habit_ of reading for instruction. During these years
the child should enter upon the domain of knowledge, in a good many
directions, in a reposeful, _consecutive_ way, which is not to be
attained through the somewhat exciting medium of oral lessons. I hope
that teachers may find the approach (from a new standpoint), to the
hackneyed “subjects of instruction” proper for little children at any
rate interesting and stimulating; and possibly the methods which this
fresh standpoint indicates may prove suggestive and helpful.
The particular object of this volume, as a member of the ‘Home
Education’ Series, is to show the bearing of the physiology of habit
upon education; why certain physical, intellectual, and moral habits
are a valuable asset to a child, and what may be done towards the
formation of such habits. I beg to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr
Carpenter’s _Mental Physiology_ for valuable teaching on the
subject of habits contained in some two or three chapters of that
work. Also, I would renew my grateful thanks to those medical friends
who have given careful and able revision to such parts of the work as
rest on a physiological basis.
I should add that some twenty years ago (1885) the greater part of
this volume was delivered as ‘Lectures to Ladies,’ in which form
the papers were originally published (1886) under the title which
is still retained. Lectures VII. and VIII. and the Appendix of the
original volume have been transferred from this to other volumes of
the Series. The whole has been very carefully revised, and much new
matter introduced, especially in Part V., ‘Lessons as Instruments of
Education,’ which now offers a fairly complete introduction to methods
of teaching subjects fit for children between the ages of six and nine.
The rest of the volume attempts to deal with the whole of education
from infancy until the ninth year of life.
C. M. MASON.
SCALE HOW, AMBLESIDE,
1905.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Rev. F. D. Maurice.
Contents
PART I
SOME PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
PAGE
Children are public trusts--Mothers owe ‘a thinking love’
to their children--The training of children ‘dreadfully
defective’--How parents usually proceed 1
I. A METHOD OF EDUCATION
Traditional methods of education--Method a way to an end--A
system easier than a method 6
II. THE CHILD’S ESTATE
The child in the midst--Code of education in the Gospels 11
III. OFFENDING THE CHILDREN
Children are born law-abiding--They must perceive that their
governors are law-compelled--Parents may offend their
children by disregarding the laws of health--And of the
intellectual life--And of the moral life 13
IV. DESPISING THE CHILDREN
Children should have the best of their mothers--Nurse--
Children’s faults are serious 17
V. HINDERING THE CHILDREN
A child’s relationship with Almighty God--Nursery theology 19
VI. CONDITIONS OF HEALTHY BRAIN-ACTIVITY
All mind-labour means wear of brain--Exercise--Rest--Rest
after meals--Change of occupation--Nourishment--Certain
causes affect the quality of the blood--Concerning meals--Talk
at meals--Variety in meals--Air as important as
food--‘The children walk every day’--Oxygen has its
limitations--Unchanged air--‘I feed Alice on beef tea’--
Wordsworth’s _Lucy_--Indoor airings--Ventilation--Night
air wholesome--Sunshine--Free perspiration--Insensible
perspiration--Daily bath and porous garments 20
VII. ‘THE REIGN OF LAW’ IN EDUCATION
Common sense and good intentions--Law-abiding lives often
more blameless than pious lives--‘Mind’ and ‘matter’
equally governed by law--Antagonism to law shown by
some religious persons--Parents must acquaint themselves
with the principles of physiology and moral science 37
PART II
OUT-OF-DOOR LIFE FOR THE CHILDREN
I. GROWING TIME
Meals out of doors--For dwellers in towns and suburbs--
Possibilities of a day in the open--No story-books 42
II. ‘SIGHT-SEEING’
How to see--Educational uses of ‘sight-seeing’--Discriminating
observation 45
III. ‘PICTURE-PAINTING’
Method of--Strain on the attention--Seeing _fully and in detail_
--A means of after solace and refreshment 48
IV. FLOWERS AND TREES
Children should know field crops--Field flowers and the life-
history of common plants--The study of trees--The seasons
should be followed--Leigh Hunt on flowers--Calendars--Nature
diaries 51
V. ‘LIVING CREATURES’
A field of interest and delight--Children should be encouraged
to _watch_--The force of public opinion in the home--What
town children can do--Nature knowledge the most important
knowledge for young children--Mental training of
a child naturalist--Nature work especially valuable for girls 56
VI. FIELD-LORE AND NATURALISTS’ BOOKS
Reverence for life--Rough classification at first hand--Uses of
‘Naturalists’ books--Mothers and teachers should know
about Nature 62
VII. THE CHILD GETS KNOWLEDGE BY MEANS OF HIS SENSES
Nature’s teaching--Over-pressure--Object-lessons--A child learns
from _things_--The sense of beauty comes from early contact
with Nature--Most grown men lose the habit of observation 65
VIII. THE CHILD SHOULD BE MADE FAMILIAR WITH NATURAL OBJECTS
An ‘observant child’ should be put in the way of things worth
observing--Every natural object a member of a series--Power
will pass more and more into the hands of scientific
men--Intimacy with Nature makes for personal well-being 69
IX. OUT-OF-DOOR GEOGRAPHY
Small things may teach great--Pictorial geography--The
position of the sun--Clouds, rain, snow, and hail--Distance--
Direction--East and west--Practice in finding direction--
Compass drill--Boundaries--Plans--Local geography 72
X. THE CHILD AND MOTHER NATURE
The mother must refrain from too much talk--Making a new
acquaintance--Two things permissible to the mother 78
XI. OUT-OF-DOOR GAMES
The French lesson--Noisy games--_Rondes_--Skipping-rope and
shuttlecock--Climbing--Clothing 80
XII. WALKS IN BAD WEATHER
Winter walks as necessary as summer walks--Pleasures connected
with frost and snow--Winter observations--Habit of
attention--Wet weather tramps--Outer garments for--
Precautions 85
XIII. ‘RED INDIAN’ LIFE
Scouting--‘Bird-stalking’ 88
XIV. THE CHILDREN REQUIRE COUNTRY AIR
The essential proportion of oxygen--Excess of carbonic acid
gas--Unvitiated, unimpoverished air--Solar light--A physical
ideal for a child 92
PART III
‘HABIT IS TEN NATURES’
