THE GOOD AND EVIL NATURE OF A CHILD
_Children are not born bad but with possibilities for good and for
evil._
1.--WELL-BEING OF BODY
A well-known educationalist has brought heavy charges against us
all on the score that we bring up children as ‘children of wrath.’
He probably exaggerates the effect of any such teaching, and the
‘little angel’ theory is fully as mischievous. The fact seems
to be that children are like ourselves, not because they have
become so, but because they are born so; that is, with tendencies,
dispositions, towards good and towards evil, and also with a
curious intuitive knowledge as to which is good and which is evil.
Here we have the work of education indicated. There are good and
evil tendencies in body and mind, heart and soul; and the hope set
before us is that we can foster the good so as to attenuate the
evil; that is, on condition that we put Education in her true place
as the handmaid of Religion. The community, the nation, the race,
are now taking their due place in our religious thought. We are no
longer solely occupied in what an Irish woman called ‘saving yer
dirty sowl.’ Our religion is becoming more magnanimous and more
responsible and it is time that a like change should take place
in our educational thought. We find ourselves in open places
breathing fresher air when we consider, not the education of an
individual child or of a social class or even of a given country,
but of the race, of the human nature common to every class and
country, every individual child. The prospect is exhilarating and
the recognition of the potentialities in any child should bring
about such an educational renaissance as may send our weary old
world rejoicing on its way.
Physicians and physiologists tell us that new-born children start
fair. A child is not born with tuberculosis, for example, if with
a tendency which it is our business to counteract. In the same
way all possibilities for good are contained in his moral and
intellectual outfit, hindered it may be by a corresponding tendency
to evil for every such potentiality. We begin to see our way. It
is our business to know of what parts and passions a child is made
up, to discern the dangers that present themselves, and still
more the possibilities of free-going in delightful paths. However
disappointing, even forbidding, the failings of a child, we may be
quite sure that in every case the opposite tendency is there and we
must bring the wit to give it play.
Parents have this sort of mother-wit more commonly than we
outsiders, teachers and the like. Of course, we know of the
mothers and fathers who can’t do anything with Tom and hope the
schoolmaster will lick him into shape. But how often on the other
hand are we surprised to see how much more of persons Bob and Polly
are in their own homes than at school! Perhaps this is because
parents know their children better than do others and for that
reason believe in them more; for our faith in the divine and the
human keeps pace with our knowledge. For this reason it behoves
us teachers to get a bird’s eye view of the human nature which is
present in every child. Everybody knows that hunger, thirst, rest,
chastity are those natural endowments of the body by means of which
it grows and functions; but in every child there are tendencies
to greediness, restlessness, sloth, impurity, any one of which by
allowance may ruin the child and the man that he will be.
Again, our old friends, the five senses, require direction and
practice. Smell, especially, might be made a source of delicate
pleasure by the habit of discriminating the good smells of
field and garden, flower and fruit, for their own sakes, not as
ministering to taste, which, unduly pampered, becomes a man’s
master. But there is little that is new to be learned about the
body and those various body-servants with which it is equipped.
Education already does her part in training the muscles,
cultivating the senses, ordering the nerves, of all children, rich
and poor; for in these days we perceive that the development which
is due to one child is due to all. If we make a mistake in regard
to physical education it is perhaps in the matter of ordering the
nerves of a child. We do not consider enough that the nourishment,
rest, fresh air and natural exercise, proper for the body as a
whole, meet the requirements of the nervous system and that the
undue nervous tension which a small child suffers in carrying a cup
of tea, an older boy or girl in cramming for an examination, may be
the cause later of a distressing nervous breakdown. We are becoming
a nervous, overstrained nation and though golf and cricket may
do something for us, a watchful education, alert to arrest every
symptom of nervous over-pressure, would do much to secure for every
child a fine physique and a high degree of staying power.
A snare which attends the really brilliant teacher is the
exhausting effect upon children of an overpowering personality.
