CHAPTER XIIITHE NURSERY-SCHOOL

Inprevious chapters, I have tried to give an outline of what can be done for the young child in the way of creating the habits which will give happiness and usefulness in later life. But I have not discussed the question whether parents are to give this training, or whether it is to be given in schools designed for the purpose. I think the arguments in favour of the nursery-school are quite overwhelming—not only for children whose parents are poor, ignorant, and overworked, but for all children, or, at the very least, for all children who live in towns. I believe that the children at Miss Margaret McMillan’s nursery-school in Deptford get something better than any children of well-to-do parents can at present obtain. I should like to see the same system extended to all children, rich and poor alike. But before discussing any actual nursery-school, let us see what reasons there are for desiring such an institution.

To begin with, early childhood is of immeasurable importance both medically and psychologically.These two aspects are very closely intertwined. For example: fear will make a child breathe badly, and breathing badly will predispose it to a variety of diseases.[17]Such interrelations are so numerous that no one can hope to succeed with a child’s character without some medical knowledge, or with its health without some psychology. In both directions, most of the knowledge required is very new, and much of it runs counter to time-honoured traditions. Take for example the question of discipline. The great principle in a contest with a child is: do not yield, but do not punish. The normal parent sometimes yields for the sake of a quiet life, and sometimes punishes from exasperation; the right method, to be successful, requires a difficult combination of patience and power of suggestion. This is a psychological example; fresh air is a medical example. Given care and wisdom, children profit by constant fresh air, day and night, with not too much clothing. But if care and wisdom are absent, the risk of chills from wet or sudden cold cannot be ignored.

Parents cannot be expected to possess the skill or the leisure required for the new and difficult art of dealing with young children. In the case of uneducated parents, this is obvious; they donot know the right methods, and if they were taught them they would remain unconvinced. I live in an agricultural district by the sea, where fresh food is easy to obtain, and there are no extremes of heat or cold; I chose it largely because it is ideal for children’s health. Yet almost all the children of the farmers, shopkeepers, and so on, are pasty-faced languid creatures, because they are indulged in food and disciplined in play. They never go to the beach, because wet feet are thought dangerous. They wear thick woollen coats out-of-doors even in the hottest summer weather. If their play is noisy, steps are taken to make their behaviour “genteel”. But they are allowed to stay up late, and are given all kinds of unwholesome tit-bits of grown-up food. Their parents cannot understand why my children have not died of cold and exposure long ago; but no object lesson will convince them that their own methods are capable of improvement. They are neither poor nor lacking in parental affection, but they are obstinately ignorant owing to bad education. In the case of town parents who are poor and overworked, the evils are of course far greater.

But even in the case of parents who are highly educated, conscientious, and not too busy, the children cannot get as much of what they need as in a nursery-school. First andforemost, they do not get the companionship of other children of the same age. If the family is small, as such families usually are, the children may easily get too much attention from their elders, and may become nervous and precocious in consequence. Moreover, parents cannot have the experience of multitudes of children which gives a sure touch. And only the rich can provide the space and the environment that best suits young children. Such things, if provided privately for one family of children, produce pride of possession and a feeling of superiority, which are extraordinarily harmful morally. For all these reasons, I believe that even the best parents would do well to send their children to a suitable school from the age of two onwards, at least for part of the day—provided such a school existed in their neighbourhood.

