excellent, if we mean simply to contrast it with the process of pouring
in. But, after all, it is difficult to connect the idea of drawing out
with the ordinary doings of the child of three, four, seven, or eight
years of age. He is already running over, spilling over, with activities
of all kinds. He is not a purely latent being whom the adult has to
approach with great caution and skill in order gradually to draw out some
hidden germ of activity. The child is already intensely active, and the
question of education is the question of taking hold of his activities,
of giving them direction. Through direction, through organized use, they
tend toward valuable results, instead of scattering or being left to
merely impulsive expression.
If we keep this before us, the difficulty I find uppermost in the minds
of many people regarding what is termed the new education is not so much
solved as dissolved; it disappears. A question often asked is: If you
begin with the child’s ideas, impulses, and interests, all so crude, so
random and scattering, so little refined or spiritualized, how is he
going to get the necessary discipline, culture, and information? If there
were no way open to us except to excite and indulge these impulses of
the child, the question might well be asked. We should either have to
ignore and repress the activities or else to humor them. But if we have
organization of equipment and of materials, there is another path open
to us. We can direct the child’s activities, giving them exercise along
certain lines, and can thus lead up to the goal which logically stands at
the end of the paths followed.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Since they are not, since
really to satisfy an impulse or interest means to work it out, and
working it out involves running up against obstacles, becoming acquainted
with materials, exercising ingenuity, patience, persistence, alertness,
it of necessity involves discipline—ordering of power—and supplies
knowledge. Take the example of the little child who wants to make a box.
If he stops short with the imagination or wish, he certainly will not get
discipline. But when he attempts to realize his impulse, it is a question
of making his idea definite, making it into a plan, of taking the right
kind of wood, measuring the parts needed, giving them the necessary
proportions, etc. There is involved the preparation of materials, the
sawing, planing, the sandpapering, making all the edges and corners
to fit. Knowledge of tools and processes is inevitable. If the child
realizes his instinct and makes the box, there is plenty of opportunity
to gain discipline and perseverance, to exercise effort in overcoming
obstacles, and to attain as well a great deal of information.
So undoubtedly the little child who thinks he would like to cook has
little idea of what it means or costs, or what it requires. It is simply
a desire to “mess around,” perhaps to imitate the activities of older
people. And it is doubtless possible to let ourselves down to that
level and simply humor that interest. But here, too, if the impulse
is exercised, utilized, it runs up against the actual world of hard
conditions, to which it must accommodate itself; and there again come
in the factors of discipline and knowledge. One of the children became
impatient, recently, at having to work things out by a long method of
experimentation, and said: “Why do we bother with this? Let’s follow a
recipe in a cook-book.” The teacher asked the children where the recipe
came from, and the conversation showed that if they simply followed this
they would not understand the reasons for what they were doing. They were
then quite willing to go on with the experimental work. To follow that
work will, indeed, give an illustration of just the point in question.
Their occupation happened that day to be the cooking of eggs, as making
a transition from the cooking of vegetables to that of meats. In order
to get a basis of comparison they first summarized the constituent
food elements in the vegetables and made a preliminary comparison with
those found in meat. Thus they found that the woody fiber or cellulose
in vegetables corresponded to the connective tissue in meat, giving
the element of form and structure. They found that starch and starchy
products were characteristic of the vegetables, that mineral salts were
found in both alike, and that there was fat in both—a small quantity in
vegetable food and a large amount in animal. They were prepared then to
take up the study of albumen as the characteristic feature of animal
food, corresponding to starch in the vegetables, and were ready to
consider the conditions requisite for the proper treatment of albumen—the
eggs serving as the material of experiment.
They experimented first by taking water at various temperatures, finding
out when it was scalding, simmering, and boiling hot, and ascertained the
effect of the various degrees of temperature on the white of the egg.
That worked out, they were prepared, not simply to cook eggs, but to
understand the principle involved in the cooking of eggs. I do not wish
to lose sight of the universal in the particular incident. For the child
simply to desire to cook an egg, and accordingly drop it in water for
three minutes, and take it out when he is told, is not educative. But for
the child to realize his own impulse by recognizing the facts, materials,
and conditions involved, and then to regulate his impulse through that
recognition, is educative. This is the difference, upon which I wish
to insist, between exciting or indulging an interest and realizing it
through its direction.