They are such ardent and responsive little souls that the teacher
who gives them nods and becks and wreathéd smiles may play the Pied
Piper with them. But he or she should beware. The undue play of
the personality of the teacher is likely to suppress and subdue
that of his scholars; and, not only so, children are so eager to
live up to the demands made upon them that they may be brought to a
state of continual nervous over-pressure under the influence of a
‘charming personality.’ This sort of subjection, the _Schwärmerei_
of the Germans, was powerfully set forth in a recent novel in which
an unprincipled and fascinating mistress ‘ran’ her personality with
disastrous results. But the danger does not lie in extreme cases.
The girl who kisses the chamber door of her class mistress will
forget this lady by and by; but the parasitic habit has been formed
and she must always have some person or some cause on which to hang
her body and soul. I speak of ‘she’ and ‘her’ perhaps unfairly,
because ever since the Greek youth hung about their masters in the
walks of the Academy there have been teachers who have undermined
the stability of the boys to whom they devoted themselves. Were his
countrymen entirely wrong about Socrates? A tendency to this manner
of betrayal is the infirmity of noble minds, of those who have the
most to give; and for this reason, again, it is important that we
should have before us a bird’s eye view, let us call it, of human
nature.
2.--WELL-BEING OF MIND
There is a common notion that it is our inalienable right not
only to say what we please but to think as we please, that is, we
believe that while body is subject to physical laws, while the
affections, love and justice, are subject to moral laws, the mind
is a chartered libertine. Probably this notion has much to do with
our neglect of intellect. We do not perceive that the mind, too,
has its tendencies both good and evil and that every inclination
towards good is hindered and may be thwarted by a corresponding
inclination towards evil; I am not speaking of moral evil but
of those intellectual evils which we are slow to define and are
careless in dealing with. Does the teacher of a large class always
perceive that intellect is enthroned before him in every child,
however dull and inattentive may be his outer show? Every child
in such a class is open to the wonders that science reveals, is
interested in the wheeling worlds of the winter firmament. “Child
after child,” said a schoolmistress, “writes to say how much they
have enjoyed reading about the stars.” “As we are walking sometimes
and the stars are shining,” says a girl of eleven in an Elementary
School, “I tell mother about the stars and planets and comets. She
said she should think astronomy very interesting.”
But we teach astronomy, no, we teach ‘light and heat’ by means of
dessicated text-books, diagrams and experiments, which last are no
more to children than the tricks of white magic. The infinitely
little is as attractive to them as the infinitely great and the
behaviour of an atom, an ion, is a fairy tale they delight in,
that is, if no semblance to a fairy tale be suggested. The pageant
of history with its interplay of characters is as delightful as
any tale because every child uses his own film to show the scenes
and exhibit the persons. We fuss a good deal about the dress,
implements and other small details of each historic period but
we forget that, give the child a few fit and exact words on the
subject and he has the picture in his mind’s eye, nay, a series,
miles long of really glorious films; for a child’s amazing,
vivifying imagination is part and parcel of his intellect.
The way children make their own the examples offered to them is
amazing. No child would forget the characterisation of Charles
IX as ‘feeble and violent,’ nor fail to take to himself a lesson
in self-control. We may not point the moral; that is the work
proper for children themselves and they do it without fail. The
comparative difficulty of the subject does not affect them. A
teacher writes (of children of eleven),--“They cannot have enough
of Publicola and there are always groans when the lesson comes to
an end.”
I have said much of history and science, but mathematics, a
mountainous land which pays the climber, makes its appeal to mind,
and good teachers know that they may not drown their teaching in
verbiage. As for literature--to introduce children to literature
is to instal them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring
a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast
exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being
familiar with it from the very first. A child’s intercourse must
always be with good books, the best that we can find. Of course,
we have always known that this is the right thing for children in
cultivated homes, but what about those in whose dwellings books are
little known? One of the wise teachers in Gloucestershire[13] notes
that a recognition of two things is necessary in dealing with this
problem. First, that,--
“To explain the meaning of words destroys interest in the story
and annoys the child. Second, that in many instances it is
unnecessary. Although a child’s dictionary knowledge of words
is lacking it does not follow that the meaning of a sentence or
paragraph is unknown to him ... neither is the correct employment
of the words beyond him in writing or narrating. Two examples
of this power to sense the meaning were observed last term.
