every child, and if any youth was seen in public to violate any of the
customs or ideals of the nation, it was the duty of the citizen to
chastise the boy and to otherwise instruct him in the duties of
citizenship. At the same time the citizen was careful himself to set an
example worthy of emulation. The result was the most perfect and harmonious
education that the world has ever seen--at once the inspiration and the
despair of all succeeding civilizations. Why should we not adopt some of
the Grecian methods suited to our needs? In Greece no citizen would think
of doing in public, or permitting to be done, anything which was not
desirable for the child to do either in public or private. Why should any
man who walks upright, with his head pointing to the stars, be permitted to
profane the name of Deity, to stagger under the influence of liquor, to
puff at a cigar, to gamble, to run a disorderly resort or show, to enrich
himself through the manufacture and sale of poisons, or to do anything else
that corrupts the community and destroys her children? Surely in our feeble
attempts at free government, the right hand knows not what the left is
doing.
But the remedy, as I have said, is in the hands of the citizens. While it
is true that certain reforms to be most effective must be national rather
than local, such, for example, as prohibiting the manufacture and sale of
poisonous drugs, tobacco and alcohol, it is, nevertheless, evident that the
initiative must be taken by the individual. His first duty is to convert
himself and then his neighbors before any nation-wide reform can be
undertaken.
It is one of the chief glories of a democracy that any desired good may be
obtained through conversion and co-operation. But since in most communities
90 per cent, or more of the citizens are law-abiding and would not
consciously do anything to destroy the children of the commonwealth, it
ought to be a simple matter to restrain the few that are lawless and
unsocial. There can be no possible doubt that any community that is fully
alive to its needs and responsibilities can bring about just such civic and
social conditions as it may desire. To help accomplish these purposes, it
is necessary that efficient officers are elected who will enforce the laws
and that public sentiment be aroused in support of these officials; in some
communities sympathy for law-breakers is so easily awakened that justice
cannot be enforced and law and order are placed in contempt.
The citizen in a democracy should realize that his training and education
are never completed, that life itself is the great school-master and that
one of the chief pleasures of existence is continued study and
investigation. His occupation, no matter what it is, will offer him some
opportunity for study and improvement, and a portion of his leisure time
ought to be devoted to books and magazines. He may, also, if he desires,
take an extension course or correspondence work offered by a higher
institution of learning, some of which are making earnest efforts to take
the college to the people. Every citizen should at least be identified with
some civic, social, or industrial organization in his town, such as a
debating and literary club, an agricultural society, or a commercial club.
If each community would seek out and utilize the talent within its
precinct, it might develop an intellectual and civic consciousness that
would rival the spirit of ancient Greece.
An old-time prophet uttered the inspiring thought: "The Glory of God is
intelligence," and the great latter-day Prophet added the supplement: "No
man can be saved in ignorance." It is the duty of the individual,
therefore, to be an eternal seeker after knowledge and perfection. In this
blessed age when the sun of education shines so brilliantly, none need to
slumber under the clouds of ignorance. May the sun shine until under its
regenerating influence the home, school, church and state may each awaken
to the full measure of its power and so prepare the way for the coming of
that mightier Son of Righteousness, who promises to reign for a thousand
years over a redeemed world.
LESSON XXII
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Show the close relationship between the individual and the state.
2. Account for the two different standards of conduct.
3. Indicate how social influences modify the character of children.
4. How do examples of the use of tobacco and liquor affect children?
5. Compare example and precept.
6. Why must a democratic form of government develop its ideals slowly?
7. Why is community government frequently inefficient?
8. What per cent, of the population usually "sets the moral pace?"
9. What is the remedy for inefficient free government?
10. Why is the community the chief civic and social educator of children?
11. What should receive the highest award in the gift of a people?
12. How did Greece train her children?
13. What evil practices should be prohibited in a community?
14. What reforms should be national rather than local?
15. How may the few lawless individuals be restrained?
16. What is the duty of the citizen towards self-improvement and education?
PART II
SUPPLEMENTAL STUDIES
MAN'S PARTNERSHIP WITH NATURE[1]
_Dr. John M. Tyler_
_Nature will bear our burdens for us, if we will obey her laws and heed
her suggestions_.