Another instinct of the child is the use of pencil and paper. All
children like to express themselves through the medium of form and
color. If you simply indulge this interest by letting the child go on
indefinitely, there is no growth that is more than accidental. But
let the child first express his impulse, and then through criticism,
question, and suggestion bring him to consciousness of what he has done,
and what he needs to do, and the result is quite different. Here, for
example, is the work of a seven-year-old child. It is not average work,
it is the best work done among the little children, but it illustrates
the particular principle of which I have been speaking. They had been
talking about the primitive conditions of social life when people lived
in caves. The child’s idea of that found expression in this way: the
cave is neatly set up on the hillside in an impossible way. You see the
conventional tree of childhood—a vertical line with horizontal branches
on each side. If the child had been allowed to go on repeating this sort
of thing day by day, he would be indulging his instinct rather than
exercising it. But the child was now asked to look closely at trees,
to compare those seen with the one drawn, to examine more closely and
consciously into the conditions of his work. Then he drew trees from
observation.
Finally he drew again from combined observation, memory, and imagination.
He made again a free illustration, expressing his own imaginative
thought, but controlled by detailed study of actual trees. The result was
a scene representing a bit of forest; so far as it goes, it seems to me
to have as much poetic feeling as the work of an adult, while at the same
time its trees are, in their proportions, possible ones, not mere symbols.
If we roughly classify the impulses which are available in the school,
we may group them under four heads. There is the social instinct of
the children as shown in conversation, personal intercourse, and
communication. We all know how self-centered the little child is at
the age of four or five. If any new subject is brought up, if he says
anything at all, it is: “I have seen that;” or, “My papa or mamma told
me about that.” His horizon is not large; an experience must come
immediately home to him, if he is to be sufficiently interested to
relate it to others and seek theirs in return. And yet the egoistic and
limited interest of little children is in this manner capable of infinite
expansion. The language instinct is the simplest form of the social
expression of the child. Hence it is a great, perhaps the greatest of all
educational resources.
Then there is the instinct of making—the constructive impulse. The
child’s impulse to do finds expression first in play, in movement,
gesture, and make-believe, becomes more definite, and seeks outlet in
shaping materials into tangible forms and permanent embodiment. The child
has not much instinct for abstract inquiry. The instinct of investigation
seems to grow out of the combination of the constructive impulse with
the conversational. There is no distinction between experimental science
for little children and the work done in the carpenter shop. Such work
as they can do in physics or chemistry is not for the purpose of making
technical generalizations or even arriving at abstract truths. Children
simply like to do things and watch to see what will happen. But this can
be taken advantage of, can be directed into ways where it gives results
of value, as well as be allowed to go on at random.
And so the expressive impulse of the children, the art instinct, grows
also out of the communicating and constructive instincts. It is their
refinement and full manifestation. Make the construction adequate, make
it full, free, and flexible, give it a social motive, something to tell,
and you have a work of art. Take one illustration of this in connection
with the textile work—sewing and weaving. The children made a primitive
loom in the shop; here the constructive instinct was appealed to. Then
they wished to do something with this loom, to make something. It was
the type of the Indian loom, and they were shown blankets woven by the
Indians. Each child made a design kindred in idea to those of the Navajo
blankets, and the one which seemed best adapted to the work in hand was
selected. The technical resources were limited, but the coloring and
form were worked out by the children. The example shown was made by
the twelve-year-old children. Examination shows that it took patience,
thoroughness, and perseverance to do the work. It involved not merely
discipline and information of both a historical sort and the elements of
technical design, but also something of the spirit of art in adequately
conveying an idea.
One more instance of the connection of the art side with the constructive
side: The children had been studying primitive spinning and carding, when
one of them, twelve years of age, made a picture of one of the older
children spinning. Here is another piece of work which is not quite
average; it is better than the average. It is an illustration of two
hands and the drawing out of the wool to get it ready for spinning. This
was done by a child eleven years of age. But, upon the whole, with the
younger children especially, the art impulse is connected mainly with the
social instinct—the desire to tell, to represent.
Now, keeping in mind these fourfold interests—the interest in
conversation, or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in
making things, or construction; and in artistic expression—we may say
they are the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise
of which depends the active growth of the child. I wish to give one or
two illustrations, the first from the work of children seven years of
age. It illustrates in a way the dominant desire of the children to
talk, particularly about folks and of things in relation to folks. If
you observe little children, you will find they are interested in the
world of things mainly in its connection with people, as a background and
medium of human concerns. Many anthropologists have told us there are
certain identities in the child interests with those of primitive life.