There is a particular boy in Form IIB who has not hitherto been
looked upon as possessing high intelligence. Classified by age he
ought to be two Forms higher. Last term in taking the story of
Romulus and Remus, I found that in power of narrating and degree
of understanding (that is, of ‘sensing’ a paragraph and either
translating it into his vocabulary or in using the words read to
him) he stood above the others and also above the majority in the
next higher Form.”
“What has surprised us most,” said the Headmaster of A., “is
the ready way in which boys absorb information and become
interested in literature, literature which we have hitherto
considered outside the scope of primary school teaching. A year
ago I could not have believed that boys would have read Lytton’s
_Harold_, Kingsley’s _Hereward_, and Scott’s _Talisman_ with
real pleasure and zest or would study with understanding and
delight Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_, _King John_ and _Richard II_;
but experience has shown us we have underrated the abilities and
tastes of the lads we should have known better.”
That is the capital charge against most schools. The teachers
underrate the tastes and abilities of their pupils. In things
intellectual, children, even backward children, have extraordinary
‘possibilities for good’--possibilities so great that if we had the
wit to give them their head they would carry us along like a stream
in spate.
But what about intellectual tendencies, or ‘possibilities for
evil’? One such tendency dominates many schools notwithstanding
prodigious efforts on the part of the teachers to rouse slumbering
minds. Indeed, the more the teacher works, the greater the
_incuria_ of the children, so the class is prodded with marks,
the boys take places, the bogie of an oncoming examination is
held before them. Some spasmodic effort is the result but no
vital response and, though boys and girls love school, like
their teachers and even their lessons, they care not at all for
knowledge, for which the school should create enthusiasm. I can
touch here on no more than two potent means of creating _incuria_
in a class. One is the talky-talky of the teacher. We all know
how we are bored by the person in private life who explains and
expounds. What reason have we to suppose that children are not
equally bored? They try to tell us that they are by wandering eyes,
inanimate features, fidgetting hands and feet, by every means at
their disposal; and the kindly souls among us think that they want
to play or to be out of doors. But they have no use for play
except at proper intervals. What they want is knowledge conveyed in
literary form and the talk of the facile teacher leaves them cold.
Another soothing potion is little suspected of producing mental
lethargy. We pride ourselves upon going over and over the same
ground ‘until the children know it’; the monotony is deadly. A
child writes,--“Before we had these (books) we had to read the same
old lot again and again.” Is it not true? In the home schoolroom
books used by the grandmother are fit for the grandchildren, books
used in boys’ schools may be picked up at second-hand stalls with
the obliterated names of half-a-dozen successive owners. And what
of the compilations, neither books nor text-books, which do duty in
Elementary Schools? No wonder Mr. Fisher said, in opening a public
library, that he had been “surprised and pained when visiting
Elementary Schools to find that there was nothing in them which
could be called a book, nothing that would charm and enlighten and
expand the imagination.” And yet, as he went on to say, the country
is “full of artistic and literary ability and always has been so.”
If this ability is to be brought into play we must recognise that
children are not ruminants intellectually any more than physically.
They cannot go over the same ground repeatedly without deadening,
even paralysing results, for progress, continual progress is the
law of intellectual life.
In matters of the mind again _Habit_ is a good servant but a bad
master. Specialisation, the fetish of the end of the last century,
is to be deprecated because it is at our peril that we remain too
long in any one field of thought. We may not, for example, allow
the affairs and interests of daily life to deprive the mind of its
proper range of interests and occupations. It is even possible for
a person to go into any one of the great fields of thought and to
work therein with delight until he become incapable of finding his
way into any other such field. We know how Darwin lost himself in
science until he could not read poetry, find pleasure in pictures,
think upon things divine; he was unable to turn his mind out of
the course in which it had run for most of his life. In the great
(and ungoverned) age of the Renaissance, the time when great things
were done, great pictures painted, great buildings raised, great
discoveries made, the same man was a painter, an architect, a
goldsmith and a master of much knowledge besides; and all that he
did he did well, all that he knew was part of his daily thought and
enjoyment. Let us hear Vasari on Leonardo,--
“Possessed of a divine and marvellous intellect and being an
excellent geometrician, he not only worked at sculpture ... but
also prepared many architectural plans and buildings ... he made
designs for mills and other engines to go by water; and, as
painting was to be his profession, he studied drawing from life.”