I. EDUCATION BASED UPON NATURAL LAW
A healthy brain--Out-of-door life--Habit, the instrument by
which parents work 96
II. CHILDREN HAVE NO SELF-COMPELLING POWER
An educational _cul-de-sac_--Love, law, and religion as
educational forces--Why children are incapable of steady
effort--Young children should be saved the labour of decision 98
III. WHAT IS ‘NATURE’?
All persons born with the same primary desires--And affections--
Content of the most elemental notion of human nature--Nature
_plus_ heredity--_plus_ physical conditions--Human
nature the sum of certain attributes--The child must not be
left to his human nature--Problem before the educator--Divine
grace works on the lines of human effort--The trust
of parents must not be supine 100
IV. HABIT MAY SUPPLANT ‘NATURE’
Habit runs on the lines of Nature--But habit may be a lever--A
mother forms her children’s habits involuntarily--Habit
forces Nature into new channels--Parents and teachers
must lay down lines of habit 105
V. THE LAYING DOWN OF LINES OF HABIT
‘Begin it, and the thing will be completed’--Direction of lines
of habit--We think as we are accustomed to think--Habit
and free-will--Habit rules ninety-nine in a hundred of our
thoughts and acts--Habit powerful even where the will
decides 107
VI. THE PHYSIOLOGY OF HABIT
Growing tissues form themselves to modes of action--Therefore
children should learn dancing, swimming, etc., at an early
age--Moral and mental habits make their mark upon
physical tissues--Persistent trains of thought--Incessant
regeneration of brain tissue--Artificial reflex actions may
be acquired--Intellectual and moral education--Character
affected by modification of brain tissue--Outside influence 111
VII. THE FORMING OF A HABIT--‘SHUT THE DOOR AFTER YOU’
‘Do ye next thinge’--Habit a delight in itself--Tact,
watchfulness, and persistence--Stages in the formation of
a habit--The dangerous stage 119
VIII. INFANT ‘HABITS’
Some branches of infant education--A sensitive nose--The baby
is ubiquitous--Personal cleanliness as an early habit--Modesty
and purity--The habit of obedience and the sense of honour--
Order essential--The child of two should put away his
playthings--Neatness akin to order--Regularity--Habits
of time and place 124
IX. PHYSICAL EXERCISES
Importance of daily--Drill in good manners--Training of the
ear and voice--The habit of music--Let children alone 132
PART IV
SOME HABITS OF MIND--SOME MORAL HABITS
A science of education--Education in habit favours an easy
life--Training in habits becomes a habit--Habits inspired by
the home atmosphere 135
I. THE HABIT OF ATTENTION
A mind at the mercy of associations--Wandering attention--The
habit of attention to be cultivated in the infant--Attention
to _things_, words a weariness--Lessons attractive--Time-table,
definite work in a given time--A natural reward--Emulation--
Affection as a motive--Attractiveness of knowledge--What is
attention?--Self-compelled attention--The secret of over-
pressure--The schoolboy’s home-work--Wholesome home treatment
for ‘mooning’--Rewards and punishments should be relative
consequences of conduct--Natural and educative consequences 137
II. THE HABITS OF APPLICATION, ETC.
Rapid mental effort--Zeal must be stimulated 149
III. THE HABIT OF THINKING
‘A lion’--Operations included in thinking 150
IV. THE HABIT OF IMAGINING
The sense of the incongruous--Commonplace tales; tales of
imagination--Imagination and great conceptions--Imagination
grows--Thinking comes by practice 151
V. THE HABIT OF REMEMBERING
Remembering and recollecting--A ‘spurious’ memory--Memory,
a record in the brain substance--Made under what conditions--
Recollection and the law of association--Every lesson must
recall the last--No limit to the recording power of the
brain--But links of association a condition of recollection 154
VI. THE HABIT OF PERFECT EXECUTION
The habit of turning out imperfect work--A child should
execute perfectly 159
VII. SOME MORAL HABITS
Obedience--The whole duty of a child--Obedience no accidental
duty--Children must have the desire to obey--Expect
obedience--Law ensures liberty 160
VIII. TRUTHFULNESS, ETC.
Three causes of lying--All vicious--Only one kind visited on
children--Accuracy of statement--Exaggeration and ludicrous
embellishments--Reverence--Temper born in a child--Not
temper but tendency--Parents must correct tendency
by new habit of temper--Change the child’s thoughts 164
PART V
LESSONS AS INSTRUMENTS OF EDUCATION
I. THE MATTER AND METHOD OF LESSONS
Parents must reflect on the subject-matter of instruction--Home
the best growing ground for young children--Three
questions for the mother--Children learn, to grow--Doctoring
of the material of knowledge--Children learn, to get ideas--
Ideas grow and produce after their kind--Scott and Stephenson
worked with ideas--Value of dominant ideas--Lessons must
furnish ideas--Children learn, to get knowledge--Diluted
knowledge--Dr Arnold’s knowledge as a child--Literature proper
for children--Four tests which should be applied to children’s
lessons--_Résumé_ of six points just considered 169
II. THE KINDERGARTEN AS A PLACE OF EDUCATION
The mother the best _Kindergärtnerin_--The nursery need not
therefore be a kindergarten--Field of knowledge too
circumscribed--Training of a just eye and faithful hand--
‘Sweetness and light’ in the kindergarten 178
III. FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS OF THE KINDERGARTEN
The childhood of Tolstoi--_The Story of a Child_--What we owe
to Froebel--Requirements of a person--Nature as an educator--
Danger of undervaluing children’s intelligence--We all like
to be humoured--Teachers mediate too much--Danger of personal
magnetism--‘Kindergarten’ a false analogy--‘Mother-games’
too strenuous for a child--The society of his equals too
stimulating for a child--Danger of supplanting Nature--
Importance of personal initiative--Parents and teachers must
sow opportunities--‘Only’ children--The child should be
allowed some ordering of his life--_Helen Keller_--Miss
Sullivan on systems of education--The kindergarten in the
United States--Mr Thistleton Mark on the kindergarten--
Dr Stanley Hall on the kindergarten 182
IV. READING
Time of teaching to read--Mrs Wesley’s plan--The alphabet--
Word-making--Word-making with long vowels, etc.--Early
spelling--Reading at sight--The reading of prose--Careful
pronunciation--A year’s work--Ordinary method 199
V. THE FIRST READING LESSON
(Two mothers confer) 207
VI. READING BY SIGHT AND BY SOUND
Learning to read is hard work--Knowledge of arbitrary
symbols--These symbols should be interesting--Tommy’s
first lesson--Steps--Reading sentences--Tommy’s second
lesson--Unknown words--Like combinations have different
sounds--Moral training in reading lessons 214
VII. RECITATION
‘The children’s art’--Memorising 222
VIII. READING FOR OLDER CHILDREN
The habit of reading--Reading aloud--Limitation--Reading
to children--Questions on the subject-matter--Lesson-books--
Slipshod habits; Inattention--Careless enunciation 226
IX. THE ART OF NARRATING
Children narrate by nature--This power should be used in
their education--Method of lesson 231
X. WRITING
Perfect accomplishment--Printing--Steps in teaching--Text-
hand--_A New Handwriting_--How to use 233
XI. TRANSCRIPTION
Value of transcription--Children should transcribe favourite
passages--Small text-hand--Double-ruled lines--Position
in writing--Desks--Children’s table 238
XII. SPELLING AND DICTATION
A fertile cause of bad spelling--The _rationale_ of spelling--
Steps of a dictation lesson 240
XIII. COMPOSITION
George Osborne’s essay--An educational futility--Lessons in
composition--Teaching that is a public danger--‘Composition’
comes by nature 243
XIV. BIBLE LESSONS
Children enjoy the Bible--Should know the Bible text--Essential
and accidental truth--Method of Bible lessons--Picture
illustrations--Bible recitations 247
XV. ARITHMETIC
Educative value of--Problems within the child’s grasp--
Demonstrate--Problems--Notation--Weighing and measuring--
Arithmetic as a means of training--The _A B C Arithmetic_--
Preparation for mathematics 253
XVI. NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
A basis of facts--Eyes and no eyes--Principles--To be
comprehended by children--As taught in a village school 264
XVII. GEOGRAPHY
Educational value of--As commonly taught--Geography should
be interesting--How to begin--What next--Maps--What general
knowledge a child of nine should have--Particular knowledge--
Definitions--Fundamental ideas--Meaning of a map 271
XVIII. HISTORY
A storehouse of ideas--‘Outlines’ mischievous--So are most
history books written for children--Early history of a nation
best fitted for children--Some old Chronicles--Age of myths--
_Plutarch’s Lives_--History books--Dates--Illustrations by
the children--‘Playing at’ history 279
XIX. GRAMMAR
Grammar a difficult study--Latin grammar--English grammar a
logical study--Two grammar lessons 295
XX. FRENCH.
M. Gouin’s method--The ‘Series’--How does the child learn? 300
XXI. PICTORIAL ART, ETC.
Study of pictures--Should be regular--A picture talk--Drawing
lessons--Children have ‘Art’ in them--Clay modelling--The
piano and singing--Handicrafts and drills 307
PART VI
THE WILL--THE CONSCIENCE--THE DIVINE LIFE IN THE CHILD
I. THE WILL
Government of Mansoul--Executive power vested in the will--What
is the will?--Persons may go through life without a deliberate
act of will--Character the result of conduct regulated by will--
Three functions of the will--A limitation of the will
disregarded by some novelists--Parents fall into this
metaphysical blunder--Wilfulness indicates want of will-power--
What is wilfulness?--The will has superior and inferior
functions--The will not a moral faculty--A disciplined will
necessary to heroic Christian character--The sole practical
faculty of man--How the will operates--The way of the will;
Incentives--Diversion--Change of thought--The way of the will
should be taught to children--Power of will implies power of
attention--Habit may frustrate the will--Reasonable use of so
effective an instrument--How to strengthen the will--Habit of
self-management--Education of the will more important than of
the intellect 317
II. THE CONSCIENCE
Conscience is judge and law-giver--I am, I ought, I can, I
will--Inertness of parents not supplemented by Divine grace--
Conscience not an infallible guide--But a real power--That
spiritual sense whereby we know good and evil--A child’s
conscience an undeveloped capability rather than a supreme
authority--The uninstructed conscience--The processes implied
in a ‘conscientious’ decision--The _instructed_ conscience
nearly always right--The good conscience of a child--Children
play with moral questions--The Bible the chief source of moral
ideas--Tales fix attention upon conduct--Ignorance of a child’s
conscience--Instructing the conscience--Kindness--The
conscience made effective by discipline 329
III. THE DIVINE LIFE IN THE CHILD
The ‘very pulse of the machine’--Parents have some power to
enthrone the King--The functions and life of the soul--What
is the life of the soul?--The parent must present the idea of
God to the soul of the child--Must not make blundering
efforts--God presented to the children as an exactor and
punisher--Parents must select inspiring ideas--We must
teach only what we know--Fitting and vital ideas--The
knowledge of God distinct from morality--The times and
the manner of religious instruction--The reading of the
Bible--Father and Giver--The essence of Christianity is
loyalty to a Person 341
APPENDICES
A. LIST OF BOOKS 353
B. QUESTIONS FOR THE USE OF STUDENTS 357
C. THE EXAMINATION OF A CHILD OF SEVEN UPON A TERM’S WORK
ON THE LINES INDICATED IN THIS VOLUME 387
D. THE EXAMINATION OF A CHILD OF NINE UPON A TERM’S WORK 398
INDEX 420
Home Education
PART I
SOME PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
Not the least sign of the higher _status_ they have gained, is
the growing desire for work that obtains amongst educated women.
