CHAPTER XIMPORTANCE OF OTHER CHILDREN
Sofar, we have been considering what parents and teachers can do themselves towards creating the right kind of character in a child. But there is a great deal that cannot possibly be done without the help of other children. This becomes increasingly true as the child gets older; indeed contemporaries are never more important than at the university. In the first year of life, other children are not important at all in the earlier months, and only a slight advantage in the last three months. At that stage, it is slightly older children that are useful. The first child in a family is usually slower in learning to walk and talk than subsequent children, because grown-ups are so perfect in these accomplishments that they are difficult to imitate. A child of three years old is a better model for a child one year old, both because the things it does are more what the younger child would wish to do, and because its powers do not seem so superhuman. Children feel that other children are more akin to them than adults are,and therefore their ambition is more stimulated by what other children do. Only the family provides the opportunity for this early education by older children. Most children who have a choice wish to play with children rather older than themselves, because then they feel “grand”; but these older children wish to play with still older children, and so on. The consequence is that, in a school, or in the streets of a slum, or anywhere else where a large choice is possible, children play almost entirely with their contemporaries, because the older ones will not play with the younger ones. In this way it comes about that what is to be learnt from older children must be learnt mainly in the home. This has the drawback that in every family there must be one oldest child, who fails to get the benefits of the method. And as families grow smaller, the percentage of oldest children grows larger, so that the drawback is an increasing one. Small families are in some ways a disadvantage to children, unless supplemented by nursery-schools. But nursery-schools will form the subject of a later chapter.
Older children, younger children, and contemporaries all have their uses, but the uses of older and younger children, for the reasons just given, are mainly confined to the family. The great use of older children is to provide attainable ambitions. A child will make tremendousefforts to be thought worthy of joining in an older child’s game. The older child behaves in an offhand natural way, without the consideration and make-believe which is bound to form part of a grown-up person’s games with children. The same lack of consideration in a grown-up would be painful, both because the grown-up has power and authority, and because he plays to please the child, not to please himself. A child will be cheerfully submissive to an older brother or sister, in a way which would be impossible towards an adult except as a result of excessive discipline. The lesson of co-operation in a subordinate role is best learnt from other children; when grown-ups try to teach it, they are faced with the opposite dangers of unkindness and pretence—unkindness if they demand real co-operation, pretence if they are content with the appearance of it. I do not mean that either real or pretence co-operation is to be always avoided, but that it has not the spontaneity which is possible between an older and a younger child, and therefore cannot be combined for hours on end with pleasure to both parties.
All through youth, slightly older people continue to have a special use in teaching—not formal teaching, but the sort which occurs outside working hours. A slightly older boy or girl remains always a very effective stimulus to ambition,and, if kind, can explain difficulties better than an adult, from the recent recollection of overcoming them. Even at the university, I learnt much from people a few years senior to me, which I could not have learnt from grave and reverend signors. I believe this experience is general wherever the social life of the university is not too rigidly stratified by “years”. It is, of course, impossible where, as too often happens, the older students consider itinfra digto have anything to do with the younger ones.
Younger children also have their uses, especially in the years from three to six; these uses are chiefly in connection with moral education. So long as a child is with adults, it has no occasion for the exercise of a number of important virtues, namely, those required by the strong in dealing with the weak. A child has to be taught not to take things by force from a younger brother or sister, not to show excessive anger when the junior inadvertently knocks over his tower of bricks, not to hoard toys he is not using which the other desires. He has to be taught that the junior can be easily hurt by rough handling, and to feel compunction when he has wantonly caused tears. In protecting a younger child, one can speak to the senior with a sharpness and suddenness which would not otherwise be justified, but which have their uses through the strong impression produced bytheir unexpectedness. All these are useful lessons, which it is hardly possible to give naturally in any other way. It is a folly and a waste of time to give abstract moral instruction to a child; everything must be concrete, and actually demanded by the existing situation. Much that, from an adult point of view, is moral education, feels to the child just like instruction in handling a saw. The child feels that he is being shown how the thing is done. That is one reason why example is so important. A child who has watched a carpenter at work tries to copy his movements; a child who has seen his parents behaving always with kindness and consideration tries to copy them in this respect. In each case, prestige is attached to what he wants to imitate. If you gave your child a solemn lesson in the use of a saw, but yourself always tried to use it as a chopper, you would never make a carpenter of him. And if you urge him to be kind to his little sister, but are not kind to her yourself, all your instruction will be wasted. For that reason, when you have to do something that makes a little child cry, such as cleaning its nose, you should be careful to explain to the older child why it is necessary to do it. Otherwise he is quite likely to rise up in defence of the younger child, and fight you to make you stop being cruel. If you allow him to remain under the impression that you are cruel, youwill have lost the power to curb his own impulses towards tyranny.