Leonardo knew nothing about Art for Art’s sake, that shibboleth
of yesterday, nor did our own Christopher Wren, also a great
mathematician and master of much and various knowledge, to whom
architecture was rather a by-the-way interest, and yet he built St.
Paul’s. What an irreparable loss we had when that plan of his for
a beautiful and spacious London was flung aside because it would
cost too much to carry it out! Just so of our parsimony do we fling
aside the minds of the children of our country, also capable of
being wrought into pleasaunces of delight, structures of utility
and beauty, at a pitifully trifling cost. It is well we should
recognise that the business of education is with us all our lives,
that we must always go on increasing our knowledge.
Of the means we employ to hinder the growth of mind perhaps none
is more subtle than the _questionnaire_. It is as though one
required a child to produce for inspection at its various stages
of assimilation the food he consumed for his dinner; we see at once
how the digestive processes would be hindered, how, in a word,
the child would cease to be fed. But the mind also requires its
food and leave to carry on those quiet processes of digestion and
assimilation which it must accomplish for itself. The child with
capacity, which implies depth, is stupified by a long rigmarole on
the lines of,--“If John’s father is Tom’s son, what relation is Tom
to John?” The shallow child guesses the riddle and scores; and it
is by the use of tests of this kind that we turn out young people
sharp as needles but with no power of reflection, no intelligent
interests, nothing but the aptness of the city _gamin_.
_Imagination_ may become like that cave Ezekiel tells of wherein
were all manner of unseemly and evil things; it may be a temple
wherein self is glorified; it may be a chamber of horrors and
dangers; but it may also be a House Beautiful. It is enough for us
to remember that imagination is stored with those images supplied
day by day whether by the cinema, the penny dreadful, by Homer or
Shakespeare, by the great picture or the flaming ‘shocker.’ We have
heard of the imaginative man who conceived a passion for the Sphinx!
In these days when _Reason_ is deified by the unlearned and plays
the part of the Lord of Misrule it is necessary that every child
should be trained to recognize fallacious reasoning and above all
to know that a man’s reason is his servant and not his master; that
there is no notion a man chooses to receive which his reason will
not justify, whether it be mistrust of his neighbour, jealousy of
his wife, doubts about his religion, or contempt for his country.
Realising this, we ‘see reason’ in the fact that thousands of men
go on strike because two of their body have been denied permission
to attend a certain meeting. We see reason in this but the men
themselves confound reason with right and consider that such a
strike is a righteous protest. The only safeguard against fallacies
which undermine the strength of the nation morally and economically
is a liberal education which affords a wide field for reflection
and comparison and abundant data upon which to found sound
judgments.
As for that _æsthetic_ ‘appetency’ (to use Coleridge’s word) upon
which so many of the gentle pleasures of life depend, it is open
to many disasters: it dies of inanition when beauty is not duly
presented to it, beauty in words, in pictures and music, in tree
and flower and sky. The function of the sense of beauty is to open
a paradise of pleasure for us; but what if we grow up admiring the
wrong things, or, what is morally worse, arrogant in the belief
that it is only we and our kind who are able to appreciate and
distinguish beauty? It is no small part of education to have seen
much beauty, to recognize it when we see it, and to keep ourselves
humble in its presence.
3.--INTELLECTUAL APPETITE
As the body is provided with its appetites, by undue indulgence
of any one of which a man may make shipwreck, but which duly
ordered should result in a robust and vigorous frame; so, too,
the spiritual part of us is provided with certain caterers whose
business it is to secure that kind of nourishment which promotes
spiritual or intellectual growth in one or another direction.