The world wants the work of such women; and presently, as education
becomes more general, we shall see all women with the capacity to work
falling into the ranks of working women, with definite tasks, fixed
hours, and for wages, the pleasure and honour of doing useful work if
they are under no necessity to earn money.
=Children are a Public Trust.=--Now, that work which is of most
importance to society is the bringing-up and instruction of the
children--in the school, certainly, but far more in the home, because
it is more than anything else the home influences brought to bear upon
the child that determine the character and career of the future man
or woman. It is a great thing to be a parent: there is no promotion,
no dignity, to compare with it. The parents of but one child may
be cherishing what shall prove a blessing to the world. But then,
entrusted with such a charge, they are not free to say, “I may do
as I will with mine own.” The children are, in truth, to be regarded
less as personal property than as public trusts, put into the hands
of parents that they may make the very most of them for the good of
society. And this responsibility is not equally divided between the
parents: it is upon the mothers of the present that the future of the
world depends, in even a greater degree than upon the fathers, because
it is the mothers who have the sole direction of the children’s early,
most impressible years. This is why we hear so frequently of great
men who have had good mothers--that is, mothers who brought up their
children themselves, and did not make over their gravest duty to
indifferent persons.
=Mothers owe ‘a thinking love’ to their Children.=--“The mother is
qualified,” says Pestalozzi, “and qualified by the Creator Himself, to
become the principal agent in the development of her child; ... and
what is demanded of her is--_a thinking love_.... God has given
to thy child all the faculties of our nature, but the grand point
remains undecided--how shall this heart, this head, these hands, be
employed? to whose service shall they be dedicated? A question the
answer to which involves a futurity of happiness or misery to a life
so dear to thee. Maternal love is the first agent in education.”
We are waking up to our duties, and in proportion as mothers become
more highly educated and efficient, they will doubtless feel the more
strongly that the education of their children during the first six
years of life is an undertaking hardly to be entrusted to any hands
but their own. And they will take it up as their profession--that is,
with the diligence, regularity, and punctuality which men bestow on
their professional labours.
That the mother may know what she is about, may come thoroughly
furnished to her work, she should have something more than a hearsay
acquaintance with the theory of education, and with those conditions
of the child’s nature upon which such theory rests.
=The Training of Children ‘dreadfully defective.’=--“The training
of children,” says Mr Herbert Spencer--“physical, moral, and
intellectual--is dreadfully defective. And in great measure it is so,
because parents are devoid of that knowledge by which this training
can alone be rightly guided. What is to be expected when one of the
most intricate of problems is undertaken by those who have given
scarcely a thought to the principle on which its solution depends? For
shoemaking or house-building, for the management of a ship or of a
locomotive engine, a long apprenticeship is needful. Is it, then, that
the unfolding of a human being in body and mind is so comparatively
simple a process that any one may superintend and regulate it with no
preparation whatever? If not--if the process is, with one exception,
more complex than any in Nature, and the task of ministering to it
one of surpassing difficulty--is it not madness to make no provision
for such a task? Better sacrifice accomplishments than omit this
all-essential instruction.... Some acquaintance with the first
principles of physiology and the elementary truths of psychology is
indispensable for the right bringing-up of children.... Here are the
indisputable facts: that the development of children in mind and body
follows certain laws; that unless these laws are in some degree
conformed to by parents, death is inevitable; that unless they are in
a great degree conformed to, there must result serious physical and
mental defects; and that only when they are completely conformed to,
can a perfect maturity be reached. Judge, then, whether all who may
one day be parents should not strive with some anxiety to learn what
these laws are.”[2]
=How Parents usually proceed.=--The parent begins instinctively by
regarding his child as an unwritten tablet, and is filled with great
resolves as to what he shall write thereon. By-and-by, traits of
disposition appear, the child has little ways of his own; and, at
first, every new display of personality is a delightful surprise.
That the infant should show pleasure at the sight of his father, that
his face should cloud in sympathy with his mother, must always be
wonderful to us. But the wonder stales; his parents are used to the
fact by the time the child shows himself a complete human being like
themselves, with affections, desires, powers; taking to his book,
perhaps, as a duck to the water; or to the games which shall make a
man of him. The notion of doing _all_ for the child with which
the parents began gradually recedes. So soon as he shows that he has
a way of his own he is encouraged to take it. Father and mother have
no greater delight than to watch the individuality of their child
unfold as a flower unfolds. But Othello loses his occupation. The more
the child shapes his own course, the less do the parents find to do,
beyond feeding him with food convenient, whether of love, or thought,
or of bodily meat and drink. And here, we may notice, the parents
need only supply; the child knows well enough how to appropriate. The
parents’ chief care is, that that which they supply shall be wholesome
and nourishing, whether in the way of picture-books, lessons,
playmates, bread and milk, or mother’s love. This is education as
most parents understand it, with more of meat, more of love, more of
culture, according to their kind and degree. They let their children
alone, allowing human nature to develop on its own lines, modified by
facts of environment and descent.
Nothing could be better for the child than this ‘masterly inactivity,’
so far as it goes. It is well he should be let grow and helped to grow
according to his nature; and so long as the parents do not step in to
spoil him, much good and no very evident harm comes of letting him
alone. But this philosophy of ‘let him be,’ while it covers a part,
does not cover the serious part of the parents’ calling; does not
touch the strenuous incessant efforts upon lines of law which go to
the producing of a human being at his best.
Nothing is trivial that concerns a child; his foolish-seeming words
and ways are pregnant with meaning for the wise. It is in the
infinitely little we must study the infinitely great; and the vast
possibilities, and the right direction of education, are indicated in
the open book of the little child’s thoughts.
A generation ago, a great teacher amongst us never wearied of
reiterating that in the Divine plan “the _family_ is the unit of
the nation”: not the individual, but the family. There is a great deal
of teaching in the phrase, but this lies on the surface; the whole is
greater than the part, the whole contains the part, owns the part,
orders the part; and this being so, the children are the property of
the nation, to be brought up for the nation as is best for the nation,
and not according to the whim of individual parents. The law is for
the punishment of evil-doers, for the praise of them that do well; so,
practically, parents have very free play; but it is as well we should
remember that the children are a national trust whose bringing-up is
the concern of all--even of those unmarried and childless persons
whose part in the game is the rather dreary one of ‘looking on.’
I.--A METHOD OF EDUCATION
=Traditional Methods of Education.=--Never was it more necessary for
parents to face for themselves this question of education in all its
bearings. Hitherto, children have been brought up upon traditional
methods mainly. The experience of our ancestors, floating in a vast
number of educational maxims, is handed on from lip to lip; and few or
many of these maxims form the educational code of every household.
But we hardly take in how complete a revolution advancing science is
effecting in the theory of education. The traditions of the elders
have been tried and found wanting; it will be long before the axioms
of the new school pass into common currency; and, in the meantime,
parents are thrown upon their own resources, and absolutely must weigh
principles, and adopt a method, of education for themselves.
For instance, according to the former code, a mother might use her
slipper now and then, to good effect and without blame; but now, the
person of the child is, whether rightly or wrongly, held sacred,
and the infliction of pain for moral purposes is pretty generally
disallowed.
Again, the old rule for the children’s table was, ‘the plainer the
better, and let hunger bring sauce’; now, the children’s diet must
be at least as nourishing and as varied as that of their elders; and
appetite, the craving for certain kinds of food, hitherto a vicious
tendency to be repressed, is now within certain limitations the
parents’ most trustworthy guide in arranging a dietary for their
children.
That children should be trained to endure hardness, was a principle of
the old régime. “I shall never make a sailor if I can’t face the wind
and rain,” said a little fellow of five who was taken out on a bitter
night to see a torchlight procession; and, though shaking with cold,
he declined the shelter of a shed. Nowadays, the shed is everything;
the children must not be permitted to suffer from fatigue or exposure.
That children should do as they are bid, mind their books, and take
pleasure as it offers when nothing stands in the way, sums up the old
theory; now, the pleasures of children are apt to be made of more
account than their duties.
Formerly, they were brought up in subjection; now, the elders give
place, and the world is made for the children.
English people rarely go so far as the parents of that story in
_French Home Life_, who arrived an hour late at a dinner-party,
because they had been desired by their girl of three to undress and
go to bed when she did, and were able to steal away only when the
child was asleep. We do not go so far, but that is the direction in
which we are moving; and how far the new theories of education are
wise and humane, the outcome of more widely spread physiological
and psychological knowledge, and how far they just pander to the
child-worship to which we are all succumbing, is not a question to be
decided off-hand.
At any rate, it is not too much to say that a parent who does
not follow reasonably a method of education, fully thought out,
fails--now, more than ever before--to fulfil the claims his children
have upon him.
