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Title: Study of Child Life
Author: Marion Foster Washburne
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STUDY OF CHILD LIFE
by
MARION FOSTER WASHBURNE
THE LIBRARY OF HOME ECONOMICS
A COMPLETE HOME-STUDY COURSE
ON THE NEW PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING AND ART OF RIGHT LIVING;
THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF THE MOST RECENT ADVANCES
IN THE ARTS AND SCIENCES TO HOME AND HEALTH
PREPARED BY TEACHERS OF RECOGNIZED AUTHORITY
FOR HOME-MAKERS, MOTHERS, TEACHERS, PHYSICIANS, NURSES, DIETITIANS,
PROFESSIONAL HOUSE MANAGERS, AND ALL INTERESTED
IN HOME, HEALTH, ECONOMY AND CHILDREN
TWELVE VOLUMES
NEARLY THREE THOUSAND PAGES, ONE THOUSAND ILLUSTRATIONS
TESTED BY USE IN CORRESPONDENCE INSTRUCTION
REVISED AND SUPPLEMENTED
[Illustration: AMERICAN SCHOOL OF HOME ECONOMICS]
CHICAGO
AMERICAN SCHOOL OF HOME ECONOMICS
1907
[Illustration: A MODERN MADONNA.]
AUTHORS
ISABEL BEVIER, Ph.M.
Professor of Household Science, University of Illinois. Author
U.S. Government Bulletins, "Development of the Home Economics
Movement in America," etc.
ALICE PELOUBET NORTON, M.A.
Assistant Professor of Home Economics, School of Education,
University of Chicago; Director of the Chautauqua School of
Domestic Science.
S. MARIA ELLIOTT
Instructor in Home Economics, Simmons College; Formerly
Instructor School of Housekeeping, Boston.
ANNA BARROWS
Director Chautauqua School of Cookery; Lecturer Teachers'
College, Columbia University, and Simmons College; formerly
Editor "American Kitchen Magazine;" Author "Home Science Cook
Book."
ALFRED CLEVELAND COTTON, A.M., M.D.
Professor Diseases of Children, Rush Medical College,
University of Chicago; Visiting Physician Presbyterian
Hospital, Chicago; Author of "Diseases of Children."
BERTHA M. TERRILL, A.B.
Professor in Home Economics in Hartford School of Pedagogy;
Author of U.S. Government Bulletins.
KATE HEINTZ WATSON
Formerly Instructor in Domestic Economy, Lewis Institute;
Lecturer University of Chicago.
MARION FOSTER WASHBURNE
Editor "The Mothers' Magazine;" Lecturer Chicago Froebel
Association; Author "Everyday Essays", "Family Secrets," etc.
MARGARET E. DODD
Graduate Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Teacher of
Science, Woodward Institute.
AMY ELIZABETH POPE
With the Panama Canal Commission; Formerly Instructor in
Practical and Theoretical Nursing, Training School for Nurses,
Presbyterian Hospital, New York City.
MAURICE LE BOSQUET, S.B.
Director American School of Home Economics; Member American
Public Health Association and American Chemical Society.
CONTRIBUTORS AND EDITORS
ELLEN H. RICHARDS
Author "Cost of Food," "Cost of Living," "Cost of Shelter,"
"Food Materials and Their Adulteration," etc., etc.; Chairman
Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics.
MARY HINMAN ABEL
Author of U.S. Government Bulletins, "Practical Sanitary and
Economic Cooking," "Safe Food," etc.
THOMAS D. WOOD, M.D.
Professor of Physical Education, Columbia University.
H.M. LUFKIN, M.D.
Professor of Physical Diagnosis and Clinical Medicine,
University of Minnesota.
OTTO FOLIN, Ph.D.
Special Investigator, McLean Hospital, Waverly, Mass.
T. MITCHELL PRUDDEN, M.D., LL.D.
Author "Dust and Its Dangers," "The Story of the Bacteria,"
"Drinking Water and Ice Supplies," etc.
FRANK CHOUTEAU BROWN
Architect, Boston, Mass.; Author of "The Five Orders of
Architecture," "Letters and Lettering."
MRS. MELVIL DEWEY
Secretary Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics.
HELEN LOUISE JOHNSON
Professor of Home Economics, James Millikan University,
Decatur.
FRANK W. ALLEN, M.D.
Instructor Rush Medical College, University of Chicago.
* * * * *
MANAGING EDITOR
MAURICE LE BOSQUET, S.B.
Director American School of Home Economics.
BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF HOME ECONOMICS
* * * * *
MRS. ARTHUR COURTENAY NEVILLE
President of the Board.
MISS MARIA PARLOA
Founder of the first Cooking School in Boston; Author of "Home
Economics," "Young Housekeeper," U.S. Government Bulletins,
etc.
MRS. MARY HINMAN ABEL
Co-worker in the "New England Kitchen," and the "Rumford Food
Laboratory;" Author of U.S. Government Bulletins, "Practical
Sanitary and Economic Cooking," etc.
MISS ALICE RAVENHILL
Special Commissioner sent by the British Government to report
on the Schools of Home Economics in the United States; Fellow
of the Royal Sanitary Institute, London.
MRS. ELLEN M. HENROTIN
Honorary President General Federation of Woman's Clubs.
MRS. FREDERIC W. SCHOFF
President National Congress of Mothers.
MRS. LINDA HULL LARNED
Past President National Household Economics Association;
Author of "Hostess of To-day."
MRS. WALTER McNAB MILLER
Chairman of the Pure Food Committee of the General Federation
of Woman's Clubs.
MRS. J.A. KIMBERLY
Vice President of the National Household Economics
Association.
MRS. JOHN HOODLESS
Government Superintendent of Domestic Science for the province
of Ontario; Founder Ontario Normal School of Domestic Science,
now the MacDonald Institute.
[Illustration: A MADONNA OF THE WILD.
A Takima mother, with papoose]
STUDY OF CHILD LIFE
BY
MARION FOSTER WASHBURNE
Associate Editor Mother's Magazine; Author "Everyday Essays," "Family
Secrets," etc.; Lecturer to Chicago Froebel Association
[Illustration: AMERICAN SCHOOL OF HOME ECONOMICS]
CHICAGO AMERICAN SCHOOL OF HOME ECONOMICS 1907
CONTENTS
AN OPEN LETTER
DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD
FAULTS AND THEIR REMEDIES
CHARACTER BUILDING
PLAY
OCCUPATIONS
ART AND LITERATURE IN CHILD LIFE
STUDIES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS
FINANCIAL TRAINING
RELIGIOUS TRAINING
APPLICATION OF PRINCIPLES
OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN
THE SEX QUESTION
FATHERS
THE UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SUPPLEMENTAL STUDY PROGRAM
INDEX
AMERICAN SCHOOL OF HOME ECONOMICS
CHICAGO
January 1, 1907.
My dear Madam:
In beginning this subject of the "Study of Child Life" there may
be lurking doubts in your mind as to whether any reliable rules can
really be laid down. They seem to arise mostly from the perception of
the great difference between children. What will do for one child will
not do for another. Some children are easily persuaded and gentle,
others willful, still others sullen unresponsive. How, then, is
it possible that a system of education and training can be devised
suitable for their various dispositions?
We must remember that children are much more alike than they are
different. One may have blue eyes, another gray, another black, but
they all have two. We are, therefore, in a position to make rules for
creatures having two eyes and these rules apply to eyes of all colors.
Children may be nervous, sanguine, bilious, or plethoric, but they all
have the same kind of internal organs end the same general rules of
health apply to them all.
In this series of lessons I have endeavored to set forth principles
briefly and to confirm them by instances within the experience of
every observer of childhood. The rules given are such as are held at
present by the best educators to be based upon sound philosophy, not
at variance with the slight array or scientific facts at our command.
Perhaps you yourself may be able to add to the number of reliable
facts intelligently reported that must be collected before much
greater scientific advance is possible.
There is, to be sure, an art of application of these rules both in
matters of health of body and of health of mind and this art must be
worked out by each mother for each individual child.
We all recognize that it is a long endeavor before we can apply to our
own lives such principles of conduct as we heartily acknowledge to be
right. Why, then, expect to be able to apply principles instantly
and unerringly to a little child? If a rule fails when you attempt
to apply it, before questioning the principle, may it not be well to
question your own tact and skill?
So far as I can advise with you in special instances of difficulty, I
shall be very glad to do so; not that I shall always know what to do
myself, but that we can get a little more light upon the problems by
conferring together. I know well how difficult a matter this of child
training is, for every day, in the management of my own family of
children, I find each philosophy, science and art as I can command
very much put to the test.
Sincerely yours,
[Signature: Marion Foster Washburne.]
Instructor
[Illustration: FREIDRICH FROEBEL
By courtesy of The Perry Pictures Co., Malden, Mass.]
STUDY OF CHILD LIFE
PART I.
The young of the human species is less able to care for itself than
the young of any other species. Most other creatures are able to walk,
or at any rate stand, within a few hours of birth. But the human baby
is absolutely dependent and helpless, unable even to manufacture all
the animal heat that he requires. The study of his condition at birth
at once suggests a number of practical procedures, some of them quite
at variance with the traditional procedures.
HOW THE CHILD DEVELOPS
[Sidenote: Condition at Birth]
Let us see, then, exactly what his condition is. In the first place,
he is, as Virchow, an authority on physiological subjects declares,
merely a spinal animal. Some of the higher brain centers do not yet
exist at all, while others are in too incomplete a state for service.
The various sensations which the baby experiences--heat, light,
contact, motion, etc.--are so many stimuli to the development of these
centers. If the stimulus is too great, the development is sometimes
unduly hastened, with serious results, which show themselves chiefly
in later life. The child who is brought up a noisy room, is constantly
talked to and fondled, is likely to develop prematurely, to talk and
walk at an early age; also to fall into nervous decay at an early age.
And even if by reason of an unusually good heredity he escapes these
dangers, it is almost certain that his intellectual power is not
so great in adult life as it would have been under more favorable
conditions. A new baby, like a young plant, requires darkness and
quiet for the most part. As he grows older, and shows a spontaneous
interest in his surroundings, he may fittingly have more light, more
companionship, and experience more sensations.
[Sidenote: Weight at Birth]
The average boy baby weighs about seven pounds at birth; the average
girl, about six and a half pounds. The head is larger in proportion
to the body than in after life; the nose is incomplete, the legs short
and bowed, with a tendency to fall back upon the body with the knees
flexed. This natural tendency should be allowed full play, for the
flexed position is said to be favorable to the growth of the bones,
permitting the cartilaginous ends of the bones to lie free from
pressure at the joints.
The plates of the skull are not complete and do not fit together at
the edges. Great care needs to be taken of the soft spot thus left
exposed on the top of the head--the undeveloped place where the edges
of these bones come together. Any injury here in early life is liable
to affect the mind.
[Sidenote: State of Development]
The bony enclosures of the middle ear are unfinished and the eyes also
are unfinished. It is a question yet to be settled, whether a
new-born baby is blind and deaf or not. At a rate, he soon acquires a
sensitiveness to both light and sound, although it is three years
or more before he has amassed sufficient experience to estimate with
accuracy the distance of objects seen or herd. He can cry, suck,
sneeze, cough, kick, and hold on to a finger. All of these acts,
though they do not yet imply personality, or even mind, give evidence
of a wonderful organism. They require the co-operation of many
delicate nerves and muscles--a co-operation that has as yet baffled
the power of scientists to explain.
Although the young baby is in almost constant motion while he is
awake, he is altogether too weak to turn himself in bed or to escape
from an uncomfortable position, and he remains so for many weeks. This
constant motion is necessary to his muscular development, his control
of his own muscles, his circulation, and, very probably, to the
free transmission of nervous energy. Therefore, it is of the first
importance that he has freedom to move, and he should be given time
every day to move and stretch before the fire, without clothes on. It
is well to rub his back and legs at the same time, thus supplementing
his gymnastics with a gentle massage.
[Sidenote: Educational Beginnings.]
By the time he is four or five weeks old it is safe to play with him,
a little every day, and Froebel has made his "Play with the Limbs" one
of his first educational exercises. In this play the mother lays the
baby, undressed, upon a pillow and catches the little ankles in her
hands. Sometimes she prevents the baby from kicking, so that he has
to struggle to get his legs free; sometimes she helps him, so that
he kicks more freely and regularly; sometimes she lets him push hard
against her breast. All the time she laughs and sings to him, and
Froebel has made a little song for this purposes. Since consciousness
is roused and deepened by sensations, remembered, experienced, and
compared, it is evident that this is more than a fanciful play; that
it is what Froebel claimed for it--a real educational exercise. By
means, of it the child may gain some consciousness of companionship,
and thus, by contrast, a deeper self-consciousness.
[Sidenote: First Efforts]
The baby is at first unable to hold up its head, and in this he is
just like all other animals, for no animal, except man, holds up its
head constantly. The human baby apparently makes the effort, because
he desires to see more clearly--he could doubtless see clearly enough
for all physical purposes with his head hung down, but not enough to
satisfy his awakening mentality. The effort to hold the head up and to
look around is therefore regarded by most psychologists as one of
the first tokens of an awakening intellectual life. And this is true,
although the first effort seems to arise from an overplus of nervous
energy which makes the neck muscles contract, just as it makes other
muscles contract. The first slight raisings of the head are like the
first kicking movements, merely impulsive; but the child soon sees the
advantage of this apparently accidental movement and tries to master
it. Preyer[A] considers that the efforts to balance the head among the
first indications that the child's will is taking possession of his
muscles. His own boy arrived at this point when he was between three
and four months old.
[Sidenote: Reflex Grasping]
The grasp of the new-born baby's hand has a surprising power, but the
baby himself has little to do with it. The muscles act because of
a stimulus presented by the touch of the fingers, very much as the
muscles of a decapitated frog contract when the current of electricity
passes over them. This is called reflex grasping, and Dr. Louis
Robinson,[B] thinking that this early strength of gasp was an
important illustration of and evidence for evolution, tried
experiments on some sixty new-born babies. He found that they could
sustain their whole weight by the arms alone when their hands were
clasped about a slender rod. They grasped the rod at once and could
be lifted from the bed by it and kept in this position about half a
minute. He argued that this early strength of arm, which soon begins
to disappear, was survival from the remote period when the baby's
ancestors were monkeys or monkey-like people who lived in trees.
[Sidenote: Beginnings Of Will Power]
However this may be, during the first week the baby's hands are much
about his face. By accident they reach, the mouth, they are sucked;
the child feels himself suck its own fist; he feels his fist being
sucked. Some day it will occur to him that that fist belongs to
the same being who owns the sucking mouth. But at this point, Miss
Shinn[C] has observed, the baby is often surprised and indignant that
he cannot move his arms around and at the same time suck his fist.
This discomfort helps him to make an effort to get his fist into his
mouth and keep it there, and this effort shows his will, beginning to
take possession of his hands and arms.
[Sidenote: Growth of Will]
Since any faculty grows by its own exercise, just as muscles grow by
exercise, every time the baby succeeds in getting his hands to his
mouth as a result of desire, every time that he succeeds in grasping
an object as result of desire, his will power grows. Action of this
nature brings in new sensations, and the brain centers used for
recording such sensations grow.
As the sensations multiply, he compares them, and an idea is born. For
the beginnings of mental development no other mechanism is actually
needed than a brain and a hand and the nerves connecting them. Laura
Bridgeman and Helen Keller, both of them deaf and blind, received
their education almost entirely through their hands, and yet they
were unusually capable of thinking. The child's hands, then, from the
beginning, are the servants of his brain-instruments by means of
which he carries impressions from the outer world to the seat of
consciousness, and by which in turn he imprints his consciousness upon
the outer world.
[Sidenote: Intentional Grasping]
The average baby does not begin to grasp objects with intention before
the fourth month. The first grasping seems to be done by feeling,
without the aid of the eye, and is done with the fingers with no
attempt to oppose the thumb to them. So closely does the use of the
thumbs set opposite the fingers in grasping coincide with the first
grasping with the aid of sight, that some observers have been led to
believe that as soon as the baby learns to use its thumb in this way
he proves that he is beginning to grasp with intention.
[Sidenote: Order of Development]
The order of development seems to be, _first_, automatism, the muscles
contracting of themselves in response to nervous stimuli; _second_,
instinct, the inherited wisdom of the race, which discovered ages ago
that the hand could be used to greater advantage when the thumb
was separated from the fingers; and _thirdly_, the child's own
intelligence and will making use of this natural and inherited
machinery. This order holds true of the development, not only of the
hand, but of the whole organism.
[Sidenote: Looking]
A little earlier than this, during the third month, the baby first
looks upon his own hands and notices them. Darwin tells us that his
boy looked at his own hands and seemed to study them until his eyes
crossed. About the same then the child notices his foot and uses his
hand to carry it to its mouth. It is some time later that he discovers
that he can move his feet without his hands.
[Sidenote: Tearing]
About this time, three or four months old, the child begins to tear
paper into pieces, and may be easily taught to let the piece, that
have found their way into his mouth be taken out again. Now, too, he
begins to throw things, or to drop them; then he wants to get them
back again, and the patient mother must pick them up and give them
back many times. Sometimes a baby is punished for this proclivity,
but it is really a part of his development, and at least once a day he
should be allowed to play in this manner to his heart's content. It
is tact, not discipline, that is needed, and the more he is helped
the sooner he will live through this stage and come to the next point
where he begins to throw things.
[Sidenote: Throwing]
In this stage, of course, he must be given the proper things to
throw--small, bright-colored worsted balls, bean-bags, and other
harmless objects. If he is allowed to discover the pleasure there is
in smashing glass and china, he will certainly be, for a time, a very
destructive little person. When later he is able to creep throw his
ball and creep after it--he will amuse himself for hours at a time,
and so relieve those who have patiently attended him up to this time.
_In general we may lay down the rule, that the more time and attention
of the right sort is to a young child, the less will need to be given
as he grows older_. It is poor economy to neglect a young child, and
try to make it up on the growing boy or girl. This is to substitute a
complicated and difficult problem for a simple one.
[Sidenote: The Grasping Instinct]
It is some time before a child's will can so overcome his
newly-acquired tendency to grasp every possible object that he can
keep his hand off of anything that invites him. The many battles
between mothers and children it the subject of not touching forbidden
things are at this stage a genuine wrong and injustice to the child.
So young a child is scarcely more responsible for touching whatever he
can reach that is a piece of steel for being drawn toward a powerful
magnet. Preyer says that it is years before voluntary inhibitions
of grasping become possible. The child has not the necessary brain
machinery. Commands and sparring of the hands create bewilderment and
tend to build up a barrier between mother and child. Instead of doing
such thing, simply put high out of reach and sight whatever the child
must not touch.
Another way in which young children are often made to suffer because
of the ignorance of parents is the leaving of undesired food on the
child's plate. Every child, when he does not want his food, pushes the
plate away from him, and many mothers push it back and scold. The real
truth is that the motor suggestion of the food upon the plate is so
strong that the child feels as if he were being forced to eat it every
time he looks at the plate; to escape from eating it he is obliged to
push it out of sight.
[Sidenote: The Three Months' Baby]
But this difficulty comes later. Now we are concerned with a
three-months-old baby. At this stage the child is usually able to
balance his head, to sit up against pillows, to seize and grasp
objects, and to hold out his arm, when he wishes to be taken.
Although he may have made number of efforts to sit erect, and may have
succeeded for a few minutes at a time, he still is far from being able
to sit alone, unsupported. This he does not accomplish until the fifth
or the month.
[Sidenote: Danger of Forcing]
There is nothing to be gained by trying to make him sit alone sooner;
indeed, there is danger in it--danger in forcing young bones and
muscles to do work beyond their strength, and danger also to the
nerves. It is safe to say that _a normal child always exercises all
its faculties to the utmost without need of urging, and any exercise
beyond the point of natural fatigue, if persisted in, is sure to bring
about abnormal results_.
[Sidenote: Creeping]
The first efforts toward creeping often appear in the bath when the
child turns over and raise, himself upon his hands and knees. This is
sign that he might creep sooner, if he were not impeded by clothing.
He should be allowed to spread himself upon a blanket every day for
an hour or two, and to get on his knees as frequently as he pleases.
Often he needs a little help to make him creep forward, for most
babies creep backward at first, their arms being stronger than their
legs. Here the mother may safely interfere, pushing the legs as they
ought to go and showing the child how to manage himself; for very
often he becomes much excited over his inability to creep forward.
The climbing instinct begins to appear by this time--the seventh
month--and here the stair-case has its great advantages. It ought not
to be shut from him by a gate, but he should be taught how to climb
up and down it in safety. To do this, start him at the head of the
stairs, and, you yourself being below him, draw first one knee and
then the other over the step, thus showing him how to creep backward.
Two lessons of about twenty minutes each will be sufficient. The
only danger is creeping down head foremost, but if he once learns
thoroughly to go backward, and has not been allowed the other way at
all, he will never dream of trying it. In going down backward, if he
should slip, he can easily save himself by catching the stairs with
his hands as he slips past.
The child who creeps is often later in his attempts to walk than the
child who does not; and, therefore, when he is ready to walk, his legs
will be all the stronger, and the danger of bow-legs will be past. As
long as the child remains satisfied with creeping, he is not yet ready
either mentally or physically for walking.
[Sidenote: Standing]
If the child has been allowed to creep about freely, he will soon
be standing. He will pull himself to his feet by means of any chair,
table, or indeed anything that he may get hold of. To avoid injuring
him, no flimsy chairs or spindle-legged tables should be allowed in
his nursery. He will next begin to sidle around a chair, shuffling his
feet in a vague fashion, and sometimes, needing both of his hands to
seize some coveted object, he will stand without clinging, leaning on
his stomach. An unhurried child may remain at this stage for weeks.
[Sidenote: Walking]
Let alone, as he should be, he will walk without knowing how he does
it, and will be the stronger for having overcome his difficulties
himself. He should not be coaxed to stand or walk. The things in his
room actually urge him to come and get them. Any further persuasion is
forced, and may urge him beyond his strength.
Walking-chairs and baby-jumpers are injurious in this respect. They
keep the child from his native freedom of sprawling, climbing, and
pulling himself up. The activity they do permit is less varied and
helpful than the normal activity, and the child, restricted from the
preparatory motions, begins to walk too soon.
[Sidenote: Alternate Growth]
A curious fact in the growth of children is that they seem to grow
heavier for a certain period, and then to grow taller for a similar
period. That is, a very young baby, say, two months old, will grow
fatter for about six weeks, and then for the next six weeks will grow
longer, while the child of six years changes his manner of growth
every three or four months. These periods are variable, or at least
their law has not yet been established, but the observant mother can
soon make the period out for herself in the case of her own child. For
two or three days, when the manner of growth seems to be changing
from breadth to length, and vice versa, the children are likely to
be unusually nervous and irritable, and these aberrations must, of
course, be patiently borne with.
[Sidenote: Precocity]
[Sidenote: Early Ripening]
In all these things some children develop earlier than others, but too
early development is to be regretted. Precocious children are always
of a delicate nervous organization. Fiske[D] has proved to us that the
reason why the human young is so far more helpless and dependent than
the young of any other species is because the activities of the human
race have become so many, so widely varied, and so complex, that they
could not fix themselves in the nervous structure before birth. There
a only a few things that the chick needs to know in order to lead a
successful chicken life; as a consequence these few things are well
impressed upon the small brain before ever he chips the shell; but the
baby needs to learn a great many things--so many that there is no
time or room to implant them before birth, or indeed, in the few years
immediately succeeding birth. To hurry the development, therefore,
of certain few of these faculties, like the faculties of talking,
and walking, of imitation or response, is to crowd out many other
faculties perhaps just beginning to grow. Such forcing will limit the
child's future development to the few faculties whose growth is thus
early stimulated. Precocity in a child, therefore, is a thing to be
deplored. His early ripening foretells a early decay and a wise mother
is she who gives her child ample opportunity for growing, but no
urging.
[Sidenote: Ample Opporunity for Growth]
Ample opportunity for growth includes (1) Wholesome surroundings, (2)
Sufficient sleep, (3) Proper clothing, (4) Nourishing food. We will
take up these topics in order.
[Footnote A: W. Preyer. Professor of Physiology, of Jena, author of
"The Mind of the Child." D. Appleton & Co.]
[Footnote B: Dr. Robinson. Physician and Evolutionist, paper in The
Eclectic, Vol. 29.]
[Footnote C: Miss Millicent Shinn, American Psychologist, author of
"Biography of a Baby."]
[Footnote D: John Fiske, writer on Evolutionary Philosophy. His theory
of infancy is perhaps his most important contribution to science.]
WHOLESOME SURROUNDINGS
The whole house in which the child lives ought to be well warmed and
equally well aired. Sunlight also is necessary to his well-being. If
it is impossible to have this in every room, as sometimes happens in
city homes, at least the nursery must have it. In the central States
of the Union plants and trees exposed to the southern sun put forth
their leaves two weeks sooner than those exposed to the north. The
infant cannot fail to profit by the same condition, for the young
child may be said to lead in part a vegetative as well as an animal
life, and to need air and sunshine and warmth as much as plants do.
The very best room in the house is not too good for the nursery, for
in no other room is such important and delicate work being done.
[Illustration: JOHN FISKE]
[Sidenote: Temperature]
The temperature is a matter of importance. It should not be decided
by guess-work, but a thermometer should be hung upon a wall at a
place equally removed from draft and from the source of heat. The
temperature for children during the first year should be about 70
degrees Fahrenheit during the day and not lower than 50 degrees at
night. Children who sleep with the mother will not be injured by a
temperature 5 to 20 degrees lower at night.
[Sidenote: Fresh Air]
It is important to provide means for the ingress of fresh air. It is
not sufficient to air the room from another room unless that other
room has in it an open window. Even then the nursery windows should
be opened wide from fifteen minutes to half an hour night and morning,
while the child is in another room; and this even when the weather is
at zero or below. It does not take long to warm up room that has been
aired. Perhaps the best means of obtaining the ingress of fresh air
without creating a draft upon the floor, where the baby spends so much
of his time, is to raise the window six inches at the top or bottom
and insert a board cut to fit the aperture.
[Sidenote: Daily Outing]
But no matter how well ventilated the nursery may be, all children
more than six weeks old need unmodified outside air, and need it every
day, no matter what the weather, unless they are sick.
The daily outing secures them better appetites, quiet sleep, and
calmer nerves. Let them be properly clothed and protected in their
carriages, and all weathers are good for them.
