STUDY OF CHILD LIFE.

PART I.

Read Carefully. In answering these questions you are earnestly requested not to answer according to the text-book where opinions are asked for, but to answer according to conviction. In all cases credit will be given for thought and original observation. Place your name and full address at the head of the paper; use your own words so that your instructor may be sure that you understand the subject.



1. How does Fiske account for the prolonged helplessness of the human infant? To what practical conclusions does this lead?

2. Name the four essentials for proper bodily growth.

3. How does the child's world differ from that of the adult?

4. In training a child morally, how do you know which faults are the most important and should have, therefore, the chief attention?

5. In training the will, what end must be held steadily in view?

6. What are the advantages or disadvantages of a broken will?

7. Is obedience important? Obedience to what? How do you train for prompt obedience in emergencies?

8. What is the object of punishment? Does corporal punishment accomplish this object?

9. What kind of punishment is most effective?

10. Have any faults a physical origin? If so, name some of them and explain.

11. What are the two great teachers according to Tiederman?

12. What can you say of the fault of untidiness?

13. What are the dangers of precocity?

14. What do you consider were the errors your own parents made in training their children?

15. Are there any questions which you would like to ask in regard to the subjects taken up in this lesson?

NOTE.—After completing the test, sign your full name.



STUDY OF CHILD LIFE



PART II.



CHARACTER BUILDING

[Sidenote: Froebel's Philosophy]

Although we have taken up the question of punishment and the manner of dealing with various childish iniquities before the question of character-building, it has only been done in order to clear the mind of some current misconceptions. In the statements of Froebel's simple and positive philosophy of child culture, misconception on the part of the reader must be guarded against, and these misconceptions generally arise from a feeling that, beautiful as his optimistic philosophy may be, there are some children too bad to profit by it—or at least that there are occasions when it will not work out in practice. In the preceding section we have endeavored to show in detail how this method applies to a representative list of faults and shortcomings, and having thus, we hope, proved that the method is applicable to a wide range of cases—indeed to all possible cases—we will proceed to recount the fundamental principles which Froebel, and before him Pestalozzi,[A] enunciated; which times who adhere to the new education are to-day working out into the detail of school-room practice.

[Sidenote: Object of Moral Training.]

As previously stated, the object of the moral training of the child is the inculcation of the love of righteousness. Froebel is not concerned with laying down a mass of observances which the child must follow, and which the parents must insist upon. He thinks rather that the child's nature once turned into the right direction and surrounded by right influences will grow straight without constant yankings and twistings. The child who loves to do right is safe. He may make mistakes as to what the right is, but he will learn by these mistakes, and will never go far astray.

[Sidenote: The Reason Why]

However, it is well to save him as far as possible from the pain of these mistakes. We need to preserve in him what has already been implanted there; the love of understanding the reasons for conduct. When the child asks "Why?" therefore, he should seldom be told "Because mother says so." This is to deny a rightful activity of his young mind; to give him a monotonous and insufficient reason, temporary in its nature, instead of a lasting reason which will remain with him through life. Dante says all those who have lost what he calls "the good of the intellect" are in the Inferno. And when you refuse to give your child satisfactory reasons for the conduct you require of him, you refuse to cultivate in him that very good of the intellect which is necessary for his salvation.

[Sidenote: Advantage of Positive Commands]

As soon, however, as your commands become positive instead of negative, the difficulty of meeting the situation begins to disappear. It is usually much easier to tell the child why he should do a thing than why he should not do its opposite. For example, it is much easier to make him see that he ought to be a helpful member of the family than to make him understand why he should stop making a loud noise, or refrain from waking up the baby. There is something in the child which in calm moments recognizes that love demands some sacrifice. To this something you must appeal and these calm moments, for the most part, you must choose for making the appeal. The effort is to prevent the appearance of evil by the active presence of good. The child who is busy trying to be good has little time to be naughty.

