"The atmosphere of freedom is the only atmosphere in which a child can gain experiences that will help to develop character."
The principle of Freedom underlies all the activities of the school and does not refer to conduct simply; intellectual and emotional aspects of discipline are too often ignored and we have as a product the commonplace, narrow, imitative person, too timid or too indolent to think a new thought, or to feel strongly enough to stand for a cause. Self-control is the goal of discipline, but independent thinking, enthusiasm and initiative are all included in the term.
It will be well to discriminate between the occasions, both in the Nursery School and in the transition and junior classes, when a child should be free to learn by experience and when he should be controlled from without. We shall probably find occasions which partake of the nature of each.
The Nursery School is a collection of individuals presumably from 2-1/2 to 5-1/2 years of age. They know no social life beyond the family life, and family experience is relative to the size of the family. In any case they have not yet measured themselves against their peers, with the exception of the occasional twin. A few months ago about twenty children of this description formed the nucleus of a new Nursery School where, as far as possible, the world in miniature was spread out before them, and they were guided in their entrance to it by an experienced teacher and a young helper. For the first few weeks the chief characteristic was noise; the children rushed up and down the large room, shouting, and pushing any portable toys they could find. One little boy of 2-1/2 employed himself in what can only be called "punching" the other children, snatching their possessions away from them and responding to the teacher by the law of contra-suggestion. He was the most intelligent child in the school. He generally left a line of weeping children behind him, and several began to imitate him. The pugnacious instinct requires little encouragement. Lunch was a period of snatching, spilling, and making plans to get the best. Many of the toys provided were carelessly trampled upon and broken: requests to put away things at the end of the day were almost unavailing.
When the time for sleeping came in the afternoon many of the children refused to lie down: some consented but only to sing and talk as they lay. Only one, a child of 2-1/2, slept, because he cried himself to sleep from sheer strangeness. This apparently unbeautiful picture is only the first battle of the individual on his entrance to the life of the community.
On the other hand, there were intervals of keen joy: water, sand and clay chiefly absorbed the younger children: the older ones wanted to wash up and scrub, and many spent a good deal of time looking at picture-books. This was the raw material for the teacher to begin with: the children came from comfortable suburban homes: none were really poor, and many had known no privation. They were keen for experiences and disposed to be very friendly to her.
After five months there is a marked difference in spirit. The noise is modified because the children found other absorbing interests, though at times nature still demands voice production. During lunch time and sleeping time there is quiet, but the teacher has neveraskedfor silence unless there was some such evident reason. There is no silence game. The difference has come from within the children. All now lie down in the afternoon quietly, and the greater number sleep; but there has been no command or any kind of general plan: again the desire has gradually come to individuals from suggestion and imitation. Lunch is quite orderly, but not yet without an occasional accident or struggle. There is much less fighting, but primitive man is still there. The most marked development is in the growth of the idea of "taking turns"; the children have begun to master this all-important lesson of life. The strong pugnacious habit in the little punching boy reached a point that showed he was unable to conquer it from within: about two months after his arrival the teacher consulted his mother, who confirmed all that the teacher had experienced: her prescription was smacking. After a good deal of thought and many ineffectual talks and experiments with the boy, the teacher came to the conclusion that the mother was right: she took him to the cloakroom after the next outbreak and smacked his hands: he was surprised and a little hurt, but very soon forgot and continued his practices: on the next occasion the teacher repeated the punishment and it was never again necessary. For a few days he was at a loss for an occupation because punching had become a confirmed habit, but soon other interests appealed to him: he has never changed in his trust in his teacher of whom he is noticeably very fond, and he has now realised that he must control a bad habit. This example has been given at length to illustrate the relation of government to freedom.
If these children had been in the ordinary Baby Room, subject to a time-table, to constant plans by the teacher for their activities, few or none of these occasions would have occurred: the incipient so-called naughtiness would have been displayed only outside, in the playground or at home: there would have been little chance of chaos, of fighting, of punching, of trying to get the best thing and foremost place, there would have been little opportunity for choice and less real absorption, because of the time-table. The children would have been happy enough, but they would not have been trained to live as individuals. Outward docility is a fatal trait and very common in young children; probably it is a form of self-preservation. But the real child only lies in wait to make opportunities out of school. The school is therefore not preparing him for life.
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Freedom in the transition and the junior school must be differently applied: individual life begins to merge into community life, and the children begin to learn that things right for individuals may be wrong for the community. But the problem of freedom is not as easy as the problem of authority: standards must be greatly altered and outward docility no longer mistaken for training in self-control. Individual training cannot suddenly become class discipline, neither can children be switched from the Nursery School to a full-blown class system.
The idea of class teaching must be postponed, for out of it come most of the difficulties of discipline, and it is not the natural arrangement at this transitional period. A teacher is imposing on a number of very different individuals a system that says their difficulties are alike, that they must all work at one rate and in one way: and so we have the weary "reading round" class, when the slow ones struggle and the quick ones find other and unlawful occupation: we have the number lessons broken by the teacher's breathless attempts to see that all the class follows: we have the handwork that imposes an average standard of work that fits nobody exactly. Intellectual freedom can only come by individual or group work, while class teaching is only for such occasions as a literature or a singing lesson, or the presentation of an occasional new idea in number. Individual and group work need much organisation, but while classes consist of over forty children there is no other way to permit intellectual and moral freedom. Of course the furniture of the room will greatly help to make this more possible, and it is hoped that an enlightened authority will not continue to supply heavy iron-framed desks for the junior school, those described as "desks for listening."
The prevailing atmosphere should be a busy noise and not silence—it should be the noise of children working, oftener than of the teacher teaching,i.e.teaching the whole class. The teacher should be more frequently among the children than at her desk, and the children's voices should be heard more often than hers.
Such children will inevitably become intellectually independent and morally self-controlled. Most of the order should be taken in hand by children in office, and they should be distinguished by a badge: most questions of punishment should be referred to them. This means a constant appeal to the law that is behind both teacher and children and which they learn to reach apart from the teacher's control.
"Where 'thou shalt' of the law becomes 'I will' of the doer, then we are free."
The aim of the following chapters is to show how principles may be applied to what are usually known as subjects of the curriculum, and what place these subjects take in the acquisition of experience. An exhaustive or detailed treatment of method is not intended, but merely the establishment of a point of view and method of application.
