A Tempting Vista.––A fascinating vista is open before us; education has all things made plain and easy for her use; she has nothing to do but to select her ideas and turn out a man to her mind. Here is a tempting scheme of unity and continuity! One might occupy all the classes in a school for a whole month upon all the ideas that combine in one ‘apperception mass’ with the idea ‘book.’ We might have object-lessons on the colours, shapes, and sizes of books; more advanced object-lessons on paper-making and book-binding; practical lessons in book-sewing and book-binding; lessons, according to the class, on the contents of books, from A B C and little Bo-Peep to philosophy and poetry. A month! why, a whole school education might be arranged in groups of ideas which should combine into one vast ‘apperception mass,’ all clustering about ‘book.’ The sort of thing was done publicly some time ago, in London, apple being the idea round which the ‘apperception mass’ gathered.
The Person, an Effect and not a Cause.––The problem is simplified anyway. All our complex notions of intellect, will, feeling and so on, disappear. The soul is thrown open to ideas––a fair field and no favour; and ideas, each of them a living entity, according to the familiar Platonic notion, crowd and jostle one another for admission, and for the best places, and for the most important and valuable coalitions, once they have entered. They lie below the ‘threshold’ watching a chance to slip in. They hurry to join their friends and allies upon admission, they ‘vault’ and they ‘taper,’ they form themselves into powerful ‘appreception masses’ which occupy a more or less permanent place in the soul; and the soul––what does it do? It is not evident otherwise than as it affords a stage for this drama of ideas; and the self, the soul or the person, however we choose to call him, is an effect and not a cause, a result, and not an original fact.
A philosopher who emphasises the potency of ideas does good work in the cause of education. We get glimpses of a perfect theory––how our function shall be, to supply the child always with fit ideas, and with the best ideas; how we shall take care so to select and arrange these ideas that they shall naturally fly to one another and make strong ‘apperception masses’ once they have got beyond the ‘threshold’ in the child’s soul.
Herbartian Psychology.––I have only space to glance at one more ‘psychology,’ that which is, curiously enough, dividing the American mind with the school which regards psychology as a ‘natural science,’ and at which English teachers are beginning to snatch as a drowning man snatches at a straw. This is the psychology of Herbart, another German philosopher of the beginning of the last century, contemporary with both Pestalozzi and Froebel during the best years of his life. His theory of man is wide as the poles apart from either of those we have already considered; and there is no denying that it affords a tempting working basis for education. It is only when we come to examine the Herbartian psychology in connection with the two or three great thoughts upon which, as we have seen, the world is being educated, that it is found wanting. Herbart begins to account for man minus what I have called the person. (Person is used in the common-sense, everyday acceptance of the word.) He allows a soul, but he says, “The soul has no capacity nor faculty whatever either to receive or to produce anything. It has originally neither ideas nor feelings nor desires. It knows nothing of itself and nothing of other things. Further, within it lie no forms of intuition or thought, no laws of willing and acting, nor any sort of predisposition, however remote, to all this.” (Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, Part III, sects.152––See Herbatian Psychology, by J. Adams)There remain two possibilities for the soul: an effective vis inertiae and what Herbart describes as the power of reacting on an idea; that is to say, the soul itself is no longer quite as it was after it has thus reacted.
The Struggle for Existence, a Part of Life.––The weak point in the argument is that man would appear to fall under the laws of two universes, the material and the spiritual; and that to energise and resist and repel is the law of his being. It will be said that this need not apply to the child; that the struggle for existence may well begin after a happy childhood has been secured; but probably any sort of transition violates the principles of unity and continuity which should rule education. No doubt all thoughtful Kindergarten teachers recognise in what direction the limitations––all men have their limitations––of their Founder lay, and their practices are levelled up to modern thought. The general substitution of free brush-drawing, in which the children have some initiative, for the cramped pencil drawing in chequers of the old Kindergarten, is an illustration of the modern spirit; but it is well for us all to remember our origins and our tendencies, that we may recognise and avoid our dangers.
Lack the Element of Personality.––’Make children happy and they will be good,’ is absolutely true, but does it develop that strenuousness, the first condition of virtue, which comes of the contrary axiom––’Be good and you will be happy’? Kindergarten teachers are doing beautiful work; but many of them are hampered by the original metaphor of the plant, which is exactly lacking in that element of personality, the cherishing and developing of which is a sacred and important part of education. The philosophic German mind beheld in man a part of the Cosmos, which, like the rest, needed only to be placed in fit conditions to develop according to its nature.