Children who take their naps in their baby-carriages may with
advantage be wheeled into a sheltered spot, covered warmly, and left
to sleep in the outer air. They are likely to sleep longer than in the
house, and find more refreshment in their sleep.
SUFFICIENT SLEEP.
Few children in America get as much sleep as they really need. Preyer
gives the record of his own child, and the hours which this child
found necessary for his sleep and growth may be taken for a standard.
In the first month, sixteen, in full, out of twenty-four hours were
spent in sleep. The sleep rarely lasted beyond two hours at a time.
In the second month about the same amount was spent in sleep, which
lasted from three to six hours at a time. In the sixth month, it
lasted from six to eight hours at a time, and began to diminish to
fifteen hours in the twenty-four. In the thirteenth month, fourteen
hours' sleep daily; it the seventeenth, prolonged sleep began, ten
hours without interruption; in the twentieth, prolonged sleep became
habitual, and sleep in the day-time was reduced to two hours. In the
third year, the night sleep lasted regularly from eleven to twelve
hours, and sleep in the daytime was no longer required.
[Sidenote: Naps]
Preyer's record stops here. But it may be added that children from
three to eight years still require eleven hours' sleep; and, although
the child of three nay not need a daily nap, it is well for him, until
he is six years old, to lie still for an hour in the middle of the
day, amusing himself with a picture book or paper and pencil, but
not played with or talked to by any other person. Such a rest in the
middle of the day favors the relaxation of muscles and nerves and
breaks the strain of a long day of intense activity.
PROPER CLOTHING.
Proper clothing for a child includes three things: (a) Equal
distribution of warmth, (b) Freedom from restraint, (c) Light weight.
_Equal distribution of warmth_ is of great importance, and is seldom
attained. The ordinary dress for a young baby, for example, leaves
the arms and the upper part of the chest unprotected by more than one
thickness of flannel and one of cotton--the shirt and the dress. About
the child's middle, on the contrary, there are two thicknesses of
flannel--a shirt and band--and five of cotton, i.e., the double bands
of the white and flannel petticoats, and the dress. Over the legs,
again, are two thicknesses of flannel and two of cotton, i.e., the
pinning blanket, flannel skirt, white skirt, and dress. The child in
a comfortably warm house needs two thicknesses of flannel and one of
cotton all over it, and no more.
[Sidenote: The Gertrude Suit]
The practice of putting extra wrappings about the abdomen is
responsible for undue tenderness of those organs. Dr. Grosvenor, of
Chicago, who designed a model costume for a baby, which he called the
Gertrude suit, says that many cases of rupture are due to bandaging of
the abdomen. When the child cries the abdominal walls normally expand;
if they are tightly bound, they cannot do this, and the pressure upon
one single part, which the bandages may not hold quite firmly, becomes
overwhelming, and results in rupture. Dr. Grosvenor also thinks that
many cases of weak lungs, and even of consumption in later life, are
due to the tight bands of the skirts pressing upon the soft ribs of
the young child, and narrowing the lung space.
[Sidenote: Objection to the Pinning Blanket]
_Freedom from restraint._. Not only should the clothes not bind the
child's body in any way, but they should not be so long as to prevent
free exercise of the legs. The pinning-blanket is objectionable on
this account. It is difficult for the child to kick in it; and as we
have seen before, kicking is necessary to the proper development of
the legs. Undue length of skirt operates in the same way--the weight
of cloth is a check upon activity. The first garment of a young baby
should not be more than a yard in length from the neck to the bottom
of the hem, and three-quarters of a yard is enough for the inner
garment.
The sleeves, too, should be large and loose, and the arm-size should
be roomy, so as to prevent chafing. The sleeves may be tied in at the
wrist with a ribbon to insure warmth.
_Lightness of weight._ The underclothing should be made of pure wool,
so as to gain the greatest amount of warmth from the least weight.
In the few cases where wool would cause irritation, a silk and wool
fixture makes a softer but more expensive garment. Under the best
conditions, clothes restrict and impede free development somewhat, and
the heavier they are the more they impede it. Therefore, the effort
should be to get the greatest amount of warmth with the least possible
weight. Knit garments attain this most perfectly, but the next
best thing is all-wool flannel of a fine grade. The weave known as
stockinet is best of all, because goods thus made cling to the body
and yet restrict its activity very little.
The best garments for a baby are made according to the accompanying
diagram.
[Sidenote: Princess Garment]
They consist of three garments, to be worn one over the other, each
one an inch longer in every way than the underlying one. The first is
a princess garment, made of white stockinet, which takes the place of
shirt, pinning-blanket, and band. Before cutting this out, a box-pleat
an inch and a half wide should be laid down the middle of the front,
and a side pleat three-fourths of an inch wide on either side of the
placket in the back. The sleeve should have a tuck an inch wide. These
tucks and pleats are better run in be hand, so that they may be easily
ripped. As the baby grows and the flannel shrinks, these tucks and
pleats can be let out.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF THE "GERTRUDE" SUIT.]
The next garment, which goes over this, is made in the same way, only
an inch larger in every measurement. It is made of baby flannel, and
takes the place of the flannel petticoat with its cotton band. Over
these two garments any ordinary dress may be worn. Dressed in this
suit, the child is evenly covered with too thicknesses of flannel
and one of cotton. As the skirts are rather short, however, and he is
expected to move his legs about freely, he may well wear long white
wool stockings.
As the child grows older, the principles underlying this method of
clothing should be borne in mind, and clothes should be designed and
adapted so as to meet these three requirements.
FOOD.
[Sidenote: Natural Food]
[Sidenote: Bottle-fed Babies]
The natural food of a young baby is his mother's milk, and no
satisfactory substitute for it has yet been found. Some manufactured
baby foods do well for certain children; to others they are almost
poison; and for none of them are they sufficient. The milk of the cow
is not designed for the human infant. It contains too much casein, and
is too difficult of digestion. Various preparations of milk and grains
are recommended by nurses and physicians, but no conscientious nurse
or physician pretends that any of them begins to equal the nutritive
value of human milk. More women can nurse their babies than now think
they can; the advertisements of patent foods lead them to think the
rather of little importance, and they do not make the necessary
effort to preserve and increase the natural supply of milk. The family
physician can almost always better the condition of the mother who
really desires to nurse her own child, and he should be consulted and
his directions obeyed. The importance of a really great effort to this
direction is shown by the fact that the physical culture records,
now so carefully kept in many of our schools and colleges, prove that
bottle-fed babies are more likely to be of small stature, and to have
deficient bones, teeth and hair, than children who have been fed on
mother's milk.
[Sidenote: Simple Diet]
The food question is undoubtedly the most important problem to the
physical welfare of the child, and has, as well, a most profound
effect upon his disposition and character. Indiscriminate feeding is
the cause of much of the trouble and worry of mothers. This subject is
taken up at length in other papers of this course, and it will suffice
to say here that the table of the family with young children should be
regulated largely by the needs of the growing sons and daughters. The
simplified diet necessary may well be of benefit to other members of
the family.
FAULTS AND THEIR REMEDIES.
The child born of perfect parents, brought up perfectly, in a perfect
environment, would probably have no faults. Even such a child,
however, would be at times inconvenient, and would do and say things
at variance with the order of the adult world. Therefore he might
seem to a hasty, prejudiced observer to be naughty. And, indeed,
imperfectly born, imperfectly trained as children now are, many of
their so-called faults are no more than such inconvenient crossings of
an immature will with an adult will.
[Illustration: JEAN PAUL RICHTER]
[Sidenote: The Child's World and the Adult's World]
No grown person, for instance, likes to be interrupted, and is likely
to regard the child who interrupts him wilfully naughty. No young
child, on the contrary, objects to being interrupted in his speech,
though he may object to being interrupted in his play; and he
cannot understand why an adult should set so much store on the quiet
listening which is so infrequent in his own experience. Grown persons
object to noise; children delight in it. Grown persons like to have
things kept in their places; to a child, one place as good as another.
Grown persons have a prejudice in favor of cleanliness; children like
to swim, but hate to wash, and have no objections whatever to grimy
hands and faces. None of these things imply the least degree of
obliquity on the child's part; and yet it is safe to say that
nine-tenths of the children who are punished are punished for some
of these things. The remedy for these inconveniences is time
and patience. The child, if left to himself, without a word of
admonishment, would probably change his conduct in these respects,
merely by the force of imitation, provided that the adults around
him set him, a persistent example of courtesy, gentleness, and
cleanliness.
[Sidenote: Real Faults]
The faults that are real faults, as Richter[A] says, are those faults
which increase with age. These it is that need attention rather than
those that disappear of themselves as the child grows older. This
rule ought to be put in large letters, that every one who has to train
children may be daily reminded by it; and not exercise his soul and
spend his force in trying to overcome little things which may perhaps
be objectionable, but which will vanish to-morrow. Concentrate your
energies on the overcoming of such tendencies as may in time develop
into permanent evils.
[Sidenote: Training the Will]
To accomplish this, you most, of course, train the child's own will,
because no one can force another person into virtue against his will.
The chief object of all training is, as we shall see in the next
section, to lead the child to love righteousness, to prefer right
doing to wrong doing; to make right doing a permanent desire.
Therefore, in all the procedures about to be suggested, an effort is
made to convince the child of the ugliness and painfulness of wrong
doing.
[Sidenote: Natural Punishment]
Punishment, as Herbert Spencer[B] agrees with Froebel[C] in pointing
out, should be as nearly as possible a representation of the natural
result of the child's action; that is, the fault should be made to
punish itself as much as possible without the interference of any
outside person; for the object is not to make the child bend his
will to the will of another, but make him see the fault itself as an
undesirable thing.
[Sidenote: Breaking the Will]
The effort to break the child's will has long been recognized as
disastrous by all educators. A broken will is worse misfortune than a
broken back. In the latter case the man is physically crippled; in
the former, he is morally crippled. It is only a strong, unbroken,
persistent will that is adequate to achieve self-mastery, and mastery
of the difficulties of life. The child who is too yielding and
obedient in his early days is only too likely to be weak and
incompetent in his later days. The habit of submission to a more
mature judgment is a bad habit to insist upon. The child should be
encouraged to think out things for himself; to experiment and discover
for himself why his ideas do not work; and to refuse to give them up
until he is genuinely convinced of their impracticability.
[Sidenote: Emergencies]
It is true that there are emergencies in which his immature judgment
and undisciplined will must yield to wiser judgment and steadier will;
but such yielding should not be suffered to become habitual. It is
a safety valve merely, to be employed only when the pressure of
circumstances threatens to become dangerous. An engine whose safety
valve should be always in operation could never generate much power.
Nor is there much difficulty in leading even a very strong-willed
and obstinate child to give up his own way under extraordinary
circumstances. If he is not in the habit of setting up his own will
against that of his mother or teacher, he will not set it up when the
quick, unfamiliar word of command seems to fit in the with the unusual
circumstances. Many parents practice crying "Wolf! wolf!" to their
children, and call the practice a drill of self-control; but they meet
inevitably with the familiar consequences: when the real wolf comes
the hackneyed cry, often proved false, is disregarded.
[Illustration: Herbert Spencer]
[Sidenote: Disobedience]
When the will is rightly trained, disobedience is a fault that rarely
appears, because, of course, where obedience is seldom required, it is
seldom refused. The child needs to obey--that is true; but so does his
mother need to obey, and all other persons about him. They all need to
obey God, to obey the laws of nature, the impulses of kindness, and
to follow after the ways of wisdom. Where such obedience is a
settled habit of the entire household, it easily, and, as it were,
unconsciously, becomes the habit of the child. Where such obedience is
not the habit of the household, it is only with great difficulty that
it can become the habit of the child. His will must set itself against
its instinct of imitativeness, and his small house, not yet quite
built, must be divided against itself. Probably no cold even rendered
entire obedience to any adult who did not himself hold his own wishes
in subjection. As Emerson says, "In dealing with my child, my Latin
and my Greek, my accomplishments and my money, stead me nothing,
but as much soul as I have avails. If I a willful, he sets his will
against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation
of beating him by my superiority of strength. But, if I renounce my
will and act for the soul, setting that up as an umpire between us
two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves
with me."
[Sidenote: Negative Goodness]
Suppose the child to be brought to such a stage that he is willing to
do anything his father or mother says; suppose, even, that they never
tell him to do anything that he does not afterwards discover to be
reasonable and just; still, what has he gained? For twenty years
he has not had the responsibility for a single action, for a single
decision, right or wrong. What is permitted is right to him; what
is forbidden is wrong. When he goes out into the world without his
parents, what will happen? At the best he will not lie, or steal, or
commit murder. That is, he will do none of these things in their bald
and simple form.
But in their beginnings these are hidden under a mask of virtue and
he has never been trained to look beneath that mask; as happened to
Richard Feveril,[D] sin may spring upon him unaware. Some one else,
all his life, has labeled things for him; he is not in the habit of
judging for himself. He is blind, deaf, and helpless--a plaything of
circumstances. It is a chance whether he falls into sin or remains
blameless.
[Sidenote: Real Disobedience]
Disobedience, then, in a true sense, does not mean failure to do as he
is told to do. It means failure to do the things that he knows to
be right. He must be taught to listen and obey the voice of his own
conscience; and if that voice should ever speak, as it sometimes
does, differently from the voice of the conscience of his parents
or teachers, its dictates must still be respected by these older and
wiser persons, and he must be permitted to do this thing which in
itself may be foolish, but which is not foolish, to him.
[Sidenote: Liberty]
And, on the other hand, the child who will have his own way even when
he knows it to be wrong should be allowed to have it within reasonable
limits. Richter says, leave to him the sorry victory, only exercising
sufficient ingenuity to make sure that it is a sorry one. What he must
be taught is that it is not at all a pleasure to have his own way,
unless his own way happens to be right; and this he can only be taught
by having his own way when the results are plainly disastrous. Every
time that a willful child does what he wants to do, and suffers
sharply for it, he learns a lesson that nothing but this experience
can teach him.
[Sidenote: Self-Punishment]
But his suffering must be plainly seen to be the result of his deed,
and not the result of his mother's anger. For example, a very young
child who is determined to play with fire may be allowed to touch the
hot lamp or a stove, whenever affairs can be so arranged that he is
not likely to burn himself too severely. One such lesson is worth all
the hand-spattings and cries of "No, no!" ever resorted to by anxious
parents. If he pulls down the blocks that you have built up for him,
they should stay down, while you get out of the room, if possible, in
order to evade all responsibility for that unpleasant result.
Prohibitions are almost useless. In order to convince yourself of
this, get some one to command you not to move your right arm or to
wink your eye. You will find it almost impossible to obey for even
a few moments. The desire to move your arm, which was not at all
conscious before, will become overpowering. The prohibition acts like
a suggestion, and is an implication that you would do the negative act
unless you were commanded not to. Miss Alcott, in "Little Men," well
illustrates this fact in the story of the children who were told not
to put beans up their noses and who straightway filled their noses
with beans.
[Sidenote: Positive Commands]
As we shall see in the next section, Froebel meets this difficulty by
substituting positive commands for prohibitions; that is, he tells the
child to do instead of telling him not to do. Tiedemann[E] says that
example is the first great evolutionary teacher, and liberty is the
second. In the overcoming of disobedience, no other teachers are
needed. The method may be tedious; it may be many years before the
erratic will is finally led to work in orderly channels; but there is
no possibility of abridging the process. There is no short and sudden
cure for disobedience, and the only hope for final cure is the steady
working of these two great forces, _example_ and _liberty._
To illustrate the principles already indicated, we will consider some
specific problems together with suggestive treatment for each.
[Footnote A: Jean Paul Richter, "Der einsige." German writer and
philosopher. His rather whimsical and fragmentary book on education,
called "Levana," contains some rare scraps of wisdom much used by
later writers on educational topics.]
[Footnote B: Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher and Scientist. His
book on "Education" is sound and practical.]
[Footnote C: Freidrich Froebel, German Philosopher and Educator,
founder of the Kindergarten system, and inaugurator of the new
education. His two great books are "The Education of Man" and "The
Mother Play."]
[Footnote D: "The Ordeal of Richard Feveril," by George Meredith.]
[Footnote E: Tiedemann, German Psychologist.]
QUICK TEMPER.
This, as well as irritability and nervousness, very often springs from
a wrong physical condition. The digestion may be bad, or the child
may be overstimulated. He may not be sleeping enough, or may not
get enough outdoor air and exercise. In some cases the fault appears
because the child lacks the discipline of young companionship. Even
the most exemplary adult cannot make up to the child for the influence
of other children. He perceives the difference between himself
and these giants about him, and the perception sometimes makes him
furious. His struggling individuality finds it difficult to maintain
itself under the pressure of so many stronger personalities. He makes,
therefore, spasmodic and violent attempts of self-assertion, and these
attempts go under the name of fits of temper.
The child who is not ordinarily strong enough to assert himself
effectively will work himself up into a passion in order to gain
strength, much as men sometimes stimulate their courage by liquor. In
fact, passion is a sort of moral intoxication.
[Sidenote: Remedy--Solitude and Quiet]
But whether the fits of passion are physical or moral, the immediate
remedy is the same--his environment must be promptly changed and his
audience removed. He needs solitude and quiet. This does not mean
shutting him into a closet, but leaving him alone in a quiet room,
with plenty of pleasant things about. This gives an opportunity for
the disturbed organism to right itself, and for the will to recover
its normal tone. Some occupation should be at hand--blocks or other
toys, if he is too young to read; a good book or two, such as Miss
Alcott's "Little Men" and "Little Women," when he is old enough to
read.
If he is destructive in his passion, he must be put in a room where
there are very few breakables to tempt him. If he does break anything
he must be required to help mend it again. To shout a threat to this
effect through the door when the storm of temper is still on, is only
to goad him into fresh acts of rebellion. Let him alone while he is in
this temporarily insane state, and later, when he is sorry and wants
to be good, help him to repair the mischief he has wrought. It is as
foolish to argue with or to threaten the child in this state as it
would be were he a patient in a lunatic asylum.
It is sometimes impossible to get an older child to go into retreat.
Then, since he cannot be carried, and he is not open to remonstrance
or commands, go out of the room yourself and leave him alone there. At
any cost, loneliness and quiet must be brought to bear upon him.
Such outbursts are exceedingly exhausting, using up in a few minutes
as much energy as would suffice for many days of ordinary activity.
After the attack the child needs rest, even sleep, and usually seeks
it himself. The desire should be encouraged.
[Sidenote: Precautions to be Taken]
Every reasonable precaution should be taken against the recurrence of
the attacks, for every lapse into this excited state makes him more
certain the next lapse and weakens the nervous control. This does not
mean that you should give up any necessary or right regulations for
fear of the child's temper. If the child sees that you do this, he
will on occasion deliberately work himself up into a passion in order
to get his own way. But while you do not relax any just regulations,
you may safely help him to meet them. Give him warning. For instance,
do not spring any disagreeable commands upon him. Have his duties as
systematized as possible so that he may know what to expect; and do
not under any circumstances nag him nor allow other children to tease
him.
SULLENNESS.
This fault likewise often has a physical cause, seated very frequently
in the liver. See that the child's food is not too heavy. Give him
much fruit, and insist upon vigorous exercise out of doors. Or he may
perhaps not have enough childish pleasures. For while most children
are overstimulated, there still remain some children whose lives are
unduly colorless and eventless. A sullen child is below the normal
level of responsiveness. He needs to be roused, wakened, lifted out of
himself, and made to take an active interest in other persons and in
the outside world.
[Sidenote: Inheritance and Example]
In many cases sullenness is an inherited disposition intensified by
example. It is unchildlike and morbid to an unusual degree and very
difficult to cure. The mother of a sullen child may well look to her
own conduct and examine with a searching eye the peculiarities of her
own family and of her husband's. She may then find the cause of the
evil, and by removing the child from the bad example and seeing to it
that every day contains a number of childish pleasures, she may win
him away from a fault that will otherwise cloud his whole life.
LYING
All lies are not bad, nor all liars immoral. A young child who cannot
yet understand the obligations of truthfulness cannot be held morally
accountable for his departure from truth. Lying is of three kinds.
(1.) _The imaginative lie._ (2.) _The evasive lie._ (3.) _The politic
lie._
[Sidenote: Imaginative "Lying"]
(1.) It is rather hard to call the imaginative lie a lie at all. It is
so closely related to the creative instinct which makes the poet
and novelist and which, common among the peasantry of a nation,
is responsible for folk-lore and mythology, that it is rather an
intellectual activity misdirected than a moral obliquity. Very
imaginative children often do not know the difference between what
they imagine and what they actually see. Their minds eye sees as
vividly as their bodily eye; and therefore they even believe their own
statements. Every attempt at contradiction only brings about a fresh
assertion of the impossible, which to the child becomes more and more
certain as he hears himself affirming its existence.
Punishment is of no use at all in the attempt to regulate this
exuberance. The child's large statements should be smiled at and
passed over. In the meantime, he should be encouraged in every
possible way to get a firm, grasp of the actual world about him.
Manual training, if it can be obtained, is of the greatest advantage,
and for a very young child, the performance every day of some little
act, which demands accuracy and close attention, is necessary. For the
rest, wait; this is one of the faults that disappear with age.
[Sidenote: The Lie of Evasion]
(2.) The lie of evasion is a form of lying which seldom appears when
the relations between child and parents are absolutely friendly and
open. However, the child who is very desirous of approval may find
it difficult to own up to a fault, even when he is certain that the
consequence of his offense will not be at all terrible. This is the
more difficult, because the more subtle condition. It is obvious that
the child who lies merely to avoid punishment can be cured of that
fault by removing from him the fear of punishment. To this end, he
should be informed that there will be no punishment whatever for any
fault that he freely confesses. For the chief object of punishment
being to make him face his own fault and to see it as something ugly
and disagreeable, that object is obviously accomplished by a free and
open confession, and no further punishment is required.
But when the child in spite of such reassurance still continues to
lie, both because he cannot bear to have you think him capable of
wrong-doing, and because he is not willing to acknowledge to himself
that he is capable of wrong-doing, the situation becomes more complex.
All you can do is to urge upon him the superior beauty of frankness;
to praise him and love him, especially when he does acknowledge a
fault, thus leading him to see that the way to win your approval--that
approval which he desires so intensely--is to face his own
shortcomings with a steady eye and confess them to you unshrinkingly.
[Sidenote: The Politic Lie]
(3.) The politic lie is of course the worst form of lying, partly
because it is so unchildlike. This is the kind of fault that will grow
with age; and grow with such rapidity that the mother must set herself
against it with all the force at her command. The child who lies
for policy's sake, in order to achieve some end which is most easily
achieved by lying, is a child led into wrong-doing by his ardent
desire to get something or do something. Discover what this something
is, and help him to get it by more legitimate means. If you point out
the straight path, and show the goal well in view, at the end of it,
he may be persuaded not to take the crooked path.
[Sidenote: Inherited Crookedness]
But there are occasionally natures that delight in crookedness and
that even in early childhood. They would rather go about getting their
heart's desire in some crooked, intricate, underhanded way than by the
direct route. Such a fault is almost certain to be an inherited one;
and here again, a close study of the child's relatives will often help
the mother to make a good diagnosis, and even suggest to her the line
of treatment.
[Sidenote: Extreme Cases]
In an extreme case, the family may unite in disbelieving the child who
lies, not merely disbelieving him, when he is lying, but disbelieving
him all the time, no matter what he says. He must be made to see, and,
that without room for any further doubt, that the crooked paths that
he loves do not lead to the goal his heart desires, but away from it.
His words, not being true to the facts, have lost their value, and
no one around him listens to them. He is, as it were, rendered
speechless, and his favorite means of getting his own way is thus made
utterly valueless. Such a remedy is in truth a terrible one. While
it is being administered, the child suffers to the limit of his
endurance; and it is only justified in an extreme case, and after the
failure of all gentler means.
JEALOUSY.
[Sidenote: Justice and Love]
Too often this deadly evil is encouraged in infancy, instead of being
promptly uprooted as it ought to be. It is very amusing, if one does
not consider the consequences, to sec a little child slap and push
away the father or the older brother, who attempts to kiss the mother;
but this is another fault that grows with years, and a fault so
deadly that once firmly rooted it can utterly destroy the beauty
and happiness of an otherwise lovely nature. The first step toward
overcoming it must be to make the reign of strict justice in the home
so obvious as to remove all excuse for the evil. The second step is to
encourage the child's love for those very persons of whom he is most
likely to be jealous. If he is jealous of the baby, give him special
care of the baby. Jealousy indicates a temperament overbalanced
emotionally; therefore, put your force upon the upbuilding of the
child's intellect. Give him responsibilities, make him think out
things for himself. Call upon him to assist in the family conclaves.
In every way cultivate his power of judgment. The whole object of the
treatment should be to strengthen his intellect and to accustom his
emotions to find outlet in wholesome, helpful activity.
One wise mother made it a rule to pet the next to the baby. The
baby, she said, was bound to be petted a good deal because of its
helplessness and sweetness, therefore she made a conscious effort to
pet the next to the youngest, the one who had just been crowded out
of the warm nest of mother's lap by the advent of the newcomer. Such a
rule would go far to prevent the beginnings of jealousy.
SELFISHNESS.
This is a fault to which strong-willed children are especially liable.
The first exercise of will-power after it has passed the stage of
taking possession of the child's own organism usually brings him into
conflict with those about him. To succeed in getting hold of a thing
against the wish of someone else, and to hold on to it when someone
else wants it, is to win a victory. The coveted object becomes dear,
not so much for its own sake, as because it is a trophy. Such a child
knows not the joy of sharing; he knows only the joys of wresting
victory against odds. This is indeed an evil that grows with the
years. The child who holds onto his apple, his Candy, or toy, fights
tooth and nail everyone who wants to take it from him, and resists all
coaxing, is liable to become a hard, sordid, grasping man, who stops
at no obstacle to accomplish his purpose.
Yet in the beginning, this fault often hides itself and escapes
attention. The selfish child may be quiet, clean, and under ordinary
circumstances, obedient. He may not even be quarrelsome; and may
therefore come under a much less degree of discipline than his
obstreperous, impulsive, rebellious little brother. Yet, in reality,
his condition calls for much more careful attention than does the
condition of the younger brother.
[Sidenote: The Only Child]
However, the child who has no brother at all, either older or younger,
nor any sister, is almost invited by the fact of his isolation to fall
into this sin. Only children may be--indeed, often are--precocious,
bright, capable, and well-mannered, but they are seldom spontaneously
generous. Their own small selves occupy an undue proportion of the
family horizon, and therefore of their own.
