EXPERIENCES BY MEANS OF DOING
In the Nursery School activity is the chief characteristic: one of its
most usual forms is experimenting with tools and materials, such as
chalk, paints, scissors, paper, sand, clay and other things. The desire
to experiment, to change the material in some way, to gratify the
senses, especially the muscular one, may be stronger than the desire to
construct. The handwork play of the Nursery School is therefore chiefly
by means of imitation and experiment, and direct help is usually quite
unwelcome to the child under six. There is little more to be said in the
way of direction than, "Provide suitable material, give freedom, and
help, if the child wants it." But the case is rather different in the
transitional stage. As the race learnt to think by doing, so children
seem to approach thought in that way; they have a natural inclination to
do in the first case; they try, do wrongly, consider, examine, observe,
and do again: for example, a girl wants to make a doll's bonnet like the
baby's; she begins impulsively to cut out the stuff, finds it too small,
tries to visualise the right size, examines the real bonnet, and makes
another attempt. At some apparently odd moment she stumbles on a truth,
perhaps the relation of one form to another in the mazes of
bonnet-making; it is at these odd moments that we learn. Or a boy may be
painting a Christmas card, and in another odd moment he may _feel_
something of the beauty of colour, if, for example, he is copying
holly-berries. No purposeless looking at them would have stirred
appreciation. Whether the end is doing, or whether it is thinking, the
two are inextricably connected; in the earlier stages the way to know
and feel is very often by action, and here is the basis of the maxim
that handwork is a method.
This idea has often been only half digested, and consequently it has led
to a very trivial kind of application; a nature lesson of the "look and
say" description has been followed by a painting lesson; a geography
lesson, by the making of a model. If the method of learning by doing was
the accepted aim of the teacher then it was not carried out, for this is
learning and then doing, not learning for the purpose of doing, but
doing for the purpose of testing the learning, which is quite another
matter, and not a very natural procedure with young children. Many
people have tried to make things from printed directions, a woman may
try to make a blouse and a man to make a knife-box; their procedure is
not to separate the doing and the learning process; probably they have
first tried to do, found need for help, and gone to the printed
directions, which they followed side by side with the doing; and in the
light of former failures or in the course of looking or of
experimenting, they stumbled upon knowledge: this is learning by doing.
Therefore the making of a box may be arithmetic, the painting of a
buttercup may be nature study, the construction of a model, or of
dramatic properties may be geography or history, not by any means the
only way of learning, but one of the earlier ways and a very sound way;
there is a purpose to serve behind it all, that will lead to very
careful discrimination in selection of knowledge, and to pains taken to
retain it. If this is fully understood by a teacher and she is content
to take nature's way, and abide for nature's time to see results, then
her methods will be appropriately applied: she will see that she is not
training a race of box-makers, but that she is guiding children to
discover things that they need to know in a natural way, and ensuring
that as these facts are discovered they shall be used. Consequently
neither haste nor perfection of finish must cloud the aim; it is not the
output that matters but the method by which the children arrive at the
finished object, not forty good boxes, but forty good thinkers. Dewey
has put it most clearly when he says that the right test of an
occupation consists "in putting the maximum of consciousness into
whatever is done." Froebel says, "What man tries to represent or do he
begins to understand."
This is what we should mean by saying that handwork is a method of
learning.
But handwork has its own absolute place as well. A child wants to
acquire skill in this direction even more consciously than he wants to
learn: if he has been free, in the nursery class, to experiment with
materials, and if he knows some of his limitations, he is now, in the
transition class, ready for help, and he should get it as he needs it.
This may run side by side with the more didactic side of handwork which
has been described, but it is more likely that in practice the two are
inextricably mixed up; and this does not matter if the two ends are
clear in the teacher's mind; both sides have to be reckoned with.
The important thing to know is the kind of help that should be given,
and when and how it is needed. It is well to remember that in this
connection a child's limitations are not final, but only mark stages:
for example, in his early attempts to use thick cardboard he cannot
discover the neat hinge that is made by the process known as a
"half-cut"; he tries in vain to bend the cardboard, so as to secure the
same result. There are two ways of helping him: either he can be quite
definitely shown and made to imitate, or he can be set to think about
it; he is given a cardboard knife and allowed to experiment: if he
fails, it may be suggested that a clean edge can only be got by some
form of cutting; probably he will find out the rest of the process. The
second method is the better one, because it promotes thinking, while the
first only promotes pure imitation and the habit of reckoning on this
easy solution of difficulties. A dull child may have to be shown, but
there are few such children, unless they have been trained to dulness.
Imitation is not, however, always a medicine for dulness, nor does it
always produce dulness. There is a time for imitation and there is a
kind of imitation that is very intelligent. For example, a child may
come across a toy aeroplane and wish to make one; he will examine it
carefully, think over the uses of parts and proceed to make one as like
it as possible: here again is the maximum of consciousness, the essence
of thinking. Or the imitation may consist in following verbal
directions: this is far from easy if the teacher is at all vague, and
promotes valuable effort if she is clear but not diffuse: the putting of
words into action necessitates a considerable amount of imagining, and
the establishment of very important associations in brain centres. Such
cases might occur in connection with weaving, cardboard and paper work,
or the more technical processes of drawing and painting, where race
experience is actually _given_ to a child, by means of which he leaps
over the experiences of centuries. This is progress.
If a teacher is to take handwork seriously, and not as a pretty
recreation with pleasing results, she should be fully conscious of all
that it means, and apply this definitely in her work: it is so easy to
be trivial while appearing to be thorough by having well-finished work
produced, which has necessitated little hard thinking on the child's
part. Construction gives a sense of power, a strengthening of the will,
ability to concentrate on a purpose in learning, a social sense of
serviceableness, a deepened individuality: but this can only be looked
for if a child is allowed to approach it in the right way, first as an
experimenter and investigator, or as an artist, and afterwards as a
learner, who is also an individual, and learns in his own way and at his
own rate: but if the teacher's ambition is external and economic then
the child is a tool in her hands, and will remain a tool. We cannot
expect the fruits of the spirit if our goal is a material one.
One of the lessons of the war is economy. In handwork this has come to
us through the quest for materials, but it has been a blessing, if now
and then in disguise. In the more formal period of handwork only
prepared, almost patented material was used; everything was
"requisitioned" and eager manufacturers supplied very highly finished
stuff. Not very many years ago, the keeper of a "Kindergarten" stall at
an exhibition said, while pointing to cards cut and printed with
outlines for sewing and pricking, "We have so many orders for these that
we can afford to lay down considerable plant for their production." An
example in another direction is that of a little girl who attended one
of the best so-called Kindergartens of the time: she was afflicted,
while at home, with the "don't know what to do" malady; her mother
suggested that she might make some of the things she made at school, but
she negatived that at once with the remark, "I couldn't do that, you
see, because we have none of the right kind of stuff to make them of
here."
It is quite unnecessary to give more direct details as to the kind of
work suitable and the method of doing it; more than enough books of help
have been published on every kind of material, and it might perhaps be
well if we made less use of such terms as "clay-modelling,"
"cardboard-work," "raffia," and took handwork more in the sense of
constructive or expressive work, letting the children select one or
several media for their purpose; they ought to have access to a variety
of material; and except when they waste, they should use it freely. It
is limiting and unenlightened to put down a special time for the use of
special material, if the end might be better answered by something else:
if modelling is at 11.30 on Monday and children are anxious to make
Christmas presents, what law in heaven or earth are we obeying if we
stick to modelling except the law of Red Tape.