[Footnote 1: These supplemental studies are based on lectures by Dr. John
M. Tyler, given before the Utah Educational Association, by whose
permission they are used. Parents will find Dr. Tyler's book on Growth in
Education of great interest. It is listed with other books at the close of
this volume.]
How has all the material progress of the nineteenth century come about? I
think we shall find that it was due to man's intelligently and carefully
and scrupulously going into partnership with Nature by obeying her laws.
Not so very many years ago messages were sent across this continent by
pony-riders; it was a slow process and a very expensive one. Now I step
into an office here and I say, "I wish to send a message to my wife way out
yonder in Massachusetts." The man touches a button and says, "Your message
is in Massachusetts, sir." It is a miracle. The lightning has run with my
message. Electricity not only carries our messages, it lights our houses;
it turns many a wheel of machinery; it serves us beneficiently just as long
as we obey the laws of electricity; but when we offend against these laws,
it thwarts us or very likely destroys us. "Obey, and I will do anything
for you in the world," says Nature, "disobey and you cannot move me one
single inch." Coal hurries our great locomotives and long trains of
merchandise and carries men and women across this continent without any
great amount of human labor. The engineer and the brakeman do not get
behind and push those great palace cars of ours; it is Nature which drives
the train as if it were sport. Man guides and directs the water pouring
down our hillsides, turning wheels of countless factories. A few ounces of
gasoline send the automobile down the street, polluting the air and
endangering our lives. The power of Nature is absolutely irresistible and
unlimited; and furthermore, she is always working towards some great and
good end.
When I was a child I used to hear that Nature was bad, and we used to have
sermons to the natural man. They were excellent sermons, too, but they
ought to have been preached to the unnatural man. The natural child was
considered a child of wrath, and, having that reputation, he quite
frequently lived up to it; but Nature is beneficient, as long as we let her
be so, and she is always working toward great and grand ends. She has been
working towards a higher and nobler and a better race of men than you and I
are to-day. She is working for a race of men and women who shall tower
above us as the sages and prophets in Athens and Jerusalem towered above
their slaves. Can we not trust her just a little?
Did you ever think that it is the most marvelous thing in the world that
such a thing as a chicken ever comes out of such a thing as an egg? If only
one chicken were hatched in a century, we would go from here to the
Himalaya mountains to see the miracle of that chicken coming out of that
egg. You put an egg under a very stupid old hen, and all the hen does is to
keep that egg warm, and leave it alone; after twenty days there comes out a
chicken. How in the world did that chicken ever frame that body? How did it
build the skeleton and string the muscles, and spin the nerves? If every
nerve in that body did not make just the right connection, that chicken
would be paralyzed. If you could watch the development of that chicken in
the egg, your hair would stand on end. Isn't it Nature that makes those
chickens? You and I can't make them. Nature puts a shell around the egg
with the express purpose that we are to keep our fingers out and let her
alone. She says: "I am on very important business now and I am going to do
some strange things; if you could watch me you would interfere with me, and
if you interfere with me, you will ruin me or ruin the chicken, so I want
you to stand to one side and leave me entirely alone; and while I might do
a good many things that you don't like, I shall bring a chicken out of that
egg;" and she does; she has been making them for thousands of years in that
same old stupid way, but she brings the chicken out all right.
Sometimes she seems to blunder still worse. She takes an egg which we
suppose is going to turn into a frog, and she brings out of it a
tadpole--neither fish, flesh nor fowl nor anything else. After a while the
tadpole gets legs and has a long tail; it must lose that tail in order to
become a frog. A benevolent zoologist one day started in to help the
tadpole by snipping off the tadpole's tail; he made a frog of him in a
hurry, but the strange thing was that that frog never was able to leap
properly. Nature had been relying on the material that was in the tail. She
was going to shift it forward and put it in the hind legs, but when the
zoologist cut it off, she couldn't build the hind legs right after that.