[Sidenote: Kindergarten a Remedy]
This is where the Kindergarten has its great value. In the true
Kindergarten the children live under a dispensation of loving justice,
and selfishness betrays itself instantly there, because it is alien
to the whole spirit of the place. Showing itself, it is promptly
condemned, and the child stands convicted by the only tribunal whose
verdict really moves him--a jury of his peers. Normal children hate
selfishness and condemn it, and the selfish child himself, following
the strong, childish impulse of imitation, learns to hate his own
fault; and so quick is the forgiveness of children that he needs only
to begin to repent before the circle of his mates receives him again.
This is one reason why the Kindergarten takes children at such an
early age. Aiming, as it does, to lay the foundations for right
thinking and feeling, it must begin before wrong foundations are too
deeply laid. Its gentle, searching methods straighten the strong will
that is growing crooked, and strengthen the enfeebled one.
[Sidenote: Intimate Association a Help]
But if the selfish child is too old for the Kindergarten, he should
belong to a club. Consistent selfishness will not long be tolerated
here. The tacit or outspoken rebuke of his mates has many times the
force of a domestic rebuke; because thereby he sees himself, at least
for a time, as his comrades see him, and never thereafter entirely
loses his suspicion that they may be right. Their individual judgment
he may defy, but their collective judgment has in it an almost magical
power, and convinces him in spite of himself.
[Sidenote: Cultivate Affections]
Whatever strong affections the selfish boy shows most be carefully
cultivated. Love for another is the only sure cure for selfishness. If
he loves animals, let him have pets, and give into his hands the whole
responsibility for the care of them. It is better to let the poor
animals suffer some neglect, than to take away from the boy the
responsibility for their condition. They serve him only so far as
he can be induced to serve them. The chief rule for the cure of
selfishness is, then, to watch every affection, small and large,
encourage it, give it room to grow, and see to it that the child does
not merely get delight out of it, but that he works for it, that he
sacrifices himself for those whom he loves.
LAZINESS.
[Sidenote: The Physical Cause]
This condition is often normal, especially during adolescence. The
developing boy or girl wants to lop and to lounge, to lie sprawled
over the floor or the sofa. Quick movement is distasteful to him,
and often has an undue effect upon the heart's action. He is normally
dreamy, languid, indifferent, and subject to various moods. These
things are merely tokens of the tremendous change that is going on
within his organism, and which heavily drains his vitality. Certain
duties may, of course, be required of him at this stage, but they
should be light and steady. He should not be expected to fill
up chinks and run errands with joyful alacrity. The six- or
eight-year-old may be called upon for these things, and not he harmed,
but this is not true of the child between twelve and seventeen. He
has absorbing business on hand and should not be too often called away
from it.
[Sidenote: Laziness and Rapid Growth]
Laziness ordinarily accompanies rapid growth of any kind. The
unusually large child, even if he has not yet reached the period of
adolescence, is likely to be lazy. His nervous energies are deflected
to keep up his growth, and his intelligence is often temporarily
dulled by the rapidity of his increase in size.
[Sidenote: Hurry Not Natural]
Moreover, it is not natural for any child to hurry. Hurry is in itself
both a result of nervous strain and a cause of it; and grown people
whose nerves have been permanently wrenched away from normal quietude
and steadiness, often form a habit of hurry which makes them both
unfriendly toward children and very bad for children. These young
creatures ought to go along through their days rather dreamily and
altogether serenely. Every turn of the screw to tighten their nerves
makes more certain some form of early nervous breakdown. They ought
to have work to do, of course,--enough of it to occupy both mind and
body--but it should be quiet, systematic, regular work, much of it
performed automatically. Only occasionally should they be required to
do things with a conscious effort to attain speed.
[Sidenote: Abnormal Laziness]
However, there is a degree of laziness difficult of definition which
is abnormal; the child fails to perform any work with regularity, and
falls behind both at school and at home. This may be the result of
(1) _poor assimilation_, (2) _of anaemia_, or it may be (3) _the first
symptom of some disease_.
(1.) Poor assimilation may show itself either by (a) thinness and lack
of appetite; (b) fat and abnormal appetite; (c) retarded growth; or
(d) irregular and poorly made teeth and weak bones.
[Sidenote: Anaemia]
(2.) Anaemia betrays itself most characteristically by the color of
the lips and gums. These, instead of being red, are a pale yellowish
pink, and the whole complexion has a sort of waxy pallor. In extreme
cases this pallor even becomes greenish. As the disease is accompanied
with little pain, and few if any marked symptoms, beyond sleepiness
and weakness, it often exists for some time without being suspected by
the parents.
(3.) The advent of many other diseases is announced by a languid
indifference to surroundings, and a slow response to the customary
stimuli. The child's brain seems clouded, and a light form of
torpor invades the whole body. The child, who is usually active and
interested in things about him, but who loses his activity and becomes
dull and irresponsive, should be carefully watched. It may be that he
is merely changing his form of growth--_i.e._, is beginning to grow
tall after completion of his period of laying on flesh, or vice versa.
Or he may be entering upon the period of adolescence. But if it is
neither of these things, a physician should be consulted.
[Sidenote: Monotony]
A milder degree of laziness may be induced by a too monotonous round
of duties. Try changing them. Make them as attractive as possible.
For, of course, you do not require him to perform these duties for
your sake, whatever you allow him to suppose about it, but chiefly
for the sake of their influence on his character. Therefore, if the
influence of any work is bad, you will change it, although the
new work may not be nearly so much what you prefer to have him do.
Whatever the work is, if it is only emptying waste-baskets, don't nag
him, merely expect him to do it, and expect it steadily.
[Sidenote: Helping]
In their earlier years all children love to help mother. They like any
piece of real work even better than play. If this love of activity was
properly encouraged, if the mother permitted the child to help, even
when he succeeded only in hindering, he might well become one
those fortunate persons who love to work. This is the real time for
preventing laziness. But if this early period has been missed, the
next best thing is to take advantage of every spontaneous interest as
it arises; to hitch the impulse, as it were, to some task that must
be steadily performed. For example, if the child wants to play with
tools, help him to make a small water-wheel, or any other interesting
contrivance, and keep him at it by various devices until he has
brought it to a fair degree of completion Your aim is to stretch his
will each time he attempts to do something a little further than
it tends to go of itself; to let him work a little past his first
impulse, so that he may learn by degrees to work when work is needed,
and not only when he feels like it.
UNTIDINESS
[Sidenote: Neatness Not Natural]
Essentially a fault of immaturity as this is, we must beware how we
measure it by a too severe adult standard. It is not natural for any
young creature to take an interest in cleanliness. Even the young
animals are cared for in this respect by their parents; the cow licks
her calf; the cat, her kittens; and neither calf nor kittens seem to
take much interest in the process. The conscious love of cleanliness
and order grows with years, and seems to be largely a matter of
custom. The child who has always lived in decent surroundings
by-and-by finds them necessary to his comfort, and is willing to make
a degree of effort to secure them. On the contrary, the street boy who
sleeps in his clothes, does not know what it is to desire a well-made
bed, and an orderly room.
[Sidenote: Remedies]
[Sidenote: Example]
[Sidenote: Habit]
The obvious method of overcoming this difficulty, then, is not to
chide the child for the fault, but to make him so accustomed to
pleasant surroundings that he not help but desire them. The whole
process of making the child love order is slow but sure. It consists
in (1) _Patient waiting on nature_: first, keep the baby himself sweet
and clean, washing the young child yourself, two or three times a day,
and showing your delight in his sweetness; dressing him so simply
that he keeps in respectable order without the necessity of a painful
amount of attention. (2) _Example_: He is to be accustomed to orderly
surroundings, and though you ordinarily require him to put away some
of his things himself, you do also assist this process by putting away
a good deal to which you do not call attention. You make your home not
only orderly but pretty, and yourself, also, that his love for you
may lead him into a love for daintiness. (3) _Habits_: A few set
observances may be safely and steadfastly demanded, but these should
be _very_ few: Such as that he should not come to breakfast without
brushing his teeth and combing his hair, or sit down to any meal with
unwashed hands. Make them so few that you can be practically certain
that they are attended to, for the whole value of the discipline is
not in the superior condition of his teeth, but in the habit of mind
that is being formed.
IMPUDENCE.
Impudence is largely due to, (1) lack of perception: (2) to bad
example and to suggestion; and (3) to a double standard of morality.
[Sidenote: Lack of Perception]
(1.) In the first place, too much must not be expected of the young
savages in the nursery. Remember that the children there are in
a state very much more nearly resembling that of savage or
half-civilized nation than resembling your own, and that, therefore,
while they will undoubtedly take kindly to showy ceremonial, they are
not ripe yet for most of the delicate observances. At best, you can
only hope to get the crude material of good manners from them. You can
hope that they will be in the main kind in intention, and as courteous
under provocation as is consistent with their stage of development. If
you secure this, you need not trouble yourself unduly over occasional
lapses into perfectly innocent and wholesome barbarism.
Good manners are in the main dependent upon quick sympathies, because
sympathies develop the perceptions. A child is much less likely to
hurt the feelings or shock the sensibilities of a person whom he loves
tenderly than of one for whom he cares very little. This is the chief
reason why all children are much more likely to be offensive in speech
and action before strangers than when alone in the bosom of their
families. They are so far from caring what a stranger thinks or
feels that they cannot even forecast his displeasure, nor imagine
its reaction upon mother or father. The more, then, that the child's
sympathies are broadened, the more he is encouraged to take an
interest in all people, even strangers, the better mannered will he
become.
[Sidenote: Bad Example]
(2.) Bad example is more common than is usually supposed. Very few
parents are consistently courteous toward their children. They permit
themselves a sharp tone of voice, and rough and abrupt habits of
speech, that would scarcely be tolerated by any adult. Even an
otherwise gentle and amiable woman is often disagreeable in her
manner toward her children, commanding them to do things in a way
well calculated to excite opposition, and rebuking wrong-doing in
unmeasured terms. She usually reserves her soft and gentle speeches
for her own friends and for her husband's, yet discourtesy cannot
begin to harm them as it harms her children.
It is true that the children are often under foot when she is busiest,
when, indeed, she is so distracted as to not be able to think about
manners, but if she would acknowledge to herself that she ought to be
polite, and that when she fails to be, it is because she has yielded
to temptation; and if, moreover, she would make this acknowledgment
openly to her children and beg their pardon for her sharp words, as
she expects them to beg hers, the spirit of courtesy, at any rate,
would prevail in her house, and would influence her children. Children
are lovingly ready to forgive an acknowledged fault, but keen-eyed
beyond belief in detecting a hidden one.
[Sidenote: Double Standard]
(3.) The most fertile cause of impudence is assumption of a double
standard of morality, one for the child and another for the adult.
Impudence is, at bottom, the child's perception of this injustice, and
his rebellion against it. When to this double standard,--a standard
that measures up gossip, for instance, right for the adult and
listening to gossip as wrong for the child--when to this is added the
assumption of infallibility, it is no wonder that the child fairly
rages.
For, if we come to analyze them, what are the speeches which find so
objectionable? "Do it yourself, if you are so smart." "Maybe, I am
rude, but I'm not any ruder than you are." "I think you are just as
mean as mean can be; I wouldn't be so mean!" Is this last speech any
worse in reality than "You are a very naughty little girl, and I am
ashamed of you," and all sorts of other expressions of candid adverse
opinion? Besides these forms of impudence, there is the peculiarly
irritating: "Well, you do it yourself; I guess I can if you can."
In all these cases the child is partly it the right. He is stating
the feet as he sees it, and violently asserting that you are not
privileged to demand more of him than of yourself. The evil comes in
through the fact that he is doing it in an ugly spirit. He is not only
desirous of stating the truth, but of putting you in the wrong and
himself in the right, and if this hurts you, so much the better. All
this is because he is angry, and therefor, in impudence, the true evil
to be overcome is the evil of anger.
[Sidenote: Example]
Show him, then, that you are open to correction. Admit the justice
of the rebuke as far as you can, and set him an example of careful
courtesy and forbearance at the very moment when these traits are most
conspicuously lacking in him. If some special point is involved,
some question of privilege, quietly, but very firmly, defer the
consideration of it until he is master of himself and can discuss the
situation with an open mind and in a courteous manner.
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT.
In all these examples, which are merely suggestive, it is impossible
to lay down an absolute moral recipe, because circumstances so truly
alter cases--in all these no mention is made of corporal punishment.
This is because corporal punishment is never necessary, never right,
but is always harmful.
[Sidenote: Moral Confusion]
There are three principal reasons why it should not be resorted to:
_First_, because it is indiscriminate. To inflict bodily pain as a
consequence of widely various faults, leads to moral confusion. The
child who is spanked for lying, spanked for disobedience, and spanked
again for tearing his clothes, is likely enough to consider these
three things as much the same, as, at any rate, of equal importance,
because they all lead to the same result. This is to lay the
foundation for a permanent moral confusion, and a man who cannot see
the nature of a wrong deed, and its relative importance, is incapable
of guiding himself or others. Corporal punishment teaches a child
nothing of the reason why what he does is wrong. Wrong must seem to
him to be dependent upon the will of another, and its disagreeable
consequences to be escapable if only he can evade the will of that
other.
[Sidenote: Fear versus Love]
_Second_: Corporal punishment is wrong because it inculcates fear of
pain as the motive for conduct, instead of love of righteousness. It
tends directly to cultivate cowardice, deceitfulness, and anger--three
faults worse than almost any fault against which it can be employed.
True, some persons grow up both gentle and straightforward in spite
of the fact that they have been whipped in their youth, but it is in
spite of, and not because of it. In their homes other good qualities
must have counteracted the pernicious effect of this mistaken
procedure.
[Sidenote: Sensibilities Blunted]
_Third_: Corporal punishment may, indeed, achieve immediate results
such as seem at the moment to be eminently desirable. The child, if he
be young enough, weak enough, and helpless enough, may be made to do
almost anything by fear of the rod; and some of the things he may thus
be made to do may be exactly the things that he ought to do; and this
certainty of result is exactly what prompts many otherwise just and
thoughtful persons to the use of corporal punishment. But these good
results are obtained at the expense of the future. The effect of each
spanking is a little less than the effect of the preceding one. The
child's sensibilities blunt. As in the case of a man with the drug
habit, it requires a larger and larger dose to produce the required
effect. That is, if he is a strong child capable of enduring and
resisting much. If, on the contrary, he is a weak child, whose slow
budding will come only timidly into existence, one or two whippings
followed by threats, may suffice to keep him in a permanently cowed
condition, incapable of initiative, incapable of spontaneity.
The method of discipline here indicated, while it is more searching
than any corporal punishment, does not have any of its disadvantages.
It is more searching, because it never blunts the child's
sensibilities, but rather tends to refine them, and to make them more
responsive.
[Sidenote: Educative Discipline]
[Sidenote: Permanent Results]
The child thus trained should become more susceptible, day by day,
to gentle and elevating influences. This discipline is educative,
explaining to the child why what he does is wrong, showing him the
painful effects as inherent in the deed itself. He cannot, therefore,
conceive of himself as being ever set free from the obligation to do
right; for that obligation within his experience does not rest upon
his mother's will or ability to inflict punishment, but upon the very
nature of the universe of which he is a part. The effects of such
discipline are therefore permanent. That which happens to the child
in the nursery, also happens to him in the great world when he reaches
manhood. His nursery training interprets and orders the world for him.
He comes, therefore, into the world not desiring to experiment with
evil, but clear-eyed to detect it, and strong-armed to overcome it.
We are now ready to consider our subject in some of its larger
aspects.
TEST QUESTIONS
The following questions constitute the "written recitation" which the
regular members of the A.S.H.E. answer in writing and send in for
the correction and comment of the instructor. They are intended to
emphasize and fix in the memory the most important points in the
lesson.
[Illustration: "CARITAS"
From a Painting in the Boston Public Library, by Abbot H. Thayer]
STUDY OF CHILD LIFE.
PART I.
Read Carefully. In answering these questions you are earnestly
requested _not_ to answer according to the text-book where opinions
are asked for, but to answer according to conviction. In all cases
credit will be given for thought and original observation. Place your
name and full address at the head of the paper; use your own words so
that your instructor may be sure that you understand the subject.
1. How does Fiske account for the prolonged helplessness of the human
infant? To what practical conclusions does this lead?
2. Name the four essentials for proper bodily growth.
3. How does the child's world differ from that of the adult?
4. In training a child morally, how do you know which faults are the
most important and should have, therefore, the chief attention?
5. In training the will, what end must be held steadily in view?
6. What are the advantages or disadvantages of a broken will?
7. Is obedience important? Obedience to what? How do you train for
prompt obedience in emergencies?
8. What is the object of punishment? Does corporal punishment
accomplish this object?
9. What kind of punishment is most effective?
10. Have any faults a physical origin? If so, name some of them and
explain.
11. What are the two great teachers according to Tiederman?
12. What can you say of the fault of untidiness?
13. What are the dangers of precocity?
14. What do you consider were the errors your own parents made in
training their children?
15. Are there any questions which you would like to ask in regard to
the subjects taken up in this lesson?
NOTE.--After completing the test, sign your full name.
STUDY OF CHILD LIFE
PART II.
CHARACTER BUILDING
[Sidenote: Froebel's Philosophy]
Although we have taken up the question of punishment and the manner
of dealing with various childish iniquities before the question of
character-building, it has only been done in order to clear the mind
of some current misconceptions. In the statements of Froebel's simple
and positive philosophy of child culture, misconception on the part of
the reader must be guarded against, and these misconceptions generally
arise from a feeling that, beautiful as his optimistic philosophy may
be, there are some children too bad to profit by it--or at least that
there are occasions when it will not work out in practice. In the
preceding section we have endeavored to show in detail how this method
applies to a representative list of faults and shortcomings, and
having thus, we hope, proved that the method is applicable to a wide
range of cases--indeed to all possible cases--we will proceed to
recount the fundamental principles which Froebel, and before him
Pestalozzi,[A] enunciated; which times who adhere to the new education
are to-day working out into the detail of school-room practice.
[Sidenote: Object of Moral Training.]
As previously stated, the object of the moral training of the child is
the inculcation of the love of righteousness. Froebel is not concerned
with laying down a mass of observances which the child must follow,
and which the parents must insist upon. He thinks rather that the
child's nature once turned into the right direction and surrounded
by right influences will grow straight without constant yankings
and twistings. The child who loves to do right is safe. He may make
mistakes as to what the right is, but he will learn by these mistakes,
and will never go far astray.
[Sidenote: The Reason Why]
However, it is well to save him as far as possible from the pain
of these mistakes. We need to preserve in him what has already been
implanted there; the love of understanding the reasons for conduct.
When the child asks "Why?" therefore, he should seldom be told
"Because mother says so." This is to deny a rightful activity of
his young mind; to give him a monotonous and insufficient reason,
temporary in its nature, instead of a lasting reason which will remain
with him through life. Dante says all those who have lost what he
calls "the good of the intellect" are in the Inferno. And when you
refuse to give your child satisfactory reasons for the conduct you
require of him, you refuse to cultivate in him that very good of the
intellect which is necessary for his salvation.
[Sidenote: Advantage of Positive Commands]
As soon, however, as your commands become positive instead of
negative, the difficulty of meeting the situation begins to disappear.
It is usually much easier to tell the child why he should do a thing
than why he should not do its opposite. For example, it is much easier
to make him see that he ought to be a helpful member of the family
than to make him understand why he should stop making a loud noise, or
refrain from waking up the baby. There is something in the child which
in calm moments recognizes that love demands some sacrifice. To this
something you must appeal and these calm moments, for the most part,
you must choose for making the appeal. The effort is to prevent the
appearance of evil by the active presence of good. The child who is
busy trying to be good has little time to be naughty.
[Sidenote: Original Goodness]
Froebel's most characteristic utterance is perhaps this: "A
suppressed or perverted good quality--a good tendency, only repressed,
misunderstood, or misguided--lies originally at the bottom of
every shortcoming in man. Hence the only and infallible remedy for
counteracting any shortcoming and even wickedness is to find the
originally good source, the originally good side of the human being
that has been repressed, disturbed, or misled into the shortcoming,
and then to foster, build up, and properly guide this good side. Thus
the shortcoming will at last disappear, although it may involve a hard
struggle against habit, but not against original depravity in man, and
this is accomplished so much the more rapidly and surely because man
himself tends to abandon his shortcomings, for man prefers right to
wrong." The natural deduction from this is that we should say "do"
rather than "don't"; open up the natural way for rightful activity
instead of uttering loud warning cries at the entrance to every wrong
path.
[Sidenote: Kindergarten Methods]
It is for this reason that the kindergarten tries by every means to
make right doing delightful. This is one of the reasons for its songs,
dances, plays, its bright colors, birds, and flowers. And in this
respect it may well be imitated in every home. No one loves that which
is disagreeable, ugly, and forbidding; yet many little children are
expected to love right doing which is seldom attractively presented to
them.
The results of such treatment are apparent in the grown people of
to-day. Most persons have an underlying conviction that sinners, or
at any rate unconscientious persons, have a much easier and pleasanter
time of it than those who try to do right. To the imagination of the
majority of adults sin is dressed in glittering colors and virtue in
gray, somber garments. There are few who do not take credit for right
doing as if they had chosen a hard and disagreeable part instead
of the more alluring ways of wrong. This is because they have been
mis-taught in childhood and have come to think of wrongdoing as
pleasant and virtue as hard, whereas the real truth is exactly the
opposite. It is wrongdoing that brings unpleasant consequences and
virtue that brings happiness.
[Sidenote: Right Doing Made Easy]
There are those who object that by the kindergarten method right doing
is made too easy. The children do not have to put forth enough effort,
they say; they are not called upon to endure sufficient pain; they do
not have the discipline which causes them to choose right no matter
how painful right may be for the moment. Whether this dictum is ever
true or not, it certainly is not true in early childhood. The love of
righteousness needs to be firmly rooted in the character before it is
strained and pulled upon. We do not start seedlings in the rocky soil
or plant out saplings in time of frost. If tests and trials of virtue
must come, let them come in later life when the love of virtue is so
firmly established that it may be trusted to find a way to its own
satisfaction through whatever difficulties may oppose.
[Sidenote: Neighbors' Opinions]
In the very beginning of any effort to live up to Froebel's
requirements it is evident that children must not be measured by the
way they appear to the neighbors. This is to reaffirm the power of
that rigid tradition which has warped so many young lives. She who
is trying to fix her child's heart upon true and holy things may well
disregard her neighbor's comments on the child's manners or clothes
or even upon momentary ebullitions of temper. She is working below the
surface of things, is setting eternal forces to work, and she cannot
afford to interrupt this work for the sake of shining the child up
with any premature outside polish. If she is to have any peace of mind
or to allow any to the child, if she is to live in any way a simple
and serene life, she must establish a few fundamental principles by
which she judges her child's conduct and regulates her own, and stand
by these principles through thick and thin.
[Sidenote: The Family Republic]
Perhaps the most fundamental principle is that enunciated by Fichte.
"Each man," he says, "is a free being in a world of other free
beings." Therefore his freedom is limited only by the freedom of the
other free beings. That is, they must "divide the world amongst them."
Stated in the form of a command he says again, "Restrict your freedom
through the freedom of all other persons with whom you come in
contact." This is a rule that even a three-year-old child can be made
to understand, and it is astonishing with what readiness he will admit
its justice. He call do anything he wants to, you explain to him,
except bother other people. And, of course, the corollary follows that
every one else can do whatever he pleases except to bother the child.
[Sidenote: Rights of Others]
This clear and simple doctrine can be driven home with amazing force,
if you strictly respect the child's right as you require him to
respect yours. You should neither allow any encroachments upon your
own proper privileges, except so far as you explain that this is only
a loving permission on your part, and not to be assumed as a precedent
or to be demanded as a right; nor should you yourself encroach upon
his privileges.
If you do not expect him to interrupt you, you must not interrupt him.
If you expect him to let you alone when you are busy, you must let
hint alone when he is busy, that is, when he is hard at work playing.
If you must call him away from his playing, give him warning, so that
he may have time to put his small affairs in order before obeying your
command. The more carefully you do this the more willing will be his
response on the infrequent occasions when you must demand immediate
attention. In some such fashion you teach the child to respect the
rights of others by scrupulously respecting those rights to which he
is most alive, namely, his own. The next step is to require him with
you to think out the rights of others, and both of you together should
shape your conduct so as to leave these rights unfringed.
[Sidenote: The Child's Share in Ruling]
As soon as the young child's will has fully taken possession of his
own organism he will inevitably try to rule yours. The establishment
of the law of which I have just spoken will go far toward regulating
this new-born desire. But still he must be allowed in some degree to
rule others, because power to rule others is likely to be at some time
during his life of great importance to him. To thwart him absolutely
in this respect, never yielding yourself to his imperious demands,
is alike impossible and undesirable. His will must not be shut up
to himself and to the things that he can make himself do. In various
ways, with due consideration for other people's feelings, with
courtesy, with modesty, he may well be encouraged to do his share of
ruling. And while, of course, he will not begin his ruling in such
restrained and thoughtful fashion as is implied by these limitations,
yet he must be suffered to begin; and the rule for the respect of
the rights of others should be suffered gradually to work out these
modifications.
A safe distinction may be made as follows: Permit him, since he is
so helpless, to rule and persuade others to satisfy his legitimate
desires, such as the desire for food, sleep, affection, and knowledge;
but when be demands indulgencies, reserve your own liberty of choice,
so as to clearly demonstrate to him that you are exercising choice,
and in doing so, are well within your own rights.
[Sidenote: Low Voice Commands]
There is one simple outward observation which greatly assists us the
inculcation of these fundamental truths--that is the habit of using
a low voice in speaking, especially when issuing a command or
administering a rebuke. A loud, insistent voice practically insures
rebellion. This is because the low voice means that you have command
of yourself, the loud voice that you have lost it. The child submits
to a controlled will, but not to one as uncontrolled as his own. In
both cases he follows your example. If you are self-controlled, he
tends to become so; if you are excited and angry, he also becomes so,
or if he is already so, his excitement and anger increases.
While most mothers rely altogether too much upon speech as a means of
explaining life to the child, yet it must be admitted that speech has
a great function to perform in this regard. Nevertheless it is well to
bear in mind that it is not true that a child will always do what
you tell him to do, no matter how plain you may tell him, nor how
perfectly you may explain your reasons.