[Sidenote: Original Goodness]

Froebel's most characteristic utterance is perhaps this: "A suppressed or perverted good quality—a good tendency, only repressed, misunderstood, or misguided—lies originally at the bottom of every shortcoming in man. Hence the only and infallible remedy for counteracting any shortcoming and even wickedness is to find the originally good source, the originally good side of the human being that has been repressed, disturbed, or misled into the shortcoming, and then to foster, build up, and properly guide this good side. Thus the shortcoming will at last disappear, although it may involve a hard struggle against habit, but not against original depravity in man, and this is accomplished so much the more rapidly and surely because man himself tends to abandon his shortcomings, for man prefers right to wrong." The natural deduction from this is that we should say "do" rather than "don't"; open up the natural way for rightful activity instead of uttering loud warning cries at the entrance to every wrong path.

[Sidenote: Kindergarten Methods]

It is for this reason that the kindergarten tries by every means to make right doing delightful. This is one of the reasons for its songs, dances, plays, its bright colors, birds, and flowers. And in this respect it may well be imitated in every home. No one loves that which is disagreeable, ugly, and forbidding; yet many little children are expected to love right doing which is seldom attractively presented to them.

The results of such treatment are apparent in the grown people of to-day. Most persons have an underlying conviction that sinners, or at any rate unconscientious persons, have a much easier and pleasanter time of it than those who try to do right. To the imagination of the majority of adults sin is dressed in glittering colors and virtue in gray, somber garments. There are few who do not take credit for right doing as if they had chosen a hard and disagreeable part instead of the more alluring ways of wrong. This is because they have been mis-taught in childhood and have come to think of wrongdoing as pleasant and virtue as hard, whereas the real truth is exactly the opposite. It is wrongdoing that brings unpleasant consequences and virtue that brings happiness.

[Sidenote: Right Doing Made Easy]

There are those who object that by the kindergarten method right doing is made too easy. The children do not have to put forth enough effort, they say; they are not called upon to endure sufficient pain; they do not have the discipline which causes them to choose right no matter how painful right may be for the moment. Whether this dictum is ever true or not, it certainly is not true in early childhood. The love of righteousness needs to be firmly rooted in the character before it is strained and pulled upon. We do not start seedlings in the rocky soil or plant out saplings in time of frost. If tests and trials of virtue must come, let them come in later life when the love of virtue is so firmly established that it may be trusted to find a way to its own satisfaction through whatever difficulties may oppose.

[Sidenote: Neighbors' Opinions]

In the very beginning of any effort to live up to Froebel's requirements it is evident that children must not be measured by the way they appear to the neighbors. This is to reaffirm the power of that rigid tradition which has warped so many young lives. She who is trying to fix her child's heart upon true and holy things may well disregard her neighbor's comments on the child's manners or clothes or even upon momentary ebullitions of temper. She is working below the surface of things, is setting eternal forces to work, and she cannot afford to interrupt this work for the sake of shining the child up with any premature outside polish. If she is to have any peace of mind or to allow any to the child, if she is to live in any way a simple and serene life, she must establish a few fundamental principles by which she judges her child's conduct and regulates her own, and stand by these principles through thick and thin.

[Sidenote: The Family Republic]

Perhaps the most fundamental principle is that enunciated by Fichte. "Each man," he says, "is a free being in a world of other free beings." Therefore his freedom is limited only by the freedom of the other free beings. That is, they must "divide the world amongst them." Stated in the form of a command he says again, "Restrict your freedom through the freedom of all other persons with whom you come in contact." This is a rule that even a three-year-old child can be made to understand, and it is astonishing with what readiness he will admit its justice. He call do anything he wants to, you explain to him, except bother other people. And, of course, the corollary follows that every one else can do whatever he pleases except to bother the child.

[Sidenote: Rights of Others]

This clear and simple doctrine can be driven home with amazing force, if you strictly respect the child's right as you require him to respect yours. You should neither allow any encroachments upon your own proper privileges, except so far as you explain that this is only a loving permission on your part, and not to be assumed as a precedent or to be demanded as a right; nor should you yourself encroach upon his privileges.

If you do not expect him to interrupt you, you must not interrupt him. If you expect him to let you alone when you are busy, you must let hint alone when he is busy, that is, when he is hard at work playing. If you must call him away from his playing, give him warning, so that he may have time to put his small affairs in order before obeying your command. The more carefully you do this the more willing will be his response on the infrequent occasions when you must demand immediate attention. In some such fashion you teach the child to respect the rights of others by scrupulously respecting those rights to which he is most alive, namely, his own. The next step is to require him with you to think out the rights of others, and both of you together should shape your conduct so as to leave these rights unfringed.