It is always difficult to see the beginnings of things: we know that stories form the raw material of morality, it is not easy to trace morality inLittle Black Sambo, The Three Bears, Alice in Wonderland,orThe Sleeping Beauty,but nevertheless morality is there if we recognise morality in everyday things. It is not too much to say that everybody should have an ideal, even a burglar: his ideal is to be a good and thorough burglar, and probably if he is a burglar of the finer sort, it is to play fair to the whole gang. It is better to be a burglar with an ideal than a blameless person with very little soul or personality, who just slides through life accepting things: it is better to have a coster's ideal of a holiday than to be too indifferent or stupid to care or to know what you want.
Now ideals are supposed to be the essence of morality and morality comes to us through experience, and only experience tests its truth. The story with a moral is generally neither literature nor morality, except such unique examples as _The Pilgrim's Progress _orEveryman. The kind of experience with which morality is concerned is experience of human life in various circumstances, and the way people behave under those circumstances. The beginning of such experience is our own behaviour and the behaviour of other people we know, but this is too limited an experience to produce a satisfactory ideal; so we crave for something wider. It is curious how strong is the craving for this kind of experience in all normal children, in whom one would suppose sense experiences and especially muscular experiences to be enough. The need to know about people other than ourselves, and yet not too unlike, in circumstances other than our own, and yet not too strange, seems to be a necessary part of our education, and we interpret it in the light of our own personal conduct. Out of this, as well as out of our direct experience, we build our ideal. When one realises how an ideal may colour the whole outlook of a person, one begins to realise what literature means to a child. The early ideal is crude; it may be Jack the Giant-Killer, or an engine-driver, Cinderella, or the step-cleaner; this may grow into Hiawatha or Robinson Crusoe, for boys, and a fairy tale Princess or one of the "Little Women" for girls. In every hero a child half-unconsciously sees himself, and the ideal stimulates all that hidden life which is probably the most important part of his growth. As indirect experiences grow, or in other words as he hears or reads more stories, his ideal widens, and his knowledge of the problems of life is enlarged. This is the raw material of morality, for out of his answers to these problems he builds up standards of conduct and of judgement. He projects himself into his own ideal, and he projects himself into the experiences of other people: he lives in both: this is imagination of the highest kind, it is often called sympathy, but the term is too limited, it is rather imaginative understanding.
There is another side of life grasped by means of this new world of experience, and that is, the spiritual side that lies between conduct and ideals; children have always accepted the supernatural quite readily and it is not to be wondered at, for all the world is new and therefore supernatural to them. Magic is done daily in children's eyes, and there is no line between what is understandable and what is not, until adults try to interpret it for them.
They are curious about birth and death and all origins: thunder is terrifying, the sea is enthralling, the wind is mysterious, the sky is immense, and all suggest a power beyond: in this the children are reproducing the race experience as expressed in myths, when power was embodied in a god or goddess. Therefore the fairy world or the giant world, or the wood full of dwarfs and witches' houses, is as real to them, and as acceptable, as any part of life. It is their recognition of a world of spirits which later on mingles itself with the spiritual life of religion. That life is behind all matter, is the main truth they hold, and while it is difficult here to disentangle morality from religion, it is supremely evident that a very great and significant side of a child's education is before us.
It is by means of the divine gift of imagination, probably the most spiritual of a child's gifts, that he can lay hold of all that the world of literature has to offer him. Because of imagination he is independent of poverty, monotony, and the indifference of other people; he has a world of his own in which nothing is impossible. Edwin Pugh says of a child of the slums who was passionately fond of reading cheap literature:—"It was by means of this penny passport to Heaven that she escaped from the Hell of her surroundings. It was in the maudlin fancies of some poor besotted literary hack maybe, that she found surcease from the pains of weariness, the carks and cares of her miserable estate."
A teacher realising this, should feel an almost unspeakable sense of responsibility in having to select and present matter: but the problem should be solved on the one hand by her own high standard of story material, and on the other by her knowledge of the child's needs. According to his experiences of life the interpretation of the story will differ: for example, it was found that the children of a low slum neighbourhood translatedJack the Giant-killerinto terms of a street fight: to children living by a river or the sea, theWater-Babieswould mean very much, whileJan of the Windmillwould be more familiar ground for country children. Fairy stories of the best kind have a universal appeal.
In choosing a story a teacher should be aware of the imperishable part of it, the truth around which it grew; sometimes the truth may seem a very commonplace one, sometimes a curious one. For example, very young children generally prefer stories of home life because round the family their experience gathers: the subject seems homely, but it is really one of the fundamental things of life and the teacher should realise this in such a way that the telling or reading of the story makes the kernel its central point. To some children the ideal home life comes only through literature: daily experiences rather contradict it. Humour is an important factor in morality; unless a person is capable of seeing the humor of a situation he is likely to be wanting in a sense of balance; the humor of a situation is often caused by the wrong proportion or wrong balance of things: for example the humour ofThe Mad Tea-Partylies, partly at least, in the absurd gravity with which the animals regarded the whole situation, the extreme literal-mindedness of Alice, and the exaggerated imitation of human beings: a really moral person must have balance as well as sympathy, else he sees things out of proportion. These examples make evident that we are not to seek for anything very patently high-flown in the stories for children; it is life in all its phases that gives the material, but it must be true life: not false or sentimental or trivial life: this will rule out the "pretty" stories for children written by trivial people in teachers' papers, or the pseudo-nature story, or the artificial myth of the "How did" type, or the would-be childish story where the language is rather that of the grown-up imitating children than that of real children. Of late years, with the discovery of children, children's literature has grown, and there is a good deal to choose from past and present writers.
There is no recognised or stereotyped method of telling a story to children: it is something much deeper than merely an acquired art, it is the teacher giving something of her personality to the children, something that is most precious. One of the finest of our English Kindergarten teachers once said, "I feel almost as if I ought to prepare my soul before telling a story to young children," and this is the sense in which the story should be chosen and told. There are, of course, certain external qualifications which must be so fully acquired as to be used unconsciously, such as a good vocabulary, power over one's voice, a recognition of certain literary phases in a story, such as the working up to the dramatic crisis, the working down to the end so that it shall not fall flat, and the dramatic touches that give life; these are certainly most necessary, and should be studied and cultivated; but a teacher should not be hampered in her telling by being too conscious of them. Rather she should feel such respect and even reverence for this side of a child's education that the framework and setting can only be of the best, always remembering at the same time what is framework and setting, and what is essence.