There is a sort of natural recurrence of the child mind to the typical
activities of primitive peoples; witness the hut which the boy likes
to build in the yard, playing hunt, with bows, arrows, spears, and so
on. Again the question comes: What are we to do with this interest—are
we to ignore it, or just excite and draw it out? Or shall we get hold
of it and direct it to something ahead, something better? Some of the
work that has been planned for our seven-year-old children has the
latter end in view—to utilize this interest so that it shall become a
means of seeing the progress of the human race. The children begin by
imagining present conditions taken away until they are in contact with
nature at first hand. That takes them back to a hunting people, to a
people living in caves or trees and getting a precarious subsistence by
hunting and fishing. They imagine as far as possible the various natural
physical conditions adapted to that sort of life; say, a hilly, woody
slope, near mountains, and a river where fish would be abundant. Then
they go on in imagination through the hunting to the semi-agricultural
stage, and through the nomadic to the settled agricultural stage. The
point I wish to make is that there is abundant opportunity thus given
for actual study, for inquiry which results in gaining information. So,
while the instinct primarily appeals to the social side, the interest
of the child in people and their doings is carried on into the larger
world of reality. For example, the children had some idea of primitive
weapons, of the stone arrow-head, etc. That provided occasion for the
testing of materials as regards their friability, their shape, texture,
etc., resulting in a lesson in mineralogy, as they examined the different
stones to find which was best suited to the purpose. The discussion
of the iron age supplied a demand for the construction of a smelting
oven made out of clay and of considerable size. As the children did not
get their drafts right at first, the mouth of the furnace not being in
proper relation to the vent as to size and position, instruction in the
principles of combustion, the nature of drafts and of fuel, was required.
Yet the instruction was not given ready-made; it was first needed, and
then arrived at experimentally. Then the children took some material,
such as copper, and went through a series of experiments, fusing it,
working it into objects; and the same experiments were made with lead and
other metals. This work has been also a continuous course in geography,
since the children have had to imagine and work out the various physical
conditions necessary to the different forms of social life implied.
What would be the physical conditions appropriate to pastoral life? to
the beginning of agriculture? to fishing? What would be the natural
method of exchange between these peoples? Having worked out such points
in conversation, they have afterward represented them in maps and
sand-molding. Thus they have gained ideas of the various forms of the
configuration of the earth, and at the same time have seen them in their
relation to human activity, so that they are not simply external facts,
but are fused and welded with social conceptions regarding the life and
progress of humanity. The result, to my mind, justifies completely the
conviction that children, in a year of such work (of five hours a week
altogether), get infinitely more acquaintance with facts of science,
geography, and anthropology than they get where information is the
professed end and object, where they are simply set to learning facts in
fixed lessons. As to discipline, they get more training of attention,
more power of interpretation, of drawing inferences, of acute observation
and continuous reflection, than if they were put to working out arbitrary
problems simply for the sake of discipline.
I should like at this point to refer to the recitation. We all know
what it has been—a place where the child shows off to the teacher
and the other children the amount of information he has succeeded in
assimilating from the textbook. From this other standpoint the recitation
becomes pre-eminently a social meeting-place; it is to the school what
the spontaneous conversation is at home, excepting that it is more
organized, following definite lines. The recitation becomes the social
clearing-house, where experiences and ideas are exchanged and subjected
to criticism, where misconceptions are corrected, and new lines of
thought and inquiry are set up.