[Sidenote: The Child's Share in Ruling]

As soon as the young child's will has fully taken possession of his own organism he will inevitably try to rule yours. The establishment of the law of which I have just spoken will go far toward regulating this new-born desire. But still he must be allowed in some degree to rule others, because power to rule others is likely to be at some time during his life of great importance to him. To thwart him absolutely in this respect, never yielding yourself to his imperious demands, is alike impossible and undesirable. His will must not be shut up to himself and to the things that he can make himself do. In various ways, with due consideration for other people's feelings, with courtesy, with modesty, he may well be encouraged to do his share of ruling. And while, of course, he will not begin his ruling in such restrained and thoughtful fashion as is implied by these limitations, yet he must be suffered to begin; and the rule for the respect of the rights of others should be suffered gradually to work out these modifications.

A safe distinction may be made as follows: Permit him, since he is so helpless, to rule and persuade others to satisfy his legitimate desires, such as the desire for food, sleep, affection, and knowledge; but when be demands indulgencies, reserve your own liberty of choice, so as to clearly demonstrate to him that you are exercising choice, and in doing so, are well within your own rights.

[Sidenote: Low Voice Commands]

There is one simple outward observation which greatly assists us the inculcation of these fundamental truths—that is the habit of using a low voice in speaking, especially when issuing a command or administering a rebuke. A loud, insistent voice practically insures rebellion. This is because the low voice means that you have command of yourself, the loud voice that you have lost it. The child submits to a controlled will, but not to one as uncontrolled as his own. In both cases he follows your example. If you are self-controlled, he tends to become so; if you are excited and angry, he also becomes so, or if he is already so, his excitement and anger increases.

While most mothers rely altogether too much upon speech as a means of explaining life to the child, yet it must be admitted that speech has a great function to perform in this regard. Nevertheless it is well to bear in mind that it is not true that a child will always do what you tell him to do, no matter how plain you may tell him, nor how perfectly you may explain your reasons.

[Sidenote: Limitations of Words]

In the first place, speech means less to children than to grown persons. Each word has a smaller content of experience. They cannot get the full force of the most clear and eloquent statement. Therefore all speech must be reinforced by example, and by as many forms of concrete illustrations as can be commanded. Each necessary truth should enter the child's mind by several channels; hearing, eye-sight, motor activity should all be called upon. Many truths may be dramatized. This, where the mother is clever enough to employ it, is the surest method of appeal. But in any case, speech alone must not be relied upon, nor the child considered a hopeless case who does not respond to it.

Denunciatory speech especially needs wise regulation. As Richter says, "What is to be followed as a rule of prudence, yea, of justice, toward grown-up people, should be much more observed toward children, namely, that one should never judgingly declare, for instance, 'You are a liar,' or even, 'You are a bad boy,' instead of saying, 'You have told an untruth,' or 'You have done wrong.' For since the power to command yourself implies at the same time the power of obeying, man feels a minute after his fault as free as Socrates, and the branding mark of his nature, not his deed, must seem to him blameworthy of punishment.

"To this must be added that every individual's wrong actions, owing to his inalienable sense of a moral aim and hope, seem to him only short, usurped interregnums of the devil, or comets in the uniform solar system. The child, consequently, under such a moral annihilation, feels the wrong-doing of others more than his own; and this all the more because, in him, want of reflection and the general warmth of his feelings, represent the injustice of others in a more ugly light than his own."

[Sidenote: Example versus Precept]

If any one desires to prove the superior force of example over precept, let him try teaching a baby to say "Thank you" or "Please," merely by being scrupulously careful to say these things to the baby on all fit occasions. No one has taken the statistics of the number of times every small child is exhorted to perfect himself in this particular observance; but it is safe to say that in the United States alone these injunctions are spoken something like a million times a day and all quite unnecessarily. The child will say "Please" and "Thank you" without being told to do so, if he merely has his attention called to the fact that the people around him all use these phrases.