Much that has been said about the method and aim of stories might apply to those taken from the Bible, but they need certain additional considerations. Here religion and morality come very closely together: the recognition of a definite personality behind all circumstances of life, to whom our conduct matters, gives a soul to morality. The Old Testament is a record of the growth of a nation more fully conscious of God than is the record of any other nation, and because of this children can understand God in human life when they read such stories as the childhood of Moses and of Samuel. Children resemble the young Jewish nation in this respect: they accept the direct intervention of God in the life of every day. Their primitive sense of justice, which is an eye for an eye, will make them welcome joyfully the plagues of Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea. It would be premature to force on them the more mature idea of mercy, which would probably lead to confusion of judgement: they must be clear about the balance of things before they readjust it for themselves.
Much of the material in the Old Testament is hardly suitable for very young children, but the most should be made of what there is: the lives of Eastern people are interesting to children and help to make the phraseology of the Psalms and even of the narratives clear to them. Wonder stories such as the Creation, the Flood, the Burning Bush, Elijah's experiences, appeal to them on another side, the side that is eager to wonder: the accounts of the childhood of Ishmael, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, David and Samuel, and the little Syrian maid, come very close to them. Such stories should be given to young children so that they form part of the enchanted memory of childhood—which is permanent.
With the New Testament the problem is more difficult: one hesitates to bring the life of Christ before children until they are ready to understand, even in some degree, its significance; the subject is apt to be dealt with either too familiarly, and made too commonplace and everyday a matter, or as something so far removed from human affairs as to be mysterious and remote to a child. To mix Old and New Testament indiscriminately, as, for example, by taking them on alternate days, is unforgivable, and no teacher who has studied the Bible seriously could do so, if she cared about the religious training of her children, and understood the Bible.
If the children can realise something of the sense in which Christ helped human beings, then some of the incidents in His life might be given, such as His birth, His work of healing, feeding and helping the poor, and some of His stories, such as the lost sheep, the lost son, the sower, the good Samaritan. It is difficult to speak strongly enough of the mistreatment of Scripture, under the name of religion: it has been spoilt more than any other subject in the curriculum, chiefly by being taken too often and too slightly, by teachers who may be in themselves deeply religious, but who have not applied intelligence to this matter. The religious life of a young child is very direct: there is only a little in the religious experiences of the Jews that can help him, and much that can puzzle and hinder him; their interpretation of God as revengeful, cruel and one-sided in His dealings with their enemies must greatly puzzle him, when he hears on the other hand that God is the Father of all the nations on the earth. What is suitable should be taken and taken well, but there is no virtue in the Bible misunderstood.
Poetry is a form of literature which appeals to childrenif they are not made to learn it by rote. Unconsciously they learn it very quickly and easily, if they understand in a general way the meaning, and if they like the sound of the words. Rhythm is an early inheritance and can be encouraged by poetry, music and movement. The sound of words appeals strongly to young children, and rhyming is almost a game. The kind of poetry preferred varies a good deal but on the whole narrative or nonsense verses seem most popular; few children are ready for sentiment or reflection even about themselves, and this is why some of Stevenson's most charming poems about children are not appreciated by them as much as by grown-up people. And for the same reason only a few nature poems are really liked.
Without doubt, the only aim in giving poetry to children is to help them to appreciate it, and the only method to secure this is to read it to them appreciatively and often.
Besides such anthologies asThe Golden Staircase,E.V. Lucas'sBook of Verses for Children,and others, we must go to the Bible for poems like the Song of Miriam, or of Deborah, and the Psalms; to Shakespeare for such songs as "Where the Bee Sucks," "I know a Bank," "Ye Spotted Snakes," either with or without music; to Longfellow'sHiawathafor descriptive pieces, and to Scott and Tennyson for ballads and songs, and to many other simple classic sources outside the ordinary collections.
In both prose and poetry, probably the ultimate aim is appreciation of beauty in human conduct. Clutton Brock says, "The value of art is the value of the aesthetic activity of the spirit, and we must all value that before we can value works of art rightly: and ultimately we must value this glory of the universe, to which we give the name of beauty when we apprehend it." Again he says, "Parents, nurses and teachers ought to be aware that the child when he forgets himself in the beauty of the world is passing through a sacred experience which will enrich and glorify the whole of his life."
If all this is what literature means in a child's experiences of life, then it must be given a worthy place in the time-table and curriculum and in the serious preparation by the teacher for her work.
The first experiences the child gains from the world of nature are those of beauty, of sound, colour and smell. Flowers at first are just lovely and sweet-smelling; the keen senses of a child are more deeply satisfied with colour and scent than we have any idea of, unless some faint memory of what it meant remains with us. But he begins to grasp real scientific truth from his experiences with the elements which have for him such a mysterious attraction; by the very contact with water something in the child responds to its stimulus. Mud and sand have their charms, quite intangible, but universal, from prince to coster; a bonfire is something that arouses a kind of primeval joy. Again, race experience reproducing itself may account for all this, and it must be satisfied. The demand for contact with the rest of nature is a strong and fierce part of human nature, and it means the growth of something in life that we cannot do without. We induce children to come into our schools when this hunger is at its fiercest, and very often we do nothing to satisfy it, but set them in rooms to look at things inanimate when their very being is crying out for life. "I want something and I don't know what to want" is the expression of a state very frequent in children, and not infrequent in grown-up people, because they have been balked of something.
How, then, can we provide for their experience of this side of life? We have tried to do so in the past by object and nature lessons, but we must admit that they are not the means by which young children seek to know life, or by which they appreciate its beauty. We have been trying to kill too many birds with one stone in our economic way; "to train the powers of observation," "to teach a child to express himself," "to help a child to gain useful knowledge about living things," have been the most usual aims. And the method has been that of minute examination of a specimen from the plant or animal world, utterly detached from its surroundings, considered by the docile child in parts, such as leaves, stem, roots, petals, and uses; or head, wings, legs, tail, and habits. The innocent listener might frequently think with reason that a number lesson rather than a nature lesson was being given. The day of the object lesson is past, and to young children the nature lesson must become nature work.
