SOME VITAL PRINCIPLES
If it be true that the Infant School of to-day suffers from lack of a
clear basis for its general policy, it will be profitable to have
clearly before us such principles as great educators have found to be
most vital to the education of young children.
We all believe that we have an aim and a high aim before us: it has been
variously expressed by past educationalists, but in the main they all
agree that the aim of education is conduct.
In actual practice, however, we act too often as if we only cared for
economic values. If we are to live up to our educational profession, we
must look our aim in the face and honestly practise what we believe.
While training of character and conduct is the accepted aim for
education in general, to make this useful and practical each teacher
must fix her attention on how this ultimate aim affects her own special
part of the whole work. By watching the free child she will discover how
best she can help him: he knows his own business, and when unfettered by
advice or command shows plainly that he is chiefly concerned with
_gaining experience_. He finds himself in what is to him a new and
complex world of people and things; actual experience is the foundation
for complete living, and the stronger the foundation the better the
result of later building. _The first vital principle then is that the
teacher of young children must provide life in miniature; that is, she
must provide abundant raw material and opportunities for experience_.
The next question is that of the best method of gaining this actual
experience. The child is unaware that he is laying foundations, he is
only vaguely conscious that he finds great pleasure in certain
activities, and that something impels him in certain directions. He
realises no definite future, he is content with the present; he cannot
work for a purpose other than the pleasure of the moment; without this
stimulus concentration is impossible. In the activities of this stage he
probably assimilates more actual matter than at any other period of his
life, and it is the same with his acquirements of skill. In happy
unconsciousness he gains knowledge of his own body and of its power, of
the external world, of his mother tongue and of his relations to other
people: he makes mistakes and commits faults, but these do not
necessarily cripple or incriminate him. He is not considered a social
outcast because he once kicked or bit, or because he threw his milk over
the table; he learns to balance and adjust his muscles on a seesaw, when
a fall on soft grass is a matter of little importance, and this is
better than waiting till he is compelled hastily to cross a river on a
narrow plank. It is all a kind of joyous rehearsal of life which we call
Play. We can force a child to passivity, to formal repetitions of
second-hand knowledge, to the acquisition of that for which he has no
apparent need, but we can never _educate_ him by these things. "Children
do not play because they are young, they have their youth that they may
play," as surely as they have their legs that they may walk.
_The second principle is therefore that the method of gaining experience
lies through Play, and that by this road we can best reach work_.
The third principle is the nature of the experience that a child seeks
to gain--the life he desires to live. How can we he sure that the
surroundings we provide and the activities we encourage are in accord
with children's needs?
Let us imagine a child of about five to six years of age, one of a
family, living in a small house to which a garden is attached; inside he
has the run of the house, but keeps his own toys, picture books and
collections of treasures. We will suppose that not being at school he is
free to arrange his own day, sometimes alone, and sometimes with other
children, or with his parents. What does he do?
He is interested in inanimate things, especially in using them, and so
he plays with his toys. He builds bricks, runs engines, solves simple
puzzle pictures, asks to work with his father's gardening tools, or his
mother's cooking utensils. He is interested in the life of the garden,
in the growing things, in the snail or spider he finds, in the cat, dog
or rabbit of the family; he wants to dig, water and feed these various
things, but he declines regular responsibility; his interest is in
spurts.
He is interested in sounds, both in those he can produce and in those
produced by others: soon he is interested in music, he will listen to it
for considerable periods, and may join in it: at first more especially
on the rhythmical side. So, too, he likes the rhythm of poetry and the
melody sounds of words. He is interested in making things; on a wet day
he will ask for scissors and paste, or bring out his paint box or
chalks; on a fine day he mixes sand or mud with water, or builds a
shelter with poles and shawls; at any time when he has an opportunity he
shuts himself into the bathroom and experiments with the taps, sails
boats, colours water, blows bubbles, tries to mix things, wet and dry.
He is interested in the doings of other people, in their conduct and in
his own; he is more interested in their badness than in their goodness:
"Tell me more of the bad things your children do," said a little boy to
his teacher aunt, and the request is significant and general; we learn
so little by mere uncontrasted goodness. He is interested in the words
that clothe narrations and in their style, he is impatient of a change
in form of an accepted piece of prose or poetry. He is hungry for the
sounds of telling words and phrases.
He is interested in reproducing the doings of other people so that he
may experience them more fully, and this involves minute observation,
careful and intelligent imitation, and vivid imagination. His own word
for it is pretence.
There are other things that he grasps at more vaguely and later; he is
dimly aware that people have lived before, and he is less dimly aware
that people live in places different from his own surroundings. He
realises that some of the stories, such as the fairy stories, are true
in one sense, a sense that responds to something within himself; that
some are true in another more material, and external sense, one
concerned with things that really happen. He hears of "black men," and
of "ships that carry people across the sea," and of "things that come
back in those ships."
He is interested in the immaterial world suggested by the mysteries of
woods and gardens, he has a dim conception that there is some life
beyond the visible, he feels a power behind life and he reveals this in
his early questions. He is keenly interested in questions of birth and
death, and sometimes comes into close contact with them. He feels that
other wonders must be accounted for--the snow, thunder and lightning,
the colours of summer, the changeful sea. At first the world of fairy
lore may satisfy him, later comes the life of the undying spirit, but
the two are continuous. He may attend "religious observances," and these
may help or they may hinder.
