CHILDREN ARE BORN PERSONS
1.--THE MIND OF A CHILD
“_No sooner doth the truth ... come into the soul’s sight, but
the soul knows her to be her first and old acquaintance._”
“_The consequence of truth is great, therefore the judgment of it
must not be negligent._”
It should not surprise the reader that a chapter, designed to set
forth a startling truth, should open with the weighty words of an
old Divine (Whichcote). But truths get flat and wonders stale upon
us. We do not care much about the starry firmament, the budding
trees, the cunning architecture of the birds; and to all except
young parents and young brothers and sisters a baby is no longer a
marvel. The completeness of the new baby brother is what children
admire most, his toes and his fingers, his ears and all the small
perfections of him. His guardians have some understanding of the
baby; they know that his chief business is to grow and they feed
him with food convenient for him. If they are wise they give free
play to all the wrigglings and stretchings which give power to
his feeble muscles. His parents know what he will come to, and
feel that here is a new chance for the world. In the meantime, he
needs food, sleep and shelter and a great deal of love. So much we
all know. But is the baby more than a ‘huge oyster’? That is the
problem before us and hitherto educators have been inclined to
answer it in the negative. Their notion is that by means of a pull
here, a push there, a compression elsewhere a person is at last
turned out according to the pattern the educator has in his mind.
The other view is that the beautiful infant frame is but the
setting of a jewel of such astonishing worth that, put the whole
world in one scale and this jewel in the other, and the scale which
holds the world flies up outbalanced. A poet looks back on the
glimmering haze of his own infancy and this is the sort of thing he
sees,--
“I was entertained like an angel with the works of God in their
splendour and glory.... Is it not strange that an infant should
be heir of the whole world and see those mysteries which the
books of the learned never unfold?... The corn was orient and
immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I
thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust
and stones of the street were as precious gold.... The green
trees transported and ravished me. Their sweetness and unusual
beauty made my heart to leap.... Boys and girls tumbling in the
streets were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or
should die.... The streets were mine, the people were mine, their
clothes and gold and silver were mine as much as their sparkling
eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine and so were
the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine and I the
only spectator and enjoyer of it.”
It takes a poet like Traherne to retain and produce such vivid
memories, though perhaps we can all recall the sense that we were
spectators at the show of life, and we can recollect a sunny
time before we were able to speak or tell what we knew. _Punch_
amused us at one time with a baby’s views of his nurse and his
surroundings and especially of the unwarranted pulls and pushes
to which he was subject; but probably an infant is no critic. His
business is to perceive and receive and these he does day in and
day out.
We have an idea that poets say more than they know, express more
than they see, and that their version of life must be taken _cum
grano_, but perhaps the fact is that no labour of the mind enables
them to catch and put into words the full realities of which they
are cognisant, and therefore we may take Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Vaughan and the rest as witnesses who only hint at the glory which
might be revealed. We are not poets and are disposed to discount
the sayings of the poets, but the most prosaic of us comes across
evidence of mind in children, and of mind astonishingly alert. Let
us consider, in the first two years of life they manage to get
through more intellectual effort than any following two years can
show. Supposing that much-discussed Martian were at last able to
make his way to our planet, think of how much he must learn before
he could accommodate himself to our conditions! Our notions of hard
and soft, wet and dry, hot and cold, stable and unstable, far and
near, would be as foreign to him as they are to an infant who holds
out his pinafore for the moon. We do not know what the Martian
means of locomotion are but we can realise that to run and jump and
climb stairs, even to sit and stand at will must require fully as
much reasoned endeavour as it takes in after years to accomplish
skating, dancing, ski-ing, fencing, whatever athletic exercises
people spend years in perfecting; and all these the infant
accomplishes in his first two years. He learns the properties
of matter, knows colours and has first notions of size, solid,
liquid; has learned in his third year to articulate with surprising
clearness. What is more, he has learned a language, two languages,
if he has had the opportunity, and the writer has known of three
languages being mastered by a child of three, and one of them was
Arabic; mastered, that is, so far that a child can say all that
he needs to say in any one of the three--the sort of mastery most
of us wish for when we are travelling in foreign countries. Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu tells us that in her time the little children
of Constantinople prattled in five tongues with a good knowledge
of each. If we have not proved that a child is born a person with
a mind as complete and as beautiful as his beautiful little body,
we can at least show that he always has all the mind he requires
for his occasions; that is, that his mind is the instrument of his
education and that _his education does not produce his mind_.