It is in the term "nature lesson" that the root of the mischief lies: nature is not a lesson to the young child, it is an interest from which he seeks to gain more pleasure, by means of his own activity: plants encourage him to garden, animals stir his desire to watch, feed and protect; water, earth and fire arouse his craving to investigate and experiment: there is no motive for passive study at this juncture, and without a motive or purpose all study leads to nothing. Adults compare, and count the various parts of a living thing for purposes of classification connected with the subdivisions of life which we call botany and zoology; but such things are far removed from the young child's world—only gradually does it begin to dawn on him that there are interesting likenesses, and that in this world, as in his own, there are relationships; when he realises this, the time for a nature lesson has come. But much direct experience must come first.
In setting out the furnishing of the school the need for this activity is implied. No school worthy of the name can do without a garden, any more than it can do without reading books, or blackboards, indeed the former need is greater: if it is possible, and possibilities gradually merge into acceptances, a pond should be in the middle of the garden, and trees should also be considered as part of the whole. It is not difficult for the ordinary person to make a pond, or even to begin a garden.
In a school situated in S.E. London in the midst of rows of monotonous little houses, and close to a busy railway junction, a miracle was performed: the playground was not very large, and of the usual uncompromising concrete. The children, most of whose fathers worked on the railway, lived in the surrounding streets, and most of them had a back-yard of sorts; they had little or no idea of a garden. One of the teachers had, however, a vision which became a reality. She asked her children to help to make a garden, and for weeks every child brought from his back-yard his little paper bag of soil which was deposited over some clinkers that were spread out in a narrow border against the outside wall; in a few months there was a border of two yards in which flowers were planted: the caretaker, inspired by the sight, did his share of fixing a wooden strip as a kind of supporting border to the whole: in two years the garden had spread all round the outside wall of the playground, and belonged to several classes.
An even greater miracle was performed in a dock-side school, where to most of the children a back-yard was a luxury beyond all possibility. The school playground was very small, and evening classes made a school garden quite impossible. But the head mistress was one who saw life full of possibilities, and so she saw a garden even in the sordidness. Round the parish church was a graveyard long disused, and near one of the gates a small piece of ground that had never been used for any graveyard purpose: it was near enough to the school to be possible, and in a short time the miracle happened—the entrance to the graveyard became a children's flowering garden.
Inside the school where plants and flowers in pots are numerous, a part of the morning should be spent in the care of these: few people know how to arrange flowers, and fewer how to feed and wash them; if there are an aquarium or chrysalis boxes, they have to be attended to: all this should be a regular duty with a strong sense of responsibility attached to it; it is curious how many people are content to live in an atmosphere of decaying matter.
If the children enjoy so intensely the colour of the leaves and flowers they will be glad to have the opportunity of painting them; this is as much a part of nature work as any other, and it should be used as such, because it emphasises so strongly the side of appreciation of beauty, a side very often neglected. It is here that the individual paint box is so important. If children are to have any sense of colour they must learn to match very truthfully; there is a great difference between the blue of the forget-me-not and of the bluebell, but only by experiment can children discover that the difference lies in the amount of red in the latter. By means of discoveries of this kind they will see new colours in life around them, and a new depth of meaning will come to their everyday observations. This is true observation, not the "look and say" of the oral lesson, which has no purpose in it, and leads to no natural activity, or to appreciation.
It is difficult to satisfy the interest in animals. In connection with the Nursery School the most suitable have been mentioned. The transition and junior school children may see others when they go for excursions. At this stage, too, children have a great desire to learn about wild animals, and the need often arises out of their literature: the camel that brought Rebecca to Isaac, the wolf that adopted Mowgli, the reindeer that carried Kay and Gerda, the fox that tried to eat the seven little kids, Androcles' lion, and Black Sambo's tiger, might form an interesting series, helped by pictures of the creaturein its own home. It is difficult to say whether this may be termed literature, geography, or nature study. The difficulty serves to show the unity of life at this period. Books such as Seton Thompson's, Long's, and Kearton's, and many others, supply living experiences of animal life impossible to get from less direct sources.
As children get older, and have the power to look back, they will feel the necessity of keeping records; and thus the Nature Calendar, forerunner of geography, will be adopted naturally.
Another important feature in nature experiences is the excursion. Froebel says: "Not only children and boys, but indeed many adults, fare with nature and her character as ordinary men fare with the air. They live in it and yet scarcely know it as something distinct … therefore these children and boys who spend all their time in the fields and forests see and feel nothing of the beauties of nature and their influence on the human heart. They are like people who have grown up in a very beautiful country and who have no idea of its beauty and its spirit … therefore it is so important that boys and adults should go into the fields and forests, together striving to receive into their hearts and minds the life and spirit of nature." It is evident from this that excursions are as necessary in the country as in the town, where instead of the "fields and forests" perhaps only a park is possible, but there is no virtue in an excursion taken without preparation. The teacher must first of all visit the place and see what it is likely to give the children. She must tell them something of it, give them some aim in going there, such as collecting leaves or fruits, or recording different shapes of bare trees, or collecting things that grow in the grass. These are examples of what a town park might yield. Within one group of children there might be many with different aims. During the days following the excursion time should be spent in using these experiences, either by means of painting and modelling, or making classified collections of things found, or compiling records, oral or written. Otherwise the excursion degenerates into a school treat without its natural enjoyment.
With regard to the inevitable gaps in the children's minds in connection with the world of living things, such pictures as the following should be in every town school: a pine wood, a rabbit warren, a natural pond, a ditch and hedge, a hayfield in June, a wild daffodil patch, a sheet of bluebells, a cornfield at different stages, an orchard in spring and in autumn, and many others. These must be constantly used when they are needed, and not misused in the artificial method known as "picture talks."
There is another side to nature work. Froebel says: "The things of nature form a more beautiful ladder between heaven and earth than that seen by Jacob; not a one-sided ladder leading in one direction, but an all-sided one leading in all directions. Not in dreams is it seen; it is permanent, it surrounds us on all sides."
