THE CHILD
=The child as the center in school procedure.=--The child is the center
of school procedure in all its many ramifications. For the child the
building is erected, the equipment is provided, the course of study is
arranged and administered, and the teacher employed. The child is major,
and all else is subsidiary. In the general scheme even the teacher takes
secondary place. Teachers may come and go, but the child remains as the
focus of all plans and purposes. The teacher is secured for the child,
and not the child for the teacher. Taxpayers, boards of education,
parents, and teachers are all active in the interests of the child; and
all school legislation, to be important, must have the child as its
prime objective. Colleges of education and normal schools, in large
numbers, are working at the educational problem in an effort to develop
more effective methods of training the teachers of the child. A host of
authors and publishers are giving to the interest of the child the
products of their skill. In every commonwealth may be found a large
number of men and women whose time and energies are devoted to the work
of the schools for the child.
=All children should have school privileges.=--All these facts are
freely admitted, wherever attention is called to them, but we still have
truant officers, and child labor laws. We admit the facts, but, in our
practices, strive to circumvent their application. If the school is good
for one child, it is good for all children. Indeed, the school is
maintained on the assumption that all children will take advantage of
and profit by its presence. If there were no schools, our civilization
would surely decline. If school attendance should cease at the end of
the fifth year, then we would have a fifth-year civilization. It rests,
therefore, with the parents of the children, in large measure, whether
we are to have an eighth-grade civilization, a high-school civilization,
or a college civilization.
=Parental attitude.=--Schools are administered on the assumption that
every child is capable of and worthy of training, and that training the
child will make for a better quality of civilization. The state regards
the child as a liability during his childhood in the hope that he may be
an asset in his manhood. In this hope time and money are devoted to his
training. But, in the face of all this, there are parents, here and
there, who still look upon their own children as assets and would use
them for their own comfort or profit. They seem to think that their
children are indebted to them for bringing them into the world and that
their obligation to the children is canceled by meager provision of
food, shelter, and clothing. They seem not to realize that "life is more
than fruit or grain," and deny to their children the elements of life.
=The rights of the child.=--All this is a sort of preface to the
statement that the child comes into the world endowed with certain
inherent rights that may not be abrogated. He has a right to life in its
best and fullest sense, and no one has a right to abridge this measure
of life, or to deprive him of anything that will contribute to such a
life. He goes to the school as one of the sources of life, and any one
who denies him this boon is doing violence to his right to have life. He
does not go to school to study arithmetic, but studies arithmetic as one
of the elements of life; and experience has demonstrated that arithmetic
may be learned in the school more advantageously than elsewhere. He goes
to school to have agreeable and profitable life. Each day is an integer
of life and must be made to abound in life if it is to be accounted a
success.
=Child life.=--Again, the child has a right to the quality of life that
is consistent with and congenial to his age. A seven-year-old should be
a seven-year-old, in his thinking, in his activities, in his amusements,
and in his feeling. We should never ask or want him to "put away
childish things" at this age, for these childish things are a proof of
his normality and good health. His buoyant life and good health may
prove disastrous to the furniture in his home, but far better marred
furniture than marred childhood. If, at this age, he should become as
quiet and sedate as his father, his parents and teacher would have cause
for alarm. It is the high privilege of the parent and the teacher to
direct his activities, but not to abridge or interdict them. If the
teacher would reduce him to inaction and silence, she may well reflect
that if he were an imbecile he would be quiet. He will not pass this way
again; and if he is ever to have the sort of life that is in harmony
with his age, he must have it now.
=Childhood curtailed.=--He has a right, also, to the full measure of
childhood. This period is relatively short, and any curtailment does
violence to his physiological and psychological nature. All the years of
his childhood are necessary for a proper balancing of his physical and
mental powers, that they may do their appointed work in after years.
Entire volumes have been devoted to this subject, but, in spite of these
volumes, some mothers still try to hurry their daughters into the duties
and responsibilities of adult life. One such mother went to the high
school to get the books of her fifteen-year-old daughter and, upon being
asked why the daughter was leaving school, replied, "Oh, she's keeping
company now." That daughter will never be the hardy plant in
civilization that she ought to be, because she was reared in a hothouse
atmosphere. That mother had no right to cripple the life of her child by
thwarting nature's decrees.
=Detrimental effects.=--The pity of it all is that the child is at the
mercy of the parent, or of the teacher, as the case may be. We become so
eager to have "old heads on young shoulders" that we begrudge the child
the years that are necessary for the shoulders to attain that maturity
of strength that is needful for supporting the "old heads." Then ensues
a lack of balance, and, were all children thus denied their right to the
full period of youth, we should have a distorted civilization. Dickens
inveighs against this curtailment of youth prodigiously, and the marvel
is that we have failed to learn the lesson from his pages. We need not
have recourse to Victor Hugo to know the life of little Cosette, for we
can see her prototype by merely looking about us.