Chapter 6 Some Educational Theories Examined
Theories of Pestalozzi and Froebel––It is refreshing to turn to that school of German educational thought which has produced the two great apostles, Pestalozzi and Froebel. What we may call the enthusiasm of childhood, joyous teaching, loving and lovable teachers and happy school hours for the little people, are among the general gains from this source. To look a gift horse in the mouth is unworthy, and it would seem pure captiousness to detect any source of weakness in a system of psychology to which our indebtedness is so great. But no stream can rise higher than its source, and it is questionable whether the conception of children as cherished plants in a cultured garden has not in it an element of weakness. Are the children too carefully tended? Is Nature too sedulously assisted? Is the environment too perfectly tempered? Is it conceivable that the rough-and-tumble of a nursery should lend itself more to the dignity and self-dependence of the person and to the evolution of individual character, than that delightful place, a child-garden? I suppose we have all noticed that children show more keen intelligence and more independent thought in home-play and home-talk than one expects of the angelic little beings one sees at school. I daresay the reader will know Fra Angelico’s picture of ‘The Last Judgement,’ one of the scenes in which gives us a circle of little monks (become as little children) dancing round, hand-in-hand, with gracious angels on their way to Paradise. The little monks are obviously very happy and very good; but somehow one misses the force of personality; they do not look as if they were capable of striking out a line for themselves; and this may be a danger in the Kindergarten.
CHAPTER VI - PARENTS AS INSPIRERS
Primal Ideas derived from Parents
1. What is the chief thing we have to do in the world?
2. Name two ideas of God specially fit for children.
3. ‘We ought to move slowly up through the human side.’ Why not?
4. Distinguish between logical certainty and moral right.
5. How might the Crucifixion have appeared to a conscientious Jew? How, to a patriotic Jew?
6. Show what primal ideas children get from their parents.
7. What have you to say as to the first approaches to God made by a little child?
8. Discuss the question of archaic forms in children’s prayers.
9. Show how fit for a child is ‘the shout of a King.’
10. Also the notion of the ‘fight for Christ against the devil.’
11. “How very hard it is to be a Christian.” Is this a child’s experience?
‘Oh dear, it’s very hard to do God’s Work!’––A boy of five, a great-grandson of Dr Arnold, was sitting at the piano with his mother, choosing his Sunday hymn; he chose ‘Thy will be done,’ and, as his special favourite, the verse beginning ‘Renew my will from day to day.’ The choice of hymn and verse rather puzzled his mother, who had a further glimpse into the world of child-thought when the little fellow said wistfully, ‘Oh, dear, it’s very hard to do God’s work!’ The difference between doing and bearing was not plain to him, but the battle and struggle and strain of life already pressed on the spirit of the ‘careless, happy child.’ That an evil spiritual personality can get at their thoughts, and incite them to ‘be naughty,’ children learn all too soon and understand, perhaps, better than we do. Then, they are cross, ‘naughty,’ separate, sinful, needing to be healed as truly as the hoary sinner, and much more aware of their need, because the tender soul of the child, like an infant’s skin, is fretted by spiritual soreness. ‘It’s very good of God to forgive me so often; I’ve been naughty so many times today,’ said a sad little sinner of six, not at all because any one else had been at the pains to convince her of naughtiness. Even ‘Pet Marjorie’s’ [Marjorie Fleming] buoyancy is not proof against this sad sense of shortcoming:––
‘Yesterday I behaved extremely ill in God’s most holy church, for I would never attend myself nor let Isabella attend, . . . and it was the very same Devil that tempted Job that tempted me, I am sure; but he resisted Satan, though he had boils and many other misfortunes which I have escaped.’––(At six!)
We must needs smile at the little ‘crimes,’ but we must not smile too much, and let children be depressed with much ‘naughtiness’ when they should live in the instant healing, in the dear Name, of the Saviour of the world.
The Fight of Christ against the Devil––”After thinking the matter over with some care, I resolved that I cannot do better than give you my view of what it was that the average boy carried away from our Rugby of half a century ago which stood him in the best stead––was of the highest value to him––in after life . . . I have been in some doubt as to what to put first and am by no means sure that the few who are left of my old schoolfellows would agree with me; but, speaking for myself, I think this was our most marked characteristic, the feeling that in school and close we were in training for a big fight––were, in fact, already engaged in it––a fight which would last all our lives, and try all our powers, physical, intellectual, and moral, to the utmost. I need not say that this fight was the world-old one of good with evil, of light and truth against darkness and sin, of Christ against the devil.”
So said the author of Tom Brown’s School Days [Thomas Hughes] in an address to Rugby School delivered on a recent Quinquagesima Sunday. This is plain speaking; education is only worthy of the name as it teaches this lesson; and it is a lesson which should be learnt in the home or ever the child sets foot in any other school of life. It is an insult to children to say they are too young to understand this for which we are sent into the world.
‘The Shout of a King.’––Let them grow up, too, with the shout of a King in their midst. There are, in this poor stuff we call human nature, founts of loyalty, worship, passionate devotion, glad service, which have, alas! to be unsealed in the earth-laden older heart, but only ask place to flow from the child’s. There is no safeguard and no joy like that of being under orders, being possessed, controlled, continually in the service of One whom it is gladness to obey.
We lose sight of the fact in our modern civilisation, but a king, a leader, implies warfare, a foe, victory––possible defeat and disgrace. And this is the conception of life which cannot too soon be brought be before children.