=Method a Way to an End.=--Method implies two things--a way to an
end, and step-by-step progress in that way. Further, the following
of a method implies an idea, a mental image, of the end or object
to be arrived at. What do you propose that education shall effect
in and for your child? Again, method is natural; easy, yielding,
unobtrusive, simple as the ways of Nature herself; yet, watchful,
careful, all-pervading, all-compelling. Method, with the _end_ of
education in view, presses the most unlikely matters into service to
bring about that end; but with no more tiresome mechanism than the sun
employs when it makes the winds to blow and the waters to flow only by
shining. The parent who _sees his way_--that is, the exact force
of method--to educate his child, will make use of every circumstance
of the child’s life almost without intention on his own part, so easy
and spontaneous is a method of education based upon Natural Law. Does
the child eat or drink, does he come, or go, or play--all the time
he is being educated, though he is as little aware of it as he is of
the act of breathing. There is always the danger that a method, a
_bonâ fide_ method, should degenerate into a mere system. The
_Kindergarten Method_, for instance, deserves the name, as
having been conceived and perfected by large-hearted educators to aid
the many-sided evolution of the living, growing, most complex human
being; but what a miserable wooden _system_ does it become in the
hands of ignorant practitioners!
=A System easier than a Method.=--A ‘_system_ of education’ is
an alluring fancy; more so, on some counts, than a _method_,
because it is pledged to more definite calculable results. By means
of a system certain developments may be brought about through
the observance of given rules. Shorthand, dancing, how to pass
examinations, how to become a good accountant, or a woman of society,
may all be learned upon systems.
System--the observing of rules until the habit of doing certain
things, of behaving in certain ways, is confirmed, and, therefore, the
art is acquired--is so successful in achieving precise results, that
it is no wonder there should be endless attempts to straiten the whole
field of education to the limits of a system.
If a human being were a machine, education could do no more for him
than to set him in action in prescribed ways, and the work of the
educator would be simply to adopt a good working system or set of
systems.
But the educator has to deal with a self-acting, self-developing
being, and his business is to guide, and assist in, the production of
the latent good in that being, the dissipation of the latent evil,
the preparation of the child to take his place in the world _at his
best_, with every capacity for good that is in him developed into a
power.
Though system is highly useful as an instrument of education, a
‘system of education’ is mischievous, as producing only mechanical
action instead of the vital growth and movement of a living being.
It is worth while to point out the differing characters of a system
and a method, because parents let themselves be run away with often
enough by some plausible ‘system,’ the object of which is to produce
development in one direction--of the muscles, of the memory, of the
reasoning faculty--and to rest content, as if that single development
were a complete all-round education. This easy satisfaction arises
from the sluggishness of human nature, to which any definite scheme is
more agreeable than the constant watchfulness, the unforeseen action,
called for when the whole of a child’s existence is to be used as
the means of his education. But who is sufficient for an education
so comprehensive, so incessant? A parent may be willing to undergo
any definite labours for his child’s sake; but to be always catering
for his behoof, always contriving that circumstances shall play upon
him for his good, is the part of a god and not of a man! A reasonable
objection enough, if one looks upon education as an endless series of
independent efforts, each to be thought out and acted out on the spur
of the moment; but the fact is, that a few broad essential principles
cover the whole field, and these once fully laid hold of, it is as
easy and natural to act upon them as it is to act upon our knowledge
of such facts as that fire burns and water flows. My endeavour in
this and the following chapters will be to put these few fundamental
principles before you in their practical bearing. Meantime, let us
consider one or two preliminary questions.
II.--THE CHILD’S ESTATE
=The Child in the Midst.=--And first, let us consider where and what
the little being is who is entrusted to the care of human parents. A
tablet to be written upon? A twig to be bent? Wax to be moulded? Very
likely; but he is much more--a being belonging to an altogether higher
estate than ours; as it were, a prince committed to the fostering care
of peasants. Hear Wordsworth’s estimate of the child’s estate:--
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul’s immensity;
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find;
Thou, over whom thy immortality
Broods like the day, a master o’er a slave,
A presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom, on thy being’s height”--
and so on, through the whole of that great ode, which, next after
the Bible, shows the deepest insight into what is peculiar to the
children in their nature and estate. “Of such is the kingdom of
heaven.” “Except _ye_ become as little children ye shall in
no case enter the kingdom of heaven.” “Who is the greatest in the
kingdom of heaven?” “And He called a little child, and set him in
the midst.” Here is the Divine estimate of the child’s estate. It is
worth while for parents to ponder every utterance in the Gospels about
the children, divesting themselves of the notion that these sayings
belong, in the _first place_, to the grown-up people who have
become as little children. What these profound sayings are, and how
much they may mean, it is beyond us to discuss here; only they appear
to cover far more than Wordsworth claims for the children in his
sublimest reach--
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”
=Code of Education in the Gospels.=--It may surprise parents who
have not given much attention to the subject to discover also a
code of education in the Gospels, expressly laid down by Christ. It
is summed up in three commandments, and all three have a negative
character, as if the chief thing required of grown-up people is that
they should do no sort of injury to the children: _Take heed that ye_
OFFEND _not_--DESPISE _not_--HINDER _not_--_one of these little ones_.
So run the three educational laws of the New Testament, which, when
separately examined, appear to me to cover all the help we can give
the children and all the harm we can save them from--that is, whatever
is included in training up a child in the way he should go. Let us
look upon these three great laws as prohibitive, in order to clear
the ground for the consideration of a method of education; for if we
once settle with ourselves what we may _not_ do, we are greatly
helped to see what we _may_ do, and must do. But, as a matter of
fact, the positive is included in the negative, what we are bound to
do for the child in what we are forbidden to do to his hurt.
III.--OFFENDING THE CHILDREN
=Offences.=--The first and second of the Divine edicts appear to
include our sins of commission and of omission against the children:
we offend them, when we do by them that which we ought not to have
done; we despise them, when we leave undone those things which, for
their sakes, we ought to have done. An offence, we know, is literally
a stumbling-block, that which trips up the walker and causes him to
fall. Mothers know what it is to clear the floor of every obstacle
when a baby takes his unsteady little runs from chair to chair, from
one pair of loving arms to another. The table-leg, the child’s toy on
the floor, which has caused a fall and a pitiful cry, is a thing to be
deplored; why did not somebody put it out of the way, so that the baby
should not stumble? But the little child is going out into the world
with uncertain tottering steps in many directions. There are causes of
stumbling not so easy to remove as an offending footstool; and woe to
him who causes the child to fall!
=Children are born Law-abiding.=--‘Naughty baby!’ says the mother; and
the child’s eyes droop, and a flush rises over neck and brow. It is
very wonderful; very ‘funny,’ some people think, and say, ‘Naughty
baby!’ when the baby is sweetly good, to amuse themselves with the
sight of the infant soul rising visibly before their eyes. But what
does it mean, this display of feeling, conscience, in the child,
before any human teaching can have reached him? No less than this,
that he is born a law-abiding being, with a sense of _may_, and
_must not_, of right and wrong. That is how the children are sent
into the world with the warning, “Take heed that ye offend not one of
these little ones.” And--this being so--who has not met big girls and
boys, the children of right-minded parents, who yet do not know what
_must_ means, who are not moved by _ought_, whose hearts
feel no stir at the solemn name of _Duty_, who know no higher
rule of life than ‘I want,’ and ‘I don’t want,’ ‘I like,’ and ‘I don’t
like’? Heaven help parents and children when it has come to that!
But how has it been brought about that the babe, with an acute sense
of right and wrong even when it can understand little of human speech,
should grow into the boy or girl already proving ‘the curse of lawless
heart’? By slow degrees, here a little and there a little, as all
that is good or bad in character comes to pass. ‘Naughty!’ says the
mother, again, when a little hand is thrust into the sugar-bowl; and
a pair of roguish eyes seeks hers furtively, to measure, as they do
unerringly, how far the little pilferer may go. It is very amusing;
the mother ‘cannot help laughing’; and the little trespass is allowed
to pass: and, what the poor mother has not thought of, an offence, a
cause of stumbling, has been cast into the path of her two-year-old
child. He has learned already that that which is ‘naughty’ may yet be
done with impunity, and he goes on improving his knowledge. It is
needless to continue; everybody knows the steps by which the mother’s
‘no’ comes to be disregarded, her refusal teased into consent. The
child has learned to believe that he has nothing to overcome but his
mother’s disinclination; if she _choose_ to let him do this and
that, there is no reason why she should not; he can make her choose
to let him do the thing forbidden, and then he may do it. The next
step in the argument is not too great for childish wits: if his mother
does what she chooses, of course he will do what he chooses, _if he
can_; and henceforward the child’s life becomes an endless struggle
to get his own way; a struggle in which a parent is pretty sure to
be worsted, having many things to think of, while the child sticks
persistently to the thing which has his fancy for the moment.
