What Is and What Might Be
E >>
Edmond Holmes >> What Is and What Might Be
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 | 11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20
In this brief preliminary sketch of the more salient features of the
Utopian school, I have, I hope, said enough to show that its scholars
differ _toto coelo_ from those who attend that familiar type of
school which I have recently described. Yet the Utopian children are
made of the same clay as the children of other villages. If anything,
indeed, the clay is heavier and more stubborn in Utopia than
elsewhere. Some ten or twelve years ago, when Egeria took charge of
the school, the children were dull, lifeless, listless, resourceless.
Now they are bright, intelligent, happy, responsive, overflowing with
life, interested in many things, full of ability and resource. How
has this change been wrought? Not by veneering or even inoculating
the children with good qualities, but simply by allowing their better
and higher nature to evolve itself freely, naturally, and under
favourable conditions.
That the child's better and higher nature is his real nature, is the
assumption--let me rather say, the profound conviction--on which
Egeria's whole system of education has been based. In basing it on
this assumption, she has made a bold departure from the highway which
has been blindly followed for many centuries. We have seen that the
basis of education in this country, as in Christendom generally, is
the doctrine of original sin. It is taken for granted by those who
train the child that his nature, if allowed to develop itself freely,
will grow in the wrong direction, and will therefore lead him astray;
and that it is the function of education to counteract this
tendency, to do violence to the child's nature, to compel it by main
force to grow (or make a pretence of growing) in the right direction,
to subject it to perpetual repression and constraint. The wild whoops
to which children so often give vent, when released from school, show
that a period of unnatural tension has come to an end; and in these,
and in the further conduct of the released child--in the roughness,
rudeness, and bad language, of which the passer-by (especially in
towns) not infrequently has to complain--we see a rebound from this
state of tension, an instinctive protest against the constraint to
which he has been subjected for so many hours. The result of all this
is that the child leads two lives, a life of unnatural repression and
constraint in school, and a life--also unnatural, though it is
supposed to be the expression of his nature--of reaction and protest
out of school. Such a dislocation of the child's daily life is not
likely to conduce to his well-being; while the teacher's assumption
that his _role_ in school is essentially active, and that of the
child essentially passive, will lead at last to his turning his back
on the root-idea of growth, to his forgetting that the child is a
living and therefore a growing organism, to his regarding the child
as clay in his hands, to be "remoulded" by him "to his heart's
desire," or even as a _tabula rasa_, on which he is to inscribe words
and other symbols at his will.
In Utopia the training which the child receives may be said to be
based on the doctrine of original goodness. It is taken for granted
by Egeria that the child is neither a lump of clay nor a _tabula
rasa_, but a "living soul"; that growth is of the very essence of
his being; and that the normal child, if allowed to make natural
growth under reasonably favourable conditions, will grow happily and
well. It is taken for granted that the potencies of his nature are
well worth realising; that the end of his being--the ideal type
towards which the natural course of his development tends to take
him--is intrinsically good; in fine, that he is _by nature_ a "child
of God" rather than a "child of wrath." It is therefore taken for
granted that growth is in itself a good thing, a move in the right
direction; and that to foster growth, to make its conditions as
favourable as possible, to give it the food, the guidance, and the
stimulus that it needs, is the best thing that education can do for
the child.
It is further taken for granted that the many-sided effort to grow
which is of the essence of the child's nature is the mainspring of,
and expresses itself in, certain typical instincts which no one who
studies the child with any degree of care can fail to observe; and
that by duly cultivating these instincts,--_expansive_ instincts, as
one may perhaps call them, since each of them tends to take the child
away from his petty self,--the teacher will make the best possible
provision for the growth of the child's nature as a whole.
Above all, it is taken for granted that the growth which the child
makes must come from within himself; that no living thing can grow
vicariously; that the rings of soul-growth, like the rings of
tree-growth, must be evolved from an inner life; that the teacher
must therefore content himself with giving the child's expansive
instincts fair play and free play; and that, for the rest, he must as
far as possible efface himself, bearing in mind that not he, but the
child, is the real actor in the drama of school life.