A good deal of our education seems to me like trying to make frogs in a
hurry by cutting off their tails. Nature can make chickens; she can make
frogs. She can make bugs that will eat up everything which human ingenuity
ever tried to raise. She will make weeds which you and I can't possibly
kill even though we fight against them all summer long. We can trust Nature
to form these things; isn't it fair to trust her with the children for a
little while at least? Wouldn't it be well--I never heard of this
experiment being tried, but I should like to see it tried very much
indeed--I do wish that sometime somebody would leave a baby alone for
twenty minutes and see what it would do if it were left to itself.
What is the great characteristic of all living things? It is that they
grow; we cannot make them grow, but they grow of themselves. The farmer
plants his crop of corn. He doesn't get a jackscrew and put under every
hill of corn, and go around every morning and give the screw a turn and a
twist and hoist the hill up in the air. He prepares the soil as best he
can. He puts in the seed; he keeps down the weeds; he keeps out things and
living beings which will injure the crop as far as he can; then he leaves
it alone to God and Nature to make that corn grow, and in time he gets a
bountiful harvest.
I believe that education some day will be somewhat like raising a crop of
corn. We shall learn to keep the child under the best condition possible.
We shall learn to keep down harmful and injurious surroundings or forces so
far as they can interfere with him. We shall stimulate growth in every
possible way; that I grant you; and when we have done that, we shall leave
the rest calmly to Nature and to the good Lord who made that child for some
good purpose.
It is a grand thing to have the child learn to see for himself the glories
of this magnificent world. I verily believe that when you and I go home,
while the good Lord will be very merciful with us because of our sins, I
don't see how he can forgive many of us for not having had a great deal
better time in this glorious world in which He has put us. When you open
the child's eyes to the beauties and the glories of Nature you have done a
great thing for it. But, after all, that is not the grandest thing to my
mind. The grandest part is that every wave of vibration that goes in
through the eyes as the child looks at Nature, and pours into the brain,
stimulates that brain to a larger growth than it would otherwise possibly
have attained, and the child is a larger and a grander child for that
Nature study.
We believe in manual training because it gives us skilled fingers and
enables us to do deftly and well a great many things which we otherwise
could not do at all, and which most of us men have to go to our wives and
ask them to do for us. But that is not the grandest part of manual
training; the grandest part is the reaction from the finger upon the brain,
stimulating the brain to realize all its ideals, and stimulating it so
that whenever it sees good work of any kind in this world it shall
appreciate it heartily and enjoy it with the joy of the artist.
We speak of physical training and physical training is brain training in
the end, it is training in growth. It is very evident, however, that the
growth and development of a baby is something different from the growth and
development of a child; and the growth in the child is very different from
that in the youth and that of the youth from that of the adult. In the baby
the vital organs are growing faster. In the young child the muscular system
is coming to the front, and he runs and plays and through the stimulus of
that muscular exercise he brings out every organ in the body and gains that
magnificent health which he so much needs.
Then, after a time, the brain comes to the front and grows and develops
more rapidly than any other part of the body. Our business as teachers is
always so to stimulate, by proper exercise, the growing organs that they
shall grow faster and further than they ever could without our aid. We are
not to always hasten it. This is one thing we must bear in mind: precocity
is the worst foe of a sound education. It is the boy and the girl who
mature slowly but mature surely that in the end possess the earth. We must
not hasten the process, but when we find the organ is ready to grow and
develop, then we must give it adequate stimulus. In other words, the
stimulus must be of the right kind, and there must be just enough of it,
just enough blood to stimulate the muscles, just as much study as will best
stimulate the growing and very immature intellectual centers in the brain.
Then we will increase the stimulus as the power increases and demands the
stronger exercise, and so stimulating the growing parts by adequate
exercise, we bring one part after another up to such development that we
have one harmonious whole of perfect health.