Although both older and younger children are important, contemporaries are far more so, at any rate from the age of four onwards. Behaviour to equals is what most needs to be learnt. Most of the inequalities in the existing world are artificial, and it would be a good thing if our behaviour ignored them. Well-to-do people imagine themselves superior to their cooks, and behave to them in a different way from that in which they behave in society. But they feel inferior to a Duke, and treat him in a way which shows a lack of self-respect. In both cases they are wrong: the cook and the Duke should both be felt and treated as equals. In youth, age makes a hierarchy which is not artificial; but for that very reason the social habits which will be desirable in later life are best learnt by associating with contemporaries. Games of all kinds are better among equals, and so is school competition. Among schoolfellows, a boy has that degree of importance which is accorded to him by their judgment; he may be admired or despised, but the issue depends upon his own character and prowess. Affectionate parents create a too indulgent milieu; parents without affection create one where spontaneity is repressed. It is only contemporaries who can give scope for spontaneity in free competitionand in equal co-operation. Self-respect without tyranny, consideration without slavishness, can be learnt best in dealing with equals. For these reasons, no amount of parental solicitude can give a boy or girl the same advantages at home as are to be enjoyed in a good school.
Apart from these considerations, there is another, perhaps even more important. The mind and body of a child demand a great deal of play, and after the first years play can hardly be satisfactory except with other boys and girls. Without play, a child becomes strained and nervous; it loses the joy of life and develops anxieties. It is, of course, possible to bring up a child as John Stuart Mill was brought up, to begin Greek at the age of three, and never know any ordinary childish fun. From the mere standpoint of acquiring knowledge, the results may be good, but taken all round I cannot admire them. Mill relates in his Autobiography that during adolescence he nearly committed suicide from the thought that all combinations of musical notes would one day be used up, and then new musical composition would become impossible. It is obvious that an obsession of this sort is a symptom of nervous exhaustion. In later life, whenever he came upon an argument tending to show that his father’s philosophy might have been mistaken, he shied away from it like a frightened horse, thereby greatly diminishingthe value of his reasoning powers. It seems probable that a more normal youth would have given him more intellectual resilience, and enabled him to be more original in his thinking. However that may be, it would certainly have given him more capacity for enjoying life. I was myself the product of a solitary education up to the age of sixteen—somewhat less fierce than Mill’s, but still too destitute of the ordinary joys of youth. I experienced in adolescence just the same tendency to suicide as Mill describes—in my case, because I thought the laws of dynamics regulated the movements of my body, making the will a mere delusion. When I began to associate with contemporaries, I found myself an angular prig. How far I have remained so, it is not for me to say.
In spite of all the above arguments, I am prepared to admit that there are a certain number of boys and girls who ought not to go to school, and that some of them are very important individuals. If a boy has abnormal mental powers in some direction, combined with poor physique and great nervousness, he may be quite incapable of fitting into a crowd of normal boys, and may be so persecuted as to be driven mad. Exceptional capacities are not infrequently associated with mental instability, and in such cases it is desirable to adopt methods which would be bad for the normal boy. Careshould be taken to find out if abnormal sensitiveness has some definite cause, and patient efforts should be made to cure it. But these efforts should never involve terrible suffering, such as an abnormal boy may easily have to endure from brutal companions. I think such sensitiveness generally has its source in mistakes during infancy, which have upset the child’s digestion or its nerves. Given wisdom in handling infants, I think almost all of them would grow into boys and girls sufficiently normal to enjoy the company of other boys and girls. Nevertheless, some exceptions will occur, and they may easily occur among those who have some form of genius. In these rare cases, school is undesirable, and a more sheltered youth is to be preferred.