There are, at present, two kinds of schools, according to the status of the parents. There are Froebel schools and Montessori schools for well-to-do-children, and there are a small number of nursery-schools for very poor children. Of the latter, the most famous is Miss McMillan’s, of which the above-mentioned book gives an account which should be read by every lover of children. I am inclined to think that no existing school for well-to-do children is as good as hers, partly because she has largernumbers, partly because she is not troubled by the fussiness which middle-class snobbery obtrudes upon teachers. She aims at keeping children, if possible, from one year old till seven, though the education authorities incline to the view that the children ought to go to an ordinary elementary school at the age of five. The children come at eight in the morning, and stay till six in the evening; they have all their meals in the school. They spend as much as possible of their time out-of-doors, and indoors they have an abnormal amount of fresh air. Before a child is admitted, he or she is medically examined, and if possible cured at the clinic or in the hospital if not healthy. After admission, the children become and remain healthy with very few exceptions. There is a large, lovely garden, and a good deal of the time is spent in playing there. The teaching is broadly on Montessori lines. After dinner the children all sleep. In spite of the fact that at night, and on Sundays, they have to be in poverty-stricken homes, perhaps in cellars with drunken parents, their physique and intelligence become equal to the best that middle-class children achieve. Here is Miss McMillan’s account of her seven-year-old pupils:

They are nearly all tall, straight children. All are straight, indeed, if not tall, but the average is a big, well-made child with clean skin, bright eyes,and silky hair. He or she is a little above the average of the best type of well-to-do child of the upper middle class. So much for his or her physique. Mentally he is alert, sociable, eager for life and new experience. He can read and spell perfectly, or almost perfectly. He writes well and expresses himself easily. He speaks good English and also French. He can not only help himself, but he or she has for years helped younger children: and he can count and measure and design and has had some preparation for science. His first years were spent in an atmosphere of love and calm andfun, and his last two years were full of interesting experiences and experiment. He knows about a garden, and has planted and watered, and taken care of plants as well as animals. The seven-year-old can dance, too, and sing and play many games. Such are the children who will soon present themselves in thousands at the Junior Schools’ doors. What is to be done with them? I want to point out, first of all, that the elementary school teachers’ work will be changed by this sudden uprush of clean and strong young life from below. Either the Nursery-School will be a paltry thing, that is to say a new failure, or else it will soon influence not only elementary schools but also the secondary. It will provide a new kind of children to be educated, and this must react sooner or later, not only on all the schools, but on all our social life, on the kind of government and laws framed for the people, and on the relation of our nation to other nations.

I do not think these claims exaggerated. The nursery-school, if it became universal, could, in one generation, remove the profound differencesin education which at present divide the classes, could produce a population all enjoying the mental and physical development which is now confined to the most fortunate, and could remove the terrible dead-weight of disease and stupidity and malevolence which now makes progress so difficult. Under the Education Act of 1918, nursery-schools were to have been promoted by Government money; but when the Geddes Axe descended it was decided that it was more important to build cruisers and the Singapore Dock for the purpose of facilitating war with the Japanese. At the present moment, the Government is spending a million a year to induce people to poison themselves with preservatives in Canadian butter rather than eat pure butter from Denmark. To secure this end, our children are condemned to disease and misery and unawakened intelligence, from which multitudes could be saved by a million a year spent on nursery-schools. The mothers now have the vote; will they some day learn to use it for the good of their children?[18]

Apart from these wider considerations, what has to be realized is that the right care of youngchildren is highly skilled work, which parents cannot hope to do satisfactorily, and that it is quite different work from school-teaching in later years. To quote Miss McMillan again:

The Nursery child has a fairly good physique. Not only do his neighbours in the slums fall far short of him: his “betters” in good districts, the middle-class children, of a very good type, fall short of him. It is clear that something more than parental love and “parental responsibility” are wanted. Rules of thumb have all broken down. “Parental love” without knowledge has broken down. Child nurture has not broken down. It is very highly skilled work.

As regards the finances:

A Nursery-School of 100 children can be run to-day at an annual cost of £12 per head, and of this sum the parents in the poorest quarters can pay one-third. A Nursery-School staffed by students will cost more, but the greater part of the increased cost would be paid as fees and maintenance of future teachers. An open-air nursery and training centre, numbering in all about 100 children and thirty students, costs as nearly as makes no difference £2,200 per annum.

