Praise and Punishment
[Illustration: THE OTHER HALF OF THE CITY.
82]]
WHILE admitting that no pains can be too great, no labours too arduous
to spend upon the education of the child, we must not shut our eyes to
the fact that the sacrifice of the grown-up may often be better for
him--or much more often her--than it is for the child for whom that
sacrifice is made. There is a certain danger that the enthusiastic
educator, passionately desiring to sacrifice her whole life, may
incidentally, and quite without meaning it, sacrifice something very
vital in the child. For the child whose every want is anticipated, whose
every thought is considered, who is surrounded by the softness of love
and the sweetness of sympathy, is not unlikely to disappoint and dismay
the fond parent or guardian, pastor or master, by growing up selfish,
cowardly, heartless and ungrateful; with no capacity for obedience, no
power of endurance, no hardihood, no resource--whining in adversity
and intolerable in success. The object of education is to fit the child
for the life of the man. Once it was held that a rigorous discipline,
enforced by violence, was the best preparation for the life which is
never too easy or too soft. Now we have changed all that, and there is
some danger that the pendulum may swing too far, and that the aim of
education may come to mean only the ensuring of a happy childhood,
without arming the child for the battle of life. It is right that to the
educator the child should be the prime object, the centre of the
universe, the prime consideration to which every other consideration
must give way. But there is the danger that the child may become his own
prime object, not only the centre of his own universe, but its
circumference, and cherish, deeply rooted in his inmost soul, the
conviction that all other considerations should and will give way to his
desires.
Life, we know, will teach him, in her rough, hard school, that he is
only the centre of his own universe in that sense in which the same is
true of us all--that far from being the prime object of the world which
surrounds him, he himself counts for little or nothing, except to those
who love him--and that the consideration he receives will not be, as was
the consideration lavished on him in his childhood, free, ungrudging,
and invariable, but will be conditioned by the services he renders to
others and the extent to which he can be to them pleasant or useful.
Life, it is true, will teach him all this, but if her teaching be a
course of lessons in a wholly new subject, they will be very difficult
to learn, and the learning will hurt. Whereas if, from the very
beginning, the child is taught to understand the interdependence of
human beings, the fact that rights involve duties and that duties confer
rights, he will be able to apply and to use for his own help the lessons
which later life will teach him. More, he will have at the outset of
life the advantage which one with a clear conception of rights and
duties has over one who only sees life as a muddle and maze of things
that are "jolly hard lines." They suffer as without hope who see that
the world needs mending, and have never made up their minds what sort of
world they would like. Whereas the child to whom, quite early, the
lesson of human solidarity has been taught will, when he shall be a man,
know very well what he wants, and will be able, however humbly, to help,
in his day and generation, to re-mould the world to the fashion of his
desire.
It is not difficult to teach children the duties of kindness and
helpfulness to others, and the duty of public spirit and loyalty to
their fellow-men. A healthy child is active, energetic, and deeply
desirous of using his senses and his faculties. It is possible to assign
to quite a small child certain duties, but the wise educator will manage
to make such duties privileges and not tasks. The system of sentencing
children to the performance of useful offices by way of punishment is
abominable. It gives them for ever a distaste for that particular form
of social service.
If we must punish, let us not permit the punishments to trench on the
province of useful and, in good conditions, pleasant tasks. Give the boy
an imposition rather than an order to weed the shrubbery walk; set the
girl to learn a French verb rather than to hem dusters. The
consciousness of being useful is very dear to children--it is worth
while to feel and to show gratitude to them for all services rendered,
and though it may be, as they say, more trouble than it is worth to
teach the children to help effectually, that only means that it is more
trouble than the help they give is worth. What is really valuable is
the cultivation of the sense that it is a good and pleasant thing to
help mother to wash up, to help father to water the geraniums, and,
further, a thing which will make father and mother pleased and grateful.
Children, like the rest of us, love to feel themselves important. Is it
not well that they should feel themselves important as givers, and not
as claimants only?
The tale of their public obligations may well begin with the lesson that
it is part of the duty of a citizen to help to keep his city, his
country, clean and beautiful. Therefore, we must not leave nasty traces
of our presence in street or meadow--such traces as orange-peel,
banana-skins, and the greasy bag that once held the bun or the
bull's-eye. And it is quite as important to learn what we should as what
we should not do. The idea and organisation of the Boy Scouts is a fine
object-lesson in the way of training children to be good citizens. The
duties of a citizen should be taught in all schools: they are more
important than the latitude of Cathay and the industries of Kamskatka.
Even the smallest children could learn something of this branch of
education. I should like to write a little book of Moral Songs for Young
Citizens, only I wouldn't call it that. The songs in it might take the
place of "Mary had a little lamb" or whatever it is that they make the
infants learn by heart. One of them might go something like this:
I must not steal, and I must learn
Nothing is mine that I do not earn.
I must try in work and play
To make things beautiful every day.
I must be kind to every one
And never let cruel things be done.
I must be brave, and I must try
When I am hurt never to cry,
And always laugh as much as I can
And be glad that I'm going to be a man,
To work for my living and help the rest,
And never do less than my very best.
Another might begin:
I must not litter the park or the street
With bits of paper or things to eat:
I must not pick the public flowers
They are not _mine_, but they are _ours_. . . .