But though so much is left to the child in Utopia, and so much
demanded of him, it is not feared that the effort to grow will be
repugnant to him. On the contrary, it is taken for granted that in
growing, in developing his expansive instincts, the child will be
following the lines and obeying the laws of his own nature; that he
will be fulfilling the latent desires of his heart; that he will be
seeking his own pleasure; in fine, that he will be leading a happy
life.
All this is taken for granted in Utopia, and the child's life is
therefore one of unimpeded, though duly guided and stimulated,
activity. Every instinct that makes for the expansion and elevation
(for growth is always upward as well as outward) of the child's
nature is given the freest possible play, and the whole organisation
of the school is subordinated to this central end.
In order to find out what are the instincts which make for the
expansion and elevation of the child's nature, and which education
ought therefore to foster, we must do what Egeria has always done, we
must observe young children, and study their ways and works. Now
every healthy child wants to eat and drink, and to run about. Here
are two instincts--the instinctive desire for physical nourishment,
and the instinctive desire for physical exercise--through which
Nature provides for the growth of the body. How does she provide for
the growth of what we have agreed to call the soul? We need not
be very careful observers of young children in order to satisfy
ourselves that, apart from physical nourishment and exercise, there
are six things which the child instinctively desires, namely:
(1) to talk and listen:
(2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word):
(3) to draw, paint, and model:
(4) to dance and sing:
(5) to know the why of things:
(6) to construct things.
Let us consider each of these instincts, and try to determine its
meaning and purpose.
(1) The child instinctively desires to enter into communion with
other persons,--his parents, his brothers and sisters, his nurse, his
governess, his little friends. He wants to talk to them, to tell them
what he has done, seen, felt, thought; and he wants to hear what they
have to tell him,--not only of what they themselves have done, but
also of what other persons and other living things have done, in
other times, in other countries, in other worlds. Later on, the
desire to talk and listen will develop into the desire to write and
read; but the desire will still be one for communion, for intercourse
with other lives.
We will call this the _communicative instinct_.
(2) The child desires, not only to enter into communion with other
persons and other living things, but also, in some sort, to identify
his life with theirs. Watch him when he is playing with other
children, or even when he is alone, except for the companionship of
his dolls and toys. He is pretty sure to be _acting_, playing at
make-believe, pretending to be something that he is not, some
grown-up person of his acquaintance, some hero of history or
romance, some traveller or other adventurer, some giant, dwarf, or
fairy, some animal, wild or tame. He plays the part of one or other
of these, and his playmates play other parts, and so a little drama
is enacted. If he has no playmates, his dolls have to play their
parts, or his toy animals have to be endowed with life, so that they
may become fellow-actors with him on the stage that he has selected.
No instinct is more inevitable, more sure to energise, than this.
We will call it the _dramatic instinct_.
In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand
his being, by going out of himself, through the medium of sympathy
and imagination--twin aspects of the same vital tendency--into the
lives of other living beings. We will therefore call these the
_Sympathetic Instincts_, and place them in a class by themselves.
(3) From his very babyhood the child delights in colour, and at a
very early age he learns to love and understand pictures. Then comes
the desire to make these for himself. Give him pencil and paper, give
him chalk, charcoal, a paint-box, and other suitable materials, and
he will set to work of his own accord to depict what he sees or has
seen, either with his outward or his inward eye. Give him a lump of
clay, and he will try to mould it into the likeness of something
that has either attracted his attention, or presented itself to his
imagination. In all these attempts he is trying, unknown to himself,
to express his perception of, and delight in, the visible beauty of
Nature. This instinct will expand, in the fullness of time, into a
strong and subtle feeling for visible beauty, and into a restless
desire to give expression to that feeling.
We will call this the _artistic instinct_, the word _artistic_ being
used, for lack of a more suitable term, in its narrow and
conventional sense.