Froebel believed that contact with nature helps a child's realisation of God, and any one who believes in early religious experience must agree; a child's early questions and difficulties, as well as his early awe and fear show it—he is probably nearer to God in his nature work than in many of thedailyScripture lessons. All his education should be permeated by spiritual feeling, but there are some aspects in which the realisation is clearer, and possibly his contact with nature stands out as the highest in this respect. There is no conscious method or art in bringing this about; the teacher must feel it and be convinced of it.
Thus we come to the conclusion that the Nursery School nature work can be safely left to look after itself, provided the surroundings are satisfying and the children are free.
In the transition and the junior school there should be no nature lessons of the object lesson type, but plenty of nature work, leading to talks, handwork, and poetry. The aim is not economic or informational at this stage, but the development of pure appreciation and interest. There can hardly be a regular place on the time-table for such irregular work, comprising excursions, gardening, handwork, and literature at least, and depending on the weather and the seasons. There should always be a regular morning time for attending to plants and animals and for the Nature Calendar, but no "living" teacher will be a slave to mere time-table thraldom.
By means of toys, handwork and games, as well as various private individual experiments, a child touches on most sides of mathematics in the nursery class. In experimenting with bricks he must of necessity have considered relative size, balance and adjustment, form and symmetry; in fitting them back into their boxes some of the most difficult problems of cubic content; in weighing out "pretence" sugar and butter by means of sand and clay new problems are there for consideration; in making a paper-house questions of measurement evolve. This is all in the incidental play of the Nursery School, and yet we might say that a child thus occupied is learning mathematics more than anything else. Here, if he remained till six, he did a certain amount of necessary counting, and he may have acquired skill in recognising groups, he may have unconsciously and incidentally performed achievements in the four rules, but never, of course, in any shortened or technical form. Probably he knows some figures. It is best to give these to a child when he asks for or needs them, as in the case of records of games. On the other hand he may be content with strokes. Various mathematical relationships are made clear in his games or trials of strength, such as distance in relation to time or strength, weight in relation to power and to balance, length and breadth in relation to materials, value of material in relation to money or work. By means of many of his toys the properties of solids have become working knowledge to him. Here, then, is our starting-point for the transition period.
Undoubtedly the aim of the transition class is partly to continue by means of games and dramatic play the kind of knowledge gained in the Nursery School; but it has also the task of beginning to organise such knowledge, as the grouping into tens and hundreds. This organisation of raw material and the presenting of shortened processes, as occur in the first four rules, forms the work also of the junior school. To give to a child shortened processes which he would be very unlikely to discover in less than a lifetime, is simply giving him the experience of the race, as primitive man did to his son. But the important point is to decide when a child's discovery should end and the teacher's demonstration begin.
This is the period when we are accustomed to speak of beginning "abstract" work; it is well to be clear what it means, and how it stands related to a child's need for experience. When we leave the problems of life, such as shopping, keeping records of games and making measurements for construction; and when we begin to work with pure number, we are said to be dealing with the abstract. Formerly dealing with pure number was called "simple," and dealing with actual things, such as money and measures, "compound," and they were taken in this order. But experience has reversed the process, and a child comes to see the need of abstract practice when he finds he is not quick enough or accurate enough, or his setting out seems clumsy, in actual problems. This was discussed at greater length in the chapter on Play.
For instance, he might set down the points of a game by strokes, each line representing a different opponent:
John ||||||||||||||||
Henry |||||||||||
Tom |||
He will see how difficult it is to estimate at a glance the exact score, and how easy it is to be inaccurate. It seems the moment to show him that the idea of grouping or enclosing a certain number, and always keeping to the same grouping, is helpful:
John |||||||||| |||||| = 1 ten and 6 singles.
Henry |||||||||| | = 1 ten and 1 single.
Tom ||| = 3 singles.
After doing this a good many times he could be told that this is a universal method, and he would doubtless enjoy the purely puzzle pleasure in working long sums to perfect practice. This pleasure is very common in children at this stage, but too often it comes to them merely through being shown the "trick" of carrying tens. They have reached a purely abstract point, but they cannot get through it without some more material help. The following is an example of the kind of help that can be given in getting clear the concept of the ten grouping and the processes it involves:
[Illustration: Board with hooks, in ranks of nine, and rings]
The whole apparatus is a rectangular piece of wood about 3/4 of an inch thick, and about 3x1-1/2 feet of surface. It is painted white, and the horizontal bars are green, so that the divisions may be apparent at a distance; it has perpendicular divisions breaking it up into three columns, each of which contains rows of nine small dresser hooks. It can be hung on an easel or supported by its own hinge on a table. Each of the divisions represents a numerical grouping, the one on the right is for singles or units, the central one for tens, and the left side one for hundreds: the counters used are button moulds, dipped in red ink, with small loops of string to hang on the hooks: it is easily seen by a child that, after nine is reached, the units can no longer remain in their division or "house," but must be gathered together into a bunch (fastened by a safety pin) and fixed on one of the hooks of the middle division.
Sums of two or three lines can thus be set out on the horizontal bars, and in processes of addition the answer can be on the bottom line. It is very easy, by this concrete means, to see the process in subtraction, and indeed the whole difficulty of dealing with ten is made concrete. The whole of a sum can be gone through on this board with the button-moulds, and on boards and chalk with figures, side by side, thus interpreting symbol by material; but the whole process is abstract.
The piece of apparatus is less abstract only in degree than the figures on the blackboard, because neither represents real life or its problems: in abstract working we are merely going off at a side issue for the sake of practice, to make us more competent to deal with the economic affairs of life. There is a place for sticks and counters, and there is a place for money and measures, but they are not the same: the former represents the abstract and the latter the concrete problem if used as in real life: the bridge between the abstract and the concrete is largely the work of the transition class and junior school, in respect of the foundations of arithmetic known as the first four rules.
Games of skill, very thorough shopping or keeping a bankbook, or selling tickets for tram or train, represent the kind of everyday problem that should be the centre of the arithmetic work at this transition stage; and out of the necessities of these problems the abstract and semi-abstract work should come, but it shouldneverprecede the real work. A real purpose should underlie it all, a purpose that is apparent and stimulating enough to produce willing practice. A child will do much to be a good shopkeeper, a good tram conductor, a good banker; he will always play the game for all it is worth.
