That the groundwork of man’s character is laid in his childhood appears
as a trivial platitude. I am almost ashamed to bring it before you. And
yet, as I look round me and find how apt we are to forget this simple
precept which is so fundamental in our life, I cannot help calling your
attention to it. If we consider the matter, we can well understand the
reason why its full significance is not realized. We must remember that
all science begins with axioms which are apparently truisms. What is
more of a truism than the axioms of Geometry and Mechanics—that the
whole is greater than the part, that things which are equal to the same
thing are equal to one another, or that a body remains in the same state
unless an external force changes it? And yet the whole of Mathematics
and Mechanics is built on those simple axioms.
The elements of science are just such obvious platitudes. What is needed
is to use them as efficient tools and by their means draw the consequent
effects. The same holds true in the science of education. The axiom or
the law of early training is not new, it is well known, but it is
unfortunately too often neglected and forgotten, and its significance is
almost completely lost.
It is certainly surprising how this law of early training is so
disregarded, so totally ignored in the education of the child. Not only
do we neglect to lay the necessary solid basis in the early life of the
child, a solid basis ready for the future structure, we do not even take
care to clear the ground. In fact, we even make the child’s soul a
dunghill, full of vermin of superstitions, fears and prejudices,—a
hideous heap saturated with the spirit of credulity.
We regard the child’s mind as a _tabula rasa_, a vacant lot, and empty
on it all our rubbish and refuse. We labor under the delusion that
stories and fairy tales, myths and deceptions about life and man are
good for the child’s mind. Is it a wonder that on such a foundation men
can only put up shacks and shanties? We forget the simple fact that what
is harmful for the adult is still more harmful to the child. Surely what
is poisonous to the grown-up mind cannot be useful food to the young. If
credulity in old wives’ tales, lack of individuality, sheepish
submissiveness, barrack-discipline, unquestioned and uncritical belief
in authority, meaningless imitation of jingles and gibberish,
memorization of mother-goose wisdom, repetition of incomprehensible
prayers and articles of creed, unintelligent aping of good manners,
silly games, prejudices and superstitions and fears of the supernormal
and supernatural, are censured in adults, why should we approve their
cultivation in the young?
At home and at school we drill into the child’s mind uncritical beliefs
in stories and tales, fictions and figments, fables and myths, creeds
and dogmas which poison the very sources of the child’s mind. At home
and at school we give the child over as a prey to all sorts of fatal
germs of mental diseases and moral depravity. We leave the child’s mind
an open field to be sown with dragon’s teeth which bring forth a whole
crop of pernicious tendencies,—love and admiration of successful evil,
and adoration of the rule of brute force. From the dragon’s teeth sown
in early childhood there rises in later life a whole brood of
flint-hearted men who blindly jostle and fight and mercilessly tear one
another, to obtain for some greedy Jason, some witch of a Medea their
coveted golden fleece.