Perhaps in no part of our educational service do we make more
serious blunders than in our use of those _desires_ which act as
do the appetites for the body’s service. Every child wants to be
approved, even baby in his new red shoes; to be first in what is
going on; to get what is going; to be admired; to lead and manage
the rest; to have the companionship of children and grown people;
and last, but not least, every child wants _to know_. There they
are, those desires, ready to act on occasion and our business is to
make due use of this natural provision for the work of education.
We do make use of the desires, not wisely, but too well. We run our
schools upon _emulation_, the desire of every child to be first;
and not the ablest, but the most pushing, comes to the front. We
quicken emulation by the common desire to get and to have, that
is, by the impulse of avarice. So we offer prizes, exhibitions,
scholarships, every incentive that can be proposed. We cause him
to work for our _approbation_, we play upon his vanity, and the
boy does more than he can. What is the harm, we say, when all
those springs of action are in the child already? The athlete is
beginning to discover that he suffers elsewhere from the undue
development of any set of muscles; and the boy whose ambition, or
emulation, has been unduly stimulated becomes a flaccid person. But
there is a worse evil. We all want knowledge just as much as we
want bread. We know it is possible to cure the latter appetite by
giving more stimulating food; and the worst of using other spurs
to learning is that a natural love of knowledge which should carry
us through eager school-days, and give a spice of adventure to the
duller days of mature life, is effectually choked; and boys and
girls ‘Cram to pass but not to know; they do pass but they don’t
know.’ The divine curiosity which should have been an equipment for
life hardly survives early schooldays.
Now it has been demonstrated very fully indeed that the
delightfulness of knowledge is sufficient to carry a pupil joyfully
and eagerly through his school life and that prizes and places,
praise, blame and punishment, are unnecessary in so far as they
are used to secure ardent interest and eager work. The love of
knowledge is sufficient. Each of those other stimuli should no
doubt have its natural action, but one or two springs of action
seem to be played upon excessively in our schools. Conduct gives
opportunity for ‘virtue emulously rapid in the race’ and especially
that part of conduct known as ‘play’ in which most of the natural
desires come into action; but even in play we must beware of
the excess of zeal which risks the elimination of the primary
feelings of love and justice. In the schoolroom, without doubt,
the titillation of knowledge itself affords sufficient stimulus to
close attention and steady labour; and the desire of acquisition
has due play in a boy who is constantly increasing his acquirements.
4.--MISDIRECTED AFFECTIONS
We are aware of more than mind and body in our dealings with
children. We appeal to their ‘feelings’; whether ‘mind’ or
‘feelings’ be more than names we choose to give to manifestations
of that spiritual entity which _is_ each one of us. Probably we
have not even taken the trouble to analyse and name the feelings
and to discover that they all fall under the names of love and
justice, that it is the glory of the human being to be endowed with
such a wealth of these two as is sufficient for every occasion of
life. More, the occasions come and he is ready to meet them with
the ease and triumph of the solvent debtor.
But this rich endowment of the moral nature is also a matter with
which the educator should concern himself. Alas, he does so. He
points the moral with a thousand tedious platitudes, directs,
instructs, illustrates and bores exceedingly the nimble and
subtle minds of his scholars. This, of the feelings and their
manifestations, is certainly the field for the spare and guarded
praise and blame of parent and teacher; but this praise or blame is
apt to be either scrapped by children, or, taken as the sole motive
for conduct, they go forth unused to do a thing ‘for it is right’
but only because somebody’s approbation is to be won.
This education of the feelings, moral education, is too delicate
and personal a matter for a teacher to undertake trusting to
his own resources. Children are not to be fed morally like
young pigeons with predigested food. They must pick and eat for
themselves and they do so from the conduct of others which they
hear of or perceive. But they want a great quantity of the sort
of food whose issue is conduct, and that is why poetry, history,
romance, geography, travel, biography, science and sums must all
be pressed into service. No one can tell what particular morsel a
child will select for his sustenance. One small boy of eight may
come down late because--“I was meditating upon Plato and couldn’t
fasten my buttons,” and another may find his meat in ‘Peter Pan’!