Who shall measure the range of a child’s thoughts? His continual
questions about God, his speculations about ‘Jesus,’ are they no
more than idle curiosity, or are they symptoms of a God-hunger
with which we are all born, and is a child able to comprehend as
much of the infinite and the unseen as are his self-complacent
elders? Is he ‘cabined, cribbed, confined,’ in our ways and does
the fairy tale afford a joyful escape to regions where all things
are possible? We are told that children have no imagination, that
they must needs see and touch, taste and handle, in order to know.
While a child’s age is still counted by months, he devotes himself
to learning the properties of things by touching, pulling, tearing,
throwing, tasting, but as months pass into years a _coup d’œil_
suffices for all but new things of complicated structure. Life is
a continual progress to a child. He does not go over old things in
old ways; his joy is to go on. The immensity of his powers brings
its own terrors. Let me again quote Traherne,--
“Another time in a lowering and sad evening being alone in the
field when all things were dead and quiet a certain wanton horror
fell upon me beyond imagination. The unprofitableness and silence
of the place dissatisfied me: its wildness terrified me. From
the utmost ends of the earth fear surrounded me.... I was a weak
and little child and had forgotten there was a man alive on the
earth. Yet also something of hope and expectation comforted me
from every border.”
Traherne never loses the lessons that come to him and he goes on,--
“This taught me that I was concerned in all the world ... that
the beauties of the earth were made to entertain me ... that the
presence of cities, temples and kingdoms, ought to sustain me and
that to be alone in the world was to be desolate and miserable.”
Reason is present in the infant as truly as imagination. As soon
as he can speak he lets us know that he has pondered the ‘cause
why’ of things and perplexes us with a thousand questions. His
‘why?’ is ceaseless. Nor are his reasonings always disinterested.
How soon the little urchin learns to manage his nurse or mother,
to calculate her moods and play upon her feelings! It is in him to
be a little tyrant; “he has a will of his own,” says his nurse,
but she is mistaken in supposing that his stormy manifestations of
greed, wilfulness, temper, are signs of will. It is when the little
boy is able to stop all these and restrain himself with quivering
lip that his will comes into play; for he has a conscience too.
Before he begins to toddle he knows the difference between right
and wrong; even a baby in arms will blush at the ‘naughty baby!’
of his nurse; and that strong will of his acts in proportion as he
learns the difficult art of obedience; for no one can make a child
obey unless he wills to do so, and we all know how small a rebel
may make confusion in house or schoolroom.
2.--THE MIND OF A SCHOOL-CHILD
But we must leave the quite young child, fascinating as he is, and
take him up again when he is ready for lessons. I have made some
attempt elsewhere[11] to show what his parents and teachers owe to
him in those years in which he is engaged in self-education, taking
his lessons from everything he sees and hears, and strengthening
his powers by everything he does. Here, in a volume which is
chiefly concerned with education in the sense of schooling, I am
anxious to bring before teachers the fact that a child comes into
their hands with a mind of amazing potentialities: he has a brain
too, no doubt, the organ and instrument of that same mind, as a
piano is not music but the instrument of music. Probably we need
not concern ourselves about the brain which is subject to the same
conditions as the rest of the material body, is fed with the body’s
food, rests, as the body rests, requires fresh air and wholesome
exercise to keep it in health, but depends upon the mind for its
proper activities.