[Sidenote: Limitations of Words]
In the first place, speech means less to children than to grown
persons. Each word has a smaller content of experience. They cannot
get the full force of the most clear and eloquent statement. Therefore
all speech must be reinforced by example, and by as many forms of
concrete illustrations as can be commanded. Each necessary truth
should enter the child's mind by several channels; hearing, eye-sight,
motor activity should all be called upon. Many truths may be
dramatized. This, where the mother is clever enough to employ it, is
the surest method of appeal. But in any case, speech alone must not
be relied upon, nor the child considered a hopeless case who does not
respond to it.
Denunciatory speech especially needs wise regulation. As Richter says,
"What is to be followed as a rule of prudence, yea, of justice, toward
grown-up people, should be much more observed toward children, namely,
that one should never judgingly declare, for instance, 'You are a
liar,' or even, 'You are a bad boy,' instead of saying, 'You have told
an untruth,' or 'You have done wrong.' For since the power to command
yourself implies at the same time the power of obeying, man feels a
minute after his fault as free as Socrates, and the branding mark
of his _nature_, not his _deed_, must seem to him blameworthy of
punishment.
"To this must be added that every individual's wrong actions, owing to
his inalienable sense of a moral aim and hope, seem to him only short,
usurped interregnums of the devil, or comets in the uniform solar
system. The child, consequently, under such a moral annihilation,
feels the wrong-doing of others more than his own; and this all the
more because, in him, want of reflection and the general warmth of his
feelings, represent the injustice of others in a more ugly light than
his own."
[Sidenote: Example versus Precept]
If any one desires to prove the superior force of example over
precept, let him try teaching a baby to say "Thank you" or "Please,"
merely by being scrupulously careful to say these things to the baby
on all fit occasions. No one has taken the statistics of the number
of times every small child is exhorted to perfect himself in this
particular observance; but it is safe to say that in the United States
alone these injunctions are spoken something like a million times
a day and all quite unnecessarily. The child will say "Please"
and "Thank you" without being told to do so, if he merely has his
attention called to the fact that the people around him all use these
phrases.
[Sidenote: Politeness to Children]
The truth is, too many parents forget to speak these agreeable words
whenever they ask favors of their own children; so the force of their
example is marred. What you do to the child himself, remember, always
outweighs anything you do to others before him. This is the reason why
it is necessary that you should acknowledge your own shortcomings to
the child, if you expect him to acknowledge his to you. It is also
necessary sometimes to point out clearly the kind and considerate
things that you are in the habit of doing to others, lest the
untrained mind of the young child may fail to see and so miss the
force of your example.
But in thus revealing your own good deeds to the child, remember
the motive, and reveal them only (a) when he cannot perceive them
of himself, (b) when he needs to perceive them in order that his own
conduct may be influenced by them, and (c) at the time when he is most
likely to appreciate them. This latter requirement precludes you from
announcing your own righteousness when he is naughty, and compels you,
of course, to go directly against your native impulse, which is to
mention your deeds of sacrifice and kindness only when you are angry
and mean to reproach him with them. When you tell him how devoted you
have been at some moment when you are both thoroughly angry, he is in
danger of either denying or hating your devotion; but when you refer
to it tenderly, and, as your heart will then prompt you, modestly, at
some loving moment, he will give it recognition, and be moved to love
goodness more devotedly because you embody it.
[Sidenote: Law-Making Habit]
Another important rule is this: Do not make too many rules. Some women
are like legislatures in perpetual session. The child who is confused
and tantalized by the constant succession of new laws learns presently
to disregard them, and to regulate his life according to certain
deductions of his own--sometimes surprisingly wise and politic
deductions. The way to re yourself of this law-making habit is to stop
thinking of every little misdeed as the beginning of a great wrong. It
is very likely an accident and a combination of circumstances such as
may not happen again. To treat misdemeanors which are not habitual nor
characteristic as evanescent is the best way to make them evanescent.
They should not be allowed to enter too deeply into your consciousness
or into that of your child.
[Sidenote: Live with Your Children]
In order to be able to discriminate between accidental wrong-doing,
and that which is the first symptom of wrong-thinking, you must be
in close touch with your children. This brings us to Froebel's great
motto, "Come, let us live with our children!" This means that you are
not merely to talk with your child, to hear from his lips what he is
doing, but to live so closely with him, that in most cases you know
what he is doing without any need of his telling you. When, however,
he does tell you something which happened in the school play-ground
or otherwise out of the range of your knowledge, be careful not to
moralize over it. Make yourself as agreeable a secret-keeper as his
best friend of his own age; let your moralizing be so rare that it is
effective for that very reason. If the occasion needs moral reflection
at all--and that seldom happens--the wise way is to lead the child to
do his own reflecting; to arrive at his own conclusions, and if you
must lead him, by all means do so as invisibly as possible. For the
most part it is safe to take the confessions lightly, and well to keep
your own mind young by looking at things from the boy's point of view.
[Sidenote: The Subject of Sex]
If, however, there is to be perfect confidence between you, the
one subject which is usually kept out of speech between mothers and
children must be no forbidden subject between them; you must not
refuse to answer questions about the mystery of sex. If you are not
the fit person to teach your child these important facts, who is?
Certainly not the school-mates and servants from whom he is likely
to learn them if you refuse to furnish the information. Usually it is
sufficient simply to answer the child's honest questions honestly; but
any mother who finds herself unable to cope with this simple matter
in this simple spirit, will find help in Margaret Morley's "Song
of Life," in the Wood-Allen Publications, and the books of the Rev.
Sylvanus Stall.[B]
In respect to these matters more than in respect to others, but also
in respect to all matters, children often do not know that they are
doing wrong, even when it it very difficult for parents to believe
that they do not intend wrong-doing. As we have seen from our analysis
of truthfulness, the child may very often lie without a qualm of
conscience, and he may still more readily break the unwritten rules
of courtesy, asking abrupt and even cruel questions of strangers, and
haul the family skeleton out of its closet at critical moments. Such
things cannot be wholly guarded against, even by the exercise of the
utmost wisdom, but the habit of reasoning things out for himself is
the greatest help a child can have.
[Sidenote: Righteousness]
The formation of the bent of the child's nature as a whole is a matter
of unconscious education, but as he grows in the power to reason,
conscious education must direct his mental activity. It is not enough
for him, as it is not enough for any grown person, to do the best
that he knows; he must learn to know the best. The word righteousness
itself means right-wiseness, i.e., right knowingness.
To quote Froebel again, "In order, therefore, to impart true, genuine
firmness to the natural will-activity of the boy, all the activities
of the boy, his entire will should proceed from and have reference
to the development, cultivation, and representation of the internal.
Instruction in example and in words, which later on become precept
and example, furnishes the means for this. Neither example alone, nor
words will do; not example alone, for it is particular and special,
and the word is needed to give the particular individual example
universal applicability; not words alone, for example is needed to
interpret and explain the word, which is general, spiritual, and of
many meanings.
"But instruction and example alone and in themselves are not
sufficient; they must meet a good pure heart and this is the outcome
of proper educational influences in childhood."
[Sidenote: Moral Precocity]
Lest these directions should seem to demand an almost superhuman
degree of control and wisdom on the part of the mother, remember that
moral precocity is as much to be guarded against a mental precocity.
Remember that you are neither required to be a perfect mother nor
to rear a perfect child. As Spencer remarks, a perfect child in this
imperfect world would be sadly out of joint with the times, would
indeed be a martyr. If your basic principles are right and if your
child has before him the daily and hourly spectacle of a mother who is
trying to conform herself to high standards, he will grow as fast as
it is safe for him to grow. Spencer says: "Our higher moral faculties
like our higher intellectual ones, are comparatively complex. As a
consequence they are both comparatively late in their evolution, and
with the one as with the other, a very early activity produced by
stimulation will be at the expense of the future character. Hence the
not uncommon fact that those who during childhood were instanced as
models of juvenile goodness, by and by undergo some disastrous and
seemingly inexplicable change, and end by being not above but below
par; while relatively exemplary men are often the issue of a childhood
not so promising.
"Be content, therefore, with moderate measures and moderate results,
constantly bearing in mind the fact that the higher morality, like the
higher intelligence, must be reached by a slow growth; and you will
then have more patience with those imperfections of nature which your
child hourly displays. You will be less prone to constant scolding,
and threatening, and forbidding, by which many parents induce a
chronic irritation, in a foolish hope that they will thus make their
children what they should be."
[Sidenote: Rules in Character Building]
In conclusion, the rules that may be safely followed in
character-building may be summed up thus:
(1) Recognize that the object of your training is to help the child to
love righteousness. Command little and then use positive commands
rather than prohibitions. Use "do" rather than "don't."
(2) Make right-doing delightful.
(3) Establish Fichte's doctrine of right, see page 64.
(4) Teach by example rather than precept. Therefore respect the
child's rights as you wish him to respect yours.
(5) Use a low voice, especially in commanding or rebuking.
(6) In chiding, remember Richter's rule and rebuke the sin and not the
sinner.
(7) Confess your own misdeeds, by this means and others securing the
confidence of your children.
Finally, remember that this is an imperfect world, you are an
imperfect mother, and the best results you can hope for are likely
to be imperfect. But the results may be so founded upon eternal
principles as to tend continually to give place to better and better
results.
[Footnote A: Pestalozzi, Educator, Philosopher, and Reformer. Author
of "How Gertrude Teaches Her Children."]
[Footnote B: "What a Young Girl Ought to Know" and "What a Young Woman
Ought to Know" by Dr. Mary Wood Allen. "What a Young Boy Ought to
Know," "What a Young Man Ought to Know," by Rev. Sylvanus Stall.]
PLAY
Although Froebel is best known as the educator who first took
advantage of play as a means of education, he was not, in reality, the
first to recognize the high value of this spontaneous activity. He was
indeed the first to put this recognition into practice and to use the
force generated during play to help the child to a higher state of
knowledge.
But before him Plato said that the plays of children have the
mightiest influence on the maintenance or the non-maintenance of laws;
that during the first three years the child should be made "cheerful"
and "kind" by having sorrow and fear and pain kept away from him and
by soothing him with music and rhythmic movements.
[Sidenote: Aristotle]
Aristotle held that children until they were five years old "should be
taught nothing, not even necessary labor, lest it hinder growth, but
should be accustomed to use much motion as to avoid a indolent habit
of body, and this," he added, "can he acquired by various means, among
others by play, which ought to be neither illiberal, nor laborious, or
lazy."
[Sidenote: Luther]
Luther rebukes those who despise the plays of children and says
that Solomon did not prohibit scholars from play at the proper time.
Fenelon, Locke, Schiller, and Richter all admit the deep significance
of this universal instinct of youth.
Preyer, speaking not as a philosopher or educator, but as a scientist,
mentions "the new kinds of pleasurable sensations with some admixture
of intellectual elements," which are gained when the child
gradually begins to play. Much that is called play he considers true
experimenting, especially when the child is seen to be studying the
changes produced by his own activity, as when he tears paper into
small bits, shakes a bunch of keys, opens and shuts a box, plays with
sand, and empties bottles, and throws stones into the water. "The
zeal with which these seemingly aimless movements are executed is
remarkable. The sense of gratification must be very great, and is
principally due to the feeling of his own power, and of being the
cause of the various changes."
[Sidenote: Educational Value of Play]
All these authorities are quoted here in order to show that the
practical recognition of play which obtains among the advanced
educators to-day is not a piece of sentimentalism, as stern critics
sometimes declare, but the united opinion of some of the wisest minds
of this and former ages. As Froebel says, "Play and speech constitute
the element in which the child lives. At this stage (the first three
years of childhood) he imparts to everything the virtues of sight,
feeling, and speech. He feels the unity between himself and the whole
external world." And Froebel conceives it to be of the profoundest
importance that this sense of unity should not be disturbed. He finds
that play is the most spiritual activity of man at this age, "and at
the same time typical of human life as a whole--of the inner, hidden,
natural life of man and all things; it gives, therefore, joy, freedom,
contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world: it holds the
sources of all that is good. The child that plays thoroughly until
physical fatigue forbids will surely be a thorough, determined man,
capable of self-sacrifice for the promotion and welfare of himself and
others."
But all play does not deserve this high praise. It fits only the play
under right conditions. Fortunately these are such that every mother
can command them. There are three essentials: (1) Freedom, (2)
Sympathy, (3) Right materials.
[Sidenote: Freedom]
(1) Freedom is the first essential, and here the child of poverty
often has the advantage of the child of wealth. There are few things
in the poverty-stricken home too good for him to play with; in
its narrow quarters, he becomes, perforce, a part of all domestic
activity. He learns the uses of household utensils, and his play
merges by imperceptible degrees into true, healthful work.
In the home of wealth, however, there is no such freedom, no such
richness of opportunity. The child of wealth has plenty of toys, but
few real things to play with. He is shut out of the common activity of
the family, and shut in to the imitation activity of his nursery. He
never gets his small hands on realities, but in his elegant clothes is
confined to the narrow conventional round that is falsely supposed to
be good for him.
Froebel insists upon the importance of the child's dress being
loose, serviceable, and inconspicuous, so that he may play as much
as possible without consciousness of the restrictions of dress.
The playing child should also have, as we have noticed in the first
section, the freedom of the outside world. This does not mean merely
that he should go out in his baby-buggy, or take a ride in the park,
but that he should be able to play out-of-doors, to creep on the
ground, to be a little open-air savage, and play with nature as he
finds it.
[Sidenote: Sympathy]
(2) Sympathy is much more likely to rise spontaneously in the mother's
breast for the child's troubles than for the child's joys. She will
stop to take him up and pet him when he is hurt, no matter how busy
she is, but she too often considers it waste of time to enter into his
plays with him; yet he needs sympathy in joy as much as in sorrow. Her
presence, her interest in what he is doing, doubles his delight in it
and doubles its value to him. Moreover, it offers her opportunity for
that touch and direction now and then, which may transform a rambling
play, without much sequence or meaning, into a consciously useful
performance, a dramatization, perhaps, of some of the child's
observations, or an investigation into the nature of things.
(3) Right Material. Even given freedom and sympathy, the child needs
something more in order to play well: he needs the right materials.
The best materials are those that are common to him and to the rest of
the world, far better than expensive toys that mark him apart from
the world of less fortunate children. Such toys are not in any way
desirable, and they may even be harmful. What he needs are various
simple arrangements of the four elements--earth, air, fire and water.
[Sidenote: Mud-pies]
(1) _Earth_. The child has a noted affinity for it, and he is
specially happy when he has plenty of it on hands, face, and clothes.
The love of mud-pies is universal; children of all nationalities and
of all degrees of civilization delight in it. No activity could be
more wholesome.
[Sidenote: Sand]
Next to mud comes sand. It is cleaner in appearance and can be brought
into the house. A tray of moistened sand, set upon a low table, should
be in every nursery, and the sand pile in every yard.
[Sidenote: Clay]
Clay is more difficult to manage indoors, because it gets dry and
sifts all about the house, but if a corner of the cellar, where there
is a good light, can be given up for a strong table and a jar of clay
mixed with some water, it will be found a great resource for rainy
days. If modeling aprons of strong material, buttoned with one button
at the neck, be hung near the jar of clay, the children may work in
this material without spoiling their clothes. Clay-modeling is an
excellent form of manual training, developing without forcing
the delicate muscles of the fingers and wrists, and giving wide
opportunity for the exercise of the imagination.
[Sidenote: Digging]
Earth may be played with in still another way. Children should dig in
it; for all pass through the digging stage and this should be given
free swing. It develops their muscles and keeps them busy at helpful
and constructive work. They may dig a well, make a cave, or a pond, or
burrow underground and make tunnels like a mole. Give them spades
and a piece of ground they can do with as they like, dress them in
overalls, and it will be long before you are asked to think of another
amusement for them.
[Illustration: Pattern of a modelling apron]
[Sidenote: Gardens]
In still another way the earth may be utilized, for children may
make gardens of it. Indeed, there are those who say that no child's
education is complete until he has had a garden of his own and grown
in it all sorts of seeds from pansies to potatoes. But a garden is
too much for a young child to care for all alone. He needs the help,
advice, and companionship of some older person. You must be careful,
however, to give help only when it is really desired; and careful also
not to let him feel that the garden is a task to which he is driven
daily, but a joy that draws him.
[Sidenote: Kites Windmills Soap-bubbles]
(2) _The Air_. The next important plaything is the air. The kite and
the balloon are only two instruments to help the child play with it.
Little windmills made of colored paper and stuck by means of a pin
at the end of a whittled stick, make satisfactory toys. One of their
great advantages is that even a very young child can make them for
himself. Blowing soap-bubbles is another means of playing with air.
By giving the children woolen mittens the bubbles may be caught and
tossed about as well as blown.
(3) _Water_. Perhaps the very first thing he learns to play with is
water. Almost before he knows the use of his hands and legs he plays
with water in his bath, and sucks his sponge with joy, thus feeling
the water with his chief organs of touch, his mouth and tongue. A few
months later he will be glad to pour water out of a tin cup. Even
when he is two or three years old, be may be amused by the hour,
by dressing him in a woolen gown, with his sleeves rolled high, and
setting him down before a big bowl or his own bath-tub half full of
warm water. To this may be added a sponge, a tin cup, a few bits of
wood, and some paper. They should not be given all at once, but one at
a time, the child allowed to exhaust the possibilities of each before
another is added. Still later he may be given the bits of soap left
after a cake of soap is used up. Give him also a few empty bottles or
bowls and let him put them away with a solid mass of soap-suds in them
and see what will happen. When he is older--past the period of putting
everything in his mouth--he may be given a few bits of bright ribbons,
petals of artificial flowers, or any bright colored bits of cloth
which can color the water.
Children love to sprinkle the grass with the hose or to water the
flowers with the sprinkling can. They enjoy also the metal fishes,
ducks, and boats which may be drawn about in the water by means of a
magnet. Presently they reach the stage when they must have toy-boats,
and next they long to go into real boats and go rowing and sailing.
They want to fish, wade, swim, and skate.
[Sidenote: Dangerous Pastimes]
Some of those pastimes are dangerous, but they are sure to be indulged
in at some time or other, with or without permission. There never grew
a child to sturdy manhood who was successfully kept away from water.
The wise mother, then, will not forbid this play, but will do her
best to regulate it, to make it safe. She will think out plans for
permitting children to go swimming in a safe place with some older
person. She will let them go wading, and at holiday time will take
them boat-riding. If she permits as much activity in these respects
as possible, her refusal when it does come will be respected; and
the child will not, unless perhaps in the first bitterness of
disappointment, think her unfriendly and fussy. Above all, he is not
likely to try to deceive her, to run off and take a swim on the sly,
and thus fall into true danger.
[Sidenote: Precaution with Fire]
(4) _Fire_ is another inevitable plaything. Miss Shinn reports that
the first act of her little niece that showed the dawn of voluntary
control of the muscles was the clinging of her eyes to the flame of
a candle, at the end of the second week. The sense of light and
the pleasure derived from it is of the chief incentives to a baby's
intellectual development. But since fire is dangerous the child must
be taught this fact as quickly and painlessly as possible. He will
probably have to be burned once before he really understands it,
but by watching you can make this pain very small and slight,
barely sufficient to give the child a wholesome fear of playing with
unguarded fire. For instance, show that the lamp globe is hot. It is
not hot enough to injure him, but quite hot enough to be unpleasant to
his sensitive nerves. Put your own hand on the lamp and draw it away
with a sharp cry, saying warningly, "Hot, hot!" Do not put his hand
on the lamp, but let him put it there himself and then be very
sympathetic over the result. Usually one such lesson is sufficient.
Only do not permit yourself to call everything hot which you do not
want him to touch. He will soon discover that you are untruthful and
will never again trust you so fully.
[Sidenote: Bonfires]
Under _proper regulations_, however, fire may be played with safely.
Bonfires with some older person in attendance are safe enough and
prevent unlawful bonfires in dangerous places. The rule should be that
none of the children may play with fire except with permission; and
then that permission should be granted as often as possible that the
children may be encouraged to ask for it. A stick smouldering at one
end and waved about in circles and ellipses is not dangerous when
elders are by, but it is dangerous if played with on the sly. Playing
with fire on the sly is the most dangerous thing a child can do, and
the only way to prevent it is to permit him to play with fire in
the open. A beautiful game can be made from number of Christmas tree
candles of various colors and a bowl of water. The candles are lighted
and the wax dropped into the water, making little colored circles
which float about. These can be linked together such a fashion as to
form patterns which may be lifted out on sheets of paper.
[Sidenote: Magic Lantern]
The magic lantern is an innocent and comparatively cheap means of
playing with light. If it is well taken care of and fresh slides
added from time to time it can be made a source of pleasure for years.
Jack-o'-lanterns are great fun, and when pumpkins are not available,
oranges may be used instead.
[Sidenote: Rhythmic Movements]
Besides these elemental playthings the child gets much valuable
pleasure out of the rhythmic use of his own muscles. All such plays
Plato thought should be regulated by music, and with this Froebel
agreed, but in the Household this is often impossible. The children
must indulge in many movements when there is no one about who
has leisure to make music for them. Still, when they come to the
quarrelsome age, a few minutes' rhythmic play to the sound of music
will be found to harmonize the whole group wonderfully. For this
purpose the ordinary hippity-hop, fast or slow according to the music,
is sufficient. It is as if the regulation of the body to the laws
of harmony reacted upon minds and nerves. Such an exercise is
particularly valuable just before bed-time. The children go to sleep
then with their minds under the influence of harmony and wake in the
morning inclined to be peaceful and happy.
[Sidenote: Songs]
A book of Kindergarten songs, such as Mrs. Gaynor's "Songs of the
Child World" and Eleanor Smith's "Songs for the Children," ought to be
in every household, and the mother ought to familiarize herself with a
dozen or so of these perfectly simple melodies. Of course the children
must learn them with her. When once this has been done she has a
valuable means of amusing them and bringing them within her control at
any time. She may hum one of the songs or play it. The children must
guess what it is and then act out their guess in pantomime, so that
she can see what they mean. Perhaps it is a windmill song; their
arms fly around and around in time to the music, now fast, now slow.
Perhaps it is a Spring song; the children are birds building their
nests. Other songs turn them into shoemakers, galloping horses, or
soldiers.
[Sidenote: Dramatic Plays]
Dramatic plays, whether simple, like this, or elaborate, are,
as Goethe shows in _Wilhelm Meister_, of the greatest possible
educational advantage. In them the child expresses his ideas of the
world about him and becomes master of his own ideas. He acts out
whatever he has heard or seen. He acts out also whatever he is
puzzling about, and by making the terms of his problem clear to his
consciousness usually solves it.
[Sidenote: Dancing]
As for dancing, Richter exclaims: "I know not whether I should most
deprecate children's balls or most praise children's dances. For the
harmony connected with it (dancing) imparts to the affections and the
mind that material order which reveals the highest, and regulates the
beat of the pulse, the step, and even the thought. Music is the meter
of this poetic movement, and is an invisible dance, as dancing is a
silent music. Finally, this also ranks among the advantages of his
eye and heel pleasure; that children with children, by no harder canon
than the musical, light as sound, may be joined in a rosebud feast
without thorns or strife." The dances may be of the simplest kind,
such as "Ring Around a Rosy," "Here We Go, To and Fro," "Old Dan
Tucker" and the "Virginia Reel." The old-fashioned singing plays, such
as "London Bridge," "Where Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow," and
"Pop Goes the Weasel" have their place and value. Several collections
of them have been made and published, but usually quite enough
material may be found for these plays in the memories of the people of
any neighborhood.
[Sidenote: Toys]
All these plays, it will be noticed, call for very simple and
inexpensive apparatus, in most cases for no apparatus at all.
Nevertheless there is a place for toys. All children ought to have
a few, both because of the innocent pleasure they afford and because
they need to have certain possessions which are inalienably their own.
A simple and inexpensive list of suitable toys adapted to various ages
is given at the end of this section. Most of them are exactly the toys
that parents usually buy. But it will be noticed that none of them are
very elaborate or expensive, and that the patrol wagon is not among
them. This is because the patrol wagon directly leads to plays that
are not only uneducational but positively harmful in their tendencies.
The children of a whole neighborhood were once led into the habit of
committing various imitation crimes for the sake of being arrested
and carried off in miniature patrol wagon. It any such expensive and
elaborate toys are bought, it may well be the plain express wagon or
the hook and ladder and fire engine. The first of these leads to plays
of industry, the second to those of heroism.
LIST OF TOYS SUITABLE FOR VARIOUS AGES.
Ball, rubber ring, soft animals and rag dolls ......... Before 1 year
Blocks and Bells ............................................. 1 year
Small chair and table ....................................1 1/2 years
Noah's Ark .................................................. 2 years
Picture books ............................................... 2 years
Materials and instruments .............................. 2 to 3 years
Carts, stick-horses, and reins ..................... 2 1/2 to 3 years
Boats, ships, engines, tin or wooden animals, dolls,
dishes, broom, spade, sand-pile, bucket, etc ................ 3 years
Hoop, games and story books ................................. 5 years
OCCUPATIONS
[Sidenote: Home Kindergarten]
There are a number of books designed to teach mothers how to carry the
Kindergarten occupations over into the home; but while such books may
be helpful in a few cases, in most cases better occupations present
themselves in the course of the day's work. The Kindergarten
occupations themselves follow increasingly the order of domestic
routine. For example, many children in the Kindergarten make mittens
out of eiderdown flannel in the Fall, when their own mothers are
knitting their mittens, and make little hoods either for themselves
or for their dolls. At other periods they put up little glasses of
preserves or jelly, and study the industry of the bees and the way
they put up their tiny jars of jelly. Their attention is called also
to the preparations that the squirrels and other animals make for
winter, and to that of the trees and flowers. In other words, the
occupations in the Kindergarten are designed to bring the children
into conscious sympathy with the life of nature and of the home.
[Sidenote: Kindergarten Methods]
That mother who keeps this purpose in mind and applies it to the
occupations that come up naturally in the course of a day's work,
will thereby bring the Kindergarten spirit into her own home much more
truly than if she invests in a number of perforated sewing cards and
colored strips of paper for weaving. Not that there is any harm in
these bits of apparatus, provided that the sewing cards are large and
so perforated as not to task the eyes and young fingers of the sewer.
But unless for some special purpose, such as the making of a Christmas
or birthday gift, these devices are unnecessary and better left to the
school, which has less richness of material at hand than has the home.