This change of the recitation, from an examination of knowledge already
acquired to the free play of the children’s communicative instinct,
affects and modifies all the language work of the school. Under the old
régime it was unquestionably a most serious problem to give the children
a full and free use of language. The reason was obvious. The natural
motive for language was seldom offered. In the pedagogical textbooks
language is defined as the medium of expressing thought. It becomes that,
more or less, to adults with trained minds, but it hardly needs to be
said that language is primarily a social thing, a means by which we give
our experiences to others and get theirs again in return. When it is
taken away from its natural purpose, it is no wonder that it becomes a
complex and difficult problem to teach language. Think of the absurdity
of having to teach language as a thing by itself. If there is anything
the child will do before he goes to school, it is to talk of the things
that interest him. But when there are no vital interests appealed to in
the school, when language is used simply for the repetition of lessons,
it is not surprising that one of the chief difficulties of school work
has come to be instruction in the mother-tongue. Since the language
taught is unnatural, not growing out of the real desire to communicate
vital impressions and convictions, the freedom of children in its use
gradually disappears, until finally the high-school teacher has to invent
all kinds of devices to assist in getting any spontaneous and full use of
speech. Moreover, when the language instinct is appealed to in a social
way, there is a continual contact with reality. The result is that the
child always has something in his mind to talk about, he has something to
say; he has a thought to express, and a thought is not a thought unless
it is one’s own. On the traditional method, the child must say something
that he has merely learned. There is all the difference in the world
between having something to say and having to say something. The child
who has a variety of materials and facts wants to talk about them, and
his language becomes more refined and full, because it is controlled and
informed by realities. Reading and writing, as well as the oral use of
language, may be taught on this basis. It can be done in a _related_ way,
as the outgrowth of the child’s social desire to recount his experiences
and get in return the experiences of others, directed always through
contact with the facts and forces which determine the truth communicated.
I shall not have time to speak of the work of the older children, where
the original crude instincts of construction and communication have
been developed into something like scientifically directed inquiry, but
I will give an illustration of the use of language following upon this
experimental work. The work was on the basis of a simple experiment of
the commonest sort, gradually leading the children out into geological
and geographical study. The sentences that I am going to read seem to
me poetic as well as “scientific.” “A long time ago when the earth
was new, when it was lava, there was no water on the earth, and there
was steam all round the earth up in the air, as there were many gases
in the air. One of them was carbon dioxide. The steam became clouds,
because the earth began to cool off, and after a while it began to
rain, and the water came down and dissolved the carbon dioxide from the
air.” There is a good deal more science in that than probably would be
apparent at the outset. It represents some three months of work on the
part of the child. The children kept daily and weekly records, but this
is part of the summing up of the quarter’s work. I call this language
poetic, because the child has a clear image and has a personal feeling
for the realities imaged. I extract sentences from two other records
to illustrate further the vivid use of language when there is a vivid
experience back of it. “When the earth was cold enough to condense, the
water, with the help of carbon dioxide, _pulled_ the calcium out of the
rocks into a large body of water where the little animals could get it.”
The other reads as follows: “When the earth cooled, calcium was in the
rocks. Then the carbon dioxide and water united and formed a solution,
and, as it ran, it _tore_ out the calcium and carried it on to the sea,
where there were little animals who took it out of solution.” The use
of such words as “pulled” and “tore” in connection with the process of
chemical combination evidences a personal realization which compels its
own appropriate expression.
If I had not taken so much time in my other illustrations, I should like
to show how, beginning with very simple material things, the children
are led on to larger fields of investigation and to the intellectual
discipline that is the accompaniment of such research. I will simply
mention the experiment in which the work began. It consisted in making
precipitated chalk, used for polishing metals. The children, with
simple apparatus—a tumbler, lime water, and a glass tube—precipitated
the calcium carbonate out of the water; and from this beginning went on
to a study of the processes by which rocks of various sorts, igneous,
sedimentary, etc., had been formed on the surface of the earth and
the places they occupy; then to points in the geography of the United
States, Hawaii, and Porto Rico; to the effects of these various bodies
of rock, in their various configurations, upon the human occupations;
so that this geological record finally rounded itself out into the life
of man at the present time. The children saw and felt the connection
between these geologic processes, taking place ages and ages ago, and the
physical conditions determining the industrial occupations of today.
Of all the possibilities involved in the subject, “The School and the
Life of the Child,” I have selected but one, because I have found that
that one gives people more difficulty, is more of a stumbling-block, than
any other. One may be ready to admit that it would be most desirable
for the school to be a place in which the child should really live,
and get a life-experience in which he should delight and find meaning
for its own sake. But then we hear this inquiry: How, upon this basis,
shall the child get the needed information; how shall he undergo the
required discipline? Yes, it has come to this, that with many, if not
most, people the normal processes of life appear to be incompatible with
getting information and discipline. So I have tried to indicate, in a
highly general and inadequate way (for only the school itself, in its
daily operation, could give a detailed and worthy representation), how
the problem works itself out—how it is possible to lay hold upon the
rudimentary instincts of human nature, and, by supplying a proper medium,
so to control their expression as not only to facilitate and enrich the
growth of the individual child, but also to supply the same results, and
far more, of technical information and discipline that have been the
ideals of education in the past.