=They must perceive that their Governors are Law-compelled.=--Where
is the beginning of this tangle, spoiling the lives of parent and
child alike? In this: that the mother began with no sufficient sense
of duty; she thought herself free to allow and disallow, to say and
unsay, at pleasure, as if the child were hers to do what she liked
with. The child has never discovered a background of _must_
behind his mother’s decisions; he does not know that she _must
not_ let him break his sister’s playthings, gorge himself with
cake, spoil the pleasure of other people, because these things
are not _right_. Let the child perceive that his parents are
law-compelled as well as he, that they simply cannot allow him to do
the things which have been forbidden, and he submits with the sweet
meekness which belongs to his age. To give reasons to a child is
usually out of place, and is a sacrifice of parental dignity; but he
is quick enough to read the ‘must’ and ‘ought’ which rule her, in his
mother’s face and manner, and in the fact that she is not to be moved
from a resolution on any question of right and wrong.
=Parents may Offend their Children by Disregarding the Laws of
Health.=--This, of allowing him in what is wrong, is only one of
many ways in which the loving mother may offend her child. Through
ignorance, or wilfulness, which is worse, she may not only allow wrong
in him, but do wrong by him. She may cast a stumbling-block in the way
of his physical life by giving him unwholesome food, letting him sleep
and live in ill-ventilated rooms, by disregarding any or every of the
simple laws of health, ignorance of which is hardly to be excused in
the face of the pains taken by scientific men to bring this necessary
knowledge within the reach of every one.
=And of the Intellectual Life.=--Almost as bad is the way the child’s
intellectual life may be wrecked at its outset by a round of dreary,
dawdling lessons in which definite progress is the last thing made or
expected, and which, so far from educating in any true sense, stultify
his wits in a way he never gets over. Many a little girl, especially,
leaves the home schoolroom with a distaste for all manner of learning,
an aversion to mental effort, which lasts her her lifetime, and that
is why she grows up to read little but trashy novels, and to talk all
day about her clothes.
=And of the Moral Life.=--And her affections--the movements of the
outgoing tender child-heart--how are they treated? There are few
mothers who do not take pains to cherish the family affections; but
when the child comes to have dealings with outsiders, do no worldly
maxims and motives ever nip the buds of childish love? Far worse than
this happens when the child’s love finds no natural outlets within
her home: when she is the plain or the dull child of the family, and
is left out in the cold, while the parents’ affection is lavished on
the rest. Of course she does not love her brothers and sisters, who
monopolise what should have been hers too. And how is she to love
her parents? Nobody knows the real anguish which many a child in the
nursery suffers from this cause, nor how many lives are embittered
and spoiled through the suppression of these childish affections. “My
childhood was made miserable,” a lady said to me a while ago, “by my
mother’s doting fondness for my little brother; there was not a day
when she did not make me wretched by coming into the nursery to fondle
and play with him, and all the time she had not a word nor a look nor
a smile for me, any more than if I had not been in the room. I have
never got over it; she is very kind to me now, but I never feel quite
natural with her. And how can we two, brother and sister, feel for
each other as we should if we had grown up together in love in the
nursery?”
IV.--DESPISING THE CHILDREN
=Children should have the best of their Mothers.=--Suppose that a
mother _may_ offend her child, how is it possible that she should
despise him? “Despise: to have a low opinion of, to undervalue”--thus
the dictionary; and, as a matter of fact, however much we may delight
in them, we grown-up people have far too low an opinion of children.
If the mother did not undervalue her child, would she leave him to
the society of an ignorant nursemaid during the early years when his
whole nature is, like the photographer’s sensitive plate, receiving
momently indelible impressions? Not but that his nurse is good for
the child. Very likely it would not answer for educated people to
have their children always about them. The constant society of his
parents might be too stimulating for the child; and frequent change
of thought, and the society of other people, make the mother all the
fresher for her children. But they should have the _best_ of
their mother, her freshest, brightest hours; while, at the same time,
she is careful to choose her nurses wisely, train them carefully, and
keep a vigilant eye upon all that goes on in the nursery.
‘=Nurse.=’--Mere coarseness and rudeness in his nurse does the
tender child lasting harm. Many a child leaves the nursery with his
moral sense blunted, and with an alienation from his heavenly Father
set up which may last his lifetime. For the child’s moral sense is
exceedingly quick; he is all eyes and ears for the slightest act
or word of unfairness, deception, shiftiness. His nurse says, “If
you’ll be a good boy, I won’t tell”; and the child learns that things
_may_ be concealed from his mother, who should be to him as God,
knowing all his good and evil. And it is not as if the child noted the
slips of his elders with aversion. He _knows_ better, it is true,
but then he does not trust his own intuitions; he shapes his life on
any pattern set before him, and with the fatal taint of human nature
upon him he is more ready to imitate a bad pattern than a good. Give
him a nurse who is coarse, violent, and tricky, and before the child
is able to speak plainly he will have caught these dispositions.
=Children’s Faults are Serious.=--One of many ways in which parents
are apt to have too low an opinion of their children is in the matter
of their faults. A little child shows some ugly trait--he is greedy,
and gobbles up his sister’s share of goodies as well as his own; he
is vindictive, ready to bite or fight the hand that offends him; he
tells a lie;--no, he did not touch the sugar-bowl or the jam-pot. The
mother puts off the evil day: she knows she must sometime reckon with
the child for those offences, but in the meantime she says, “Oh, it
does not matter this time; he is very little, and will know better
by-and-by.” To put the thing on no higher grounds, what happy days
for herself and her children would the mother secure if she would
keep watch at the place of the letting out of waters! If the mother
settle it in her own mind that the child never does wrong without
being aware of his wrong-doing, she will see that he is not too young
to have his fault corrected or prevented. Deal with a child on his
_first_ offence, and a grieved look is enough to convict the
little transgressor; but let him go on until a habit of wrong-doing
is formed, and the cure is a slow one; then the mother has no chance
until she has formed in him a contrary habit of well-doing. To laugh
at ugly tempers and let them pass because the child is small, is to
sow the wind.
V.--HINDERING THE CHILDREN
=A Child’s Relationship with Almighty God.=--The most fatal way of
despising the child falls under the third educational law of the
Gospels; it is to overlook and make light of his natural relationship
with Almighty God. “Suffer the little children to come unto Me,” says
the Saviour, as if that were the natural thing for the children to
do, the thing they do when they are not hindered by their elders. And
perhaps it is not too beautiful a thing to believe in this redeemed
world, that, as the babe turns to his mother though he has no power
to say her name, as the flowers turn to the sun, so the hearts of the
children turn to their Saviour and God with unconscious delight and
trust.
=Nursery Theology.=--Now listen to what goes on in many a
nursery:--‘God does not love you, you naughty, wicked boy!’ ‘He will
send you to the bad, wicked place,’ and so on; and this is all the
practical teaching about the ways of his ‘almighty Lover’ that the
child gets!--never a word of how God does love and cherish the little
children all day long, and fill their hours with delight. Add to
this, listless perfunctory prayers, idle discussions of Divine things
in their presence, light use of holy words, few signs whereby the
child can read that the things of God are more to his parents than
any things of the world, and the child is hindered, tacitly forbidden
to “come unto Me,”--and this, often, by parents who in the depths of
their hearts desire nothing in comparison with God. The mischief lies
in that same foolish undervaluing of the children, in the notion that
the child can have no spiritual life until it please his elders to
kindle the flame.
VI.--CONDITIONS OF HEALTHY BRAIN-ACTIVITY
Having just glanced at the wide region of forbidden ground, we are
prepared to consider what it is, definitely and positively, that the
mother owes to her child under the name of Education.
=All Mind Labour means Wear of Brain.=--And first of all, the more
educable powers of the child--his intelligence, his will, his moral
feelings--have their seat in the brain; that is to say, as the eye is
the organ of sight, so is the brain, or some part of it, the organ
of thought and will, of love and worship. Authorities differ as to
how far it is possible to localise the functions of the brain; but
this at least seems pretty clear--that none of the functions of mind
are performed without real activity in the mass of grey and white
nervous matter named ‘the brain.’ Now, this is not a matter for the
physiologist alone, but for every mother and father of a family;
because that wonderful brain, by means of which we do our thinking, if
it is to act healthily and in harmony with the healthful action of the
members, should act only under such conditions of exercise, rest, and
nutrition as secure health in every other part of the body.
=Exercise.=--Most of us have met with a few eccentric and a good many
silly persons, concerning whom the question forces itself, Were these
people born with less brain power than others? Probably not; but if
they were allowed to grow up without the daily habit of appropriate
moral and mental _work_, if they were allowed to dawdle through
youth without regular and sustained efforts of thought or will,
the result would be the same, and the brain which should have been
invigorated by daily exercise has become flabby and feeble as a
healthy arm would be after being carried for years in a sling. The
large active brain is not content with entire idleness; it strikes
out lines for itself and works fitfully, and the man or woman becomes
eccentric, because wholesome mental effort, like moral, must be
carried on under the discipline of rules. A shrewd writer suggests
that mental indolence may have been in some measure the cause of those
pitiable attacks of derangement and depression from which poor Cowper
suffered; the making of graceful verses when the ‘maggot bit’ did
not afford him the amount of mental _labour_ necessary for his
well-being.