He is keenly interested in games, whether they are games of physical
skill, of mental skill, or games of pretence. Here most especially he
comes into contact with other people, and here he realises some of the
experiences of social life.
Such are the most usual sides of life sought by the ordinary child, and
on such must we base the surroundings we provide for our children in
school, and the aspects of life to which we introduce them, commonly
called subjects of the curriculum.
_Our third principle is therefore, evident: we find, in the child's
spontaneous choice, the nature of the surroundings and of the activities
that he craves for; in other words, he makes his own curriculum and
selects his own subject matter_.
The next consideration is the atmosphere in which a child can best
develop character by means of these experiences. A young child is a
stranger in an unknown, untried country: he has many strange promptings
that seek for satisfaction; he has strong emotions arising from his
instincts, he feels crudely and fiercely and he must act without delay,
as a result of these emotions. He is like a tourist in a new strange
country, fresh and eager, and with a similar holiday spirit of
adventure: the stimulation of the new arouses a desire to interpret, to
investigate and to ask questions: it arouses strong emotions to like or
dislike, to fear, to be curious; it leads to certain modes of conduct,
as a result of these emotions. Picture such a young tourist buttonholed
by a blasé guide, who had forgotten what first impressions meant, who
insisted on accompanying him wherever he went, regulating his procedure
by telling him just what should be observed and how to do so, pouring
out information so premature as to be obnoxious, correcting his taste,
subduing his enthusiasm, and modifying even his behaviour. The tourist
would presumably pay off the unwelcome guide, but the children cannot
pay off the teacher: they can and do rebel, but docility and
adaptability seem to play a large part in self-preservation. For the
young child freedom must precede docility, because the only reasonable
and profitable docility is one that comes after initiative and
experiment have been satisfied, and when the child feels that he needs
help.
The world that the free child chooses represents every side of life that
he is ready to assimilate, and his freedom must be intellectual,
emotional and moral freedom. In the school with the rigidly organised
time-table, where the remarks of the children provoke the constantly
repeated reproach: "We are not talking of that just now," where the
apparatus is formal and the method of using it prescribed, where home
life and street life are ignored, where there are neither garden nor
picture books, where childish questions are passed over or hastily
answered, where the room is full of desks and the normal attitude is
sitting, where the teacher is teaching more often than the children are
doing, there is no intellectual freedom.
Where passion and excitement are instantly arrested, where appreciation
for strong colours, fierce punishments, loud noises, is killed, where
fear is ridiculed, where primitive likes and dislikes are interpreted as
coarseness, there is no emotional freedom. A child must have these
experiences if he is to come to his own later: this is not the time to
stamp out but only to deflect and guide; otherwise he becomes a weak and
pale reflection of his elders, with little resource or enthusiasm.
Where it is almost impossible to be openly naughty, where there is no
opportunity for choice or for making mistakes, where control is all from
the teacher and self-control has no place, there is no moral freedom.
The school is not for the righteous but for the so-called sinner, who is
only a child learning self-control by experience.
Self-control is a habit gained through habits; a child must acquire the
habit of arresting desire, of holding the physical side in check, the
habit of reflection, of choice, and most of all the habit of either
acting or holding back, as a result of all this. If in the earliest
years his will is in the hands of others, and he has the habit of
obedience to the exclusion of all other habits, then his development as
a self-reliant individual is arrested, and may be permanently weakened.
There is no other way to learn life, and build up an ideal from the raw
material he has gained in other ways. In the rehearsal of life at school
he can do this without serious harm; but every time a mode of conduct is
imposed upon him when he might have chosen, every time he is externally
controlled when he might have controlled himself, every time he is
balked in making a mistake that would have been experience to him, he
will be proportionally less fit to choose, to exercise self-control, to
learn by experience, and these are the chief lessons at this
impressionable period.
_The fourth principle therefore is that the atmosphere of freedom is the
only atmosphere in which a child can gain experiences that will help to
develop character and control conduct._
These four vital principles will be applied to practical work in the
following chapters.
II. PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF VITAL PRINCIPLES
Before applying these principles it is necessary for practical
considerations to set out clearly the various stages of this period.
During the first eight years of life, development is very rapid and not
always relatively continuous. Sometimes it takes leaps, and sometimes
appears for a time to be quiescent. But roughly the first stage, of a
child's developing life ends when he can walk, eat more or less ordinary
food, and is independent of his mother. At this point the Nursery School
stage begins: the child is learning for himself his world by experience,
and through play he chooses his raw material in an atmosphere of
freedom. When the period of play pure and simple begins to grow into a
desire to do things better, to learn and practise for a more remote
end--in other words, when the child begins to be willing to be taught,
the transitional period from play to work begins. It can never be said
to end, but the relative amount of play to work gradually defines the
life of the school: and so the transitional period merges into the
school period. Thus we are concerned first with the Nursery School
period which corresponds to what Froebel meant by his Kindergarten and
Owen by his Infant School; secondly, with the transitional period which
has been far too long neglected or rushed over, and which roughly
corresponds to the Standard I. of the Elementary School; and thirdly, we
have the beginnings of the Junior School where work is the predominant
factor. In spite of Shakespeare's assertion, there is much in a name,
and if these names were definitely adopted, teachers would realise
better the nature of their business.
The following chapters seek to apply practically the four vital
principles to these periods of a child's life, but in many cases the
Transition Classes and the Junior School are considered together.