In the Nursery School activity is the chief characteristic: one of its most usual forms is experimenting with tools and materials, such as chalk, paints, scissors, paper, sand, clay and other things. The desire to experiment, to change the material in some way, to gratify the senses, especially the muscular one, may be stronger than the desire to construct. The handwork play of the Nursery School is therefore chiefly by means of imitation and experiment, and direct help is usually quite unwelcome to the child under six. There is little more to be said in the way of direction than, "Provide suitable material, give freedom, and help, if the child wants it." But the case is rather different in the transitional stage. As the race learnt to think by doing, so children seem to approach thought in that way; they have a natural inclination to do in the first case; they try, do wrongly, consider, examine, observe, and do again: for example, a girl wants to make a doll's bonnet like the baby's; she begins impulsively to cut out the stuff, finds it too small, tries to visualise the right size, examines the real bonnet, and makes another attempt. At some apparently odd moment she stumbles on a truth, perhaps the relation of one form to another in the mazes of bonnet-making; it is at these odd moments that we learn. Or a boy may be painting a Christmas card, and in another odd moment he mayfeelsomething of the beauty of colour, if, for example, he is copying holly-berries. No purposeless looking at them would have stirred appreciation. Whether the end is doing, or whether it is thinking, the two are inextricably connected; in the earlier stages the way to know and feel is very often by action, and here is the basis of the maxim that handwork is a method.
This idea has often been only half digested, and consequently it has led to a very trivial kind of application; a nature lesson of the "look and say" description has been followed by a painting lesson; a geography lesson, by the making of a model. If the method of learning by doing was the accepted aim of the teacher then it was not carried out, for this is learning and then doing, not learning for the purpose of doing, but doing for the purpose of testing the learning, which is quite another matter, and not a very natural procedure with young children. Many people have tried to make things from printed directions, a woman may try to make a blouse and a man to make a knife-box; their procedure is not to separate the doing and the learning process; probably they have first tried to do, found need for help, and gone to the printed directions, which they followed side by side with the doing; and in the light of former failures or in the course of looking or of experimenting, they stumbled upon knowledge: this is learning by doing.
Therefore the making of a box may be arithmetic, the painting of a buttercup may be nature study, the construction of a model, or of dramatic properties may be geography or history, not by any means the only way of learning, but one of the earlier ways and a very sound way; there is a purpose to serve behind it all, that will lead to very careful discrimination in selection of knowledge, and to pains taken to retain it. If this is fully understood by a teacher and she is content to take nature's way, and abide for nature's time to see results, then her methods will be appropriately applied: she will see that she is not training a race of box-makers, but that she is guiding children to discover things that they need to know in a natural way, and ensuring that as these facts are discovered they shall be used. Consequently neither haste nor perfection of finish must cloud the aim; it is not the output that matters but the method by which the children arrive at the finished object, not forty good boxes, but forty good thinkers. Dewey has put it most clearly when he says that the right test of an occupation consists "in putting the maximum of consciousness into whatever is done." Froebel says, "What man tries to represent or do he begins to understand."
This is what we should mean by saying that handwork is a method of learning.
But handwork has its own absolute place as well. A child wants to acquire skill in this direction even more consciously than he wants to learn: if he has been free, in the nursery class, to experiment with materials, and if he knows some of his limitations, he is now, in the transition class, ready for help, and he should get it as he needs it. This may run side by side with the more didactic side of handwork which has been described, but it is more likely that in practice the two are inextricably mixed up; and this does not matter if the two ends are clear in the teacher's mind; both sides have to be reckoned with.
The important thing to know is the kind of help that should be given, and when and how it is needed. It is well to remember that in this connection a child's limitations are not final, but only mark stages: for example, in his early attempts to use thick cardboard he cannot discover the neat hinge that is made by the process known as a "half-cut"; he tries in vain to bend the cardboard, so as to secure the same result. There are two ways of helping him: either he can be quite definitely shown and made to imitate, or he can be set to think about it; he is given a cardboard knife and allowed to experiment: if he fails, it may be suggested that a clean edge can only be got by some form of cutting; probably he will find out the rest of the process. The second method is the better one, because it promotes thinking, while the first only promotes pure imitation and the habit of reckoning on this easy solution of difficulties. A dull child may have to be shown, but there are few such children, unless they have been trained to dulness.
Imitation is not, however, always a medicine for dulness, nor does it always produce dulness. There is a time for imitation and there is a kind of imitation that is very intelligent. For example, a child may come across a toy aeroplane and wish to make one; he will examine it carefully, think over the uses of parts and proceed to make one as like it as possible: here again is the maximum of consciousness, the essence of thinking. Or the imitation may consist in following verbal directions: this is far from easy if the teacher is at all vague, and promotes valuable effort if she is clear but not diffuse: the putting of words into action necessitates a considerable amount of imagining, and the establishment of very important associations in brain centres. Such cases might occur in connection with weaving, cardboard and paper work, or the more technical processes of drawing and painting, where race experience is actuallygivento a child, by means of which he leaps over the experiences of centuries. This is progress.
If a teacher is to take handwork seriously, and not as a pretty recreation with pleasing results, she should be fully conscious of all that it means, and apply this definitely in her work: it is so easy to be trivial while appearing to be thorough by having well-finished work produced, which has necessitated little hard thinking on the child's part. Construction gives a sense of power, a strengthening of the will, ability to concentrate on a purpose in learning, a social sense of serviceableness, a deepened individuality: but this can only be looked for if a child is allowed to approach it in the right way, first as an experimenter and investigator, or as an artist, and afterwards as a learner, who is also an individual, and learns in his own way and at his own rate: but if the teacher's ambition is external and economic then the child is a tool in her hands, and will remain a tool. We cannot expect the fruits of the spirit if our goal is a material one.
One of the lessons of the war is economy. In handwork this has come to us through the quest for materials, but it has been a blessing, if now and then in disguise. In the more formal period of handwork only prepared, almost patented material was used; everything was "requisitioned" and eager manufacturers supplied very highly finished stuff. Not very many years ago, the keeper of a "Kindergarten" stall at an exhibition said, while pointing to cards cut and printed with outlines for sewing and pricking, "We have so many orders for these that we can afford to lay down considerable plant for their production." An example in another direction is that of a little girl who attended one of the best so-called Kindergartens of the time: she was afflicted, while at home, with the "don't know what to do" malady; her mother suggested that she might make some of the things she made at school, but she negatived that at once with the remark, "I couldn't do that, you see, because we have none of the right kind of stuff to make them of here."