(4) While the child is still a baby in arms, his mother will sing to
him, and dance him on her knee. This is her first attempt to initiate
him into the mystery of music; and the response that he makes to her
proves that she is a wise teacher, and is appealing to a genuinely
natural faculty. It will not be long before he begins to dance and
sing for himself. Watch the children in a London court or alley when
a barrel-organ appears on the scene. Without having any one to direct
or teach them, they will come together and dance in couples, often
with abundant grace and charm. Nature is their tutor. Her own rhythm,
of which the musician must have caught an echo, is passing through
their ears into their hearts and into their limbs. No instinct is
so spontaneous as this. A child will whistle or sing while his mind
is engaged on other things. If he is happy he will dance about as
naturally, and almost as inevitably, as the leaves dance when the
breeze passes through them.
We will call this the _musical instinct_. So elemental is it that man
shares it, in some degree, with other living things. The birds are
accomplished musicians, and their movements, and those of many other
creatures, are full of rhythm and grace.
In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand
his being, by going out of himself, in response to the attractive
force of beauty, into that larger life which is at the heart of
Nature, but which is not ours until we have made it our own. We will
therefore call these the _AEsthetic Instincts_, and place them in a
class by themselves.
(5) From a very early age the child desires to know the why and
wherefore of things, to understand how effects are produced, to
discover new facts, and pass on, if possible, to their causes. In
response to the pressure of this instinct, the child breaks his toys
in order that he may find out how they work, and asks innumerable
questions which make him the terror and despair of his parents and
the other "Olympians." No instinct is more insistent in the early
days of the child's life. No instinct is more ruthlessly repressed by
those to whom the education of the child is entrusted. No instinct
dies out so completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely
utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type
has done its deadly work. It has been said that children go to school
ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. This
gibe is the plain statement of a patent truth.
We will call this the _inquisitive instinct_.
(6) After analysis comes synthesis. The child pulls his toys to
pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct them, and so be
the better able to control the working of them. The ends that he sets
before himself are those which Comte set before the human
race,--"savoir pour prevoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour deduire,
afin de construire." The desire to make things, to build things up,
to control ways and means, to master the resources of Nature, to put
his knowledge of her laws and facts to a practical use, is strong in
his soul. Give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours in
building and rebuilding houses, churches, towers, and the like. Set
him on a sandy shore, with a spade and a pail, and he will spend
hours in constructing fortified castles with deep, encircling moats
into which the sea may be duly admitted. Or he will make harness and
whips of plaited rushes, armour of tea-paper, swords of tin-plate,
boxes and other articles of cardboard, waggons, engines, and other
implements of wood.
We will call this the _constructive instinct_.
In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand
his being, by going out of himself, through the correlated channels
of theory and practice, into what I may call the machinery of
Nature's life,--an aspect of that life which reveals its mysteries to
reason rather than to emotion, or (to use the language of Eastern
philosophy) to the faculties that try to find order in the Many,
rather than to those which try to hold intercourse with the One.[16]
Whichever channel he may use,--and indeed they are not so much two
channels as one, for each in turn is for ever leading into and then
passing out of the other,--his concern is always for "facts," for the
actualities of things, for "objective truth." We will therefore call
these the _Scientific Instincts_, and place them in a class by
themselves.
There are six instincts, then,--six formative and expansive
instincts--which Nature has implanted in every normal child, and
which education, so far as it aims at being loyal to Nature, should
take account of and try to foster. Two of these are _sympathetic_;
two are _aesthetic_; two are _scientific_. In and through the
sympathetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of _love_. In
and through the aesthetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of
_beauty_. In and through the scientific instincts the soul grows in
the direction of _truth_. It is towards this triune goal that Nature
herself is ever directing the growth of the growing child. The
significance of this conclusion will unfold itself as we proceed.