The world has concerned itself of late so much with psychology,
whose province is what has been called ‘the unconscious mind,’
a region under the sway of nerves and blood (which it is best
perhaps to let alone) that in our educational efforts we tend to
ignore the _mind_ and address ourselves to this region of symptoms.
Now mind, being spiritual, knows no fatigue; brain, too, duly
nourished with the food proper for the body, allowed due conditions
of fresh air and rest, should not know fatigue; given these two
conditions, we have a glorious field of educational possibilities;
but it rests with us to evolve a theory and practice which afford
due recognition to mind. An authoritative saying which we are apt
to associate with the religious life only is equally applicable
to education. That which is born of the flesh, is flesh, we are
told; but we have forgotten this great principle in our efforts
at schooling children. We give them a ‘play way’ and play is
altogether necessary and desirable but is not the avenue which
leads to mind. We give them a fitting environment, which is again
altogether desirable and, again, is not the way to mind. We teach
them beautiful motion and we do well, for the body too must have
its education; but we are not safe if we take these by-paths as
approaches to mind. It is still true that that which is born of
the spirit, is spirit. The way to mind is a quite direct way. Mind
must come into contact with mind through the medium of ideas.
“What is mind?” says the old conundrum, and the answer still is
“No matter.” It is necessary for us who teach to realize that
things material have little effect upon mind, because there are
still among us schools in which the work is altogether material and
technical, whether the teaching is given by means of bars of wood
or more scientific apparatus. The mistress of an Elementary School
writes,--“The father of one of my girls said to me yesterday, ‘You
have given me some work to do. E. has let me have no rest until I
promised to set up my microscope and get pond water to look for
monads and other wonders.’” Here we have the right order. That
which was born of the spirit, the idea, came first and demanded to
confirm and illustrate. “How can these things be?” we ask, and the
answer is not _evident_.
Education, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen. We must
begin with the notion that the business of the body is to grow;
and it grows upon food, which food is composed of living cells,
each a perfect life in itself. In like manner, though all analogies
are misleading and inadequate, the only fit sustenance for the
mind is ideas, and an idea too, like the single cell of cellular
tissue, appears to go through the stages and functions of a life.
We receive it with appetite and some stir of interest. It appears
to feed in a curious way. We hear of a new patent cure for the
mind or the body, of the new thought of some poet, the new notion
of a school of painters; we take in, accept, the idea and for days
after every book we read, every person we talk with brings food to
the newly entertained notion. ‘Not proven,’ will be the verdict of
the casual reader; but if he watch the behaviour of his own mind
towards any of the ideas ‘in the air,’ he will find that some such
process as I have described takes place; and this process must be
considered carefully in the education of children. We may not take
things casually as we have done. Our business is to give children
the great ideas of life, of religion, history, science; but it is
the _ideas_ we must give, clothed upon with facts as they occur,
and must leave the child to deal with these as he chooses.
This is how he deals with Geography, for example:--
“When I heard of any new kingdom beyond the seas the light and
glory of it entered into me. It rose up within me and I was
enlarged by the whole. I entered into it, I saw its commodities,
springs, meadows, inhabitants and became possessor of that new
room as if it had been prepared for me so much was I magnified
and delighted in it. When the Bible was read my spirit was
present in other ages. I saw the light and splendour of them,
the land of Canaan, the Israelites entering into it, the ancient
glory of the Amorites, their peace and riches, their cities,
houses, vines and fig-trees.... I saw and felt all in such a
lively manner as if there had been no other way to those places
but in spirit only.... Without changing place in myself I could
behold and enjoy all those. Anything when it was proposed though
it was a thousand years ago being always present before me.”
I venture again to quote Traherne because I know of no writer who
retains so clear a memory of his infancy; but Goethe gives as full
and convincing an account of his experience of the Bible,[12] I say
‘experience’ advisedly, for the word denotes the process by which
children get to know. They _experience_ all the things they hear
and read of; these enter into them and are their life; and thus it
is that ideas feed the mind in the most literal sense of the word
‘feed.’