You remember that when the old deacon in Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem
started in to build the one-horse shay, he said, "Every shay that has ever
been made has broken down, because there was always a weakest spot in it;
now I am going to make a shay that never will break down, because I am
going to make the weakest part just as strong as the rest." We cannot
always do that, but if we can make that part somewhere near as strong as
the rest, we are past masters in education.
If we obey Nature's laws, all of her powers will be on our side; and with
all her powers on our side and the very stars in their courses fighting for
us, we cannot possibly fail, there is absolutely nothing which is
impossible to us. We must be strong and of good courage, if we are to guide
these little people into the land sworn unto their fathers before them.
LESSON I
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What is meant by the expression, "Man's partnership with Nature?"
Illustrate how man makes Nature serve him.
2. In what way can man enter into a partnership with Nature regarding his
own body?
3. What can man do best when it comes to making things grow?
4. What do you think of the "hurry" methods in education?
5. What is the most we can do in providing for the education of the child?
6. How does Nature help us in the training process?
7. What does Nature try to make sure of first in the child?
8. When does the brain of the child begin to develop rapidly?
9. What advice would you give about precocity in children? Why?
10. What should we study in our children to give them a strong and even
development?
CONSERVATION OF THE CHILD
_By Dr. J.M. Tyler_
When the good Lord sets out to develop a child, the first organ with which
He starts is the stomach. The stomach is the foundation of all greatness.
It is a matter of daily observation if not of experience that a man can get
along very well with very few brains, but a man can't get along at all
without a good digestive system. The digestive system furnishes all the
material for growth and the fuel which is continually burned or consumed in
our nerves and muscles. Now, any furnace requires besides fuel, a good
draught. When we burn the fuel, by uniting it with the oxygen thus brought
in, we get the energy which draws our locomotives and our great ships.
Similarly in our bodies, our lungs bring in the oxygen and the heart and
blood-vessels carry the fuel and the oxygen to every part of the body. But
every furnace requires a smoke-stack to carry off the waste, and,
similarly, we must have in our bodies an excretory system to remove the
waste of the burned-up material and of the used-up tissue of the heart,
muscles and nerves. This constitutes the digestive system; the lungs, the
excretory system and the circulatory system are absolutely necessary to
support the combustion which is going on in nerve and muscle and without
which energy is impossible.
All productive labor manifests itself through the muscles. Our muscles
directly write the book, speak the word, build the railroads, do the deeds.
Our muscles are of very different ages. In the child the trunk muscles are
developed first; the shoulder muscles next; the arm muscles next; the
finger muscles last of all. The heavy muscles of trunk, shoulder and thigh
require but a small amount of nervous impulse or control, and they react
strongly on all the vital organs, as is shown every time that we take a
walk. The finest and youngest muscles of the fingers require a very large
amount of nervous control for a very small output of muscular energy and
their exercise stimulates the very highest centers in the brain, and this
is the great argument for physical training, that through one muscle or
another you can stimulate and develop as you choose either any vital organ
or the highest center in the brain.
Never forget the maxim of the old German physiologist that "Health comes in
through the muscles and flows out through the nerves." The nervous system
was created for good and wise ends, but in many people it has become a
nuisance. Its use is to insure that every stimulus from the external world
shall call forth a response suited to the emergency. A fly lights upon my
face; I wave my hand and drive him away. The fly has tickled my face; there
is the external stimulus. A sensory impulse travels to the brain or to some
other center and a motor impulse goes from there to a certain muscle in my
arm which moves my hand and drives away the fly. The impulse has called out
a response suited to that emergency. You watch a cat walk across the lawn;
you will think that fool cat is going to fall down, it is going so slowly
and it can hardly raise one foot above the other, but watch it when it sees
its prey; every muscle seems to turn to steel; it is ready for the spring.
When that spring is made there is no energy wasted. After that the cat does
not move for two hours; no wasting energy there. Wasting of energy is a
sin.
I awaken in the morning, and the first horrible emergency of the day
confronts me at once, I have to get up. How I get up I have no idea.