But all children must read widely, and know what they have read,
for the nourishment of their complex nature.
As for moral lessons, they are worse than useless; children want
a great deal of fine and various moral feeding, from which they
draw the ‘lessons’ they require. It is a wonderful thing that every
child, even the rudest, is endowed with _Love_ and is able for all
its manifestations,--kindness, benevolence, generosity, gratitude,
pity, sympathy, loyalty, humility, gladness; we older persons are
amazed at the lavish display of any one of these to which the most
ignorant child may treat us. But these aptitudes are so much coin
of the realm with which a child is provided that he may be able to
pay his way through life; and, alas, we are aware of certain vulgar
commonplace tendencies in ourselves which make us walk delicately
and trust, not to our own teaching, but to the best that we have in
art and literature and above all to that storehouse of example and
precept, the Bible, to enable us to touch these delicate spirits to
fine issues. St. Francis, Collingwood, Father Damien, one of the
V.C.’s among us, will do more for children than years of talk.
Then there is that other wonderful provision for right living
without which no neglected or savage man-soul exists. Everyone has
_Justice_ in his heart; a cry for ‘fair play’ reaches the most
lawless mob, and we all know how children torment us with their
‘It’s not fair.’ It is much to know that as regards justice as
well as love there exists in everyone an adequate provision for
the conduct of life: general unrest, which has its rise in wrong
thinking and wrong judging far more than in faulty conditions, is
the misguided outcome of that sense of justice with which, thank
God, we are all endued.
Here, on the face of it, we get one office of education. This, of
justice, is another spiritual provision which we fail to employ
duly in our schools; and so wonderful is this principle that we
cannot kill, paralyse, or even benumb it, but, choked in its
natural course, it spreads havoc and devastation where it should
have made the soil fertile for the fruits of good living.
Few of the offices of education are more important than that
of preparing men to distinguish between their rights and their
duties. We each have our rights and other persons have their duties
towards us as we towards them; but it is not easy to learn that
we have precisely the same rights as other people and no more;
that other people owe to us just such duties as we owe to them.
This fine art of self-adjustment is possible to everyone because
of the ineradicable principle which abides in us. But our eyes
must be taught to see, and hence the need for all the processes of
education, futile in proportion as they do not serve this end. To
think fairly requires, we know, knowledge as well as consideration.
Young people should leave school knowing that their thoughts are
not their own;[14] that what we think of other people is a matter
of justice or injustice; that a certain manner of words is due from
them to all manner of persons with whom they have to deal; and that
not to speak those words is to be unjust to their neighbours. They
should know that truth, that is, justice in word, is their due and
that of all other persons; there are few better equipments for a
citizen than a mind capable of discerning the truth, and this just
mind can be preserved only by those who take heed what they think.
“Yet truth,” says Bacon, “which only doth judge itself, teacheth
that the enquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of
it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the
belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good
of human nature.”
If justice in word is to be duly learned by all scholars still more
is integrity, justice in action; integrity in work, which disallows
ca’canny methods, whether those of the artisan who does as little
as he can in the time, or of the schoolboy who receives payment
in kind--in his support, the cost of his education and the trust
imposed in him by parents and teachers. Therefore he may not scamp,
dawdle over, postpone, crib, or otherwise shirk his work. He learns
that “my duty towards my neighbour” is “to keep my hands from
picking and stealing,” and, whether a man be a workman, a servant,
or a prosperous citizen, he must know that justice requires from
him the integrity in material which we call honesty; not the common
honesty which hates to be found out, but that refined and delicate
sense of values which George Eliot exhibits for us in ‘Caleb Garth.’
There is another form in which the magnanimous citizen of the
future must be taught the sense of justice. Our opinions show
our integrity of thought. Every person has many opinions whether
his own honestly thought out, or notions picked up from his pet
newspaper or his companions. The person who thinks out his
opinions modestly and carefully is doing his duty as truly as if he
saved a life because there is no more or less about duty.
