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 sand-papering, 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.
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES]
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 hill side 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.
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A FOREST]
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.
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF HANDS SPINNING]
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.
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A GIRL SPINNING]
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 or 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 arrowhead, 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 indefinitely 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 placer where the child shows off to the teacher and the
other children the amount of information he has succeeded in
assimilating from the text-book. From this other standpoint, the
recitation becomes preëminently 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
text-books 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 from its natural basis, 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, _pulls_ 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
were 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 Puerto 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 control their expression as not only to facilitate and enrich
the growth of the individual child, but also to supply the results, and
far more, of technical information and discipline that have been the
ideals of education in the past.