[Sidenote: Politeness to Children]

The truth is, too many parents forget to speak these agreeable words whenever they ask favors of their own children; so the force of their example is marred. What you do to the child himself, remember, always outweighs anything you do to others before him. This is the reason why it is necessary that you should acknowledge your own shortcomings to the child, if you expect him to acknowledge his to you. It is also necessary sometimes to point out clearly the kind and considerate things that you are in the habit of doing to others, lest the untrained mind of the young child may fail to see and so miss the force of your example.

But in thus revealing your own good deeds to the child, remember the motive, and reveal them only (a) when he cannot perceive them of himself, (b) when he needs to perceive them in order that his own conduct may be influenced by them, and (c) at the time when he is most likely to appreciate them. This latter requirement precludes you from announcing your own righteousness when he is naughty, and compels you, of course, to go directly against your native impulse, which is to mention your deeds of sacrifice and kindness only when you are angry and mean to reproach him with them. When you tell him how devoted you have been at some moment when you are both thoroughly angry, he is in danger of either denying or hating your devotion; but when you refer to it tenderly, and, as your heart will then prompt you, modestly, at some loving moment, he will give it recognition, and be moved to love goodness more devotedly because you embody it.

[Sidenote: Law-Making Habit]

Another important rule is this: Do not make too many rules. Some women are like legislatures in perpetual session. The child who is confused and tantalized by the constant succession of new laws learns presently to disregard them, and to regulate his life according to certain deductions of his own—sometimes surprisingly wise and politic deductions. The way to re yourself of this law-making habit is to stop thinking of every little misdeed as the beginning of a great wrong. It is very likely an accident and a combination of circumstances such as may not happen again. To treat misdemeanors which are not habitual nor characteristic as evanescent is the best way to make them evanescent. They should not be allowed to enter too deeply into your consciousness or into that of your child.

[Sidenote: Live with Your Children]

In order to be able to discriminate between accidental wrong-doing, and that which is the first symptom of wrong-thinking, you must be in close touch with your children. This brings us to Froebel's great motto, "Come, let us live with our children!" This means that you are not merely to talk with your child, to hear from his lips what he is doing, but to live so closely with him, that in most cases you know what he is doing without any need of his telling you. When, however, he does tell you something which happened in the school play-ground or otherwise out of the range of your knowledge, be careful not to moralize over it. Make yourself as agreeable a secret-keeper as his best friend of his own age; let your moralizing be so rare that it is effective for that very reason. If the occasion needs moral reflection at all—and that seldom happens—the wise way is to lead the child to do his own reflecting; to arrive at his own conclusions, and if you must lead him, by all means do so as invisibly as possible. For the most part it is safe to take the confessions lightly, and well to keep your own mind young by looking at things from the boy's point of view.

[Sidenote: The Subject of Sex]

If, however, there is to be perfect confidence between you, the one subject which is usually kept out of speech between mothers and children must be no forbidden subject between them; you must not refuse to answer questions about the mystery of sex. If you are not the fit person to teach your child these important facts, who is? Certainly not the school-mates and servants from whom he is likely to learn them if you refuse to furnish the information. Usually it is sufficient simply to answer the child's honest questions honestly; but any mother who finds herself unable to cope with this simple matter in this simple spirit, will find help in Margaret Morley's "Song of Life," in the Wood-Allen Publications, and the books of the Rev. Sylvanus Stall.[B]

In respect to these matters more than in respect to others, but also in respect to all matters, children often do not know that they are doing wrong, even when it it very difficult for parents to believe that they do not intend wrong-doing. As we have seen from our analysis of truthfulness, the child may very often lie without a qualm of conscience, and he may still more readily break the unwritten rules of courtesy, asking abrupt and even cruel questions of strangers, and haul the family skeleton out of its closet at critical moments. Such things cannot be wholly guarded against, even by the exercise of the utmost wisdom, but the habit of reasoning things out for himself is the greatest help a child can have.

[Sidenote: Righteousness]

The formation of the bent of the child's nature as a whole is a matter of unconscious education, but as he grows in the power to reason, conscious education must direct his mental activity. It is not enough for him, as it is not enough for any grown person, to do the best that he knows; he must learn to know the best. The word righteousness itself means right-wiseness, i.e., right knowingness.