It is quite unnecessary to give more direct details as to the kind of work suitable and the method of doing it; more than enough books of help have been published on every kind of material, and it might perhaps be well if we made less use of such terms as "clay-modelling," "cardboard-work," "raffia," and took handwork more in the sense of constructive or expressive work, letting the children select one or several media for their purpose; they ought to have access to a variety of material; and except when they waste, they should use it freely. It is limiting and unenlightened to put down a special time for the use of special material, if the end might be better answered by something else: if modelling is at 11.30 on Monday and children are anxious to make Christmas presents, what law in heaven or earth are we obeying if we stick to modelling except the law of Red Tape.
This aspect of experience comes in two forms, the life of man in the past, with the memorials and legacies he has left, and the life of man in the present under the varying conditions of climate and all that it involves. In other words these experiences are commonly known as history and geography, though in the earlier stages of their appearance in school it is perhaps better to call the work—preparation for history and geography. They would naturally appear in the transition or the junior class, preferably in the latter, but they need not be wholly new subjects to a child; his literature has prepared him for both; to some extent his experiments in handwork have prepared him for history, while his nature work, especially his excursions and records, have prepared him for geography. That he needs this extension of experience can be seen in his growing demands for true stories, true in the more literal sense which he is coming fast to appreciate; undoubtedly most children pass through a stage of extreme literalism between early childhood and what is generally recognised as boyhood and girlhood. They begin to ask questions regarding the past, they are interested in things from "abroad," however vague that term may be to them.
Perhaps it will be best to treat the two subjects separately, though like all the child's curriculum at this stage they are inextricably confused and mingled both with each other, and with literature, as experiences of man's life and conduct.
The beginnings of geography lie in the child's foundations of experience. Probably the first real contact, unconscious though it may be, that any child has in this connection is through the production of food and clothing. A country child sees some of the beginnings of both, but it is doubtful how much of it is really interpreted by him; the village shop with its inexhaustible stores probably means much more in the way of origins, and he may never go behind its contents in his speculations. It is true he sees milking, harvesting, sheep-shearing, and many other operations, but he often misses the stage between the actual beginning and the finished product—between the wool on the sheep's back and his Sunday clothes, between the wheat in the field and his loaf of bread. The town child has many links if he can use them: the goods train, the docks, the grocer's, green-grocer's or draper's shop, foreigners in the street, the vans that come through the silent streets in the early morning; in big towns, such markets as Covent Garden or Leadenhall or Smithfield; such a river as the Thames, Humber or Mersey—from any one of these beginnings he can reach out from his own small environment to the world. A town child has very confused notions of what a farm really means to national life, and a country child of what a big railway station or dock involves. All children need to know what other parts of their own land look like, and what is produced; they ought to trace the products within reach to their origin, and this will involve descriptions of such things as fisheries at Hull or Aberdeen, the coal mines of Wales or Lanarkshire, pottery districts of Stafford, woollen and cotton factories of Yorkshire and Lancashire, mills driven by steam, wind and water, lighthouses, the sheep-rearing districts of Cumberland and Midlothian, the flax-growing of northern Ireland, and much else, and the means of transit and communication between all these. The children will gradually realise that many of the things they are familiar with, such as tea, oranges, silk and sugar, have not been accounted for, and this will take them to the lives of people in other countries, the means of getting there, the time taken and mode of travelling. They will also come to see that we do not produce enough of the things that are possible to grow, such as wheat, apples, wool and many other common necessaries, and that we can spare much that is manufactured to countries that do not make them, such as boots, clothes, china and cutlery. There will come a time when the need for a map is apparent: that is the time to branch off from the main theme and make one; it will have to be of the very immediate surroundings first, but it is not difficult to make the leap soon to countries beyond. Previous to the need for it, map-making is useless.
This working outwards from actual experiences, from the home country to the foreign, from actual contact with real things to things of travellers' tales, is the only way to bring geography to the very door of the school, to make it part of the actual life.
The beginning of history, as of geography, lies in the child's foundations of experience. In the country village he sees the church, possibly some old cottages, or an Elizabethan or Jacobean house near; in the churchyard or in the church the tombstones have quaint inscriptions with reference possibly to past wars or to early colonisation. The slum child on the other hand sees much that is worn out, but little that is antiquated, unless the slum happen to be in such places as Edinburgh or Deptford, situated among the remains of really fine houses: but he realises more of the technicalities and officialism of a social system than does the country child; the suburban child has probably the scantiest store of all; his district is presumably made up of rows of respectable but monotonous houses, and the social life is similarly respectable and monotonous.
There are certain cravings, interests and needs, common to all children, which come regardless of surroundings. All children want to know certain things about people who lived before them, not so much their great doings as their smaller ones; they want to know what these people were like, what they worked at, and learnt, how they travelled, what they bought and sold: and there is undoubtedly a primitive strain in all children that comes out in their love of building shelters, playing at savages, and making things out of natural material. One of the most intense moments inPeter Panto many children is the building of the little house in the wood, and later on, of the other on the top of the trees: that is the little house of their dreams. They are not interested in constitutions or the making of laws; wars and invasions have much the same kind of interest for them as the adventures of Una and the Red Cross Knight.
How are these cravings usually satisfied in the early stages of history teaching of to-day? As a rule a series of biographies of notable people is given, regardless of chronology, or the children's previous experiences, and equally careless of the history lessons of the future; Joan of Arc, Alfred and the Cakes, Gordon of Khartoum, Boadicea, Christopher Columbus, Julius Caesar, form a list which is not at all uncommon; there is no leading thread, no developing idea, and the old test, "the children like it," excuses indolent thinking. On the other hand, the desire to know more of the Robinson Crusoe mode of life has been apparent to many teachers for some time, but the material at their disposal has been scanty and uncertain. It is to Prof. Dewey that we owe the right organisation of this part of history. He has shown that it is on the side of industry, the early modes of weaving, cooking, lighting and heating, making implements for war and for hunting, and making of shelters, that prehistoric man has a real contribution to give: but for the beginnings of social life, for realisation of such imperishable virtues as courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice, children must go to the lives of real people and gradually acquire the idea that certain things are, so to speak, from "everlasting to everlasting," while others change with changing and growing circumstances.