[Sidenote: Helping Mother]
In allowing the children to enter a workers into the full life of the
home several good things are accomplished. (1) The eager interest of
the developing mind is utilized to brighten those duties which are
likely to remain permanent duties. Not does this observation apply
only to girls. Domestic obligations are supposed to rest chiefly upon
them, but the truth is that boys need to feel these obligations as
keenly as the girls, if they are to grow into considerate and helpful
husbands and fathers. The usual division of labor into forms falsely
called masculine and feminine is, therefore, much to be deplored.
Moreover, at an early age children are seldom sex-conscious, and any
precocity in this direction is especially evil in its results; yet
many mothers from the beginning make such a division between what
they require of their boys and of their girls as to force this
consciousness upon them. All kinds of work, then, should be allowed in
the beginning, however it may differentiate later on, and little
boys as well as little girls should be taught to take an interest in
sewing, dish-washing, sweeping, dusting, and cooking--in all the forms
of domestic activity.
This is so far recognized among educators that the most progressive
primary schools now teach cooking to mixed classes of boys and
girls, and also sewing. These activities are recognized as highly
educational, being, as they are, interwoven with the history of the
race and with its daily needs. When they are studied in their full sum
of relationship, they increase the child's knowledge of both the past
and the living world.
[Sidenote: Teaching Mother]
(2) Besides the deepening of the child's interest in that work which
in some form or other he will have with him always, is the quickening
of the mother's own interest in what may have come to seem to her
mere daily drudgery. Any woman who undertakes to perform so simple
an operation as dish-washing with the help of a bright happy child,
asking sixteen questions to the minute, will find that common-place
operation full of possibilities; and if she will answer all the
questions she will probably find her knowledge strained to the
breaking point, and will discover there is more to be known about
dish-washing than she ever dreamed of before; while in cooking, if
she will make an effort to look up the science, history, and ethics
involved in the cooking and serving of a very simple meal, she will
not be likely to regard the task as one beneath her, but rather as
one beyond her. No one can so lead her away from false conventions and
narrow prejudices as a little child whom she permits to help her and
teach her.
[Sidenote: The Love of Work]
(3) The child's spontaneous joy in being active and in doing any
service is being utilized, as it should be, in the performance of his
daily duties. We have already referred to the fact that all children
in the beginning love to work, and that there must be something the
matter with our education since this love is so early lost and so
seldom reacquired. If when young children wish to help mother they
are almost invariably permitted to do so, and their efforts greeted
lovingly, this delight in helpfulness will remain a blessing to them
throughout life.
[Sidenote: To Make "Helping" of Benefit]
But in order to get these benefits from the domestic activities two or
three simple rules must be observed. (1) Do not go silently about your
work, expecting your child to be interested and to understand without
being talked to. Play with him while you work with him, and see the
realization of youthfulness that comes to yourself while you do it.
Many tasks fit for childish hands are in their nature too monotonous
for childish minds. Here your imagination must come into play to rouse
and excite his activity. For instance, you are both shelling peas.
When he begins to be tired you suggest to him, "Here is a cage full of
birds, let us open the door for them;" or you may tell a story while
you work, but it should be a story about that very activity, or the
child will form the habit of dreaming and dawdling over his work. Such
stories may be perfectly simple and even rather pointless and yet
do good work; the whole object is to keep the child's fly-away
imagination turned upon the work at hand, thus lending wings to his
thought, and lightness to his fingers. Moreover, the mother who talks
with her child while working is training in him the habit of
bright unconscious conversation, thus giving him a most useful
accomplishment. Making a game or a play out of the work is, of course,
conducive to the same good results. When the story or the talk drags,
the game with its greater dramatic power may be substituted.
[Sidenote: Fatigue]
(2) Children should neither be allowed to work to the point of fatigue
nor to stop when they please. Fatigue, as our latest investigators in
physiological psychology have conclusively proved, is productive of an
actual poison in the blood and as such is peculiarly harmful to young
children. But while work--or for that matter play either--must never
be pushed past the point of healthful fatigue, it may well be pushed
past the point of spontaneous interest and desire: the child may be
happily persuaded by various hidden means to do a little more than he
is quite ready to do. By this device, which is one of the recognized
devices of the Kindergarten, mothers increase by imperceptible degrees
that power of attention which makes will power.
[Sidenote: Willing Industry]
(3) Set the example of willing industry. Neither let the child
conceive of you as an impersonal necessary part of the household
machinery, nor as an unwilling martyr to household necessities. Most
mothers err in one or the other of these two directions, and many of
them err in both: they either, (a) perform the innumerable services of
the household so quietly and steadily that the child does not perceive
the effort that the performance costs and, therefore, as far as his
consciousness is concerned, is deprived of the force of his mother's
example, or (b) they groan aloud over their burdens and make their
daily martyrdom vocal. Either way is wrong, for it is a mistake not to
let a child see that your steady performance of tasks, which cannot be
always delightful, is a result of self-discipline; and it is equally a
mistake to let him think that this discipline is one against which
you rebel. For in reality you are so far from being unwilling to bind
yourself in his service that if he needed it you would promptly double
and quadruple your exertions. It is exactly what you do when he is
sick or in danger; and if he dies the sorest ache of your heart is the
ache of the love that can no longer be of service to the beloved.
[Sidenote: Monotony]
(4) Remember that monotony is the curse of labor for both child and
adult, but that _monotony cannot exist where new intellectual insights
are constantly being given_. Therefore, while the daily round of
labor, shaped by the daily recurring demands for food, warmth,
cleanliness, and sleep, goes on without much change, seize every
opportunity to deepen the child's perception of the relation of this
routine to the order of the larger world. For instance, if a new house
is being built near by, visit it with the children, comparing it with
your own house, figure out whether it is going to be easier to keep
clean and to warm than your house is and why. If you need to call in
the carpenter, the plumber, the paper-hanger, or the stoveman, try
to have him come when the children are at home, and let them satisfy
their intense curiosity as to his work. This knowledge will sooner or
later be of practical value, and it is immediately of spiritual value.
[Sidenote: Beautiful Work]
(5) Beautify the work as much as possible by letting the artistic
sense have full play. This rule is so important that the attempt to
establish it in the larger world outside of the home has given rise to
the movement known as the arts and crafts movement, which has its rise
in the perception that no great art can come into existence among us
until the common things of daily living--the furniture, the books, the
carpets, the chinaware--are made to express that creative joy in the
maker which distinguishes an artistic product from an inartistic one.
This creative joy, in howsoever small degree, may be present in most
of the things that the child does. If he sets the table, he may set it
beautifully, taking real pleasure in the coloring of the china and the
shine of the silver and glass. He ought not to be permitted to set it
untidily upon a soiled tablecloth.
[Sidenote: The Right Spirit]
(6) This is a negative rule, but perhaps the most important of all: DO
NOT NAG. The child who is driven to his work and kept at it by means
of a constant pressure of a stronger will upon his own, is deriving
little, if any, benefit from it; and as you are not teaching him to
work for the sake of his present usefulness, which is small at
the best, but for the sake of his future development, you are more
desirous that he should perform a single task in a day in the right
spirit, than that he should run a dozen errands in the wrong spirit.
(7) Besides a regular time each day for the performance of his set
share in the household work, give him warning before the arrival of
that hour. Children have very incomplete notions of time; they become
much absorbed in their own play; and therefore no child under nine
or ten years of age should be expected to do a given thing at a given
time without warning that the time is at hand.
[Sidenote: "Busy Work"]
Besides these occupations which are truly part of the business of life
come any number of other occupations--a sort of a cross between real
play and steady work, what teachers call "busy work"--and here the
suggestions of the Kindergarten may be of practical value to the
mother. For instance, weaving, already referred to, may keep an active
child interested and quiet for considerable periods of time. Besides
the regular weaving mats of paper, to be had from any Kindergarten
supply store, wide grasses and rushes may be braided into mats, raffia
and rattan may be woven into baskets, and strips of cloth woven into
iron-holders. A visit to any neighboring Kindergarten will acquaint
the mother with a number of useful, simple objects that can be woven
by a child. Whatever he weaves or whatever he makes should be applied
to some useful purpose, not merely thrown away; and while it is true
that a conscientious desire to live up to this rule often results in
a considerable clutter of flimsy and rather undesirable objects about
the house, still, ways may be devised for slowly retiring the oldest
of them from view, and disposing of others among patient relatives.
[Sidenote: Sewing]
Sewing is another occupation ranch used in the Kindergarten as well as
in the home. Beginning with the simple stringing of large wooden beads
upon shoe-strings, it passes on to sewing on buttons, and sewing doll
clothes to the making of real clothing. This last in its simplest form
can be begun sooner than most parents suppose, especially if the child
is taught the use of the sewing machine. There is really no reason why
a child, say six years old, should not learn to sew upon the machine.
His interest in machinery is keen at this period, and two or three
lessons are usually sufficient to teach him enough about the mechanism
to keep him from injuring it. Once he has learned to sew upon the
machine, he may be given sheets and towels to hem, and even sew up
the seams of larger and more complex articles. He will soon be able
to make aprons for himself and his sisters and mother. Toy sewing
machines are now sold which are really useful playthings, and on which
the child can manufacture a number of small articles. Those run by
a treadle are preferable to those run by a hand crank, because they
leave the child's hands free to guide the work.
[Sidenote: Drawing Cutting Pasting]
Drawing, painting, cutting and pasting are excellent occupations for
children. A large black-board is a useful addition to the nursery
furnishings, but the children should be required to wash it off with a
damp cloth, instead of using the eraser furnished for the purpose,
as the chalk dust gets into the room and fills the children's lungs.
Plenty of soft pencils and crayons, also large sheets of inexpensive
drawing paper, should be at hand upon a low table so that they can
draw the large free outlines which best develop their skill, whenever
the impulse moves them. If they have also blunt scissors for cutting
all sorts of colored papers and a bottle of innocuous library paste,
they will be able to amuse themselves at almost any time.
[Sidenote: Painting]
Some water colors are now made which are harmless for children so
young that they are likely to put the paints in their mouths. Paints
are on the whole less objectionable than colored chalks, because
the crayons drop upon the floor and get trodden into the carpet. If
children are properly clothed as they should be in simple washable
garments, there is practically no difficulty connected with the free
use of paints, and their educational value is, of course, very high.
TEST QUESTIONS
The following questions constitute the "written recitation" which the
regular members of the A.S.H.E. answer in writing and send in for
the correction and comment of the instructor. They are intended to
emphasize and fix in the memory the most important points in the
lesson.
STUDY OF CHILD LIFE PART II
Read Carefully. In answering these questions you are earnestly
requested _not_ to answer according to the text-book where opinions
are asked for, but to answer according to conviction. In all cases
credit will be given for thought and original observation. Place your
name and full address at the head of the paper; use your own words so
that your instructor may be sure that you understand the subject.
1. State Fichte's doctrine of rights and show how it applies to child
training. If possible, give an example from your own experience.
2. What is the aim of moral training?
3. What two sayings of Froebel most characteristically sum up his
philosophy?
4. What is the value of play in education?
5. What are the natural playthings? Tell what, in your childhood, you
got out of these things, or if you were kept away from them, what the
prohibition meant to you.
6. What do you think about children's dancing? And acting?
7. Do you agree with those who think that the Kindergarten makes right
doing too easy? State the reasons for your opinion.
8. What can you say of commands, reproofs, and rules?
9. Should you let the children help you about the house, even when
they are so little as to be troublesome? Why? If they are unwilling to
help, how do you induce them to help?
10. What would you suggest as regular duties for children of 4 to 5
years? Of 7 to 8 years?
11. Which do you consider the more important, the housework or the
child?
12. Wherein may the mother learn from the child?
13. What is the difference between amusing children and playing with
them? What is the proper method?
14. Mention some good rules in character building.
15. From your own experience as a child what can you say of teaching
the mysteries of sex?
16. Are there any questions you would like to ask, or subjects which
you wish to discuss in connection with this lesson?
Note.--After completing the test sign your full name.
[Illustration: MADONNA AND CHILD
By Murillo, Spanish painter of the seventeenth century]
STUDY OF CHILD LIFE
PART III
ART AND LITERATURE IN CHILD LIFE
The influence of art upon the life of a young child is difficult of
measurement. It may freely be said, however, that there is little or
no danger in exaggerating its influence, and considerable danger in
underrating it. It is difficult of measurement because the influence
is largely an unconscious one. Indeed, it may be questioned whether
that form of art which gives him the most conscious and outspoken
pleasure is the form that in reality is the most beneficial; for,
unquestionably, he will get great satisfaction from circus posters,
and the poorly printed, abominably illustrated cheap picture-books
afford him undeniable joy. He is far less likely to be expressive of
his pleasure in a sun-shiny nursery, whose walls, rugs, white beds,
and sun-shiny windows are all well designed and well adapted to his
needs. Nevertheless, in the end the influence of this room is likely
to be the greater influence and to permanently shape his ideas of
the beautiful; while he is entirely certain, if allowed to develop
artistically at all, to grow past the circus poster period.
This fact--the fact that the highest influence of art is a secret
influence, exercised not only by those decorations and pictures which
flaunt themselves for the purpose, but also by those quiet, necessary,
every-day things, which nevertheless may most truly express the art
spirit--this fact makes it difficult to tell what art and what kind of
art is really influencing the child, and whether it is influencing him
in the right directions.
[Sidenote: Color]
Until he is three years old, for example, and often until he is past
that age, he is unable to distinguish clearly between green, gray and
blue; and hence these cool colors in the decorations around him, or in
his pictures, have practically no meaning for him. He has a right,
one might suppose, to the gratification of his love for clear reds and
yellows, for the sharp, well-defined lines and flat surfaces,
whose meaning is plain to his groping little mind. Some of the best
illustrators of children's books have seemed to recognize this. For
example, Boutet de Monvil in his admirable illustrations of Joan of
Arc meets these requirements perfectly, and yet in a manner which must
satisfy any adult lover of good art. The Caldecott picture books, and
Walter Crane's are also good in this respect, and the Perkins pictures
issued by the Prang Educational Co. have gained a just recognition
as excellent pictures for hanging on the nursery wall. Many of the
illustrations in color in the standard magazines are well worth
cutting out, mounting and framing. This is especially true of Howard
Pyle's work and that of Elizabeth Shippen Green.
[Sidenote: Classic Art]
Since photogravures and photographs of the masterpieces can be had
in this country very inexpensively, there is no reason why children
should not be made acquainted at an early age with the art classics,
but there is danger in giving too much space to black and white,
especially in the nursery where the children live. Their natural love
of color should be appealed to do deepen their interest in really good
pictures.
[Illustration: "My Mary"]
[Illustration: "Blow, Wind Blow"
PERKINS' PICTURES]
Nevertheless, it is a matter of considerable difficulty still to
find colored pictures which are inexpensive and yet really good. The
Detaille prints, while not yet cheap, are not expensive either, and
are excellent for this purpose; but the insipid little pictures of
fairies, flowers, and birds may be really harmful, as helping to form
in the young child's mind too low an ideal of beauty--of cultivating
in him what someone has called "the lust of the eye."
[Sidenote: Plastic Art]
What holds true of the pictorial art holds equally true of the plastic
art. As Prof. Veblin of the University of Chicago has scathingly
declared, our ideals of the beautiful are so mingled with worship of
expense that few of us can see the genuine beauty in any object apart
from its expensiveness. For this reason as well as, perhaps, because
of a remnant of barbarism in us, we love gold and glitter, and a great
deal of elaboration in our vases, and are far from being over-critical
of any piece of statuary which costs a respectable sum.
[Illustration: RELIEF MEDALLION
By Andrea della Robbia, in Foundling Hospital, Florence.]
A certain appreciation, however, of the real value of a good
plaster-cast has been gaining among us of late years, and many public
schools, especially in the large cities, have been establishing
standards of good taste in this respect. Good casts and bas-relief,
decorate their halls and class-rooms. There are few homes that cannot
afford to follow their example. But in buying these things be not
misled by sales and advertised bargains. It is more than seldom that
the placques, casts, and vases thus obtained are such as could have
any valuable influence whatever upon the young lives with which they
are brought in contact. Meretricious and showy ornaments, designed to
look as if they cost more than they really do, have no business in the
sincere home where the children are being sincerely educated.
[Sidenote: Music]
The same general laws apply to music. No art has a greater and more
insinuating influence. The very songs with which the mother sings the
baby to sleep have an occult influence which is later revealed and
made plain. Such songs, then, should be simple. They may be nothing
but improvisations, the mother's mind and heart making music, but
they should not be melodramatic songs of the music-hall order. No such
mawkish sentimentalism as that shown in "The Gypsy's Warning," for
example, or other songs which belong to the cheap theater should have
a place in the holy of holies--that inmost self of the child--which
responds to music.
The simple folk-songs of all nations, Eleanor Smith's and most of
Mrs. Gaynor's songs, already mentioned, and the songs collected by
Reinecke, called "Fifty Children's Songs," are excellent for this
purpose. The old-fashioned nonsense songs, such as "Billy Boy," "Mary
had a Little Lamb" and "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle,"
may also have a pleasant and harmless place of their own.
Instrumental music should be on the same general order, not loud and
showy, but clear, simple, sweet, and free from startling effects.
Dashing pieces, rag-time pieces, marches, two-steps, and familiar
tunes with variations, instead of bringing about a spirit of
gentleness and harmony, actually tend to produce self-assertiveness
and quarrelsomeness. Let any mother who does not believe this try the
effort of an hour of the one kind of music on one evening, and an
hour of the other kind on another evening. The difference will be
immediately apparent.
[Sidenote: The Drama]
The influence of the drama must not be forgotten. This form of art,
fallen so low among us since the time of the Puritans that it can
scarcely be called an art at all, is, nevertheless, the art which
perhaps above all others has an immediate and yet lasting influence.
Children are themselves instinctively dramatic. They like to compose
and act out all sorts of dramas of their own, from playing house
(which is nothing but a drama prolonged from day to day), to such
dramatic games as Statue-posing and Dumb Crambo. All children like to
dress up, to wear masks, and to imitate the peculiarities of persons
about them; to try on, as it were, the world as they see it, and
discover thereby how the actors in it feel. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister
has already been referred to. In this--his great book on education--he
practically bases all education upon the drama, and even throws the
treatise itself into dramatic form.
This does not mean, however, that all children should be permitted
to go to the theater as freely as they like. No; the plays which they
compose and act for themselves have a far higher value educationally
than most of the spectacular presentations of the old fairy tales
with which they are usually regaled, and certainly more than the
sensational melodramas which give them false ideas of art and
morality. They should go sometimes to the theater to see really good
and simple plays, but they should be oftener encouraged to get up for
themselves plays at home. If, as they grow older, they are helped to
think out their costumes with something of historical accuracy, to
be true to the spirit and scenery of the times in which the
representations are laid, the activity can be made to increase in
value to them as the years go by. There is no other art, perhaps,
by which the child so intimately links the world spirit with his own
spirit. It is for this reason that the School of Education in the
University of Chicago is equipped with small theaters in which the
children act.
[Sidenote: Literature]
As for the art of literature, not all children love reading, perhaps,
but certainly all children love to hear stories told, and the skilful
mother will direct this spontaneous affection into a love for
reading. No other single love, except perhaps the love of nature,
so emancipates the child from the thrall of circumstances. If he can
escape from the small ills of life into fairy-land merely by opening
the covers of a book, be sure that these ills will not have power to
crush him, unless they be very great ills indeed.
[Sidenote: Fairy Tales]
There are those who still believe that fairy-tales and fiction of all
sorts are nothing but lies. Poor souls, with their faces against the
stone wall of hard facts, they can never look up into the sky and see
the winged and beautiful thoughts freely disporting there. They make
no distinction between truth and fact, yet truth is of the spirit and
fact of the flesh; and truth, because it is of the spirit, may appear
under many forms, even under the form of play. All rightly told and
rightly conceived fairy-tales are true just as a good picture is true.
The painter uses oil, turpentine, and pigment to represent the wool
of a sheep, the water of a pond, the green spears of grass. Some
literal-minded person might say that he was lying because he pretented
that his little square of canvas truthfully represented grazing sheep
at the brook-side, but most of us recognize that he is really telling
the truth only in another than an every day form. In the same way
the writer of fairy-tales tells the truth, using the pigments of the
imagination.
If children ask whether a given story is true or not, answer without
hesitation, "yes." It is true, but it is a fairy kind of truth; it
is inside truth. There is magic in it and a mystery. The child who is
never allowed to read fairy tales, the man or the woman who prefers
the newspaper to a good book of fiction, misses much in life. It is
not only that the imagination--the divinest quality of man, because
the quality that makes man in his degree a creator--does not receive
culture, and that he misses the indescribable intellectual ecstasy
that comes only with the setting free of the wings of the mind, but
that also he is inevitably shorn of his sympathy and shut up to a
narrow circle of interests.
[Sidenote: Imagination and Sympathy]
For sympathy, above all moral qualities, is dependent upon
imagination. If you cannot imagine how you would feel under your
neighbor's conditions, you cannot deeply sympathize with him. The
person of unimaginative mind sympathizes only with those whose
experience and habits are similar to his own. He never escapes
from the narrow circle of his own personality. But the man whose
imagination has been kept flexible and ready from earliest childhood
has within him the power of sympathizing with whatever is human--yes!
even with creatures and things below the human level. Without
imagination, therefore, it is not possible for a man to be a great
scientist, for science demands sympathy with processes and objects
which are not yet human. It is not possible, obviously, for him to be
a great artist of any kind, for all art is interpretation of the world
by means of the imagination. It is not possible for him, even, to be
a good man in any broad sense, for the man whose sympathies are narrow
is often found to be guilty of injustice toward those who lie outside
the pale of those sympathies.
By all means, then, encourage the love of reading in your children,
and get them the best of story-books to read, and subscribe to the
best magazines. Read with them. Let some reading enter into every
day's life; talk over what has been read at the dinner-table, and so
avoid harmful personalities and disagreeable criticisms.
[Sidenote: Books]
As to the books to choose, choose the best. Generally speaking, the
best are those that have some dignity of age upon them. As in music
you chose the folksongs, so in children's literature also choose the
old fashioned fairy stories, such as those collected by the Brothers
Grimm and by Andrew Lang. Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Stories
of course are classics. Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales give excellent
suggestions as to the right use to be made of the old mythologies.
Many of the supplementary readers now being so widely used in the
public schools are good, simple versions of these old stories which
helped to make the world what it should be. For the rest there are
two standard children's magazines which help to form a good taste in
literature and which are continually suggestive of the right sort of
reading material. These are The Youth's Companion and St. Nicholas.
[Sidenote: Nature Study]
Finally, all appreciation of literature and art depends upon a love of
and some knowledge of nature. Fairy stories and mythology especially
are so dependent upon nature for their inner meaning and significance
as scarcely to be intelligible without some knowledge of natural
processes and laws. Of course, it is true that art in its turn
idealizes nature and fills her beautiful form with a beautiful soul;
so that the child who is being developed on all sides needs to take
his books and his pictures out of doors in order to get the full good
of them.
[Sidenote: Art and Nature]
No amount of music, art, and literature can make up for the free life
in the fields and under the sky which all these arts describe and
interpret. If he should be so unhappy as to have to choose between
nature and art, it would be better for him to choose nature, because
then, perhaps, art might be born in his own soul. But there is happily
no need for such a painful choice. He can sing his little song out of
doors with the birds and notice how they join in the chorus. He can
paint evening sunsets with the pine-trees against it far better out of
doors than indoors with copy perched before him. He can look down the
aisles of the real woods to watch for the enchanted princess, or for
the chivalrous knight whose story he is reading. Art and nature belong
together in the unified soul of the child. Well for him and for the
world in which he lives if they are never divorced, but he goes on to
the end loving them both and seeing them both as one.
CHILDREN'S ASSOCIATES
If the child was intended to grow into a man of family, merely, family
training might be sufficient for him, but since he must grow into a
member of society, social training is as necessary for him as family
training. Failure to recognize this truth is at the bottom of the
current misconceptions of the Kindergarten. There are still thousands
of persons who suppose it is only a superior sort of day-nursery where
children may be safely kept and innocently employed while the mother
gets the housework done.
[Sidenote: The Kindergarten]
While this might be a laudable enough function to perform, it is by
no means the function of the Kindergarten. This method of instruction
aims at much more. It aims to lay foundations for a complete later
education, and especially to make firm in the child those virtues and
aptitudes which, when they are held by the majority of men, constitute
the safety and welfare of society. For this reason no home, however
well ordered, can supply to the child what the Kindergarten supplies.
For the home is necessarily limited to the members of one family,
while the Kindergarten, on the contrary, makes plain to the child the
claims upon him of society not made up of his kinsfolk. It is the wide
world in miniature, and if it is a properly organized Kindergarten,
it will contain within itself a wide variety of children--children of
wealth and of poverty, of ignorance and of gentle breeding--and will
bring them all under one just rule. For only by this commingling of
many characters upon a common level and under the strict reign of
justice can the child be fitted practically, and by means of a series
of progressive experiments, for citizenship in a genuine democracy.
[Sidenote: Exclusive Associates]
Parents sometimes so far miss the aim of the Kindergarten as to desire
that instead of such a commingling there shall be a narrow limit set;
that in the Kindergarten shall be only such children as the child is
accustomed to associate with. But if the Kindergarten acceded to this
demand, as it seldom does, it would lose much of its usefulness, for
every one knows that children cannot be permanently sheltered from
contact with the outside world, nor can they be always reared in an
atmosphere of exclusiveness. A wisdom greater than the mother's has
ordered that no child shall be so narrowly nourished. If he has any
freedom whatever, any naturalness of life, he must and will enlarge
his circle of acquaintances beyond the limit of his mother's calling
list.
Indeed, even those Kindergartens which are professedly exclusive, and
which confine their ministrations to the children of one particular
neighborhood, are obliged by the nature of things to contain nascent
individualities of almost every type. For no neighborhood, however
equal in wealth and fashion, ever produced children of an unvarying
quality. In any circle, no matter how exclusive, there are mischievous
children, children who use bad language, children who have sly, mean
tricks, children who do not speak the truth, and who are in other ways
quite as undesirable as the children of the poor and ignorant. It is
often asserted, indeed, that the children of exclusive neighborhoods
very often show more varieties of badness than the children of the
open street. The records of the private Kindergarten as compared with
the public Kindergarten amply prove this statement.