These instincts manifest themselves in various ways, but chiefly in
the direction that they give to that very serious occupation of young
children which we call play. It is clear, then, that if these
instincts are to be duly cultivated, the work of the school must be
modelled, as far as possible, on the lines which children, when at
play, spontaneously follow. This Egeria, with her inspired sagacity,
has clearly seen; and she has taken her measures accordingly. In
Utopia the school life of the child is all play,--play taken very
seriously, play systematised, organised, provided with ample
materials and ample opportunities, encouraged and stimulated in
every possible way. Each of the fundamental instincts that manifest
themselves in the child's play, and in doing so give a clear
indication of Nature's aims in the child's life, and of the
directions in which she wishes him to grow, is duly ministered to in
this school, the current that wells up in and through it being
skilfully guided into a suitable channel, and every obstacle to its
free development being carefully removed. But the guidance which
Egeria gives tends, as we shall see, to foster rather than fetter the
freedom of the child. When the current has been led into a suitable
channel, it is expected to shape its own further course, and even to
impose on itself the limits--the containing walls--which are needed
if its depth and strength are to be maintained.
Let us now consider each of the six instincts in turn, and see what
special steps Egeria takes to foster its growth.
(1) _The Communicative Instinct_.
Through this instinct the child goes out of himself into the lives of
other persons and other living things. The desire is in its essence
one for intercourse, for communion, for the interchange of thoughts,
of feelings, of experiences. The normal child is, as we all know, an
inveterate chatterbox; but he is also a rapt listener. If he desires,
as he certainly does, to tell others about himself, he desires, in no
less a degree, to hear about others, either from themselves, or from
those who are best able to tell him about them. The balance between
the two desires is well maintained by Nature; and it should be
carefully maintained by those who train the young, if the
communicative instinct as a whole is to make healthy growth.
In too many elementary schools the instinct is systematically
starved, the scholars being strictly forbidden to talk among
themselves, while their conversational intercourse with their teacher
is limited to receiving a certain amount of dry information, and
giving this back, collectively or individually, when they are
expressly directed to do so. The child's instinctive desire to
converse, being deprived by education of its natural outlets, must
needs force for itself the subterranean and illicit outlet of
whispering in class, either under the teacher's nose, if he happens
to be unobservant or indolent, or behind his back, if he happens to
be vigilant and strict. And as the child is forbidden to talk about
things which are wholesome and interesting, it is but natural that in
his surreptitious conversations he should talk about things which
are less edifying, things which are trivial and vulgar, or even
unwholesome and unclean. Children are naturally obedient and
truthful; but in their attempts to find outlets for healthy
activities which are wantonly repressed, they will go far down the
inclined plane of disobedience and deceit.
In Utopia free conversation is systematically encouraged. No
elementary school is supposed to open before 9 a.m.; but Egeria is in
the habit of coming to school at 8.45 or earlier, so that the
children who wish to do so may come and talk to her freely about the
things that interest them,--what they have observed on their walks to
or from school, what they have heard or read at home, what they think
about things in general, and so on. The school has a good library of
books which are worth reading, both in prose and verse. These the
children read in school and out of school, and are thus brought into
communication with other minds, with other times, with other lands.
They are also accustomed to talk freely to one another about the
books that they are reading. Whatever lesson may be going on, they
are encouraged to ask questions about the matter in hand, and even to
express their own views about it. They go out into the playground in
groups and make up games and plays, discussing things freely among
themselves. When they are preparing to act an historical scene or a
passage from some dramatic author, they hold a sort of informal
parliament, in which the actors are selected and various important
questions are provisionally settled. They write letters in school to
real people. The older girls take the little ones in hand, and talk
to them and draw them out. When an interesting phenomenon is noticed,
_e.g._ in a Nature ramble, the children are accustomed to discuss it
in groups, and to try to think out among themselves its cause and
its meaning. Gossip is of course discouraged; but it is scarcely
necessary for Egeria to proscribe it; for idle talk has no attraction
for children who are allowed to talk freely and frankly, at all times
and in all places, about things that are really worth discussing.