Do our Geography lessons take the children _there_? Do they
experience, live in, our story of the call of Abraham?--or of the
healing of the blind man on the way to Jericho? If they do not,
it is not for lack of earnestness and intention on the part of
the teacher; his error is rather want of confidence in children.
He has not formed a just measure of a child’s mind and bores
his scholars with much talk about matters which they are able
to understand for themselves much better than he does. How many
teachers know that children require no pictures excepting the
pictures of great artists, which have quite another function than
that of illustration? They see for themselves in their own minds
a far more glorious, and indeed more accurate, presentation than
we can afford in our miserable daubs. They read between the lines
and put in all the author has left out. A child of nine, who had
been reading Lang’s _Tales of Troy and Greece_, drew Ulysses on
the Isle of Calypso cutting down trees to make a raft; a child of
ten, revelling in _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, drew that Indian
Princess bringing her lovely boy to Titania. We others are content
to know that Ulysses built a raft, that the boy was the child of
an Indian Princess. This is how any child’s mind works, and our
concern is not to starve these fertile intelligences. They must
have food in great abundance and variety. They know what to do with
it well enough and we need not disturb ourselves to provide for
the separate exercise of each so-called ‘faculty’; for the mind
is one and works all together; reason, imagination, reflection,
judgment, what you please, are like ‘all hands’ summoned by the
‘heave-ho!’ of the boatswain. All swarm on deck for the lading of
cargo, that rich and odorous cargo of ideas which the fair vessel
of a child’s mind is waiting to receive. Do we wish every child in
a class to say,--or, if he does not say, to feel,--“I was enlarged
wonderfully” by a Geography lesson? Let him see the place with
the eyes of those who have seen or conceived it; your barographs,
thermographs, contour lines, relief models, sections, profiles and
the like, will not do it. A map of the world must be a panorama
to a child of pictures so entrancing that he would rather ponder
them than go out to play; and nothing is more easy than to give him
this _joie de vivre_. Let him see the world as we ourselves choose
to see it when we travel; its cities and peoples, its mountains
and rivers, and he will go away from his lesson with the piece
of the world he has read about, be it county or country, sea or
shore, as that of “a new room prepared for him, so much will he
be magnified and delighted in it.” All the world is in truth the
child’s possession, prepared for him, and if we keep him out of his
rights by our technical, commercial, even historical, geography,
any sort of geography, in fact, made to illustrate our theories,
we are guilty of fraudulent practices. What he wants is the world
and every bit, piece by piece, each bit a key to the rest. He reads
of the Bore of the Severn and is on speaking terms with a ‘Bore’
wherever it occurs. He need not see a mountain to know a mountain.
He sees all that is described to him with a vividness of which
we know nothing just as if there had been “no other way to those
places but in spirit only.” Who can take the measure of a child?
The Genie of the Arabian tale is nothing to him. He, too, may be
let out of his bottle and fill the world. But woe to us if we keep
him corked up.
Enough, that the children have minds, and every man’s mind is his
means of living; but it is a great deal more. Working men will have
leisure in the future and how this leisure is to be employed is a
question much discussed. Now, no one can employ leisure fitly whose
mind is not brought into active play every day; the small affairs
of a man’s own life supply no intellectual food and but small and
monotonous intellectual exercise. Science, history, philosophy,
literature, must no longer be the luxuries of the ‘educated’
classes; all classes must be educated and sit down to these things
of the mind as they do to their daily bread. History must afford
its pageants, science its wonders, literature its intimacies,
philosophy its speculations, religion its assurances to every man,
and his education must have prepared him for wanderings in these
realms of gold.