[Sidenote: Evil Example]
Since, then, whether you confine your child to the limits of your
own circle or not, you cannot successfully keep him from playing with
children who are more or less objectionable, what are you going to do
to keep him from the harm of such association? You have to make him
strong enough to withstand temptation and resist the force of evil
example. Of course, he must have as little of the wrong example,
especially in his younger and tenderer years, as can be managed
without too greatly checking his activity and curtailing his freedom.
Yet after all he is to be taught a positive and not a negative
righteousness, and if his home training is not sufficient to enable
him to stand against a certain downward pull from the outside, there
is something the matter with it.
While he must not be strained too hard, nor too constantly associate
with children whose manners put his manners to the test, still he
ought by degrees, almost imperceptibly, to be accustomed to holding
to the truth, to that which is found good, no matter whether his
associates find it desirable or not.
[Sidenote: Social Training]
A good Kindergarten is a mother's best help in this endeavor, for
there her child meets with all sorts of other children. The very
influence of the place, and the ever-ready help of the teacher are on
his side. Every effort he makes to do right is met and welcomed. In
every stand that he takes against temptation, he is unobtrusively
reinforced. Moreover, the wrong-doing of his comrades is never allowed
to retain the attractive glitter that it sometimes acquires on the
play-ground. It is promptly held up to general obloquy, and the good
child finds to his surprise that he is not the only one who thinks
that teasing, for example, is mean and selfish and that a violent
temper is ugly.
[Sidenote: Responsibility to Society]
Moreover, in the Kindergarten the sense of social responsibility is
borne in upon him. Perhaps it comes to him first when he is chosen
to lead the march and finds that he must be careful not to squeeze
through too narrow places, lest someone get into trouble. In dealing
out pencils, worsted, and other materials he must be careful to
show strict impartiality, and give no preference to his own personal
friends. In a hundred small ways he is helped to regulate his own
conduct, so that it may conduce to the welfare of the whole school.
Where there are no Kindergartens, the task becomes a more difficult
one for the mother, for it becomes necessary, then, that she herself
should undertake the social training of her child, and this means that
she must know his playmates, not only through his report of them,
but through her own observation of them, and that they must be
sufficiently at home with her to betray their true characters in her
presence. And this means, of course, that she must become her child's
playmate. There are few women who think that they have time for this,
but there are also few who would not be benefited by it. If anywhere
there is a fountain of youth, it gushes up invisibly wherever playing
children are, and she who plays with them gets sprinkled by it.
[Sidenote: Sharing the Child's Play]
If there be no time during the busy day when she can justly enter into
the children's free play, at least there is a little while in the late
afternoon or in the early evening when she can do so, if she will. An
hour or two a week spent in active association with children at their
games will make her intimately acquainted with all their playmates,
and, moreover, constitute her a power of first magnitude among them.
Her motherhood thus extends itself, and she blesses not only her own
children, but all those who come near her children. In this respect no
Kindergarten can take the place of the mother's own companionship with
the child in his social life.
[Sidenote: The Children's Hour]
In an ideal condition the child has his Kindergarten in the morning;
his quiet hours, one of them entirely solitary, in the afternoon; his
social time, when he, his brothers and sisters and mother, are joined
with the other children and mothers in the neighborhood, in the late
afternoon, and his family time, with both father and mother, in the
evening before going to bed.
In thus sharing her child's social life the mother admits the claim
upon her of social responsibility; she sees that her duty is not
to her own home alone, but to the other homes with which hers is
linked--not to her own child alone, but to all children whose lives
touch her child's life. Her own nature widens with the perception,
and she enhances her direct teaching with the force of a beautiful
example.
STUDIES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS
[Sidenote: Abstract Studies]
There may easily be too many studies and too many accomplishments
in the life of any child. As our schools are constituted there are
certainly too many studies of the wrong kind being carried on every
day. But there are also too few studies of the right kind. In one of
our large cities a test was once made as to how much the children
who left school at the fifth grade, as 70 per cent of them do, had
actually learned in a way that would be of practical value to them,
and the results were most discouraging. These city children who could
recite their tables of measurements with glibness, and who performed
with a fair degree of success several hundred examples dealing with
units of measure, could not tell whether their school-room floor
contained one acre or two hundred and forty! None of them suspected
that it contained less than an acre. Although they could bound the
States of the Union, and give the principal exports and imports, they
knew next to nothing of their own city and of its actual relation
to the countries which they studied in their geography lessons. The
teachers, in explanation, laid much of the blame for this state of
affairs upon the parents, saying that they took but little interest
in their children's studies, and never attempted to link them to the
things of every-day life. But while this claim might be justified to
some extent, it was by no means sufficient to cover the facts of the
case. The truth is, it was quite as much the teachers' duty to link
these abstract studies with concrete facts, as it was the parents'.
[Sidenote: Dead Knowledge]
Such an experience, however, suggests the manner in which parents can
best help on the work of children in school. So long as these studies
are still taught in the dead, monotonous way common to text-books,
children will be racked nervously, and not benefited mentally in the
effort to master them. Fathers and mothers who by the exercise of some
ingenuity manage to show the child that his arithmetical knowledge is
of actual help in solving the questions of every-day life; that his
history has bearings upon the progress of events around him, and that
his geography relates to actual places which, perhaps, father and
mother may have seen, or which their books tell about--such fathers
and mothers will make their children's school work easier, at the same
time that they increase the sum of their children's knowledge. It is
dead knowledge only--knowledge wrenched from its living content--that
is difficult of digestion.
[Sidenote: The New Education]
It is natural for a young mind to like to learn, as it is for a
healthy stomach to be supplied with food; but knowledge, like the
food, must be fit for the use that is to be made of it and for the
organ that is to receive it; and the brain, like the stomach, has a
signal which it flies to show whether the food is what it wants or
not. The brain exhibits interest exactly as the stomach exhibits
appetite. The object of scientific education is to discover what the
spontaneous, universal interest of children of certain ages is, and
to meet that interest with the fullest possible supply of knowledge in
every conceivable form.
Scientific education does not depend upon text-books or upon merely
verbal explanations, but gets the idea home to the child by the means
of a varied appeal to all the senses and sensibilities. For this
reason the most advanced schools have many more studies and what are
commonly called accomplishments than the public or parochial
schools. That is, they add to the three r's--reading, 'riting and
'rithmetic--drawing, modeling, painting, manual training, physical
culture, dramatic representation, music, field trips, and laboratory
work.
[Sidenote: Correlation of Studies]
Yet this apparently great increase of subjects in the number of
studies actually lessens the amount of work required of the child,
because all these different activities, by means of what is called
correlation, are brought to bear upon the same subject. For example,
the class which goes out for a field trip to visit a near-by brook
sees the water actually at work, cutting its way to the river, and
thence to the sea. They measure its force and note its effects; they
make a water-color sketch of some curve of it; they notice what birds
and insects are about; what flowers grow there; what indications there
may be of burrowing animals. When they get back to school they model,
perhaps, some bird that they have noticed; or in the geographical
laboratory, with streams of water try to reproduce in miniature the
action of the brook upon the soil through which it flows.
For their arithmetic lesson they estimate the number of years the
brook must have been flowing to have cut its valley to its present
depth. They make a full report and description of their day's work
for their reading and writing lesson. They have thus gained an immense
amount of information, and have done a great deal of hard work; but
instead of being nervously exhausted, they are bright and exhilarated.
Such fatigue as they know is wholesome and fits them for a sound
night's sleep.
[Sidenote: Home Expedients]
When it is impossible to send the child to such a school as this,
something may be done by supplementing the ordinary school by some
of these procedures. The clay jar, the crayons, and the paints have
already been suggested, and with the parents' interest in the child's
studies, helping him to model and paint things which he studies at
school, he will instantly show the good effect of the home training
and encouragement. As for field trips, the regular Sunday walk, or
evening stroll, may be made to take its place. If you think that you
do not know enough to teach your child on these walks, give him then
the privilege of teaching you. He will work the harder in order to
rise to the occasion.
[Sidenote: Physical Culture]
As for physical culture, if your school is without it, your barn, your
parlor, and your lawn may supply it in some sort. In the barn may be a
trapeze; there is already the ladder and the hay-loft; on the lawn may
be a swing, trees to climb, and the tennis court. In your parlor may
be a little home dancing school, where for a half an hour or so, the
children march, skip, or two-step to music of your making. In the wood
shed may be a carpenter's bench with real tools, where he may work and
get some of the good of manual training.
[Sidenote: Showy Accomplishments]
Accomplishments, meaning thereby showy things that children do for
the edification of guests, are of doubtful value. It is pleasant, of
course, to have your little girl play a piece or two on the piano to
entertain your visitors, but it is not nearly so important as health
and strength, and a cheerful temper. Sometimes all three of these are
sacrificed to the two or three hours' practice a day. Often, too, this
extra work after school hours--work full as monotonous and nervous
and uninteresting as the school work itself--is just what is needed
to transform a healthy young girl into a nervous invalid. This is
especially true, if she undertakes, as she usually does, to study
music when she is about thirteen years old--the very time when, if
wise physicians could regulate affairs to their liking, she would be
taken out of school altogether and required to do nothing more than a
little light housework every day.
[Sidenote: Natural Talent]
Of course, if she is naturally musical some kind of help and sympathy
must be given her in her attempt to master the piano or violin or to
manage her own voice. But while she should be allowed to learn as
much as her unurged energies permit her to learn, she should not be
required to practice more than a very small amount, say half an hour
a day. The bulk of her musical education should be acquired in
the vacation time, when she can give two hours a day without
overstraining.
The same general rules hold good of dancing, painting, the
acquirements of foreign languages, a special course of reading, or
any other work undertaken in addition to the regular school work. This
latter, as it is now constituted, is quite as severe a nervous and
intellectual strain as most young people can undergo with safety.
[Sidenote: "Enthusiasms"]
There is one characteristic in young people which needs to be noted in
this connection:--the desire to take up some form of work, to strive
with it furiously for a brief while, to drop it unfinished; take up
another with equal eagerness, drop that in turn and go on to a third.
This performance is peculiarly irritating to all systematic and
ambitious parents. Sometimes they rigidly insist that each task shall
be finished before a new one is assumed. But in reality, is this
necessary? It seems to be as natural for a young mind to set eagerly
to work for a short time at each new bit of knowledge, as it is for a
nursing child to require refreshments every two or three hours. It is
an adult trait to stick to a task, even though a very long one, until
it is accomplished. The youthful trait is to take kindly to a clutter
of unfinished tasks.
The youthful consciousness is of a world full of jostling interests.
Why not let the children alone, and allow them to spring lightly from
one enthusiasm to another? Of course you will help them to finish,
either at the first sitting or at the second or at the third, the task
that was undertaken when that particular enthusiasm was at its height.
The drawing which has remained on the easel during the foot-ball
season may be suggestively brought to notice again in the quiet times
between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The boat begun last summer may
well be finished in the days of the succeeding Spring when all the
earth is full of the sound of running water. Thus each task, though
not completed at once, gets done in the end; and the youthful capacity
for many sympathies and many desires has not been narrowed.
[Sidenote: Parental Vanity]
Such a line of conduct presupposes, of course, that the parent
considers only the child's best welfare, and not his own parental
vanity. He is not desirous that his son shall do anything so well
as to attract the attention and admiration of the neighbors. He is
desirous merely that the boy shall grow up wholesomely and happily,
showing such superiority as there may be in him when the fitting time
and opportunity present themselves. He will not attempt to make a
musician of an unmusical child, nor a mechanic of an artistic child.
He will not object to the brilliant and impractical dreams of the
young inventor, but will help to make them practicable; and though he
may squirm at some of the investigations of the budding scientist, he
will not forbid them.
[Sidenote: Development of Intellect]
For such a parent recognizes that the important thing, educationally,
is to secure the reaction of expression upon thought and feeling.
That is, he is not trying to secure at this time--at any time during
youth--perfect expression of any thought or feeling, but only to
deepen feeling and clarify thought by encouraging all attempts at
expression. He does not wish his child to make a finished picture or
a perfect statue, but to acquire a greater sensitiveness to color and
form by each attempt to express that color and form which he already
knows. Thus whatever studies and accomplishments his child may be in
the act of acquiring are seen to be nothing as acquisitions, but the
child himself is seen to be growing stage by stage within the clumsy
scaffolding.
FINANCIAL TRAINING
The financial training of children ought really to be considered under
the head of moral training, but in some respects it can come equally
well under the head of intellectual training; for to spend money well
requires both self-control and intelligence. Some persons seem to
think that all that a child can be taught in this regard is to save
money, and they meet the situation by purchasing various shapes and
styles of savings banks. But it is entirely possible to teach the
child too thoroughly in this respect and to make him so fond of his
jingling pennies safe within a yellow crockery pig or iron cupolaed
mansion that be will not spend them for any object, however laudable.
Others evade the issue as long as possible by giving the child no
money at all; while most of us pursue an uncertain and wabbly course,
sometimes giving money, sometimes withholding it, sometimes exhorting
the child to spend, and sometimes to save.
[Sidenote: Regular Allowance]
In truth spending wisely is a difficult problem. As a rule the child
may safely be induced to lay by for a season and then encouraged to
spend for some generous purpose. Christmas and other festivals offer
excellent opportunities for proper disbursement of the hoarded funds.
These may be supposed to have accumulated from irregular gifts; but
as the child grows older he should come into receipt of a regular
definite allowance, perhaps conditioned upon his performance of some
stated duty. A certain part of his allowance he may he permitted to
spend upon such frivolities as are naturally dear to his young heart;
another part of it he should be encouraged--not commanded--to put
aside for larger purposes.
The giving of this allowance must not be confused with the pernicious
habit of bribing the child to the performance of those little daily
courtesies and duties which he ought to be willing to perform out of
love and a sense of right. A certain part of his daily work, such as
seeing that the match-boxes all over the house are filled, or some
similar share of the general labor of the household, may be regarded
as that for which he is paid wages; and any extra task which does not
justly belong to him, he may sometimes be paid for performing; but not
always. For instance, he ought to be willing to run to the grocery
for mother without demanding that he be paid a penny for the job; yet
sometimes the penny may be forthcoming. The point is that he should be
ready to work, even to work hard, without pay, and yet that he should
never feel that his mother withholds pay from him when she can give it
and he receive it without injury.
[Sidenote: Spending Foolishly]
When the money is once his, he should be allowed to feel the full
happiness and responsibility of possession, and if he insists upon
spending it foolishly, should be allowed to do it and to suffer to the
full the uncomfortable consequences. If, on the contrary, he will
not spend it at all, his mother must use every means in her power to
lessen the desire for ownership and to increase his love for others
and his eagerness to please them.
As judgment develops the allowance may well be increased to provide
for necessities in the way of incidentals and clothing until at the
"age of discretion" he is in full charge of the funds for his personal
expenses. He should be encouraged to apply his knowledge of commercial
arithmetic in the keeping of personal accounts.
Experience in spending a fixed amount of money is especially needful
for the daughters. Most young men have the value of money and
financial responsibility forced upon them in the natural course
of events, but too often the young wife has not had the training
qualifying her for the equal financial partnership which should exist
in the ideal marriage.
[Illustration: THE INFANT GALAHAD--FIRST SIGHT OF THE GRAIL
From the mural paintings by Edwin A. Abbey in the Boston Public
Library]
RELIGIOUS TRAINING
[Sidenote: Sunday School Teachers]
If the common school is not sufficient for the secular education
of the child, certainly the Sunday School is not sufficient for his
religious education. In the common schools the teachers are more or
less trained for their work. It is a life occupation with them; by
means of it they earn their living, and their daily success with their
pupils marks their rate of progress toward higher fields of endeavor.
Nothing of this sort is true in the Sunday School. While occasionally
it happens that a day school teacher becomes a Sunday School teacher,
this is seldom true, for most teachers who teach during the week
feel that they need the Sunday for rest; and while some Sunday School
teachers betray a commendable earnestness and zeal for their work, and
associations and conventions have latterly added somewhat to the
joint effort to better the conditions, still it remains true that the
teaching in the Sunday Schools is far below the pedagogic level of
the common schools. Yet the subject which is dealt with in the Sunday
Schools, instead of being of less importance than that dealt with in
the common schools, is of pre-eminently greater importance. Because
of its subtlety, its intimacy with the hidden springs of conduct, it
calls for the exercise of the very highest teaching skill.
Some sort of recognition of these two facts--that Sunday School
teachers are in most cases very inadequately trained for their work,
and that the work itself is of great importance, and of equally great
difficulty--has led to the issuing of many quarterlies, International
Lesson Leaflets, and other Sunday School aids. Necessary as such help
may be under present conditions, they cannot possibly meet the many
difficulties of the case. If the central committees, who issue these
leaflets, were composed wholly of the wisest men and women on earth,
it would still be impossible for them to give lessons to the millions
of children in their various denominations which should meet the
personal needs, and daily interests of these young people.
[Sidenote: Sunday School Training]
As a consequence, Sunday School teaching is and must be largely
theoretical and still more largely exegetical, and with neither theory
nor exegesis is the young mind of the developing child very much
concerned. What he needs is not the historical side of religion or of
that great body of religious literature which we call the Bible, but
a living faith which links all that was taught by the prophets and
apostles, centuries ago, with what is happening in the child's own
town and family at that very moment. It is a wide gap to bridge, and
it cannot be bridged by a semi-historical review backed by picture
cards, golden texts, and stars for good behavior. These things are
merely the marks of an endeavor to fitly accomplish a great task,
an endeavor almost absurdly out of proportion to this aim, rendered
significant, however, because it is the earnest of a great faith and a
great hope.
So far as Sunday Schools help children, it is because of this spirit
of faithfulness, and not because of the form which it has assumed.
In choosing, then, whether you shall send your child to a Sunday
School, choose by the presence or absence of this spirit. If you know
the teachers of the Sunday School to be earnest, loving, and devoted,
you may with safety assume that their personal influence will make up
for what is archaic in their method of teaching. Where the spirit is
present only in a few, or where it manifests itself only occasionally,
as at seasons of revival, you may well hesitate to let your child
attend. A great improvement would come about if parents would show
a greater interest and encourage proper teachers to take charge of
classes. It is a thankless task at present.
[Sidenote: Theory Not Practice]
There is one great danger in the teaching of any Sunday School--one
which the best of them cannot wholly escape--and that is, that, in the
very nature of things, they teach theory and not practice. Harmful as
this may be, indeed as it surely is in adult life, it does not begin
to be so harmful as it does in youth, for the young child, as we have
seen, is and should remain a unit in consciousness. His life, his
intellect, and his will are one--an undivided trinity. The divorce of
these three is at any time a regrettable occurrence; the divorce of
them in early life is an almost irreparable disaster.
[Sidenote: Useless Truths]
The current theory is that children will learn many truths in the
Sunday School which they will not put into practice then, perhaps, but
which they will find useful in later life. This fallacy underlies, of
course, almost all conventional education and has only been overthrown
by the dictum of modern psychology, that there is but small storage
accommodation in the brain for facts which have no immediate relation
to life. What may be termed the saturating power of the brain is
limited, and after it has soaked up a rather small number of truths,
it can contain no more until it has in some way disposed of those that
it still has--either by making them part of its own living structure,
which is done only by making immediate application of them; or by
dropping them below the threshold of consciousness, that is, in common
language, forgetting them. Moreover, the brain may form the habit of
easily dropping all that relates to a given subject into the limbo
where unused things lie disregarded, and when this becomes the
habitual method of disposing of religious instruction, the results are
particularly deplorable.
[Sidenote: The Mother as Teacher]
Feeble as her own knowledge may be, a mother has certain advantages as
a teacher of her children over any but the exceptional Sunday school
teacher. For, first, she knows the children, and, knowing them, knows
their needs. Secondly, she knows their daily lives and continually
during the week can point out wherein they fail to live up to
their Sunday's lesson. And again and most important, she loves them
tenderly, and from love flows wisdom. Usually the mother gives her own
children a love far beyond that given by anyone else, and this deeper
love sharpens her intellectual faculties and makes her both a keen
observer and a good tactician. Giving her children some simple lesson
on Sunday afternoon, she finds a hundred opportunities to make the
lesson living and vital to them during the succeeding week.
[Sidenote: Religious Enthusiasm]
In the early years of the child's life, the mother is usually the
one to decide whether he shall attend Sunday School or not, but as
he approaches adolescence he is likely to take the matter in his
own hands, and if it happens that some revivalist or a new stirring
preacher comes in contact with his life at this time, he is very
likely to be swept off his feet with a sudden zeal of religious
enthusiasm, which his mother fears to check. The reports of
memberships, baptisms, etc., show that a large number become converted
and join the church during adolescence. While this does not in the
least argue that the conclusions that they reach at that time are
therefore unsound--for adolescence is not a disease, nor a form of
insanity, but a normal, if excitable, condition--still it does prove,
when coupled with the further fact that in adult life these young
converts often relapse into their previous condition, that a more
lasting basis for religion must be found than the emotional intensity
of this period of life. A religion to be lasting must be coldly
reaffirmed by the intellect: the dictum of the heart alone is not
sufficient. Religious enthusiasm, like all other forms of enthusiasm,
tends of itself to bring about the opposite condition, and to be
succeeded by fits of despondency and bitterness as intense and severe
as the enthusiasm itself was brilliant and ecstatic. The history of
all great religious leaders amply proves this. They had their bitter
hours of wrestling with the powers of darkness, hours which almost
counter-balanced the hours of uplift. Only clearly thought-out
intellectual convictions reinforced by the habit of daily righteous
living can secure the soul against such emotional aberrations.
[Sidenote: Danger of Reaction]
Therefore, although the religious excitability of adolescence must
not be thwarted lest it be turned into less helpful channels, and lest
religion lose all the beauty and compelling power lent to it by the
glow of youthful feelings, yet it must be so balanced and ordered by
a clear reason, and especially by the habit of putting each enthusiasm
to the test of conduct, that the young mind may remain true to its law
of growth, developing harmoniously on all three sides at once.
The danger of permitting a young boy or girl while under the influence
of this emotional instability to enter into any special form of
religious service is the danger of reaction. He will discover that
all is not as his early vision led him to suppose--because that
early vision was of things too high and holy for any earthly
realization--and he may turn against what seems to him to be hypocrisy
and pretense with a bitterness proportioned to his former love. Many
honest, faithful men and women remain in this state of reaction for
the rest of their lives.
[Sidenote: A Difficult Period]
Nevertheless, it will not do to thwart these young beginnings. They
must neither be nipped in the bud nor forced to a premature ripening.
Above all they must not be suffered to endure the killing frost of
ridicule. The period is a difficult one, but, as Dr. Stanley Hall
points out, it is supremely the mother's opportunity. If she can hold
her boy's or her girl's confidence now, can ease their eager young
hearts with an intelligent sympathy, she can probably keep them from
any public commitment. Perhaps they may desire to confide in the
minister; if so, let the mother confide in him first. Perhaps they
have bosom friends, passing through the same stirring experience; then
let the mother win over these friends.
Her object should be to shelter this beautiful sentiment; to keep it
safe from exposure; above all, to utilize it as a motive-power--as
an incentive to noble action. The Kindergarten rule is a good one: as
quick as a love springs in a child's breast, give it something to do.
When the love of God awakes there, give it much to do. Usually, the
only way open is to join the church, to make a public profession. The
wise mother will see to it that there are other ways, urging the young
knight to serve his King by going forth into the world immediately
about him and fighting against all forms of evil, giving him a
practical, definite quest. The result of such restriction of
public speech, and stimulation of private deed, will be a sincere,
lowly-minded religion, so inwoven with the truest activities as to be
inseparable from them. Such a religion knows no reaction.
[Sidenote: Bible Study]
Now is supremely the time for a study of the Bible. Interesting as a
Divine Story Book to the young children, it becomes the Book of Life
to these older ones. In teaching it at home, a few simple rules need
to be borne in mind. The first is that the Bible must be thought of
not as a series of disconnected texts and thoughts, but as a connected
whole. The division of King James' Bible into verses and chapters is
but poorly adapted to this purpose. The illogical, strange character
of the paragraphing, as measured by the standards of modern English,
is apparent at a glance, for often a verse will end in the middle of
a sentence, and the sentence be concluded in the next verse. The
chapters in the same way often fail to finish the subject with which
they deal, and sometimes include several subjects. Therefore, the
mother who undertakes to read the Bible to her children needs first
to go through the lesson herself, and to decide what subject, not what
chapter, she will take up that day. There is a reader's edition of
the Bible, and one called the "Children's Bible," both of which aim
to leave out all repetition and references and to arrange the Bible
narrative in a simple, consecutive order, nevertheless employing the
beautiful Bible language. These editions might prove of considerable
help to mothers who feel unequal to doing the work by themselves.
[Sidenote: Children's Bible]
Second, comparable to this in importance is the reading of the Bible
and talking about it in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice; for what
you want is to make the Bible teachings live in to-day. You must not,
therefore, suggest by your tone or manner that they belong to another
day, and that they are, in some sense, to be shut out from common life
and speech. This does not mean such common use of Biblical phrases
in every day conversation as to cause it to grow into that form or
irreverence known as cant, but it does mean simple usage of Bible
thought, and the effort to fit it to the conditions of daily life.
Such a habit in itself will force any family to discriminate as to
what things in the Bible are living and eternal, and what things
belong rightly to that far away time and place of which the Bible
narrative treats, thus practicing both teacher and pupils--that is,
both parents and children--in the art of finding the universal spirit
of truth under all temporal disguises. Without this art the Bible is a
closed book, even to the closest student.
[Sidenote: Making Lessons Real]
Again, every effort should be made to help the home Bible class to
understand the period studied in that week's lesson, and to this end
secular literature and art should be freely called upon, not only such
stories, for example, as "Ben Hur," but other stories not necessarily
religious, which deal with the same time and place; they are of great
help in putting vividly before the children and parents the temporal
setting of the eternal stories. Cannon Farrar's "Life of Christ" is a
very great help to the realization of the New Testament scenes, as is
also Tissot's "Pictorial Life of Christ." In short every art should be
made to deepen and clarify the conceptions roused by the study of the
Bible.
[Sidenote: In Conclusion]
The mother who undertakes the tremendous task of rightly training her
children, will need to exercise herself daily in all the Christian
virtues--and if there are any Pagan ones not included under faith,
hope, charity, patience, and humility, to exercise those also.
With these virtues to support her, she will be able to use whatever
knowledge she may acquire. Without them she can do nothing.
TEST QUESTIONS
The following questions constitute the "written recitation" which the
regular members of the A.S.H.E. answer in writing and send in for
the correction and comment of the instructor. They are intended to
emphasize and fix in the memory the most important points in the
lesson.