Life is full of interest for children who are allowed, as these are,
to take an active interest in it; and subjects of conversation are
therefore ever presenting themselves, in school and out of school,
to the happy children of Utopia. This means that the life of each
individual child is overflowing through many channels, an overflow
which will carry the out-welling life into the lives of other living
beings--human and infra-human, actual and imaginary--and even beyond
these, when it has been met and reinforced by other surging currents,
into the impersonal life of Humanity and of Nature.
(2) _The Dramatic Instinct_.
Whatever else young children may be, they are all born actors; and in
a school which bases its scheme of education on the actualities of
child life, it is but natural that the dramatic instinct should be
fostered in every possible way. "Work while you work, and play
while you play," is one of those trite maxims which have been
unintelligently repeated till they have lost whatever value they may
once have possessed. "Work while you play, and play while you work,"
seems to be Egeria's substitute for it; and she would, I think, do
well to write those words over the porch of her school.
In the ordinary elementary school a fair amount of acting goes on
in the infant department, and an occasional attempt is made, in
one of the higher classes of the upper department, to act a scene
from Shakespeare or an episode in English history. But during
the five years or so of school life which intervene between the
infant department and "Standard VI," the dramatic instinct is
as a rule entirely neglected; and the consequent outgrowth of
self-consciousness in the children is too often a fatal obstacle to
the success of the spasmodic attempts at dramatisation which are
made in the higher classes.
In Utopia "acting" is a vital part of the school life of every class,
and every subject that admits of dramatic treatment is systematically
dramatised. In History, for example, when the course of their study
brings them to a suitable episode, the children set to work to
dramatise it. With this end in view, they consult some advanced
text-book or historical novel or other book of reference, and
having studied with care the particular chapter in which they are
interested, and having decided among themselves who are to play what
parts, they proceed to make up their own dialogues, and their own
costumes and other accessories. They then act the scene, putting
their own interpretation on the various parts, and receiving
the stimulus and guidance of Egeria's sympathetic and moeutic
criticism. Their class-mates and the rest of the children in the main
room look on, with their history books open in front of them, and
applaud; and, by gradually familiarising themselves with the various
parts, qualify themselves half-unconsciously to act as under-studies
in the particular scene, and in due course to play their own parts as
interpreters of some other historical episode. I know of no treatment
of history which is so effective as this for young children. The
actual knowledge of the facts of history which a child carries away
with him from an elementary school cannot well be large, and is, in
many cases, a negligible quantity. But the child who has once acted
history will always be interested in it, and being interested in it
will be able, without making a formal study of it, to absorb its
spirit, its atmosphere, and the more significant of its facts. Nor
do the advantages of the dramatic treatment of history end with the
subject itself. The actors in these historical scenes are, as I have
said, expressing their own interpretation of the various parts, and
their own perception of the meaning of each episode as a whole. This
means that they are training their imaginative sympathy,--a
sovereign faculty which of all faculties is perhaps the most
emancipative and expansive,--and training it, as I can testify, with
striking success; for the dramatic power which they display is
remarkable, and can have been generated by nothing less than
sympathetic insight into the feelings of the various historical
personages and the possibilities of the various situations.
It is probable that History lends itself more readily to dramatic
treatment than any other subject, but it is by no means the only
subject that is dramatised in Utopia. An interest in Geography is
awakened by scenes in foreign lands and episodes from books of travel
being acted by the children. An interest in Arithmetic, by a shop
being opened, which is well equipped with weights, measures, and
cardboard money, and in which a salesman stands behind the counter
and sells goods to a succession of customers. An interest in
Literature by the acting, with improvised costumes, of passages from
Shakespeare's plays, or scenes from Scott's and Dickens' novels.
Simple plays to illustrate Nature-study are acted by the younger
children; while the Folk Songs, which, as we shall see, play a
prominent part in the musical life of the children, are acted as
well as sung.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 | 11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20