The outcome of which is--Do not let the children pass a day without
distinct _efforts_, intellectual, moral, volitional; let them
brace themselves to understand; let them compel themselves to do and
to bear; and let them do right at the sacrifice of ease and pleasure:
and this for many higher reasons, but, in the first and lowest place,
that the mere physical organ of mind and will may grow vigorous with
work.
=Rest.=--Just as important is it that the brain should have due rest;
that is, should rest and work alternately. And here two considerations
come into play. In the first place, when the brain is actively at
work it is treated as is every other organ of the body in the same
circumstances; that is to say, a large additional supply of blood
is attracted to the head for the nourishment of the organ which is
spending its substance in hard work. Now, there is not an indefinite
quantity of what we will for the moment call surplus blood in the
vessels. The supply is regulated on the principle that only one set of
organs shall be excessively active at one time--now the limbs, now the
digestive organs, now the brain; and all the blood in the body that
can be spared goes to the support of those organs which, for the time
being, are in a state of labour.
=Rest after Meals.=--The child has just had his dinner, the meal of
the day which most severely taxes his digestive organs; for as much
as two or three hours after, much labour is going on in these organs,
and the blood that can be spared from elsewhere is present to assist.
Now, send the child out for a long walk _immediately_ after
dinner--the blood goes to the labouring extremities, and the food is
left half digested; give the child a regular course of such dinners
and walks, and he will grow up a dyspeptic. Set him to his books after
a heavy meal, and the case is as bad; the blood which should have been
assisting in the digestion of the meal goes to the labouring brain.
It follows that the hours for lessons should be carefully chosen,
after periods of mental rest--sleep or play, for instance--and when
there is no excessive activity in any other part of the system. Thus,
the morning, after breakfast (the digestion of which lighter meal is
not a severe tax), is much the best time for lessons and every sort of
mental work; if the whole afternoon cannot be spared for out-of-door
recreation, that is the time for mechanical tasks such as needlework,
drawing, practising; the children’s wits are bright enough in the
evening, but the drawback to evening work is, that the brain, once
excited, is inclined to carry on its labours beyond bed-time, and
dreams, wakefulness, and uneasy sleep attend the poor child who has
been at work until the last minute. If the elder children _must_
work in the evening, they should have at least one or two pleasant
social hours before they go to bed; but, indeed, we owe it to the
children to abolish evening ‘preparation.’
=Change of Occupation.=--“There is,” says Huxley, “no satisfactory
proof at present, that the manifestation of any particular kind of
mental faculty is especially allotted to, or connected with, the
activity of any particular region of the cerebral hemispheres,”
a dictum against the phrenologists, but coming to us on too high
authority to be disputed. It is not possible to localise the
‘faculties’--to say you are cautious with this fraction of your
brain, and music-loving with another; but this much is certain, and
is very important to the educator: the brain, or some portion of the
brain, becomes exhausted when any given function has been exercised
too long. The child has been doing sums for some time, and is getting
unaccountably stupid: take away his slate and let him read history,
and you find his wits fresh again. Imagination, which has had no part
in the sums, is called into play by the history lesson, and the child
brings a lively unexhausted power to his new work. School time-tables
are usually drawn up with a view to give the brain of the child
variety of work; but the secret of the weariness children often show
in the home schoolroom is, that no such judicious change of lessons is
contrived.
=Nourishment.=--Again, the brain cannot do its work well unless it be
abundantly and suitably nourished; somebody has made a calculation of
how many ounces of brain went to the production of such a work--say
_Paradise Lost_--how many to such another, and so on. Without
going into mental arithmetic of this nature, we may say with safety
that every sort of intellectual activity wastes the tissues of the
brain; a network of vessels supplies an enormous quantity of blood
to the organ, to make up for this waste of material; and the vigour
and health of the brain depend upon the quality and quantity of this
blood-supply.
=Certain Causes affect the Quality of the Blood.=--Now, the quality
of the blood is affected by three or four causes. In the first place,
the blood is elaborated from the food; the more nutritious and easy
of digestion the food, the more _vital_ will be the properties
of the blood. The food must be varied, too, a mixed diet, because
various ingredients are required to make up for the various waste in
the tissues. The children are shocking spendthrifts; their endless
goings and comings, their restlessness, their energy, the very wagging
of their tongues, all mean expenditure of substance: the loss is
not appreciable, but they lose something by every sudden sally, out
of doors or within. No doubt the gain of power which results from
exercise is more than compensation for the loss of substance; but,
all the same, this loss must be promptly made good. And not only is
the body of the child more active, proportionably, than that of the
man: the child’s brain as compared with the man’s is in a perpetual
flutter of endeavour. It is calculated that though the brain of a
man weighs no more than a fortieth part of his body, yet a fifth
or a sixth of his whole complement of blood goes to nourish this
delicate and intensely active organ; but, in the child’s case, a
considerably larger proportion of the blood that is in him is spent on
the sustenance of his brain. And all the time, with these excessive
demands upon him, the child has to grow! not merely to make up for
waste, but to produce new substance in brain and body.
=Concerning Meals.=--What is the obvious conclusion? That the
child must be well fed. Half the people of low vitality we come
across are the victims of low-feeding during their childhood; and
that more often because their parents were not alive to their
duty in this respect, than because they were not in a position to
afford their children the diet necessary to their full physical
and mental development. Regular meals at, usually, _unbroken_
intervals--dinner, never more than five hours after breakfast;
luncheon, unnecessary; animal food, once certainly, in some lighter
form, twice a day--are the suggestions of common sense followed out
in most well-regulated households. But it is not the food which is
_eaten_, but the food which is _digested_, that nourishes
body and brain. And here so many considerations press, that we can
only glance at two or three of the most obvious. Everybody knows that
children should not eat pastry, or pork, or fried meats, or cheese, or
rich, highly-flavoured food of any description; that pepper, mustard,
and vinegar, sauces and spices, should be forbidden, with new bread,
rich cakes, and jams, like plum or gooseberry, in which the leathery
coat of the fruit is preserved; that milk, or milk and water, and that
not too warm, or cocoa, is the best drink for children, and that they
should be trained not to drink until they have finished eating; that
fresh fruit at breakfast is invaluable; that, as serving the same
end, oatmeal porridge and treacle, and the fat of toasted bacon, are
valuable breakfast foods; and that a glass of water, also, taken the
last thing at night and the first thing in the morning, is useful in
promoting those regular habits on which much of the comfort of life
depends.
=Talk at Meals.=--All this and much of the same kind it is needless
to urge; but again let me say, it is _digested_ food that
nourishes the system, and people are apt to forget how far mental and
moral conditions affect the processes of digestion. The fact is,
that the gastric juices which act as solvents to the viands are only
secreted freely when the mind is in a cheerful and contented frame.
If the child dislike his dinner, he swallows it, but the digestion
of that distasteful meal is a laborious, much-impeded process: if
the meal be eaten in silence, unrelieved by pleasant chat, the child
loses much of the ‘good’ of his dinner. Hence it is not a matter of
pampering them at all, but a matter of health, of due nutrition, that
the children should enjoy their food, and that their meals should be
eaten in gladness; though, by the way, joyful _excitement_ is as
mischievous as its opposite in destroying that even, cheerful tenor
of mind favourable to the processes of digestion. No pains should
be spared to make the hours of meeting round the family table the
brightest hours of the day. This is supposing that the children are
allowed to sit at the same table with their parents; and, if it is
possible to let them do so at every meal excepting a late dinner, the
advantage to the little people is incalculable. Here is the parents’
opportunity to train them in manners and in morals, to cement family
love, and to accustom the children to habits, such as that of thorough
mastication, for instance, as important on the score of health as on
that of propriety.
=Variety in Meals.=--But, given pleasant surroundings and excellent
food, and even then the requirements of these exacting little people
are not fully met: plain as their food should be, they must have
variety. A leg of mutton every Tuesday, the same cold on Wednesday,
and hashed on Thursday, may be very good food; but the child who has
this diet week after week is inadequately nourished, simply because
he is tired of it. The mother should contrive a rotation for her
children that will last at least a fortnight without the same dinner
recurring twice. Fish, especially if the children dine off it without
meat to follow, is excellent as a change, the more so as it is rich
in phosphorus--a valuable brain food. The children’s puddings deserve
a good deal of consideration, because they do not commonly care for
fatty foods, but prefer to derive the warmth of their bodies from
the starch and sugar of their puddings. But give them variety; do
not let it be ‘everlasting tapioca.’ Even for tea and breakfast the
wise mother does not say, ‘I always give my children’ so and so. They
should not have anything ‘always’; every meal should have some little
surprise. But is this the way, to make them think overmuch of what
they shall eat and drink? On the contrary, it is the underfed children
who are greedy, and unfit to be trusted with any unusual delicacy.