If a schoolboy is to be guided into the justice of thought
from which sound opinions emanate, how much more does he need
guidance in arriving at that justice in motive which we call sound
principles. For what, after all, are principles but those motives
of first importance which govern us, move us in thought and action?
We appear to pick up these in a casual way and are seldom able to
render an account of them and yet our lives are ordered by our
principles, good or bad. Here, again, we have a reason for wide and
wisely ordered reading; for there are always catch-words floating
in the air, as,--‘What’s the good?’ ‘It’s all rot,’ and the like,
which the vacant mind catches up for use as the basis of thought
and conduct, as, in fact, paltry principles for the guidance of a
life.
Here we have one more reason why there is nothing in all those
spiritual stores in the world’s treasury too good for the
education of _all_ children. Every lovely tale, illuminating poem,
instructive history, every unfolding of travel and revelation of
science exists for children. “_La terre appartient à l’enfant,
toujours à l’enfant_,” was well said by Maxim Gorky, and we should
do well to remember the fact.
The service that some of us (of the P.N.E.U.) believe we have
done in the cause of education is to discover that all children,
even backward children, are aware of their needs and pathetically
eager for the food they require; that no preparation whatever is
necessary for this sort of diet; that a limited vocabulary, sordid
surroundings, the absence of a literary background to thought
are not hindrances; indeed they may turn out to be incentives to
learning, just as the more hungry the child, the readier he is for
his dinner. This statement is no mere pious opinion; it has been
amply proved in thousands of instances. Children of a poor school
in the slums are eager to tell the whole story of _Waverley_,
falling continually into the beautiful language and style of the
author. They talk about the Rosetta Stone and about treasures in
their local museum; they discuss Coriolanus and conclude that ‘his
mother must have spoiled him.’ They know by heart every detail of
a picture by La Hooch, Rembrandt, Botticelli, and not only is no
evolution of history or drama, no subtle sweetness, no inspiration
of a poet, beyond them, but they decline to know that which does
not reach them in literary form.
What they receive under this condition they absorb immediately and
show that they _know_ by that test of knowledge which applies to
us all, that is, they can tell it with power, clearness, vivacity
and charm. These are the children to whom we have been doling out
the ‘three R’s’ for generations! Small wonder that juvenile crime
increases; the intellectually starved boy must needs find food for
his imagination, scope for his intellectual power; and crime, like
the cinema, offers it must be admitted, brave adventures.
5.--THE WELL-BEING OF THE SOUL
If we leave the outer courts of mind and body, the holy places of
the affections and the will (we shall consider this last later)
and enter that holy of holies where man performs his priestly
functions, we may well ask with diffidence and humility what may
education do for the Soul of a child? “What is there that outwits
the understanding of a man or that is out of the range of his
thoughts, the reach of his aspirations? He is, it is true, baffled
on all hands by his ignorance, the illimitable ignorance of even
the wisest, but ignorance is not incapacity and the wings of a
man’s soul beat with impatience against the bars of his ignorance.
He would out, out into the universe of infinite thought and
infinite possibilities. How is the soul of a man to be satisfied?
Crowned kings have thrown up dominion because they want that which
is greater than kingdoms; profound scholars fret under limitations
which keep them playing upon the margin of the unsounded ocean of
knowledge; no great love can satisfy itself with loving; there
is no satisfaction save one for the soul of a man, because the
things about him are finite, measurable, incomplete and his reach
is beyond his grasp. He has an urgent, incessant, irrepressible
need of the infinite.”[15] “I want, am made for, and must have a
God;”--not a mere serviceable religion,--because we have in us an
infinite capacity for love, loyalty and service which we cannot
expend upon any other.
But what sort of approaches do we prepare for children towards
the God whom they need, the Saviour in Whom is all help, the King
Who affords all delight, commands all adoration and loyalty? Any
words or thoughts of ours are poor and insufficient, but we have a
treasury of divine words which they read and know with satisfying
pleasure and tell with singular beauty and fitness. “The Bible
is the most interesting book I know,” said a young person of ten
who had read a good many books and knew her Bible. By degrees
children get that knowledge of God which is the object of the
final daily prayer in our beautiful liturgy--the prayer of St.
