New Ways
"WHAT," we ask with anxious gravity, "what is the best sort of teaching
for children?" One might as sanely ask what is the best sort of
spectacles for men, or the best size in gloves for women. And the blind
coarse generalisation which underlies that question is the very heart
and core of the muddled, musty maze we call education. We talk of the
best sort of education for children, as we might talk of the best sort
of polish for stoves, the best sort of nourishment for mice. Stoves are
all alike, they vary in ugliness perhaps, but the iron soul of one is as
the iron soul of the other. The polish that is good for one is good for
all. Mice may, and do, vary in size and colour; their mousehood does not
vary, nor their taste for cheese. In the inner nature, in the soul and
self of it, each child is different from any other child, and the
education that treats children as a class and not as individual human
beings is the education whose failure is bringing our civilisation
about our ears even as we speak.
Each child is an explorer in a new country--an explorer with its own
special needs and curiosities. We put up iron railings to keep the
explorers to our own sordidly asphalted paths. The little free wild
creatures would seek their meat from God: we round them into herds, pen
them in folds, and feed them with artificial foods--drab flat oil cakes
all alike, not considering that for some brown nuts and red berries, and
for some the new clean green grass, may be the bread of life.
Or, if you take the mind of a child to be a garden wherein flowers grow
that might be trained to beauty, you bring along your steam-roller, and
crush everything to a flat field where you may grow cabbages. It is so
good for the field, you say--because you like cabbages.
Liberty is one of the rights we claim for ourselves, though God knows we
get little enough of it and use still less; and Liberty is one of the
rights that a child above all needs--every possible liberty, of thought,
of word, of deed. The old systems of education seem to have found it
good to coerce a child for the simple sake of coercion--to make it do
what the master chose, to make it leave undone those things which it
wished to do and to do those things which it did not wish to do--nay,
more, wished violently and conclusively not to do. To force the choice
of the teacher on the child, to override the timid natural impulses of
the child with the hard hoofs of the teacher's individuality, to crush
out all initiative, to force the young supple mind into a mould, to lop
the budding branches, nip off the sensitive seeking tendrils, to batter
down the child's will by the brute force of the grown-up will, to "break
the child's spirit," as the cursed phrase used to run--this was, in
effect, what education meant. There was a picture in _Punch_, I
remember--at least I have forgotten the picture, but I remember the
legend: "Cissy, go and see what Bobbie's doing, and tell him not to."
It did not much matter what you made a child do, so long as it was
something against the grain. He was to learn, not what he with his
wonderful new curiosities and aptitudes longed to learn, but what you
wished to teach; you with your dulled senses--dulled in the same bitter
school as that in which he was now a sad learner.
[Illustration: NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THE TABLE.]
Generation after generation has gone on, pounding away at the old silly
game, each generation anxious and eager to hurt the new one as it, in
its time, was hurt. Each generation must, one would have thought, have
remembered what things hurt children and how much these things hurt, and
yet this intolerable cycle of bullying and punishment and repression
went on and on and on. Children were bullied and broken--and grew up to
bully and break in their turn. It must be that this was because the
grown-ups did not remember. Those who have the care of children, who
work for them, who teach them, should be those who do remember: those
who have not forgotten what it feels like to be a child--any sort of
child. For, though children are all different, there is a common measure
among them as there is among men. A law for men cannot be good if it be
made--as indeed but too often happens--by those who have forgotten what
it used to feel like to be a man; and what sort of poetry do you get
from one who has forgotten beauty and sorrow, and the Spring, and how it
feels to be young and a lover? And if the people who have the care of
children have forgotten what it feels like to be a child, those who do
remember should remind them. They should be reminded how it feels to be
not so very much higher than the table, how it feels not to be so clever
as you are now, and so much more interested in so much more--how it
feels to believe in things and in people as you did when you were new to
the journey of life--to explore every road you came to, to trust every
person you met. It is a long time ago, but can you not remember the days
when right and wrong were as different as milk and mud, when you knew
that it was really wrong to be naughty and really good to be good, when
you felt that your mother could do no wrong and that your father was the
noblest and bravest of men? Do you remember the world of small and new
and joyous and delightful things? Try to remember it if you would know
how to help a child instead of hindering it--try to look at the world
with the clear, clean eyes that once were yours in the days when you had
never read a newspaper or deceived a friend. You will then be able to
see again certain ideals, unclouded and radiant, which the dust of the
crowded highway and the smears of getting-on have dimmed and
distorted--quite simple ideals of love, faith, unselfishness, honour,
truth. I know these words are often enough on the lips of all of us, but
a child's ear will be able to tell whether the words spring from the
lips or the heart. Look back, and you will see that you yourself were
also able to distinguish these things--once.
Education as it should be, the unfolding of a flower, not the distorting
of it, is only possible to those who are willing and able themselves to
become as little children.
It is because certain great spirits have done this and have tried to
teach others to do it, that reforms in education have begun to be at
least possible. Froebel, Pestalozzi, Signora Montessori and many a
lesser star has shone upon a new path. And public interest has centred
more and more on the welfare of the child. Books are written, societies
formed, newspapers founded in the interests of the child, and true
education becomes a possibility.
And well indeed it is for us that this is so. For the education of the
last three hundred years has led, in all things vital and spiritual,
downhill all the way. We have gone on frustrating natural human
intelligences and emotions, inculcating false doctrines, and choking
with incoherent facts the souls which asked to be fed with
dreams-come-true--till now our civilisation is a thing we cannot look at
without a mental and moral nausea. We have, in our countrysides,
peasants too broken for rebellion, in our cities.
The mortal sickness of a mind
Too unhappy to be kind.
If ever we are to be able to look ourselves and each other in the face
again it will be because a new generation has arisen in whose ears the
voice of God and His angels has not ceased to sound. If only we would
see the things that belong to our peace, and lead the children instead
of driving them, who knows what splendid thoughts and actions they in
their natural development might bring to the salvation of the world?
In the Palace of Education which the great minds have designed and are
designing, many stones will be needed--and so I bring the little stone I
have hewn out and tried to shape, in the hope that it may fit into a
corner of that great edifice. For if anything is to be done, it is
necessary that all who have anything to give, shall give it. As Francis
Bacon said:
"Nothing can so much conduce to the drawing down, as it were, from
heaven a whole shower of new and profitable Inventions, as this, that
the experiments of many . . . may come to the knowledge of one man, or
some few, who by mutual conference may whet and sharpen one another, so
that by this . . . Arts may flourish, and as it were by a commixture and
communication of Rays, inflame one another. . . . This sagacity by
literate experience may in the mean project and scatter for the benefit
of man many rudiments to knowledge which may be had at hand."
And that is why I have left for a little while the telling of stories
and set myself to write down something of what I know about
children--know by the grace of memory and by the dreams of childhood, to
me, thank God, persistent and imperishable.