Danger of Eccentricity––Possibly, eccentricity is a danger against which the parents of well-descended children must be on the watch. These are born with strong tendencies to certain qualities and ways of thinking. Their bringing-up tends to accentuate their qualities; the balance between these and other qualities is lost, and they become eccentric persons. Mr. Matthew Arnold writes down the life and the work of a great poet as ineffectual; and this is often enough, the verdict passed upon the eccentric. Whatever force of genius and of character, whatever lovely moral traits they may have, the world will not take them as guides for good unless they do as others do in things lawful and expedient; and truly there is a broad margin for originality in declining to hunt with the hounds in things neither lawful nor expedient.
Work and Waste of Brain Tissue Necessary––This, speaking broadly, is the rationale of the matter: just as actually as we sew or write through the instrumentality of the hand, so the child learns, thinks, feels, by means of a material organ––the very delicate nervous tissue of the cerebrum. Now this tissue is constantly and rapidly wearing away. The more it is used, whether in the way of mental effort or emotional excitement, the more it wears away. Happily, rapid new growth replaces the waste, wherefore work and consequent waste of tissue are necessary. But let the waste get ahead of the gain, and lasting mischief happens. Therefore never let the child’s brain-work exceed his chances of reparation, whether such work come in the way of too hard lessons, or of the excitement attending childish dissipations. Another plea for abundant rest is that one thing at a time, and that done well, appears to be Nature’s rule; and his hours of rest and play are the hours of the child’s physical growth; witness the stunted appearance of children who are allowed to live in a whirl of small excitements.
A word more as to the necessity of change of thought for the child who has a distinct bent. The brain tissue not only wastes with work, but, so to speak, wastes locally. We all know how done up we are after giving our minds for a few hours or days to any one subject whether anxious or joyous: we are glad at last to escape from the engrossing thought, and find it a weariness when it returns upon us. It would appear that, set up the continuous working of certain ideas, and a certain tract of the brain substance is, as it were, worn out and weakened with the constant traffic in these ideas. And this is of more consequence when the ideas are moral than when they are merely intellectual. Hamlet’s thoughts play continuously round a few distressing facts; he becomes morbid, not entirely sane; in a word, he is eccentric.
Rest––At the same time, change of occupation is not rest: if a man ply a machine, now with his foot, and now with his hand, the foot or the hand rests, but the man does not. A game of romps (better, so far as mere rest goes, than games with laws and competitions), nonsense talk, a fairy tale, or to lie on his back in the sunshine, should rest the child, and of such as these he should have his fill.
Change––Next, provide him with some one delightful change of thought, that is, with work and ideas altogether apart from his bent for languages. Let him know, with friendly intimacy, the out-of-door objects that come in his way––the redstart, the rosechaffer, the ways of the caddis-worm, forest trees, field flowers––all natural objects, common and curious, near his home. No other knowledge is so delightful as this common acquaintance with natural objects.
Or again, some one remarks that all our great inventors have in their youth handled material––clay, wood, iron, brass, pigments. Let him work in material. To provide a child with delightful resources on lines opposed to his natural bent is the one way of keeping a quite sane mind in the presence of an absorbing pursuit.
Nourishment––Let him do just so much as he takes to of his own accord; but never urge, never applaud, never show him off. Next let words convey ideas as he is able to bear them. Buttercup, primrose, dandelion, magpie, each tells its own tale; Daisy is day’s-eye, opening with the sun, and closing when he sets––
’That well by reason it men callen may
The daisie, or else the eye of day.’
Let him feel that the common words we use without a thought are beautiful, full of story and interest. It is a great thing that the child should get the ideas proper to the qualities inherent in him. An idea fitly put is taken in without effort, and, once in, ideas behave like living creatures––they feed, grow, and multiply.
Distinctive Qualities ask for Culture––It is, at first sight, bewildering to perceive that for whatever distinctive quality, moral or intellectual, we discern in the children, special culture is demanded; but, after all, our obligation towards each such quality resolves itself into providing for it these four things: nourishment, exercise, change, and rest.
Four Conditions of Culture––Exercise––A child has a great turn for languages (his grandfather was the master of nine); the little fellow ‘lisps in Latin,’ learns his ‘mensa‘ from his nurse, knows his declensions before he is five. What line is open to the mother who sees such an endowment in her child? First, let him use it; let him learn his declensions, and whatever else he takes to without the least sign of effort. Probably the Latin case-endings come as easily and pleasantly to his ear as does ’see-saw, Margery Daw,’ to the ordinary child, though no doubt ‘Margery Daw’ is the wholesomer kind of thing.