One more quotation:

One great result of the Nursery-School will be that the children can get faster through the curriculum of to-day. When they are half or two-thirds through the present elementary school life they willbe ready to go on to more advanced work.... In short, the Nursery-School, if it is arealplace of nurture, and not merely a place where babies are “minded” till they are five, will affect our whole educational system very powerfully and very rapidly. It will quickly raise the possible level of culture and attainment in all schools, beginning with the junior schools. It will prove that this welter of disease and misery in which we live, and which makes the doctor’s service loom bigger than the teacher’s, can be swept away. It will make the heavy walls, the terrible gates, the hard playground, the sunless and huge class-room look monstrous, as they are. It will give teachers a chance.

The nursery-school occupies an intermediate position between early training of character and subsequent giving of instruction. It carries on both at once, and each by the help of the other, with instruction gradually taking a larger share as the child grows older. It was in institutions having a similar function that Madame Montessori perfected her methods. In certain large tenement houses in Rome, a large room was set apart for the children between three and seven, and Madame Montessori was put in charge of these “Children’s Houses”.[19]As in Deptford, the children came from the very poorest section of the population; as in Deptford, the results showed that earlycare can overcome the physical and mental disadvantages of a bad home.

It is remarkable that, ever since the time of Séguin, progress in educational methods with young children has come from study of idiots and the feeble-minded, who are, in certain respects, still mentally infants. I believe the reason for the necessity of this detour was that the stupidities of mental patients were not regarded as blameworthy, or as curable by chastisement; no one thought that Dr. Arnold’s recipe of flogging would cure their “laziness”. Consequently they were treated scientifically, not angrily; if they failed to understand, no irate pedagogue stormed at them and told them they ought to be ashamed of themselves. If people could have brought themselves to take a scientific instead of a moralizing attitude towards children, they could have discovered what is now known about the way to educate them without first having to study the mentally deficient. The conception of “moral responsibility” is “responsible” for much evil. Imagine two children, one of whom has the good fortune to be in a nursery-school, while the other is left to unalleviated slum-life. Is the second child “morally responsible” if he grows up less admirable than the first? Are his parents “morally responsible” for the ignorance andcarelessness which makes them unable to educate him? Are the rich “morally responsible” for the selfishness and stupidity which have been drilled into them at expensive schools, and which make them prefer their own foolish luxuries to the creation of a happy community? All are victims of circumstances; all have had characters warped in infancy and intelligence stunted at school. No good purpose is served by choosing to regard them as “morally responsible”, and holding them up to reprobation because they have been less fortunate than they might have been.

There is only one road to progress, in education as in other human affairs, and that is: Science wielded by love. Without science, love is powerless; without love, science is destructive. All that has been done to improve the education of little children has been done by those who loved them; all has been done by those who knew all that science could teach on the subject. This is one of the benefits we derive from the higher education of women: in former days, science and love of children were much less likely to coexist. The power of moulding young minds which science is placing in our possession is a very terrible power, capable of deadly misuse; if it falls into the wrong hands, it may produce a world even more ruthless and cruel than the haphazard world ofnature. Children may be taught to be bigoted, bellicose, and brutal, under the pretence that they are being taught religion, patriotism, and courage, or communism, proletarianism, and revolutionary ardour. The teaching must be inspired by love, and must aim at creating love in the children. If not, it will become more efficiently harmful with every improvement in scientific technique. Love for children exists in the community as an effective force; this is shown by the lowering of the infant death-rate and the improvement of education. It is still far too weak, or our politicians would not dare to sacrifice the life and happiness of innumerable children to their nefarious schemes of bloodshed and oppression; but it exists and is increasing. Other forms of love, however, are strangely lacking. The very individuals who lavish care on children cherish passions which expose those same children, in later life, to death in wars which are mere collective insanities. Is it too much to hope that love may gradually be extended from the child to the man he will become? Will the lovers of children learn to follow their later years with something of the same parental solicitude? Having given them strong bodies and vigorous minds, shall we let them use their strength and vigour to create a better world? Or, when they turn to this work, shall we recoil in terror, and plungethem back into slavery and drill? Science is ready for either alternative; the choice is between love and hate, though hate is disguised beneath all the fine phrases to which professional moralists do homage.

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