PART III
Read Carefully. In answering these questions you are earnestly
requested _not_ to answer according to the text-book where opinions
are asked for, but to answer according to conviction. In all cases
credit will be given for thought and original observation. Place your
name and full address at the head of the paper; use your own words so
that your instructor may be sure that you understand the subject.
1. How can you bring the influence of art to bear upon your child?
2. What is the influence of music? How can you employ it?
3. Do you believe in fairy tales for children? State your reasons.
4. How would you encourage the love of nature in your child?
5. What is it that the Kindergarten can do better than the home?
6. Suppose that your child had some undesirable acquaintances, how
would you meet the situation?
7. What can you say of accomplishments for children?
8. If manual training, physical culture, domestic science, etc., are
not taught in your schools and you wish your children to get some of
the advantages of these studies, how will you set about it?
9. What do you understand to be the correlation of studies?
10. Should parents become acquainted with the teachers of their
children and their methods? Why?
11. How may children be taught the use of money?
12. State the advantages and disadvantages of Sunday schools. What
have they meant in _your own_ experience?
13. How will you train your child religiously? Can anyone take this
task from you?
14. What rules must be borne in mind in teaching the Bible at home?
15. Give some experience of your own (or of a friend) in the training
of a child wherein a success has been achieved.
16. Are there any questions you would like to ask or subjects which
you wish to discuss in connection with the lessons on the Study of
Child Life?
Note.--After completing the test sign it with your full name.
Supplementary Notes
on
STUDY OF CHILD LIFE
BY MARION FOSTER WASHBURNE
APPLICATION OF PRINCIPLES.
In this "Study of Child Life" we have considered some of the
fundamental principles of education. When we think of the complex
inheritance of the American people it is, perhaps, no wonder that many
families contain individuals varying so widely from each other as to
seem to require each a complete system of education all to himself.
We are a people born late in the history of the race, and our blood
is mingled of the Norseman's, the Celt's, and the Latin's. Advancing
civilization alone would tend to make us more complex, our problems
more subtle; but in addition to this we are mixed of all races, and
born in times so strenuous that, sooner or later, every fibre of our
weaving is strained and brought into prominence.
In the letters from my students this fact, with which I was already
familiar in a general sort of way, has been brought more particularly
to my attention. In all cases, the situation has been responsible for
much confusion and difficulty. In a good many, it has led to
family tragedies, varying in magnitude from the unhappiness of the
misunderstood child to that of the lonely woman, suffering in adult
life from the faults of her upbringing, and the failure of the family
ties whose need she felt the more as the duties of motherhood pressed
upon her. If it were possible for me to violate the confidence of my
pupils I could prove very conclusively that the old-fashioned system
of bringing up children on the three R's and a spanking did not work
so well as some persons seem to think. I could prove that the problem
has grown past the point where instinct and tradition may be held
as sufficient to solve it. Everyone, seeing these letters, would be
obliged to confess, "Yes, indeed, here is plain need of training for
parents." Yet, at the same time, these same persons would be tempted
to inquire, "But can any training meet such a difficult situation?"
Here is despair; and some cause for it. When one's own mother has not
understood one; when one has lived lonely in the midst of brothers and
sisters who are more strange than strangers; when one's childhood is
full of the memory of obscure but intense sufferings, one flies for
relief, perhaps, to any one who offers it hopefully enough; but
one does not really expect to get it. _Can_ training, especially by
correspondence, meet the need?
Not wholly, of course, let us be frank to admit. No amount of theory,
however excellent, can take the place of the drill given only in the
hard school of experience. But when the theory is not merely theory,
but sound principle, based on scientific observation, confirmed by the
wide experience of many persons, it is as valuable in practical life
as any rule of mathematics to the practical engineer. We all know that
the technical correspondence schools really do fit young mechanics
to move on and up in the trade. By correspondence he is given what
Froebel calls the interpreting word. The experience in application the
student has to supply himself.
So in the matter of education. There are genuine principles which
underlie the development of every child that lives--even the
feeble-minded, deaf, and blind. Read Helen Keller's wonderful life,
if you want to see the proof of it. Just as surely as a child has
two legs and has to learn to walk on them by a series of prolonged
experiments, just so surely he has (a) a sense of justice, (b) an
instinct for freedom, (c) a love of play. Every kind of child has all
these instincts, as much as he has love for food and drink; and to
educate him consists in developing these instincts into (a) the habit
of dealing justly by others, (b) the right use of freedom, (c) love
of work. The particular methods may differ. The principles _do not and
CANNOT DIFFER_.
She who would succeed in child training must hold to these truths with
all her might and main--making them, in fact, her religion, for they
are the doctrines of the Christian religion as applied to motherhood.
To hold them lightly, or even experimentally, will not do. One most
walk in faith. And that the faith may not be blind, but may be based
on experience and understanding, let me suggest this means of proof:
Instead of asking yourself how the laws laid down in these little
books would fit this or that particular child, your own or another's,
ask how they would have fitted you, if they had been applied to you
by your own mother. Take the chapter on faults, pick out the one which
was yours, in childhood--oh, of course, you've got over it now!--think
of some bitter trouble into which that fault hurried you, and conceive
that, instead of the punishment you did receive, you had been treated
as the lesson suggests--what, do you think, would have been the
result? And so with the other chapters--even with that much-mooted
question of companionship. Test the truth of them all by their
imaginary application to the child you know best. When you can, find
the principles that your own mother did employ in your education,
and examine the result of what she did. Some of the principles will
suddenly become luminous to you, I am sure; and some things that
happened in the past receive an explanation.
Such a self-examination, to be of any value, must be rigidly honest.
There is too much at stake here for you to permit any remnants of
bitter feeling to influence your judgment--and you will surely be
surprised to find how many bitter resentments will show that they
yet have life. The past is dead, as far as your power to change it is
concerned; but it lives, as a thing that you can use. Here is your own
child, to be helped or hindered by what you may have endured. It will
all have been worth while, if by means of it you can save him from
some bruises and falls. Every bitterness will be sweetened if you
can look through it and find the truth which shall serve this dearer
little self who looks to you for guidance.
Then, when you have found the principles true--and not one minute
before!--put them rigidly into practice. I say, not one minute before
you are convinced, because it is better to hold the truth lightly in
the memory as a mere interesting theory you have never had time to
test, than to swallow it, half assimilated. Truth is a real and living
power, once it is applied to life; and to half-use it in doubt, and
fear, is to invite indigestion and consequent disgust. Take of these
teachings that which you are sure is sound and right, and use it
faithfully, and unremittingly. Be careful that no plea of expediency,
no hurry of the moment, makes you false. If you are thus faithful
in small things, one after the other, in a series fitted to your own
peculiar constitution, the others will prove themselves to you; for
they are coherent truths, and not one lives to itself alone, but joins
hands with all the rest. Being truths, they fit all human minds--yours
and mine, and those of our children, no matter how diverse we may be.
OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN
Isn't it ridiculously true that, as soon as we get enlightened
ourselves, we burn to enlighten the rest of the world? We do not seem
to remember our own feelings during the years of darkness, and the
contentment of those who remain as we were surpasses our power of
comprehension. It is really comforting to my own sense of impatience
and balked zeal to find how many of my pupils are dreadfully concerned
about other people's children. This one's heart burns over the little
boy next door who is shamefully mismanaged and who already begins to
show the ill effects of his treatment. That one has a sister-in-law
who refuses to listen to a word spoken in season.
Between my smiles--those comfortable smiles with which we recognize
our own shortcomings--I, too, am really concerned about the
sister-in-law's children. It is true that their mother ought to be
taught better, and that, if she isn't, those innocent lambs are going
to suffer for it. Off at this distance, without the ties of kindred to
draw me too close for clear judgment, I see, though, that we have
to walk very cautiously here, for fear of doing more harm than good.
Better that those benighted women never heard the name of child-study,
than to hear it only to greet it with rebellion and hatred. Yet
to force any of our principles upon her attention when she is in a
hostile mood--or to _force_ them, indeed, in any mood--is to invite
just this attitude.
Most of us, by the time that we are sufficiently grown up to undertake
the study of child life, have outgrown the habit of plainly telling
our friends to their faces just what we think of their faults; yet
this is a safe and pleasant pastime beside that other of trying
to tell them how to bring up their children. You stand it from me,
because you have invited it, and perhaps still more because you never
see me, and the personal element enters only slightly and pleasantly
into our relationship. I sometimes think that students pour out their
hearts to me, much as we used to talk to our girl friends in the dark.
I'm very sure I should never dare to say to their faces what I write
so freely on the backs of their papers!
You see, the adult, too, has his love of freedom; and while he can
stand an indirect, impersonal preachment, which he may reject if he
likes without apology, he will not stand the insistence of a personal
appeal. I've let "Little Women" shame me into better conduct, when I
was a girl, at times when no direct speech from a living soul would
have brought me to anything but defiance--haven't you? We have to
apply our principles to the adult world about us, well as to the
child-world, and teach, when we permit ourselves to teach at all,
chiefly by example, by cheerful confession of fallibility, by
open-mindedness. Above all things, we have to respect the freedom of
these others, about whom we are so inconveniently anxious.
It is fair, though, that the spoken word should interpret what we do.
It is fair enough to tell your sister-in-law what you think and ask
her judgment upon it, if you can trust yourself not to rub your own
judgment in too hard. If you are unmarried, and a teacher, you will
have to concede to her preposterous marital conceit a humble and
inquiring attitude, and console your flustered soul by setting it
to the ingenious task of teaching by means of a graduated series of
artful inquiries. Don't, oh don't! seek for an outspoken victory.
Be content if some day you hear her proclaim your truth as her own
discovery. It never was yours, anyway, any more than it is hers or
than it is mine. Be glad that, while she claims it, she at least holds
it close.
If you are a mother, you are in an easier case. You can do to your own
children just what she ought to do to hers, and tell about it softly,
as if sure of her sympathy. If you are very sincere in your desire for
the welfare of her child, you may even ask her advice about yours, and
so gain the right to offer a little in exchange--say one-tenth of what
she gives.
All these warnings apply to unsought advice--a dangerous thing to
offer under any circumstances. Except there is a real emergency, you
had better avoid it. If your nephew or little neighbor is winning
along through his troubles fairly well, best keep hands off. But if
you absolutely _must_ interfere, guard yourself as I suggest, and
remember that, even then, you will assuredly get burned, if you play
long with that dangerous fire of maternal pride!
When your advice is sought, you are in a different position. Then you
have a right to speak out, though if you are wise and loving you will
temper that right with charity. No one can be too gentle in dealing
with a soul that honestly asks for help; but one can easily be too
timid. Think, under these circumstances, of yourself not at all;
but put yourself as much as possible in her place; be led by her
questions; and answer fearlessly from the depths of the best truth you
hold. Then leave it. You can do no more. What becomes of that truth,
once you have lovingly spoken it, is no more of your concern.
THE SEX QUESTION
Always convinced of the importance of this subject, convictions have
deepened to the point of dismay since learning, through this school,
of the many women who have suffered and who continue to suffer, both
mentally and physically, because, in early girlhood, they were not
taught those finer physiological facts upon which the very life of the
race depends. Yet, strangely enough, these very victims find it almost
impossible to give their children the knowledge necessary to save
them from a similar fate. It is as if the lack of early training in
themselves leaves them helpless before a situation from which they
suffer but which they have never mastered.
Of course such feelings, in themselves morbid, are not to be trusted.
Faced with a task like this we have only to ask ourselves not "Is it
hard?" but "Is it in truth my task?" If it is, we may be sure that we
shall be given strength to do it, provided only that we are sincere in
our willingness to do it and do not count our feelings at all.
It is preposterous to have such feelings, in the first place. They
are wholly the product of false teaching. For we have no right--as we
recognize when we stop to think about it in calmness of spirit, and
apart from our special difficult--to sit in scornful judgment upon
any of the laws of nature. When we find ourselves in rebellion against
them, what we have to do is to change the state of our minds, for
change the laws we cannot. If we women could inaugurate a gigantic
strike against the present method of bearing children--and I imagine
that millions would join such a strike if it held out any promise of
success!--we still could accomplish nothing. To fret ourselves into a
frazzle over it, is to accomplish less than nothing;--it is to enter
upon the pathway to destruction.
In teaching our children, then, we have first to conquer
ourselves--that painful, reiterated, primal necessity, which must
underlie all teaching. Having done so, we shall find our task easier
than we supposed. The children's own questions will lead us; and if we
simply make it a rule never to answer a question falsely no matter how
far it may probe, we shall find ourselves not only enlightening
but receiving enlightenment. For nothing is so sure an antidote to
morbidness as the unspoiled mind of a child. He looks at the facts
with such a calm, level gaze that proportions are restored to us as we
follow his look.
Many of my letters show that adult women, wives and mothers, still
grope for the truth that lies plain to the eyes of any simple
child--the truth that there is no such thing as clean and unclean,
only use and misuse. Others, through love, and the splendid
revelations that it makes, have risen so far above their former
misconceptions that they fear to tell a child the facts before he has
experienced the love. I can imagine that in an ideal world some such
reticence might be good and right--but this is far from an ideal
world. We have to train our children relatively, not absolutely, in
the knowledge that we do not control all their environment. I think
the solution of the difficulty is to teach the facts of sex in a
perfectly calm, unemotional, matter-of-fact manner, just as one
teaches the laws of digestion. When knowledge of evil is thrust upon
our child let us be sorry with him that those other children have
never been taught, and that they are doing their bodies such sad
mischief. But don't exaggerate it; don't be too shocked; don't condemn
the poor little sinners, who are also victims, too severely. Charity
toward wrong-doing is the best prophylactic against imitation. We
never feel the lure of a sin which grieves us in another; but often
the call of a sin which we too strongly condemn. Because the very
strength of the condemnation rouses our imaginations, is in itself an
emotion, and, since it is certainly not a loving one, must necessarily
be linked with all other unloving and therefore evil emotions. As far
as possible, let us keep feeling out of this subject, until such time
as the true and beautiful feeling of love between husband and wife
arises and uplifts it.
FATHERS
And now comes the editor of these lessons and accuses me of neglecting
the fathers! Nothing in this world could be farther from my thoughts.
Not only do I agree with him that "all ordinary children have fathers,
and it might be well to put in a paragraph;" but I am cheerfully
willing to write a whole book on the subject, provided that a mere
modicum of readers can be assured me. I fairly ache to talk to
fathers, having a really great ideal of them, and whenever a class of
them can be induced to take up a correspondence course I shall be glad
to conduct it.
Joking aside, however, I truly feel that the saddest lack many of our
children have to suffer is the lack of fathers; and the saddest lack
our men have to suffer is the lack of children. So little are most men
awake to this subject that I am perfectly convinced that much of the
prevalent "race suicide" is due to their objections to a large family,
rather than to their wives'. Upon them comes the burden of support.
They get few of the joys which belong to children, and nearly all of
the woes. Seldom do they share the games of their offspring, or their
happy times; and almost always the worst difficulties are thrust upon
them for solution. Not that they often solve them! How can we expect
it?
There is Edgar growing very untruthful and defiant. We have concealed
all the first stages of the disease for fear of bothering poor tired
papa. At last it reaches such a height that we can conceal it no
longer. We fling the desperate boy at the very head of the bewildered
father, and then have turns of bitter disappointment because the
remedies that are applied may be so much cruder, even, than our own.
Here is a boy who gets close to his father only to find the proximity
very uncomfortable; and a father who becomes acquainted with his son
only through the ugly revelations of his worst faults.
Not but that the fathers are somewhat to blame, too. Without urging by
us, they ought, of course to take a spontaneous interest in the lives
for which they are responsible. They ought to, and they often do; but
the interest is sometimes ill-advised, and consequently unwelcome.
There are fathers whose interest is a most inconvenient thing. When
they are at home, they run everything, growl at everything, upset, as
like as not, all that the mother has been trying to do during the day.
I know wives who are distinctly glad to encourage their husbands in
the habit of lunching down-town, so that they can have a little room
for their own peculiar form of activity. And maybe we all have times
of sympathizing with the woman in this familiar story: There was a man
once who never left the house without a list of directions to his wife
as to how she should manage things during his absence.
"Better have the children carry umbrellas this morning; it's going to
rain," said he, as he went out of the door. "Be sure to put on their
rubbers. And since the baby is so croupy I'd get out his winter
flannels, if I were you."
"Yes, dear," said the patient wife. "Make your mind easy. I'll take
just as good care of them as if they were my own children." Of course
this is an extreme case.
There are other fathers whose whole idea of the parental relation
seems to be indulgence. No system of discipline, however mild, can be
carried out when such a man wins the children's hearts and ruins their
dispositions. It is he, isn't it? (I don't quite recollect the tale)
who was sent, after death, to the warm regions, there to expiate his
many sins of omission. And his adoring children, who had been hauled
to heaven by the main strength, let us say, of their mother, found
that the only thing they could do for him was to call out celestial
hose company number one and ask them to play awhile upon the
overheated apartments of poor tired papa.
The truth is--sit close and let no man hear what we say!--that these
fathers are much what we, the mothers, make them. If, under the
mistaken idea of saving father from all the worries of the children,
we hurry the youngsters off to bed before he comes home in
the evening, conceal our heart-burnings over them, do our
correspondence-school work in secret and solitude, meditate in the
same fashion over plans for their upbringing, talk to our neighbors
but never to him about the daily troubles, how can we expect any man
on earth, no matter how susceptible of later angelic growth, to become
a wise and devoted father? Tired or not, he is a father, not a mere
bread-winner. Whether he likes it at the moment or not, it is for
his soul's health for him to enter into the full life of his family,
including those problems which are at the very heart of it, after his
day of grinding, and very likely unloving, work at the office. Here
love enters to interpret, to soften, to make all principles live. Here
alone he can give himself to those gentler forms of judgment which
are necessary as much to the completion of his own character as to the
happiness and welfare of his wife and children. Someone has said that
we wrong our friends when we ask nothing of them; and certainly it is
true that we wrong our husbands when we do not demand big and splendid
things of them.
That word demand troubles me a little. So many women demand--and
demand terribly! But what they demand is indulgence, sympathy,
interest--I think sometimes that they crave a man's utter absorption
in themselves much as a man craves strong drink. It is their form of
intoxication. Such demanding is not, of course, what I mean. Demand
nothing for yourself, beyond simple justice. Not love, for that flies
at the very sound of demand, and dies before nagging. But demand for
the man himself, call upon his nobler qualities, and don't let him
palm off on you his second-best. Many a man is loved and honored by
his business associates whose wife and children never catch a glimpse
of the finer side of him. Demand the exercise of these fine traits in
the home. Demand that he be a fine man in the eyes of his children as
in the eyes of his friends. Be sure that he will rise to the occasion
with a splendid sense of having, now, a home that is a home, of having
a wife who is wived to the man he likes best to be.
This bids fair to be--as I knew it would, if once I permitted myself
to write at all on the subject--not a paragraph, but a whole essay--or
perhaps, if I did not check myself, a whole volume! But after all,
what I want to say is merely that as no child can be born without
a father, so he cannot be properly trained without a father's daily
assistance. And that, since most fathers come to the task even more
untrained than the mothers, some training must be undertaken. By whom?
By the mother. It is, I solemnly believe, your duty to go ahead a
little on this part of the journey, find out what ought to be done,
and teach, coax, induce your husband to co-operate with you in these
things. No one knows better than you do that he is only a boy at heart
after all--perhaps the very dearest boy of them all. This boy you have
to help while yet the other children are little--but be sure that, as
you teach him, so, all the time, will he teach you. Every principle
laid down in this book, above all others the principle of _freedom_,
will apply to him. He will take the lessons a trifle more reluctantly
but more lastingly than the younger boys; and in a little while you
will be envied of all your women friends because of the competency,
the reliability, the contentment of your children's father.
THE UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE
When all is said and done, it remains true that the finest, the
most subtle and penetrating influence in education is precisely
that education for which no rules can be laid down. It is the silent
influence of the motives which impel the persons who constantly
surround us. If we examine for a little our own childhood we see at
once that this is so. What are those canons of conduct by which we
judge others and even occasionally ourselves? Whence came that list
of _impossible_ things, those things that are so closed to us that we
cannot, even under great stress, of temptation, conceive ourselves as
yielding to them?
There is an enlightening story of a young man, born and bred a
gentleman, who, by the way of fast living falls upon poverty. In the
hard pressure of his financial affairs he is about to commit suicide,
when suddenly he finds, in an empty cab, a roll of bills amounting to
some thousands of dollars. The circumstances are such that he knows
that he can, if he will, discover the owner; or, he can, without
fear of detection, keep the money himself. He makes up his mind,
deliberately, to keep it, and then, almost against his will,
subconsciously as it were, walks to the office of the man who lost the
money and restores it to him.
Now, doubtless, in his downward career he had done many things which
judged by any absolute standard of morality were quite as wrong as the
keeping of that money would have been, but the fact remained that he
could not do that deed. Others, yes, but not that. He was a gentleman,
and gentlemen do not steal private property, whatever they may do
about public property. Yet probably, in all his life he had not once
been told not to steal--not one word had he been taught, openly,
on the subject. No one whom he knew stole. He was never expected
to steal. Stealing was a sin beyond the pale. So strong was this
unconscious, _but unvarying_ influence, that by it he was saved, in
the hour of extreme need, from even feeling the force of a temptation
that to a boy born and reared, say, in the slums, would have been
overwhelming.
Now, considering such things, I take it that it behooves us, as
parents, to look closely at the sort of persons that we are, clear
inside of us. To examine, as if with the clear eyes of our own
children, waiting to be clouded by our sophistries, the motives from
which we habitually act in the small affairs of everyday life. Are
we influenced by fear of what the neighbors will say? Have we one
standard of courtesy for company times, and another for private
moments? If so, why? Are we self-indulgent about trifles? Are we
truthful in spirit as well as in letter? Do we permit ourselves to
cheat the street-car and the railroad company, teaching the child at
our side to sit low that he may ride for half-fare? Do we seek
justice in our bargaining, or are we sharp and self-considerate? Do we
practice democracy, or only talk it and wave the flag at it?
And so on with a hundred other questions as to those small repeated
acts, which, springing from base motives, may put our unconscious
influence with our children in the already over-weighted down-side of
the scale; or met bravely and nobly, at some expense of convenience,
may help to enlighten the weight of inherited evil. Sometimes I wonder
how much of what we call inherited evil is the result not of heredity
at all, but of this sort of unconscious education.
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS
THE SELF-DISTRUSTFUL CHILD.
"Your question is an excellent one. The answer to it is really
contained in your answer to the question about obedience. If a child
obey _laws_ not persons, and is steadily shown the reasonableness of
what is required of him, he comes to trust those laws and to trust
himself when he is conscious of obeying. But in addition to this
general training, it might be well to give a self-distrustful child
easy work to do--work well within his ability--then to praise him for
performing it; give him something a little harder, but still within
his reach, and so on, steadily calling on him for greater and greater
effort, but seeing to it that the effort is not too great and that it
bears visible fruit. He should never be allowed to be discouraged; and
when he droops over his work, some strong, friendly help may well he
given him. Sensitive, conscientious children, such as I imagine
you were, are sometimes overwhelmed in this way by parents, quite
unconscious of the pain they are giving by assigning tasks that are
beyond the strength and courage of the young toilers.
"At the same time, much might be done by training the child's
attention from _product_ to _process_. You know the St. Louis Fair
does not aim to show what has been done, but _how_ things are done.
So a child--so you--can find happiness and intellectual uplift in
studying the laws at work under the simplest employment instead of
counting the number of things _finished_."
COMPANY WAYS
"A boy who is visiting us is so beset with rules and 'nagged' even
by glances and nudges, that I wonder that he is not bewildered and
rebellious. He seems good and pleasant and obedient (12 years old),
but I keep wondering why?"
"Perhaps these were company ways inspired by an over-anxiety on his
mother's part that he should appear well. Oh, I have been so tempted
in this direction!--for of course people look at my children to see if
they prove the truth of my teachings, and as they are vigorous, free
and active youngsters, with decided characteristics they often do the
most unexpected and uncomfortable things! There must be good points
both in the boy himself--the boy you mention--and in his training
which offset the bad effects of the 'nagging' you notice--and possibly
the nagging itself may not be customary when he is at home. And
perhaps the mother knows that you are a close observer of children."
THEORY BEFORE PRACTICE
"There is only one danger in learning about the training of children
in advance of their advent, and that is the danger of being too sure
of ourselves--too systematic. The best training is that which is most
invisible--which leaves the child most in freedom. Almost the whole
duty of mothers is to provide the right environment and then just
love and enjoy the child as he moves and grows in it. But to do this
apparently easy thing requires so much simplicity and directness of
vision and most of us are so complex and confused that considerable
training and considerable effort are required to put us into the right
attitude.
"For myself, soon after I took my kindergarten training, which I did
with three babies creeping and playing about the schoolroom, I read
George Meredith's 'Ordeal of Richard Feveril' (referred to on p. 33,
Part I) and felt that that book was an excellent counter-balance,
saving me, in the nick of time, from imposing any system, however
perfect, upon my children. Perhaps you will enjoy reading it, too."
THE EMOTIONAL APPEAL
"Doing right from love of parent may easily become too strong a factor
and too much reliance may be placed upon it. There are few dangers in
child training more real than the danger of over working the emotional
appeal. You do not wish your child to form the habit of working for
approval, do you?"
THE FOOD QUESTION
"The food question can be met in less direct ways with your young
baby. No food but that which is good for him need be seen. It is
seldom good to have so young a child come to the family table. It
is better he would have his own meals, so that he is satisfied with
proper foods before the other appears. Or, if he must eat when you do,
let him have a little low table to himself, spread with his own pretty
little dishes and his own chair, with perhaps a doll for companion or
playmate. From this level he cannot see or be tempted by the viands on
the large table; yet, if his table is near your chair you can easily
reach and serve him. It is a real torment to a young child to see
things he must not touch or eat, and it is a perfectly unnecessary
source of trouble.
"My four children ate at such a low table till the oldest was eight
years old, when he was promoted to our table, and the others followed
in due order."
AIR CASTLES
"What a wonderful reader you were as a child! and certainly the books
you mention were far beyond you. Yet I can not quite agree that the
habit of air-castle building is pernicious. Indeed I believe in it.