Professor James once said that when a man thinks about it he never does get
up, and that's right; but I find myself in the middle of the floor and that
is all I know, and then the cold air or the sight of my clothes or
something reminds me to start dressing, and the putting on of one garment
leads to the putting on of another. The pangs of hunger call me to the
breakfast table; the bell calls me to work; and so all day long response
follows stimulus; the day's work is a success or a failure according to the
response which I make to the stimuli which I receive.
There is a marvelous picture given in the scripture in the parable of the
poor man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and getting wounded and left
by the road-side. Three men pass that way. They all see the same thing. The
light is reflected from the poor sufferer into the eyes of these
passers-by; a flood of vibration passes on to the brain and then the motor
impulses go out to the muscles. In the case of the good Samaritan, the
impulse went from the brain or the spinal nerve to the arms and he stooped
down and picked the poor fellow up and carried him off; while in the priest
and the Levite the impulses all went down into the legs and the cowards
hustled off for Jericho.
A healthy nervous system is the rarest thing in this wide world. I have one
illustration in mind, which I always like to think of, which I am going to
give you of a perfectly healthy and normal nervous system. It was possessed
by a good old negro minister. He had been preaching to his congregation for
a long time on the subject of meekness and it had not produced the desired
effect; so he said to them one morning: "Brethren, I'se gwine to give you
the illustration of meekness for a week now and show you what it is," and
the old man did. His congregation naturally rose to the occasion: They
insulted his wife; they abused his children; they stoned his dog; they
stole his chickens; they did everything under the heaven to break down the
meekness of that man; but he went on through the week and came into church
the next Sunday and began to preach. The congregation recognized that their
time was short and they redoubled their efforts, but all in vain. Finally,
about five minutes before the closing of the service, he turned to the
congregation and said: "Brethren, I think I ought to denounce to this
congregation that my week of meekness is just about up, and when the clock
in yonder steeple strikes twelve, I'se gwine to quit preachin', close this
blessed Bible, go down from this pulpit, and then, Brethren, Judgment day
and hell is gwine to break loose on some of you." Now, that old colored
minister had an ideal nervous system. There had not been one single
response all that week long, and not one single stimulus which had come in
from the outside had been lost either, but it was all waiting to leap into
that good right arm when the emergency was to be met, in the fullness of
time, and I commend you to go and do likewise.
It is only a step, thank fortune, from the ridiculous to the sublime, just
as it is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous. Another
illustration of a perfect nervous system: You remember how our Lord spent a
whole day in preaching, in healing, working deeds of kindness, in pouring
out sympathy and comfort, the strain of which on a man's nervous energy is
worse than anything else in the world, and how at the close of the day He
went into the little boat, took the hard cushion on which the steersman
sat, threw it down in the bottom of the boat, and laid Himself down with
His head on that hard cushion and slept like a child through the rocking of
the boat and the roaring of the storm, until His disciples came to Him
saying, "Lord, save us: we perish." There is not one man in a thousand who
could do that work or could put out one-tenth part of that nervous energy
and then sleep like that. Anybody who thinks that the Prophet of Nazareth
was a weak or a feeble man has made the mistake of his life. He was perfect
physically or He never could have done His work.
All this work of developing a steady nerve, of developing the vital organs
for the use of the muscles, has been going on until the child is nine or
ten years old. It has been going on very rapidly, and in as much as the
exercise has been suitable, as his digestion has been good, his growth has
been very rapid. During the first three years of its life the child
increases its weight more than three-fold. During the next three years it
adds over forty per cent. to this amount and between six and nine adds over
thirty per cent. more; and when the boy is about eleven years old, or the
girl is about ten, then the growth almost stops that year. It drops to a
minimum. I call your attention to this thought: the minimum growth is more
in a girl than in a boy. A girl is always more precocious than a boy. She
is a year older than he at nine or ten, and when she is fourteen, fifteen,
sixteen, she is two years older than the boy. When the girl is ten and the
boy eleven, growth drops to the minimum. Why is that? Nature is economizing
her material and husbanding her resources against the trying years which
are to come.