=Air as important as Food.=--The quality of the blood depends almost
as much on the air we breathe as on the food we eat; in the course of
every two or three minutes, all the blood in the body passes through
the endless ramifications of the lungs, for no other purpose than
that, during the instant of its passage, it should be acted upon by
the oxygen contained in the air which is drawn into the lungs in the
act of breathing. But what can happen to the blood in the course of
an exposure of so short duration? Just this--the whole character, the
very colour, of the blood is changed: it enters the lungs spoiled, no
longer capable of sustaining life; it leaves them, a pure and vital
fluid. Now, observe, the blood is only fully oxygenated when the air
contains its full proportion of oxygen, and every breathing and every
burning object withdraws some oxygen from the atmosphere. Hence the
importance of giving the children daily airings and abundant exercise
of limb and lung in unvitiated, unimpoverished air.
=The Children Walk every Day.=--‘The children walk every day; they
are never out less than an hour when the weather is suitable.’ That
is better than nothing; so is this:--An East London school-mistress
notices the pale looks of one of her best girls. “Have you had any
dinner, Nellie?” “Ye-es” (with hesitation). “What have you had?”
“Mother gave Jessie and me a halfpenny to buy our dinners, and we
bought a haporth of aniseed drops--they go further than bread”--with
an appeal in her eyes against possible censure for extravagance.
Children do not develop at their best upon aniseed drops for dinner,
nor upon an hour’s ‘constitutional’ daily. Possibly science will
bring home to us more and more the fact that animal life, pent under
cover, is supported under artificial conditions, just as is plant life
in a glass house. Here is where most Continental nations have the
advantage over us; they keep up the habit of out-of-door life; and as
a consequence, the average Frenchman, German, Italian, Bulgarian, is
more joyous, more simple, and more hardy than the average Englishman.
Climate? Did not Charles II.--and he knew--declare for the climate
of England because you could be abroad “more hours in the day and
more days in the year” in England than “in any other country”? We
lose sight of the fact that we are _not_ like that historical
personage who “lived upon nothing but victuals and drink.” “You can’t
live upon air!” we say to the invalid who can’t eat. No; we cannot
live upon air; but, if we must choose among the three sustainers
of life, air will support us the longest. We know all about it; we
are deadly weary of the subject; let but the tail of your eye catch
‘oxygenation’ on a page, and the well-trained organ skips that
paragraph of its own accord. No need to tell Macaulay’s schoolboy,
or anybody else, how the blood of the body is brought to the lungs
and there spread about in a huge extent of innumerable ‘pipes’ that
it may be exposed momentarily to the oxygen in the air; how the air
is made to blow upon the blood, so spread out in readiness, by the
bellows-like action of breathing; how the air penetrates the very
thin walls of the pipes; and then, behold, a magical (or chemical)
transmutation; the worthless sewage of the system becomes on the
instant the rich vivifying fluid whose function it is to build up the
tissues of muscle and nerve. And the Prospero that wears the cloak?
Oxygen, his name; and the marvel that he effects within us some
fifteen times in the course of a minute is possibly without parallel
in the whole array of marvels which we ‘tot up’ with easy familiarity,
setting down ‘life,’ and carrying--a cypher!
=Oxygen has its Limitations.=--We know all about it; what we forget,
perhaps, is, that even oxygen has its limitation: nothing can act
but where it is, and, waste attends work, hold true for this vital
gas as for other matters. Fire and lamp and breathing beings are all
consumers of the oxygen which sustains them. What follows? Why, that
this element, which is present in the ratio of twenty-three parts to
the hundred in pure air, is subject to an enormous drain within the
four walls of a house, where the air is more or less stationary. I am
not speaking just now of the vitiation of the air--only of the drain
upon its life-sustaining element. Think, again, of the heavy drain
upon the oxygen which must support the multitudinous fires and many
breathing beings congregated in a large town! ‘What follows?’ is a
strictly vital question. Man can enjoy the full measure of vigorous
joyous existence possible to him only when his blood is fully aërated;
and this takes place when the air he inhales contains its full
complement of oxygen. Is it too much to say that vitality is reduced,
other things being equal, in proportion as persons are house-dwellers
rather than open-air dwellers? The impoverished air sustains life at a
low and feeble level; wherefore, in the great towns, stature dwindles,
the chest contracts, men hardly live to see their children’s children.
True, we must needs have houses for shelter from the weather by day
and for rest at night; but in proportion as we cease to make our
houses ‘comfortable,’ as we regard them merely as necessary shelters
when we cannot be out of doors, shall we enjoy to the full the
vigorous vitality possible to us.
=Unchanged Air.=--Parents of pale-faced town children, think of these
things! The gutter children who feed on the pickings of the streets
are better off (and healthier looking) in this one respect than your
cherished darlings, because they have more of the first essential
of life--air. There is some circulation of air even in the slums of
the city, and the child who spends its days in the streets is better
supplied with oxygen than he who spends most of his hours in the
unchanged air of a spacious apartment. But it is not the air of the
streets the children want. It is the delicious life-giving air of the
country. The outlay of the children in living is enormously in excess
of the outlay of the adult. The endless activity of the child, while
it develops muscle, is kept up at the expense of very great waste of
tissue. It is the blood which carries material for the reparation of
this loss. The child must _grow_, every part of him, and it is
the blood which brings material for the building up of new tissues.
Again, we know that the brain is, out of all proportion to its size,
the great consumer of the blood supply, but the brain of the child,
what with its eager activity, what with its twofold growth, is
insatiable in its demands!
‘=I feed Alice on beef tea.=’--‘I feed Alice on beef tea, cod-liver
oil, and all sorts of nourishing things; but it’s very disheartening,
the child doesn’t gain flesh!’ It is probable that Alice breathes
for twenty-two of the twenty-four hours the impoverished and more or
less vitiated air pent within the four walls of a house. The child is
practically starving; for the food she eats is very imperfectly and
inadequately converted into the aërated blood that feeds the tissues
of the body.
And if she is suffering from bodily inanition, what about the eager,
active, curious, hungering mind of the little girl? ‘Oh, she has her
lessons regularly every day.’ Probably: but lessons which deal with
words, only the _signs_ of things, are not what the child wants.
There is no knowledge so appropriate to the early years of a child
as that of the name and look and behaviour _in situ_ of every
natural object he can get at. “He hath so done His marvellous works
that they ought to be had in remembrance.”
“Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown:
This child I to myself will take:
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
* * * * *
“‘She shall be sportive as the fawn,
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute, insensate things.
* * * * *
“‘The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.’”
=Indoor Airings.=--About out-of-door airings we shall have occasion to
speak more fully; but _indoor_ airings are truly as important,
because, if the tissues be nourished upon impure blood for all
the hours the child spends in the house, the mischief will not be
mended in the shorter intervals spent out of doors. Put two or three
breathing bodies, as well as fire and gas, into a room, and it is
incredible how soon the air becomes vitiated unless it be constantly
renewed; that is, unless the room be well ventilated. We know what
it is to come in out of the fresh air and complain that a room feels
stuffy; but sit in the room a few minutes, and you get accustomed to
its stuffiness; the senses are no longer a safe guide.
=Ventilation.=--Therefore, regular provision must be made for the
ventilation of rooms regardless of the feelings of their inmates:
_at least_ an inch of window open at the top, day and night,
renders a room tolerably safe, because it allows of the escape of the
vitiated air, which, being light, ascends, leaving room for the influx
of colder, fresher air by cracks and crannies in doors and floors. An
open chimney is a useful, though not a sufficient, ventilator; it is
needless to say that the stopping-up of chimneys in sleeping-rooms is
suicidal. It is particularly important to accustom children to sleep
with an inch or two, or more, of open window all through the year--as
much more as you like in the summer.
=Night Air Wholesome.=--There is a popular notion that night air is
unwholesome; but if you reflect that wholesome air is that which
contains its full complement of oxygen, and no more than its very
small complement of carbonic acid gas, and that all _burning_
objects--fire, furnace, gas-lamp--give forth carbonic acid gas
and consume oxygen, you will see that night air is, in ordinary
circumstances, more wholesome than day air, simply because there is a
less exhaustive drain upon its vital gas. When the children are out of
a room which they commonly occupy, day nursery or breakfast-room, then
is the opportunity to air it thoroughly by throwing windows and doors
wide open and producing a thorough draught.