To quote Froebel again, "In order, therefore, to impart true, genuine firmness to the natural will-activity of the boy, all the activities of the boy, his entire will should proceed from and have reference to the development, cultivation, and representation of the internal. Instruction in example and in words, which later on become precept and example, furnishes the means for this. Neither example alone, nor words will do; not example alone, for it is particular and special, and the word is needed to give the particular individual example universal applicability; not words alone, for example is needed to interpret and explain the word, which is general, spiritual, and of many meanings.

"But instruction and example alone and in themselves are not sufficient; they must meet a good pure heart and this is the outcome of proper educational influences in childhood."

[Sidenote: Moral Precocity]

Lest these directions should seem to demand an almost superhuman degree of control and wisdom on the part of the mother, remember that moral precocity is as much to be guarded against a mental precocity. Remember that you are neither required to be a perfect mother nor to rear a perfect child. As Spencer remarks, a perfect child in this imperfect world would be sadly out of joint with the times, would indeed be a martyr. If your basic principles are right and if your child has before him the daily and hourly spectacle of a mother who is trying to conform herself to high standards, he will grow as fast as it is safe for him to grow. Spencer says: "Our higher moral faculties like our higher intellectual ones, are comparatively complex. As a consequence they are both comparatively late in their evolution, and with the one as with the other, a very early activity produced by stimulation will be at the expense of the future character. Hence the not uncommon fact that those who during childhood were instanced as models of juvenile goodness, by and by undergo some disastrous and seemingly inexplicable change, and end by being not above but below par; while relatively exemplary men are often the issue of a childhood not so promising.

"Be content, therefore, with moderate measures and moderate results, constantly bearing in mind the fact that the higher morality, like the higher intelligence, must be reached by a slow growth; and you will then have more patience with those imperfections of nature which your child hourly displays. You will be less prone to constant scolding, and threatening, and forbidding, by which many parents induce a chronic irritation, in a foolish hope that they will thus make their children what they should be."

[Sidenote: Rules in Character Building]

In conclusion, the rules that may be safely followed in character-building may be summed up thus:

(1) Recognize that the object of your training is to help the child to love righteousness. Command little and then use positive commands rather than prohibitions. Use "do" rather than "don't."

(2) Make right-doing delightful.

(3) Establish Fichte's doctrine of right, see page 64.

(4) Teach by example rather than precept. Therefore respect the child's rights as you wish him to respect yours.

(5) Use a low voice, especially in commanding or rebuking.

(6) In chiding, remember Richter's rule and rebuke the sin and not the sinner.

(7) Confess your own misdeeds, by this means and others securing the confidence of your children.

Finally, remember that this is an imperfect world, you are an imperfect mother, and the best results you can hope for are likely to be imperfect. But the results may be so founded upon eternal principles as to tend continually to give place to better and better results.

[Footnote A: Pestalozzi, Educator, Philosopher, and Reformer. Author of "How Gertrude Teaches Her Children."]

[Footnote B: "What a Young Girl Ought to Know" and "What a Young Woman Ought to Know" by Dr. Mary Wood Allen. "What a Young Boy Ought to Know," "What a Young Man Ought to Know," by Rev. Sylvanus Stall.]



PLAY

Although Froebel is best known as the educator who first took advantage of play as a means of education, he was not, in reality, the first to recognize the high value of this spontaneous activity. He was indeed the first to put this recognition into practice and to use the force generated during play to help the child to a higher state of knowledge.

But before him Plato said that the plays of children have the mightiest influence on the maintenance or the non-maintenance of laws; that during the first three years the child should be made "cheerful" and "kind" by having sorrow and fear and pain kept away from him and by soothing him with music and rhythmic movements.

[Sidenote: Aristotle]

Aristotle held that children until they were five years old "should be taught nothing, not even necessary labor, lest it hinder growth, but should be accustomed to use much motion as to avoid a indolent habit of body, and this," he added, "can he acquired by various means, among others by play, which ought to be neither illiberal, nor laborious, or lazy."

[Sidenote: Luther]

Luther rebukes those who despise the plays of children and says that Solomon did not prohibit scholars from play at the proper time. Fenelon, Locke, Schiller, and Richter all admit the deep significance of this universal instinct of youth.