How do we prepare a child, again, to use the æsthetic sense with
which he appears to come provided? His education should furnish him
with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists
old and new;--Israels’ _Pancake Woman_, his _Children by the Sea_;
Millet’s _Feeding the Birds_, _First Steps_, _Angelus_; Rembrandt’s
_Night Watch_, _The Supper at Emmaus_; Velasquez’s _Surrender of
Breda_,--in fact, every child should leave school with at least a
couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in
the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings,
sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he sees. Perhaps we
might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,--sunsets,
cloudscapes, star-light nights. At any rate he should go forth
well furnished because imagination has the property of magical
expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold.
It is not only a child’s intellect but his heart that comes to
us thoroughly furnished. Can any of us love like a little child?
Father and mother, sisters and brothers, neighbours and friends,
“our” cat and “our” dog, the wretchedest old stump of a broken toy,
all come in for his lavish tenderness. How generous and grateful he
is, how kind and simple, how pitiful and how full of benevolence
in the strict sense of goodwill, how loyal and humble, how fair
and just! His conscience is on the alert. Is a tale true? Is a
person good?--these are the important questions. His _conscience_
chides him when he is naughty, and by degrees as he is trained,
his _will_ comes to his aid and he learns to order his life. He is
taught to say his prayers, and we elders hardly realize how real
his prayers are to a child.
3.--MOTIVES FOR LEARNING
Now place a teacher before a class of persons the beauty and
immensity of each one of whom I have tried to indicate and he will
say, “What have I to offer them?” His dull routine lessons crumble
into the dust they are when he faces children as they are. He
cannot go on offering them his stale commonplaces; he feels that he
may not bore them; that he may not prick the minds he has dulled
by unworthy motives of greed or emulation; he would not invite a
parcel of children to a Timon feast of smoke and lukewarm water.
He knows that children’s minds hunger at regular intervals as do
their bodies; that they hunger for knowledge, not for information,
and that his own poor stock of knowledge is not enough, his own
desultory talk has not substance enough; that his irrelevant
remarks interrupt a child’s train of thought; that, in a word, he
is not sufficient for these things.
On the other hand, the children, the children of the slums
especially, have no vocabulary to speak of, no background of
thought derived from a cultured environment. They are like goodly
pitchers, capable of holding much but with necks so narrow that
only the thinnest stream can trickle in. So we have thought
hitherto, and our teaching has been diluted to dishwater and the
pitchers have gone empty away.
But we have changed all that. Just as in the War the magnanimous,
patriotic citizen was manifested in every man so in our schools
every child has been discovered to be a person of infinite
possibilities. I say every child, for so-called ‘backward’ children
are no exception. I shall venture to bring before the reader
some experiences of the _Parents’ Union School_ as being ground
with which I am familiar. Examination papers representing tens of
thousands of children working in Elementary Schools, Secondary
Schools and home schoolrooms have just passed under my eye. How the
children have revelled in knowledge! and how good and interesting
all their answers are! How well they spell on the whole and how
well they write! We do not need the testimony of their teachers
that the work of the term has been joyous; the verve with which the
children tell what they know proves the fact. Every one of these
children knows that there are hundreds of pleasant places for the
mind to roam in. They are good and happy because some little care
has been taken to know what they are and what they require; a care
very amply rewarded by results which alter the whole outlook on
education. In our Training College, the students are not taught how
to stimulate attention, how to keep order, how to give marks, how
to punish or even how to reward, how to manage a large class or a
small school with children in different classes. All these things
come by nature in a school where the teachers know something of the
capacities and requirements of children. To hear children of the
slums ‘telling’ _King Lear_ or _Woodstock_, by the hour if you will
let them, or describing with minutest details Van Eyck’s _Adoration
of the Lamb_ or Botticelli’s _Spring_, is a surprise, a revelation.
We take off our shoes from off our feet; we ‘did not know it was
in them,’ whether we be their parents, their teachers or mere
lookers-on. And with some feeling of awe upon us we shall be the
better prepared to consider how and upon what children should be
educated. I will only add that I make no claims for them which
cannot be justified by hundreds, thousands, of instances within our
experience.