The Race is Advancing––If the race is advancing, it is along the lines of character; for each new generation inherits and adds to the best that has gone before it. We should have to-day the very flower and fruit that has been a-preparing through long lines of progenitors. Children have always been lovely, so far back as that day when a little child in the streets of Jerusalem was picked up and set in the midst to show of what sort are the princes in the Kingdom to come:
’In the Kingdom are the children––
You may read it in their eyes;
All the freedom of the Kingdom
In their careless humour lies.’
And what mother has not bowed before the princely heart of innocence in her own little child? But apart from this, of their glad living in the sunshine of the Divine countenance, surely our children are ‘more so’ than those of earlier days. Never before was a ‘Jackanapes‘ written, or the ‘Story of a Short Life’ [both by Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing] Shakespeare never made a child, nor Scott, hardly Dickens, often as he tried; either we are waking up to what is in them, or the children are indeed advancing in the van of the times, holding in light grasp the gains of the past, the possibilities of the future. It is the age of child-worship; and very lovely are the well-brought-up children of Christian and cultured parents. But alas, how many of us degrade the thing we love! Think of the multitude of innocents to be launched on the world, already mutilated, spiritually and morally, at the hands of doting parents.
But the Laws by which Body, Mind, and Moral Nature flourish have been Revealed by Science––But so surely as we believe the laws of the spiritual life to have been revealed to us, so, not less surely, though without the same sanctity, have been revealed the laws by which body, mind and moral nature flourish or decay. These it behoves us to make ourselves acquainted with; and the Christian parent who is shy of science, and prefers to bring up his children by the light of Nature when that of authoritative revelation fails, does so to his children’s irreparable loss.
Plausible Reasons for Doing Nothing––Very commonly, the vote is, do nothing; though there are three or four ways of arriving at that conclusion.
As, What’s the good? The fathers have eaten sour grapes; the children’s teeth must be set on edge. Tommy is obstinate as a little mule––but what would you have? So is his father. So have been all the Joneses, time out of mind; and Tommy’s obstinacy is taken as a fact, not to be helped nor hindered.
Or, Mary is a butterfly of a child, never constant for five minutes to anything she has in hand. ‘That child is just like me!’ says her mother; ‘but time will steady her.’ Fanny, again, sings herself to sleep with the Sicilian Vesper Hymn (her nurse’s lullaby) before she is able to speak. ‘It’s strange how an ear for music runs in our family!’ is the comment, but no particular pains are taken to develop the talent.
Another child asks odd questions, is inclined to make little jokes about sacred things, to call his father ‘Tom,’ and, generally, to show a want of reverence. His parents are earnest-minded people––think with pain of the loose opinions of Uncle Harry, and decide on a policy of repression. ‘Do as you’re bid, and make no remarks,’ becomes the child’s rule of life, until he finds outlets little suspected at home.
In another case, common thought is much more on a level with the science of the day; there is a tendency to lung-trouble: the doctors undertake to deal with the tendency so long as the habit of delicacy is not set up. The necessary precautions are taken, and there is no reason why the child should not die at a good old age.
Once more––there are parents who are aware of the advances science has made in education, but doubt the lawfulness of looking to science for aid in the making of character. They see hereditary defects in their children, but set them down as of ‘the natural fault and corruption of the nature of every man which naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam.’ This, they believe, it is not their part to remedy; that is, unless the boy’s fault be of a disturbing kind––a violent temper, for example––when the mother thinks no harm to whip the offending Adam out of him.
Two Ways of Preserving Sanity––Greatness and littleness belong to character, and life would be dull were we all cast in one mould; but how come we to differ? Surely by reason of our inherited qualities. It is hereditary tendencies which result in character. The man who is generous, obstinate, hot-tempered, devout, is so, on the whole, because that strain of character runs in his family. Some progenitor got a bent from his circumstances towards fault or virtue, and that bent will go on repeating itself to the end of the chapter. To save that single quality from the exaggeration which would destroy the balance of qualities we call sanity, two counter-forces are provided: marriage into alien families, and education.
The Development of Character the Main Work of Education––We come round now to the point we started from. If the development of character rather than of faculty is the main work of education, and if people are born, so to speak, ready-made, with all the elements of their after-character in them certain to be developed by time and circumstances, what is left for education to do?