Chrysostom--“Grant us in this world knowledge of Thy truth,” and
all other knowledge which they obtain gathers round and illuminates
this.
Here is an example of how such knowledge grows. I heard a class of
girls aged about thirteen read an essay on George Herbert. Three
or four of his poems were included, and none of the girls had read
either essay or poems before. They ‘narrated’ what they had read
and in the course of their narration gave a full paraphrase of _The
Elixir_, _The Pulley_, and one or two other poems. No point made by
the poet was omitted and his exact words were used pretty freely.
The teacher made comments upon one or two unusual words and that
was all; to explain or enforce (otherwise than by a reverently
sympathetic manner, the glance and words that showed that she too,
cared), would have been impertinent. It is an interesting thing
that hundreds of children of this age in Secondary and Elementary
Schools and in families scattered over the world read and narrated
the same essay and no doubt paraphrased the verses with equal ease.
I felt humbled before the children knowing myself incapable of such
immediate and rapid apprehension of several pages of new matter
including poems whose intention is by no means obvious. In such
ways the great thoughts of great thinkers illuminate children and
they grow in knowledge, chiefly the knowledge of God.
And yet this, the chief part of education, is drowned in torrents
of talk, in tedious repetition, in objurgation and recrimination,
in every sort of way in which the mind may be bored and the
affections deadened.
I have endeavoured to sketch some of the possibilities for good
and the corresponding possibilities for evil present in all
children; they are waiting for direction and control, certainly,
but still more for the formative influence of knowledge. I have
avoided philosophical terms, using only names in common use,--body
and soul, body and mind, body, soul and spirit,--because these
represent ideas that we cannot elude and that convey certain
definite notions; and these ideas must needs form the basis of our
educational thought.
We must know something about the material we are to work upon if
the education we offer is not to be scrappy and superficial. We
must have some measure of a child’s requirements, not based upon
his uses to society, nor upon the standard of the world he lives
in, but upon his own capacity and needs. We would not willingly
educate him towards what is called ‘self-expression’; he has little
to express except what he has received as knowledge, whether by
way of record or impression; what he can do is to assimilate and
give this forth in a form which is original because it is modified,
re-created, by the action of his own mind; and this originality is
produced by the common bread and milk which is food for everyone,
acting upon the mind which is peculiar to each individual child.
Education implies a continuous going forth of the mind; but
whatever induces introspection or any form of self-consciousness
holds up as it were the intellectual powers and brings progress to
a standstill. The reader may have noticed with some disappointment
that I have not invited him to the study of psychology as it is
understood to-day. No doubt there exists a certain dim region
described as the unconscious mind, a sort of half-way house between
mind and matter, a place where the intellect is subdued to the
action of nerves and blood. Mind is of its nature infinitely
and always conscious and to speak of the unconscious mind is a
contradiction in terms; but what is meant is that the mind thinks
in ways of which we are unconscious; and that our business is to
make ourselves aware by much introspection, much self-occupation,
of the nature and tendencies of this ‘unconscious’ region. The
results of this study, so far as they have been arrived at, are
not encouraging. The best that is in us would appear to find its
origin in ‘complexes,’ sensual, erotic, greedy. Granting that such
possibilities are in us safety, lies in so nourishing the mind
that seed of baseness may bear fruit of beauty. Researches in this
region are deeply interesting no doubt, to the psychologist, and
may eventually bear fruit if only as contributing a quota to the
classification of knowledge; but no authority on the subject is
willing to offer at present his researches as a contribution to
educational lore. It may be that the mind as well as the body has
its regions where _noli me tangere_ is a counsel of expedience;
and, by the time we have dealt with those functions of the mind
which we know, we may find ourselves in a position to formulate
that which we certainly do not possess, a Science, should it not be
a Philosophy, of Education?