And so on. Simple rhymes learned when you are very young stay with you
all your life. The duties and refrainings just touched on here might be
elaborated in different poems. There might be one on being brave, and
another on prompt obedience to the word of command. There is no position
in life where the habit of obedience to your superior officer is not of
value. To teach obedience without bullying would be quite easy: with
very little children it could take the form of a game, in which a
series of orders were given--for the performance of such actions as
occur in the mulberry bush; and the competition among the children to be
the first to obey the new order would quicken the child's mind and body,
while the habit of obedience to the word of command would be firmly
planted, so that it would grow with the child's growth and adapt itself
to the needs of life. I would write more than one poem, I think, about
the green country and the shame it is that those who should love and
protect it desecrate it as they do. Let it be the pride of the child
that he is not of the sort of people who leave greasy papers lying about
in woods, broken bottles in meadows, and old sardine tins among the
rushes at the margin of cool streams. Such people touch no foot of land
that they do not desecrate and defile. Wherever they are suffered to be,
there they leave behind them the vilest leavings. Filthy papers, the
rinds and skins of fruit, crusts and parings, jagged tins, smashed
bottles, straw and shavings and empty stained cardboard boxes. They
leave it all, openly and shamelessly, making the magic meadows sordid as
a suburb, and carrying into the very heart of the country the
vulgarities of the street corner. It is time, indeed, that certain of
the finer duties of citizenship were taught in all schools, Harrow as
well as Houndsditch, Eton as well as Borstal. And one of the first of
these is the keeping of the beauty of beautiful places unsmirched, the
duty of preserving for others the beauty which we ourselves admire, the
duty of burning bits of paper and burying pieces of orange-peel. If
there is not time to teach geography as well as the duties and decencies
of a citizen, the geography should go, and the duties and decencies be
taught. For what is the use of knowing the names of places if you do not
know that places should be beautiful, and what is the use of knowing how
many counties there are in England unless you know also that every field
and every tree and every stream in every one of those counties is a
precious gift of God not to be desecrated by shameless refuse and
garbage, but to be cared for as one cares for one's garden, and loved,
as one should love every inch of our England, this garden-land more
beautiful than any garden in the world?
A child should be taught to read almost as soon as it has learned to
speak. I can remember my fourth birthday, but I cannot remember a time
when I could not read. Without going into details as to the merits of
different methods of teaching, I may say that a good many words may be
taught before it is necessary to teach the letters--that reading should
precede spelling--that CAT should be presented whole, as the symbol of
Cat--and that the dissection of it into C.A.T. should come later. I
believe that children taught in this way, and taught young, will not in
after life be tortured by the difficulties of spelling. They will spell
naturally, as they speak or walk. Of the value of the accomplishment of
reading, as a let-off to parents and guardians, it would be impossible
to speak too highly. It keeps the child busy, amused, still and quiet.
The value to the child himself is not less. Nor is it only that the
matter of his reading stores his mind with new material. To him also it
is a good thing that he should sometimes be still and quiet, and at the
same time interested and occupied. Of books for little children there
are plenty--not fine literature, it is true--but harmless. As the child
grows older he will want more books, and different books--and if you
insist on personally conducting him on his grand tour through literature
he will probably miss a good many places that he would like to go to.
For a child from ten onwards it is no bad thing to give the run of a
good general library. When he has exhausted the story books he will
read the ballads, the histories and the travels, and may even nibble at
science, poetry, or philosophy. I myself, at the age of thirteen,
browsed contentedly in such a library--where Percy's anecdotes in
thirty-nine volumes or so divided my attention with Hume, Locke and
Berkeley. I even read Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and was none the
worse for it. It is astonishing how little harm comes to children
through books. Unless they have been taught by servants' chatter how to
look for the "harm," they do not find it. I do not mean that absolutely
every book is fit for a child's reading, but if you allow the reading of
the Old Testament it is mere imbecility to insist that all the rest of
your child's reading shall ignore the facts of life. You can always have
a locked book-case if you choose: only see to it that the doors are not
of glass, for the forbidden is always the desired.
As regards the facts of life, by which I mean the physiological facts
about which there is so much needless and vain concealment, there is, it
seems to me, only one rule. If your child has learned to love and trust
you it will come to you with its questions, instead of going to the
housemaid or the groom. Answer all its questions truthfully, even at the
cost of a little trouble in formulating your answers. Do not leave the
child to learn the truth about its body and its birth from vulgar and
tainted sources. There is absolutely nothing that you cannot decently
tell a child when it has reached the age when it understands that
certain things are not fit subjects for public conversation--and until
it has reached that age it will not ask that sort of questions. There is
no difficulty in making children understand that their digestive
processes are not to be discussed in general society, and it is quite
easy to explain to them that other physiological processes are also to
be avoided as subjects for general conversation. The Cat and her family
will help you to explain all that the child wants to know. The child
should be taught that its body is the Temple of the Holy Ghost, and that
it is our duty to keep our bodies healthy, clean, and well-exercised,
just as we should try to keep our minds strong and active, and our
hearts tender and pure. And one need not always "talk down" to children:
they understand far better than you think. They are always flattered by
talk that rises now and then above the level of their understanding. And
if they do not understand they will tell you so, and you can simplify.
In talking of the subjects which interest them, you need not be afraid
of being too clever. For even if they do not ask, your instinct and the
child's eyes will, if there be love and trust between you, tell you when
you are getting out of its depth. But there must be love and trust:
without that all education outside book-learning is for ever
impossible.