The prehistoric history should be largely concerned with doing and experimenting, with making weapons, or firing clay, or weaving rushes, or with visits to such museums as Horniman's at Forest Hill. The early social history may well take the form best suited to the child, and not appeal merely to surface interest. And the spirit in which the lives of other people are presented to children must not be the narrow, prejudiced, insular one, so long associated with the people of Great Britain, which calls other customs, dress, modes of: living, "funny" or "absurd" or "extraordinary," but rather the scientific spirit that interprets life according to its conditions and so builds up one of its greatest laws, the law of environment.
The geography syllabus, even more than the history one, depends for its beginnings at least on the surroundings of the school—out of the mass of possible materials a very rich and comprehensive syllabus can be made, beginning with any one of the central points already suggested. Above all there should be plenty of pictures, not as amplification, but as material, by means of which a child may interpret more fully; a picture should be of the nature of a problem or of a map—and picture reading should be in the junior school what map reading is in the upper school.
In both history and geography the method is partly that of discovery; especially is this the case in that part of history which deals with primitive industries, and in almost the whole of the geography of this period. The teacher is the guide or leader in discovery, not the story-teller merely, though this may be part of his function.
The following is a small part of a syllabus to show how geography and history material may grow naturally out of the children's experiences. It is meant in this case for children in a London suburb, with no particular characteristics:—
It grows out of the shops of the neighbourhood and the adjoining railway system.
Home-produced Goods—
A. The green-grocer's shop.Tracing of fruit to its own home source, or to a foreign country.Home-grown fruit. The fruit farm, garden, orchard, and wood.The packing and sending of fruit.—Railway lines.Covent Garden; the docks; fruit stalls; jam factories.
B. A grocer's or corn-chandler's shop.Flour and oatmeal traced to their sources.The farm. A wheat and grain farm at different seasons. A dairy farmand a sheep farm.A mill and its processes.Woollen factories.A dairy. Making of butter and cheeseDistribution of these goods.
C. A china shop, leading to the pottery district and making of pottery.
Foreign Goods—
Furs—Red Indians and Canada.Dates—The Arabs and the Sahara.Cotton—The Negroes and equatorial regions.Cocoa—The West Indies.The transit of these, their arrival and distribution.
[The need for a map will come early in the first part of the course, and the need for a globe in the second.]
This grows naturally out of the geography syllabus and might be taken side by side or afterwards.
The development of industries.The growth of spinning and weaving from the simplest processes, bringingin the distaff, spinning-wheel, and loom.The making of garments from the joining together of furs.The growth of pottery and the development of cooking.The growth of roads and means of transit.
[This will involve a good deal of experimental and constructive handwork.]
Reading and writing are held to have lifted man above the brute; they are the means by which we can discover and record human experience and progress, and as such their value is incalculable. But in themselves they are artificial conventions, symbols invented for the convenience of mankind, and to acquire them we need exercise no great mental power. A good eye and ear memory, and a certain superficial quickness to recognise and apply previous knowledge, is all that is needed for reading and spelling; while for writing, the development of a specialised muscular skill is all that is necessary. In themselves they do not as a rule hold any great interest for a child: sometimes they have the same puzzle interest as a long addition sum, and to children of a certain type, mechanical work such as writing gives relief; one of the most docile and uninteresting of little boys said that writing was his favourite subject, and it was easy to understand: he did not want to be stirred out of his commonplaceness; unconsciously he had assimilated the atmosphere and adopted the standards of his surroundings, which were monotonous and commonplace in the extreme, and so he desired no more adventurous method of expression than the process of writing, which he could do well. Imitation is often a strong incentive to reading, it is part of the craving for grown-upness to many children; they desire to do what their brothers and sisters can do. Butduring the first stage of childhood, roughly up to the age of six or even later, no child needs to learn to read or write, taking "need" in the psychological sense:that period is concerned with laying the foundation of real things and with learning surroundings;—any records of experience that come to a child can come as they did to his earliest forefathers—by word of mouth. When he wants to read stories for himself, or write his own letters, then he is impelled by a sufficiently strong aim or incentive to make concentration possible, without resorting to any of the fantastic devices and apparatus so dear to so many teachers. Indeed it is safe to say of many of these devices that they prove the fact that children are not ready for reading.
When a child is ready to read and write the process need not be a long one: by wise delay many tedious hours are saved, tedious to both teacher and children; they have already learnt to talk in those precious hours, to discriminate sounds as part of language training, but without any resort to symbols—merely as something natural. It has been amply proved that if a child is not prematurely forced into reading he can do as much in one year as he would have done in three, under more strained conditions.
With regard to methods a great deal has been written on the subject; it is pretty safe to leave a teacher to choose her own—for much of the elaboration is unnecessary if reading is rightly delayed, and if a child can read reasonably well at seven and a half there can be no grounds for complaint. If his phonetic training has been good in the earlier stages of language, then this may be combined with the "look and say" method, or method of reading by whole words. The "cat on the mat" type of book is disappearing, and its place is being taken by books where the subject matter is interesting and suitable to the child's age; but as in other subjects the book chosen should be considered in reference to the child's surroundings, either to amplify or to extend.
Writing is, in the first instance, a part of reading: when words are being learnt they must be written, or in the earliest stages printed, but only those interesting to the children and written for some definite purpose should be selected: a great aid to spelling is transcription, and children are always willing to copy something they like, such as a verse of poetry, or their name and address. As in arithmetic and in handwork, they will come to recognise the need for practice, and be willing to undergo such exercise for the sake of improvement, as well as for the pleasure in the activity—which actual writing gives to some children.
We must be quite clear about relative values. Reading and writing are necessities, and the means of opening up to us things of great value; but the art of acquiring them is of little intrinsic value, and the recognition of the need is not an early one; nothing is gained by beginning too early, and much valuable time is taken from other activities, notably language. The incentive should be the need that the child feels, and when this is evident time and pains should be given to the subject so that it maybe quickly acquired. But the art of reading is no test of intelligence, and the art of writing is no test of original skill.The claims of the upper departments must be resisted.