It needs only to be balanced by practical effort, directed towards
furnishing an earthly foundation for the castle. Build, then, as high
and splendid as you like, and love them so hard that you are moved
to lay a few stones on the solid earth as a beginning of a more
substantial structure; and some day you may wake to find some of your
castles coming true. Those practical foundation stones underlying a
tremendous tower of idealism have a genuine magic power. Build all you
like about your baby, for instance. Think what things Mary pondered in
her heart.
"No, I'm never worried about idealism except when it is contented with
itself and makes but little effort at outward realization. But the
fact that you are taking this course proves that you will work to
realize your ideals.
"I don't think it very bad either to read to 'kill time.' Though if
you go on having a family, you won't have any time to kill in a very
little while. But do read on when you can, otherwise you may be shut
in, first you know, to too small a world, and a mother needs to draw
her own nourishment from _all_ the world, past and present."
DUTY TO ONESELF
"Yes, I should say you were distinctly precocious, and that you are
almost certainly suffering from the effects of that early brilliancy.
But the degree was not so great as to permanently injure you,
especially if you see what is the matter, and guard against repeating
the mistakes of your parents. I mean that you can now treat your own
body and mind and nerves as you wish they had treated them. Pretend
that you are your own little child, and deal with yourself tenderly
and gently, making allowances for the early strain to which you were
subjected. So few of us American women, with our alert minds, and our
Puritanic consciences, have the good sense and self-control to refrain
from driving ourselves; and if, as often happens, we have formed
the bad habit early in life, reform is truly difficult, but not
impossible. We can get the good of our disability by conscientiously
driving home the principle that in order to 'love others as ourselves'
we must learn to _love ourselves as we love others_. We have literally
no right to be unreasonably exacting toward ourselves,--but perhaps I
am taking too much upon myself by preaching outside the realm of child
study."
THE MOTHER AND THE TEACHER
"Your paper has been intensely interesting to me. I have always held
that a true teacher was really a mother, though of a very large flock,
just as a true mother is really a teacher, though of a very small
school. The two points of view complete each other and I doubt if
either mother or teacher can see truly without the other. They tell
us, you know, that our two eyes, with their slight divergence of
position, are necessary to make us, see things as having more than one
side; and the mother and the teacher, one seeing the individual child,
the other the child as the member of the race, need each other to see
the child as the complex, many-sided individual he really is.
"In your school, do you manage to get the mothers to co-operate? Here,
I am trying to get near my children's teachers. They try, too; but
it is not altogether easy for any of us. We need some common meeting
ground--some neutral activity which we could share. If you have any
suggestions, I shall be glad to have them. Of course, I visit school
and the teachers visit me, and we are friendly in an arm's length
sort of fashion. That is largely because they believe in corporal
punishment and practice it freely and it is hard for us to look
straight at each other over this disagreement."
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT.
To the Matron of a Girls' Orphan Asylum
"Now to the specific questions you ask. My answers must, of course, be
based upon general principles--the special application, often so
very difficult a matter, must be left to you. To begin with corporal
punishment. You say you are 'personally opposed, but that your early
training and the literal interpretation of Solomon's rod keep you
undecided.' Surely your own comment later shows that part, at least,
of the influence of your early training was _against_ corporal
punishment, because you saw and felt its evils in yourself. Such
early training may have made you unapt in thinking of other means
of discipline; but it can hardly have made you think of corporal
punishment as _right_.
"And how can anyone take Solomon's rod any more literally than she
does the Savior's cross? We are bid, on a higher authority than
Solomon's proverbs, to take up our cross and follow Him. This we all
interpret figuratively. Would you dream, for instance, of binding
heavy crosses of wood upon the backs of your children because you felt
yourselves so enjoined in the literal sense of the Scriptures? Why,
then, take the rod literally? It is as clearly used to designate any
form of orderly discipline as the cross is used to designate endurance
of necessary sorrows. 'The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh
alive.'
"As to your next question about quick results, I must recognize that
you are in a most difficult position. For not the best conceivable
intentions, nor the highest wisdom, can make the unnatural conditions
you have to meet, as good as natural ones. In any asylum many purely
artificial requirements must be made to meet the artificial situation.
Time and space, those temporal appearances, grow to be menacing
monsters, take to themselves the chief realities. Nevertheless,
_so far as you are able_, you surely want to do the natural, right,
unforced thing. And with each successful effort will come fresh wisdom
and fresh strength for the next.
"Let me suggest, in the case you mention, of insolence, that three
practical courses are open to you: one to send or lead the child
quietly from the room, with the least aggressiveness possible, so as
not further to excite her opposition, and to keep her apart from the
rest until she is sufficiently anxious for society to be willing to
make an effort to deserve it; or two, to do nothing, permitting a
large and eloquent silence to accentuate the rebellious words; or
three, to call for the condemnation of the child's mates. Speaking to
one or two whose response you are sure of first, ask each one present
for a expression of opinion. This is so severe a punishment that it
ought not often to be invoked; but it is deadly sure."
STEALING
"The question of honesty is, indeed, most difficult. I do not think it
would lower the standard of morality to _assume_ honesty, as the thing
you expected to find, to accept almost any other explanation, to agree
with the whole body of children that dishonesty was so much the fault
of dreadfully poor people who had nothing unless they stole it, that
it could not be their fault, who had so much--couldn't be the fault of
anyone who was well brought up as they were. Emphasize, in story and
side allusion, at all sorts of odd moments when no concrete desire
called away the children's minds, the fact that honesty is to be
expected everywhere, except among terribly unfortunate people--of
course assuming that they with their good shelter and good schooling
are among the fortunate ones. Then you will give each child not only
plenty of everything, but things individualized, easily distinguished,
and a place to put them in. I've often thought that the habit of
buying things wholesale--so many dolls, all exactly alike, so many
yards of calico for dresses, all exactly alike, leads, in institutions
like yours, to a vague conception of private property, and even
of individuality itself. If some room could be allowed for free
choice--the children be allowed to buy their own calicoes, within a
given price, or to choose the trimmings or style, etc. I feel sure the
result would be a sturdier self-respect and a greater sense of that
difference between individuals which needs emphasizing just as much as
does the solidarity of individuals."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS FOR MOTHERS
Fundamental Books (Philosophy of Education--Pedagogy)
The Science of Rights ($5.00, postage 30c), J.G. Fichte.
Education of Man ($1.50, postage 12c), Friedrich Froebel.
Mottoes and Commentaries of Froebel's Mother Play ($1.50,
postage 14c), translated by Susan E. Blow.
The Part Played by Infancy in the Evolution of Man ($2.00,
postage 15c), from "A Century of Science," article by John
Fiske.
How Gertrude Teaches Her Children ($1.50, postage 14c),
Pestalozzi.
Levana, Bohn Library ($1.00, postage 12c), Jean Paul Richter.
Education ($1.25, postage 12c), Herbert Spencer.
General Books on Education
Household Education ($1.25, postage 10c), Harriet Martineau.
Bits of Talk About Home Matters ($1.25, Postage 10c), H.H.
Jackson.
Biography of a Baby ($1.50, postage 12c), Millicent Shinn.
Study of Child Nature ($1.00, postage 10c), Elizabeth
Harrison.
Two Children of the Foot Hills ($1.25, postage 10c), Elizabeth
Harrison.
The Moral Instruction of Children ($1.50, postage 14c), Felix
Adler.
The Children of the Future ($1.00, postage 10c), Nora A.
Smith.
Children's Rights ($1.00, postage 10c), Kate Douglas Wiggin
and Nora A. Smith.
Republic of Childhood (3 vols., each $1.00; postage 10c), Kate
Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith.
Educational Reformers ($1.50, postage 14c), Quick.
Lectures to Kindergartners ($1.00, postage 10c), Elizabeth
Peabody.
The Place of the Story in Early Education ($0.50, postage 6c),
Sara E. Wiltse.
Children's Ways ($1.25, postage 10c), Sully.
Kindergarten and Child Culture Papers ($3.50, postage 20c),
Barnard.
Adolescence (2 vols., $7.50; postage 56c), G. Stanley Hall.
Psychology and Advanced
The Mind of the Child (2 vols., each $1.50, postage 10c), W.
Preyer.
The Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child ($1.50,
postage 12c), G. Compayre.
Child Study ($1.25, postage 14c), Amy Tanner.
The Story of the Mind ($0.35, postage 6c), J. Mark Baldwin.
Psychology (Briefer Course, $1.60; postage 16c. Advanced
Course, 2 vols., $4.80; postage 44c), James.
School and Society ($1.00, postage 10c), John Dewey.
Emile ($0.90, postage 8c), Rousseau.
Pedagogics of the Kindergarten ($1.50, postage 12c), Froebel.
Education by Development ($1.50, postage 12c), Froebel.
Kindergarten and Child Culture Papers, Henry Barnard.
Letters to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel ($1.50,
postage 12c), Blow.
Studies of Childhood ($2.50, postage 20c), Sully.
Mental Development ($1.75, postage 16c), Baldwin.
Education of Central Nervous System ($1.00, postage 16c),
Halleck.
Child Observations, Imitative Symbolic Education ($1.50,
postage 12c), Blow.
Interest as Related to Will ($0.25, postage 6c), Dewey.
Religious Training
Christian Nurture ($1.25, postage 12c), Horace Bushnell.
On Holy Ground ($3.00, Postage 30c), W.L. Worcester.
The Psychology of Religion ($1.50, postage 14c), E.D.
Starbuck.
The Sex Question
The Song of Life ($1.25, postage 12c), Margaret Morley.
What a Young Boy Ought to Know ($1.00, postage 10c), Rev.
Sylvanus Stall.
What a Young Girl Ought to Know ($1.00, postage 10c), Rev.
Sylvanus Stall.
Duties of Parents to Children in Regard to Sex ($0.40, postage
4c), Rev. Wm. L. Worcester.
How to Tell the Story of Reproduction to Children, Pamphlet
5c; order from Mothers' Union, 3408 Harrison Street, Kansas
city, Mo.
Of General Interest to Mothers
Wilhelm Meister ($1.00, postage 14c), Goethe.
Story of My Life ($1.50, postage 14c), Helen Keller.
The Ordeal of Richard Feveril ($1.50, postage 14c), George
Meredith.
Up from Slavery ($1.50, postage 14c), Booker T. Washington.
Emmy Lou ($1.50, Postage 14c), Mrs. George Madden Marten.
The Golden Age ($1.00, postage 10c), Kenneth Grahame.
Dream Days ($1.00, postage 10c), Kenneth Grahame.
In the Morning Glow ($1.25, Postage 12c), Roy Rolf Gilson.
Man and His Handiwork, Wood.
Primitive Industry ($5.00, postage 40c), Abbott.
Every Day Essays ($1.25, postage 10c), Marion Foster
Washburne.
Family Secrets ($1.25, postage 10c), Marion Foster Washburne.
BOOKS FOR CHILDREN
Fairy Tales
Grimm's Fairy Tales ($0.50, postage 14c).
Andrew Lang's Green, Yellow, Blue and Red Fairy Books (each
$0.50, postage 14c).
Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales ($0.50, portage 14c).
Tanglewood Tales ($0.75, postage 14c), Hawthorne.
The Wonder Book ($0.75, postage 12c), Hawthorne.
Old Fashioned Fairy Tales by Tom Hood, retold by Marion Foster
Washburne. (In press.)
Adventures of a Brownie, by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik. Edited
by Marion Foster Washburne. (In press.)
A Few Books for Various Ages
Water Babies ($0.75, postage 12c), Charles Kingsley.
At the Back of the North Wind ($0.75, postage 12c), George
McDonald.
Little Lame Price ($0.50, postage 8c), Dinah Maria Mulock
Craik.
In the Child World ($2.00, postage 16c), Emilie Poulson.
Nature Myths ($0.35, postage 6c), Flora J. Cooke.
Sharp Eyes ($2.50, postage 18c), Gibson.
Stories Mother Nature Told ($0.50, postage 6c), Jane Andrew.
Jungle Books (2 vols, each $1.50; postage 16c), Kipling.
Just-So Stories ($1.20, postage 12c), Kipling.
Music for Children
Finger Plays ($1.25, postage 12c), Emilie Poulson.
Fifty Children's Songs, Reinecke.
Songs of the Child World (2 vols., each $1.00; postage 12c),
Gaynor.
Songs for the Children (2 vols., each $1.25; postage 14c),
Eleanor Smith.
30 Selected Studies (Instrumental), ($1.50, postage 14c),
Heller.
Pictures for Children
Detaille Prints, Boutet de Monvil, Joan of Arc.
Caldecott: Picture Books (4 vols., each $1.25; postage 12c).
Walter Crane: Picture Books ($1.25, postage 10c).
Colored illustrations cut from magazines, notably those drawn
by Howard Pyle, Elizabeth Shippen Greene, and Jessie Wilcox
Smith.
See articles in "Craftsman" for December, 1904, February and
April, 1905, "Decorations for School Room and Nursery."
_Note_.--Books in the above list may be purchased through the
American School of Home Economics at the prices given. Members
of the School will receive students' discount.
Program for Supplemental Work
on the
STUDY OF CHILD LIFE
By Marion Foster Washburne.
MEETING I
Infancy. (Study pages 3-25)
(a) Its Meaning. See Fiske on "The Part Played by Infancy in the
Evolution of Man" in "A Century of Science" (16c).
(b) General Laws of Progression. See Millicent Shinn's "Biography of
a Baby" (12c), and W. Preyer's "The Mind of the Child" (20c). Give
resumes of these two books.
(c) Practical Conclusions. Hold Experience Meeting to conclude
afternoon.
MEETING II
Faults and Their Remedies. (Study pages 26-57)
(a) General Principles of Moral Training. Read Herbert Spencer on
"Education" (12c), chapter on "Punishment"; also call for quotations
from H.H. Jackson's "Bits of Talk About Home Matters" (10c).
(b) Corporal Punishment. Why It Is Wrong.
(c) Positive Versus Negative Moral Training. Read extracts from
Froebel's "Education of Man" (12c), and Richter's "Levana" (12c), Kate
Douglas Wiggin's "Children's Rights" (10c), and Elizabeth Harrison's
"Study of Child Nature" (10c), are easier and pleasanter reading,
sound, but less fundamental. Choice may be made between these two sets
of books, according to conditions.
(Select answer to test questions on Part I and send them to the
School.)
MEETING III
Character Building. (Study pages 59-75)
Read extracts from Froebel, Pestalozzi, and Harriet Martineau.
(a) From Froebel to show general principles (12c).
(b) From Pestalozzi (14c) or if that is not available, from "Mottoes
and Commentaries on Froebel's Mother-Play" (14c), to show ideal
application of these general principles.
(c) From Harriet Martineau's "Household Education" (10c), "Children's
Rights" (10c), to show actual application of these general principles.
Experience meeting.
MEETING IV
Educational Value of Play and Occupations. (Study pages 78-99)
(a) General Principles--Quote authorities from past to present. Read
from "Education of Man" (12c) and "Mother Play" (14c).
(b) Representative and Symbolic Plays. See "Education of Man" (12c)
and "Letters to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel" (12c). Dancing
and Drama from Richter's "Levana" (12c).
(c) Nature's Playthings (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water). Ask members
of class to describe plays of their own childhood and tell what they
meant to them.
(Select answer to test questions on Part II.)
MEETING V
Art and Literature in Child Life. (Study pages 100-112)
Ask members to bring good pictures and story-books, thus making
exhibit.
(a) Place of Pictures in Children's Lives. Of Color. Of Modeling.
Influence of artistic surroundings. If anyone knows of a model nursery
or schoolroom, let her describe it. Are drawing and modeling at school
"fads" or living bases for educational processes? See Dewey on "The
School and Society" (10c).
(b) Place of fiction in education. See "The Place of the Story in
Early Education" (6c).
(c) Accomplishments. Practical discussion of the advantages and
disadvantages of music lessons, the languages, and other work out of
school. See "Adolescence," by G. Stanley Hall.
MEETING VI
Social and Religious Training. (Study pages 114-140 and Supplement)
(a) The Question of Associations. See Dewey's "The School and Society"
(10c), "The Republic of Childhood" (30c). Quote "Up from Slavery"
(14c) and "Story of My Life" (14c), to show that the humblest
companions may sometimes be the most desirable.
(b) The New Education. See catalogues of the Francis W. Parker School,
Chicago, Ill., (4c); The Elementary School, University of Chicago,
(6c); State Normal School, Hyannis, Mass., (4c); "School Gardens,"
Bulletin No. 160, Office of Experiment Stations, Department of
Agriculture, Washington, D.C., (2c).
(c) The Sex Question. Where are the foundations of morality
laid--church, school, home, or street? Read entire, "Duties of Parents
to Children in Regard to Sex" (pamphlet, 5c).
(d) Religious Training. Read from "Christian Nurture" (12c) and
"Psychology of Religion" (14c). (Select answer to test questions on
Part III.)
For more extended program, book lists for mothers, children's book
list, loan papers, send to the National Congress of Mothers, Mrs. E.C.
Grice, Corresponding Secretary, 3308 Arch Street, Philadelphia, Pa.
Price, 10 cents each. See also "The Child in Home, School, and State,"
with address by President Roosevelt.--Report of the N.C.M. for 1905.
Price, 50c.
NOTE.--When reference books mentioned in the foregoing program are not
available from public libraries, they may be borrowed of the A.S.H.E.
for the cost of postage indicated in parentheses. Three books may be
borrowed at one time by a class, one by an individual. For class work,
a book may be kept for two weeks, or longer, if there is no other call
for it. Send stamps with requests, which should be made several weeks
in advance to avoid disappointment.
INDEX
Abnormal laziness, 47
Abstract studies, 119
Accomplishments and studies, 119
showy, 123
Accounts, personal, 129
Adolescence, religious excitability, 136
Adult's world, 24
Advantage of positive commands, 61
Affections, cultivation of, 45
Aims of kindergarten, 45
Air as a plaything, 82
castles, 163
Allowance, regular, 127
Alternate growth of children, 14
Anaemia, 47
Answer honest questions, 71
Answers to questions, 160
Application of principles, 141
Aristotle's teachings, 76
Art and literature in child life, 101
and nature, 112
classic, 102
influence of, 101
plastic, 104
Associates, children's, 113
exclusive, 114
Baby-jumpers, 14
Bandaging the abdomen, 21
Beginnings of will, 7
Bible, children's, 139
Bible lessons made real, 139
study, 138
Bonfires, 85
Books for children, 111, 170
Bottle-fed babies, 25
Breaking the will, 29
Busy work, 97
Care of pets, 45
Cause of impudence, 51
of irritability and nervousness, 35
of rupture, 21
of temper, 35
Character building, rules in, 74
Children, other people's, 145
Children's associates, 113
Bible, 139
clubs, value of, 45
hour, the, 118
Child's share in family republic, 65
world, 24
Classic art, 102
Clay modeling, 80
Climbing, 13
Clothing, proper, 20
Color, 102
Colored pictures, 104
Commands, disagreeable, 37
positive, 35
useless, 11
Company ways, 161
Conclusion, 140
Condition at birth, 3
Consciousness of self, 6
Corporal punishment, 54, 166
Correlation of studies, 121
Correspondence training, 142
Costume model, 21
Creeping, 12
Cultivate affections, 45
Cutting and pasting, 99
Daily outing, 18
Dancing for children, 87
Danger of forcing, 12
Dangerous pastimes, 83
Darwin's observations, 9
Depravity, original, 61
Development of intellect, 126
premature, 3
Diagram of Gertrude suit, 23
Diet, simple, 25
Disadvantages of Sunday Schools, 134
Disagreeable commands, 37
Discipline, educative, 57
Disobedience, 30
real, 33
Double standard of morality, 53
Double standards, 158
Drama, 107
Dramatic games, 107
plays, 87
Drawing and painting, 99
Dress for play, 79
Dress, proper, 20
Duties, systematized, 37
Duty to one's self, 164
Education, the new, 120
scientific, 121
Educational beginnings, 5
exercises, 5
value of play, 77
Educative discipline, 57
Effect of Sunday school teaching, 132
Emergencies, 30
Enthusiasm, religious, 135
"Enthusiasms", 124
Essentials of play, 78
Evasive lying, 39
Evils, permanent, 28
resulting from corporal punishment, 55
Example, bad, 52
courteous, 54
evil, 115
versus precept, 34, 68
Exclusive associates, 114
Fairy tales, 109
Family republic, 64
Fathers, 152
responsibilities of, 154
Fatigue harmful to children, 94
Faults and their remedies, 26
real, 28
temporary, 24
Fear versus love, 55
Feeding, indiscriminate, 25
Financial training, 126
Fire as a plaything, 84
First grasping, 8
Fiske's doctrine of right, 64
teachings, 15
Food, natural, 24
question, 162
undesired, 11
Forcing, danger of, 12
Fresh air, 18
Froebel's great motto, 70
philosophy, 59
Fundamental principles of the new education, 59
Games, dramatic, 107
Gardens for children, 81
Gertrude suit, 21
Goodness, original, 61
Goodness, negative, 32
Grasping, 9, 11
Growth of children, 14
of will, 8
Helping, 93
mother, 91
Home kindergarten, 90
How the child develops, 3
Imagination and sympathy, 110
Imitativeness, instinct of, 32
Imaginative lying, 39
Immature judgment, 30
Impudence, cause of, 51
Incomplete development at birth, 4
Indiscriminate feeding, 25
punishment, 55
Industry, willing, 94
Influence of art, 101
Inherited crookedness, 41
disposition, 38
Instinct, 9
of imitativeness, 32
Instrumental music, 107
Intellect, development of, 126
Irritability, cause of, 35
Jealousy, 42
Justice and love in the family, 42
Kindergarten, aims of, 45
as a remedy for selfishness, 44
methods, 62
methods in the home, 90
social advantages of, 113
Knit garments, 22
Law-making habit, 70
Laziness, 46
Liberty, 33, 64
Limitations of words, 67
Literature, 108
and art, 101
Looking, 9
Love of work, 93
versus fear, 55
Low voice commands, 66
Lungs, weak, 21
Luther's teachings, 76
Lying, evasive, 39
imaginative, 39
kinds of, 38
politic, 40
Magazines for children, 111
Magic lantern, 85
Massage, 5
Meaning of righteousness, 72
Model costume, 21
Modeling apron, 81
clay, 80
Monotony undesirable, 95
Moral precocity, 73
training, object of, 60
Mother and teacher, 165
Mother, teaching, 92
Mothers as teachers, 134
Mud pies, 80
Muscular development, 5
Music for children, 106
instrumental, 107
study of, 124
Mystery of sex, 72
Nagging, 96
Naps, 20
Natural food, 24
punishment, 29
talent, 124
Nature study, 112
Negative goodness, 32
Neighbors' opinions, 63
Nervousness, cause of, 35
New education, the, 120
principles of, 59
Normal child, 12
Nursery requisites, 16
Object of moral training, 60
of punishment, 40
Objection to pinning blanket, 21
Obligation of truthfulness, 38
Occupations, 90
Only child, the, 44
Opportunity for growth, 16
Order of development, 9
Other people's children, 145
Outing, daily, 18
Painting and drawing, 99
Parental indulgence, 154
vanity, 125
Pasting and cutting, 99
Permanent evils, 28
Personal accounts, 129
Pets, care of, 45
Physical cause of laziness, 46
culture, 123
culture records, 25
Philosophy, Froebel's, 59
Pictures, colored, 104
Pinning blanket, objection to, 21
Plastic art, 104
Play, 76
educational value of, 77
essentials of, 78
with the limbs, 5
Politeness to children, 69
Politic lie, the, 40
Positive commands, 35, 61
Precautions to prevent attacks of temper, 37
with fire, 84
Precocity, 15
moral, 73
Premature development, 3
Preyer's record, 11, 19
Principles, application of, 141
Prohibitions, useless, 34
Punishment, corporal, 54
indiscriminate, 55
natural, 29
object of, 40
self, 34
Questions, answers to, 160
Quick temper, 35
Real disobedience, 33
faults, 28
Reflex grasping, 7
Regular allowance, 127
Religious enthusiasm, 135
excitability of adolescence, 136
training, 131
Remedy for fits of temper, 36
Responsibilities of fathers, 154
Restrictions of dress, 79
Rhythmic movements, 86
Richter's views, 28, 87
Right doing, 28
made easy, 63
Righteousness, meaning of, 72
Right material for play, 79
Rights of others, 64
Rules in character building, 74
Rupture, cause of, 21
Sand piles, 80
Scientific education, 121
Self-distrustful child, 160
Selfishness, 43
Self-mastery, 29
punishment, 34
Sewing, 98
Sex, 71
mystery of, 72
question, the, 149
Showy accomplishments, 123
Simple diet, 25
Sleep, sufficient, 19
Social advantages of kindergarten, 113
Soft spot in head, 4
Solitude remedy for temper, 36
Songs for children, 86
Spencer's view, 29
Spending foolishly, 128
wisely, 127
Standard of morality, double, 53
Standing, 14
Stanley Hall's views, 137
Stealing, 168
Stockinet for undergarments, 22
Story telling, 93
Studies, abstract, 119
and accomplishments,119
correlation of, 121
Success in child training, 143
Sullenness, 38
Sunday school, disadvantage of, 134
effect of, 132
teachers, 131
Sunlight necessary for growth, 16
Sympathy and imagination, 110
in play, 79
Symptoms of anaemia, 47
Systematized duties, 37
Talent, natural, 124
Teaching mother, 92
Telling stories, 93
Temperament, emotional, 42
Temperature of nursery, 18
Temper, cause of, 35
precautions to prevent attacks of, 37
Temporary faults, 24
Theater, 108
Theory before practice, 161
Thermometer in nursery, 18
Throwing, 10
Tiedemann's teachings, 35
Touching forbidden things, 11
Toys, 83, 88, 89
Training, financial, 126
for parents, 142
religious, 131
Truthfulness, obligations of, 38
Unconscious influence, 157
Underclothing, 22
Undesired food, 11
Undisciplined will, 30
Unresponsiveness, 38
Unsought advice, 148
Untidiness, its remedy, 49
Useless commands, 11
prohibitions, 34
Value of children's clubs, 45
Vanity, parental, 125
Variable periods of growth, 15
Ventilation, means of, 18
Walking, 14
Water as a plaything, 82
colors, 99
Weak lungs, 21
Weight at birth, 4
Wholesome surroundings, 16
Will, beginnings of, 7
breaking, the, 29
growth of, 8
Willful child, 34
Willing industry, 94
Will, undisciplined, 30
Work, beautiful, 96
love of, 93
Wrappings, extra, 21
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