=Sunshine.=--But it is not only air, and pure air, the children
must have if their blood is to be of the ‘finest quality,’ as the
advertisements have it. Quite healthy blood is exceedingly rich in
minute, red disc-like bodies, known as red corpuscles, which in
favourable circumstances are produced freely in the blood itself. Now,
it is observed that people who live much in the sunshine are of a
ruddy countenance--that is, a great many of these red corpuscles are
present in their blood; while the poor souls who live in cellars and
sunless alleys have skins the colour of whity-brown paper. Therefore,
it is concluded that light and sunshine are favourable to the
production of red corpuscles in the blood; and, _therefore_--to
this next ‘therefore’ is but a step for the mother--the children’s
rooms should be on the sunny side of the house, with a south aspect
if possible. Indeed, the whole house should be kept light and bright
for their sakes; trees and outbuildings that obstruct the sunshine and
make the children’s rooms dull should be removed without hesitation.
=Free Perspiration.=--Another point must be attended to, in order
to secure that the brain be nourished by healthy blood. The blood
receives and gets rid of the waste of the tissues, and one of the
most important agents by means of which it does this necessary
scavenger’s work is the skin. Millions of invisible pores perforate
the skin, each the mouth of a minute many-folded tube, and each such
pore is employed without a moment’s cessation, while the body is in
health, in discharging _perspiration_--that is, the waste of the
tissues--upon the skin.
=Insensible Perspiration.=--When the discharge is excessive, we
are aware of moisture upon the skin; but, aware of it or not, the
discharge is always going on; and, what is more, if it be checked, or
if a considerable portion of the skin be glazed, so that it becomes
impervious, death will result. This is why people die in consequence
of scalds or burns which injure a large surface of the skin, although
they do not touch any vital organ; multitudes of minute tubes which
should carry off injurious matters from the blood are closed, and,
though the remaining surface of the skin and the other excretory
organs take extra work upon them, it is impossible to make good the
loss of what may be called efficient drainage over a considerable
area. Therefore, if the brain is to be duly nourished, it is important
to keep the whole surface of the skin in a condition to throw off
freely the excretions of the blood.
=Daily Bath and Porous Garments.=--Two considerations follow: of the
first, the necessity for the daily bath, followed by vigorous rubbing
of the skin, it is needless to say a word here. But possibly it is
not so well understood that children should be clothed throughout
in porous garments which admit of the instant passing off of the
exhalations of the skin. Why did delicate women faint, or, at any
rate, ‘feel faint,’ when it was the custom to go to church in sealskin
coats? Why do people who sleep under down, or even under silk or
cotton quilts, frequently rise unrefreshed? From the one cause: their
coverings have impeded the passage of the insensible perspiration,
and so have hindered the skin in its function of relieving the blood
of impurities. It is surprising what a constant loss of vitality many
people experience from no other cause than the unsuitable character of
their clothing. The children cannot be better dressed throughout than
in loosely woven woollen garments, flannels and serges, of varying
thicknesses for summer and winter wear. Woollens have other advantages
over cotton and linen materials besides that of being porous. Wool is
a bad conductor, and therefore does not allow of the too free escape
of the animal heat; and it is absorbent, and therefore relieves the
skin of the clammy sensations which follow sensible perspiration. We
should be the better for it if we could make up our minds to sleep
in wool, discarding linen or cotton in favour of sheets made of some
lightly woven woollen material.
We might say much on this one question, the due nutrition of the
brain, upon which the very possibility of healthy education depends.
But something will have been effected if the reason why of only two or
three practical rules of health is made so plain that they cannot be
evaded without a sense of law-breaking.
I fear the reader may be inclined to think that I am inviting his
attention for the most part to a few physiological matters--the
lowest round of the educational ladder. The lowest round it may be,
but yet it _is_ the lowest round, the necessary step to all the
rest. For it is not too much to say that, in our present state of
being, intellectual, moral, even spiritual life and progress depend
greatly upon physical conditions. That is to say, not that he who has
a fine physique is necessarily a good and clever man; but that the
good and clever man requires much animal substance to make up for the
expenditure of tissue brought about in the exercise of his virtue
and his intellect. For example, is it easier to be amiable, kindly,
candid, with or without a headache or an attack of neuralgia?
VII.--‘THE REIGN OF LAW’ IN EDUCATION
=Common Sense and Good Intentions.=--Besides, though this physical
culture of the brain may be only the groundwork of education, the
method of it indicates what should be the method of all education;
that is, orderly, regulated progress under the guidance of Law. The
reason why education effects so much less than it should effect is
just this--that in nine cases out of ten, sensible good parents trust
too much to their common sense and their good intentions, forgetting
that common sense must be at the pains to instruct itself in the
nature of the case, and that well-intended efforts come to little if
they are not carried on in obedience to divine laws, to be read in
many cases, not in the Bible, but in the facts of life.
=Law-abiding Lives often more blameless than Pious Lives.=--It is a
shame to believing people that many whose highest profession is that
they do not know, and therefore do _not_ believe, should produce
more blameless lives, freer from flaws of temper, from the vice of
selfishness, than do many sincerely religious people. It is a fact
that will confront the children by-and-by, and one of which they will
require an explanation; and what is more, it is a fact that will have
more weight, should it confront them in the person of a character
which they cannot but esteem and love, than all the doctrinal teaching
they have had in their lives. This appears to me the threatening
danger to that confessed dependence upon and allegiance to Almighty
God which we recognise as religion--not the wickedness, but the
_goodness_ of a school which refuses to admit any such dependence
and allegiance.
My sense of this danger is my reason for offering the little I have to
say upon the subject of education,--my sense of the danger, and the
assurance I feel that it is no such great danger after all, but one
that parents of the cultivated class are competent to deal with, and
are precisely the only persons who _can_ deal with it.
=‘Mind’ and ‘Matter’ equally governed by Law.=--As for this superior
morality of some non-believers, supposing we grant it, what does it
amount to? Just to this, that the universe of mind, as the universe of
matter, is governed by unwritten laws of God; that the child cannot
blow soap-bubbles or think his flitting thoughts otherwise than in
obedience to divine laws; that all safety, progress, and success
in life come of obedience to law, to the laws of mental, moral,
or physical science, or of that spiritual science which the Bible
unfolds; that it is possible to ascertain laws and keep laws without
recognising the Lawgiver, and that those who do ascertain and keep
_any_ divine law inherit the blessing due to obedience, whatever
be their attitude towards the Lawgiver; just as the man who goes out
into blazing sunshine is warmed, though he may shut his eyes and
decline to see the sun. Conversely, that they who take no pains to
study the principles which govern human action and human thought miss
the blessings of obedience to certain laws, though they may inherit
the better blessings which come of acknowledged relationship with the
Lawgiver.
=Antagonism to Law shown by some Religious Persons.=--These last
blessings are so unspeakably satisfying, that often enough the
believer who enjoys them wants no more. He opens his mouth and draws
in his breath for the delight he has in the law, it is true; but it
is the law of the spiritual life only. Towards the other laws of
God which govern the universe he sometimes takes up an attitude of
antagonism, almost of resistance, worthy of an infidel. It is nothing
to him that he is fearfully and wonderfully made; he does not care
to know how the brain works, nor how the more subtle essence we call
mind evolves and develops in obedience to laws. There are pious minds
to which a desire to look into these things savours of unbelief, as
if it were to dishonour the Almighty to perceive that He carries
on His glorious works by means of glorious laws. They will have to
do with no laws excepting the laws of the kingdom of grace. In the
meantime, the non-believer, who looks for no supernatural aids, lays
himself out to discover and conform to all the laws which regulate
natural life--physical, mental, moral; all the laws of God, in fact,
excepting those of the spiritual life which the believer appropriates
as his peculiar inheritance. But these laws which are left to Esau are
laws of God also, and the observance of them is attended with such
blessings, that the children of the believers say, “Look, how is it
that these who do not acknowledge the Law as of God are better than we
who do?”
=Parents must acquaint themselves with the Principles of Physiology
and Moral Science.=--Now, believing parents have no right to lay up
this crucial difficulty for their children. They have no right, for
instance, to pray that their children may be made truthful, diligent,
upright, and at the same time neglect to acquaint themselves with
those principles of moral science the observance of which will guide
into truthfulness, diligence, and uprightness of character. For this,
also, is the law of God. Observe, not into the knowledge of God, the
thing best worth living for: no mental science, and no moral science,
is pledged to reveal that. What I contend for is, that these sciences
have their part to play in the education of the human race, and that
the parent may not disregard them with impunity. My endeavour in this
and the following volumes of the series will be to sketch out roughly
a method of education which, as resting upon a basis of natural
law, may look, without presumption, to inherit the Divine blessing.
Any sketch I can offer in this short compass must be very imperfect
and very incomplete; but a hint here and there may be enough to put
intelligent parents on profitable lines of thinking with regard to the
education of their children.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Herbert Spencer, _Education_. Some particulars of the books
referred to in this volume will be found in Appendix A.