=The child's right to the best.=--As the child has a right to life in
its fullness, so he has a right to all the agencies that can promote
this type of life. If he meets with an accident he has a right to the
best surgical skill that can be secured, and this right we readily
concede; and equally he has a right to the best teacher that money will
secure. If he has a teacher that is less than the best, the time thus
lost can never be restored to him. A lady who had an unskillful teacher
in her first year in the high school now avers that he maimed her for
life in that particular study. Life is such a delicate affair that it
demands expert handling. If we hope to have the child attain his right
to be an intelligent coöperating agent in promoting life in society,
then no price is too great to pay for the expert teaching which will
nurture the sort of life in him that will make him effective.
=The child's native tendencies.=--Then, again, the child has a right to
the exercise of the native tendencies with which he is endowed. In fact,
these tendencies should be the working capital of the teacher, the
starting points in her teaching. There was a time when the teacher
punished the child who was caught drawing pictures on his slate. Happily
that sort of barbarity disappeared, in the main, along with the slate.
The vitalized teacher rejoices in the pictures that the child draws and
turns this tendency to good account. Through this inclination to draw
she finds the real child and so, as the psychologists direct, she begins
where the child is and sets about attaching to this native tendency the
work in nature study, geography, or history. When she discovers a
constructive tendency in the child, she at once uses this in shifting
from analytic to synthetic exercises in the school order. If he enjoys
making things, he will be glad of an opportunity to make devices, or
problems, or maps.
=The play instinct.=--She makes large use, also, of the play instinct
that is one of his native tendencies. This instinct is constantly
reaching out for objects of play. The teacher is quick to note the
child's quest for objects and deftly substitutes some phase of school
work for marbles, balls, or dolls, and his playing proceeds apace
without abatement of zest. The vitalized teacher knows how to attach the
arithmetic to this play instinct and make it a fascinating game. During
the games of arithmetic, geography, history, or spelling, life is at
high tide in her school and the work is thorough in consequence. Work is
relieved of the onus of drudgery whenever it appears in the guise of a
game, and the teacher who has skill in attaching school studies to the
play instinct of the child will make her school effective as well as a
delight to herself and her pupils. In such a plan there is neither place
nor occasion for coercion.
=Self-expression.=--Another right of the child is the right to express
himself. The desire for self-expression is fundamental in the human
mind, as the study of archæology abundantly proves. Since this is true,
every school should be a school of expression if the nature of the child
is to have full recognition. Without expression there is no impression,
and without impression there is no education that has real value. The
more and better expression in the school, therefore, the more and better
the education in that school. In the vitalized school we shall find
freedom of expression, and the absence of unreasoning repression. The
child expresses himself by means of his hands, his feet, his face, his
entire body, and his organs of speech, and his expression through either
of these means gives the teacher a knowledge of what to do. These
expressions may not be what the teacher would wish, but the expression
necessarily precedes intelligent teaching.
=Imagination.=--These expressions may reveal a vivid imagination, but
they are no less valuable as indices of the child's nature on that
account. It is the very refinement of cruelty to try to interdict or
stifle the child's imagination. But for the imagination of people in the
past we should not have the rich treasures of mythology that so delight
us all. Every child with imagination is constructing a mythology of his
own, and from the gossamer threads of fancy is weaving a pattern of life
that no parent or teacher should ever wish to forbid or destroy. Day by
day, he sees visions and dreams dreams, and so builds for himself a
world in which he finds delight and profit. In this world he is king,
and only profane hands would dare attempt to dethrone him.
=The child's experiences.=--His experiences, whether in the real world,
or in this world of fancy, are his capital in the bank of life; and he
has every right to invest this capital so as to achieve further
increments of life. In this enterprise, the teacher is his counselor and
guide, and, in order that she may exercise this function sympathetically
and rationally, she must know the nature and extent of his capital. If
he knows a bird, he may invest this knowledge so as to gain a knowledge
of many birds, and so, in time, compass the entire realm of ornithology.
If he knows a flower, from this known he may be so directed that he may
become a master in the unknown field of botany. If he knows coal, this
experience may be made the open sesame to the realms of geology. In
short, all his experiences may be capitalized under the direction of a
skillful teacher, and made to produce large dividends as an investment
in life.
=Relation to school work.=--Thus the school becomes, for the child, a
place of and for real life, and not a place detached from life. There he
lives effectively, and joyously, because the teacher knows how to
utilize his experiences and native dispositions for the enlargement of
his life. He has no inclination to become a deserter or a tenant, for
life is agreeable there, and the school is made his chief interest. His
work is not doled out to him in the form of tasks, but is graciously
presented as a privilege, and as such he esteems it. There he learns to
live among people of differing tastes and interests without abdicating
his own individuality. There he learns that life is work and that work
is the very quintessence of life.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. How should dividends on school investments be estimated?
2. What are the inherent rights of childhood?
3. What use may be made of play in the education of children?
4. Explain why adults are often unwilling to coöperate through lack of
opportunity to play in childhood.
5. Illustrate from your own knowledge and experience how the exercise of
native tendencies may be the means of education.
6. What modes of self-expression should be used by pupils of elementary
schools? of high schools?
7. What may the vitalized teacher do to assist in the development of
self-expression? What should she refrain from doing?
8. Suggest methods whereby the teacher may discover the content of the
child's world.
9. How may the child's experience, imagination, and expression be
interrelated?
10. Why is the twentieth century called the "age of the child"?