Preyer, speaking not as a philosopher or educator, but as a scientist, mentions "the new kinds of pleasurable sensations with some admixture of intellectual elements," which are gained when the child gradually begins to play. Much that is called play he considers true experimenting, especially when the child is seen to be studying the changes produced by his own activity, as when he tears paper into small bits, shakes a bunch of keys, opens and shuts a box, plays with sand, and empties bottles, and throws stones into the water. "The zeal with which these seemingly aimless movements are executed is remarkable. The sense of gratification must be very great, and is principally due to the feeling of his own power, and of being the cause of the various changes."

[Sidenote: Educational Value of Play]

All these authorities are quoted here in order to show that the practical recognition of play which obtains among the advanced educators to-day is not a piece of sentimentalism, as stern critics sometimes declare, but the united opinion of some of the wisest minds of this and former ages. As Froebel says, "Play and speech constitute the element in which the child lives. At this stage (the first three years of childhood) he imparts to everything the virtues of sight, feeling, and speech. He feels the unity between himself and the whole external world." And Froebel conceives it to be of the profoundest importance that this sense of unity should not be disturbed. He finds that play is the most spiritual activity of man at this age, "and at the same time typical of human life as a whole—of the inner, hidden, natural life of man and all things; it gives, therefore, joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world: it holds the sources of all that is good. The child that plays thoroughly until physical fatigue forbids will surely be a thorough, determined man, capable of self-sacrifice for the promotion and welfare of himself and others."

But all play does not deserve this high praise. It fits only the play under right conditions. Fortunately these are such that every mother can command them. There are three essentials: (1) Freedom, (2) Sympathy, (3) Right materials.

[Sidenote: Freedom]

(1) Freedom is the first essential, and here the child of poverty often has the advantage of the child of wealth. There are few things in the poverty-stricken home too good for him to play with; in its narrow quarters, he becomes, perforce, a part of all domestic activity. He learns the uses of household utensils, and his play merges by imperceptible degrees into true, healthful work.

In the home of wealth, however, there is no such freedom, no such richness of opportunity. The child of wealth has plenty of toys, but few real things to play with. He is shut out of the common activity of the family, and shut in to the imitation activity of his nursery. He never gets his small hands on realities, but in his elegant clothes is confined to the narrow conventional round that is falsely supposed to be good for him.

Froebel insists upon the importance of the child's dress being loose, serviceable, and inconspicuous, so that he may play as much as possible without consciousness of the restrictions of dress. The playing child should also have, as we have noticed in the first section, the freedom of the outside world. This does not mean merely that he should go out in his baby-buggy, or take a ride in the park, but that he should be able to play out-of-doors, to creep on the ground, to be a little open-air savage, and play with nature as he finds it.

[Sidenote: Sympathy]

(2) Sympathy is much more likely to rise spontaneously in the mother's breast for the child's troubles than for the child's joys. She will stop to take him up and pet him when he is hurt, no matter how busy she is, but she too often considers it waste of time to enter into his plays with him; yet he needs sympathy in joy as much as in sorrow. Her presence, her interest in what he is doing, doubles his delight in it and doubles its value to him. Moreover, it offers her opportunity for that touch and direction now and then, which may transform a rambling play, without much sequence or meaning, into a consciously useful performance, a dramatization, perhaps, of some of the child's observations, or an investigation into the nature of things.

(3) Right Material. Even given freedom and sympathy, the child needs something more in order to play well: he needs the right materials. The best materials are those that are common to him and to the rest of the world, far better than expensive toys that mark him apart from the world of less fortunate children. Such toys are not in any way desirable, and they may even be harmful. What he needs are various simple arrangements of the four elements—earth, air, fire and water.

[Sidenote: Mud-pies]

(1) Earth. The child has a noted affinity for it, and he is specially happy when he has plenty of it on hands, face, and clothes. The love of mud-pies is universal; children of all nationalities and of all degrees of civilization delight in it. No activity could be more wholesome.

[Sidenote: Sand]

Next to mud comes sand. It is cleaner in appearance and can be brought into the house. A tray of moistened sand, set upon a low table, should be in every nursery, and the sand pile in every yard.

[Sidenote: Clay]

Clay is more difficult to manage indoors, because it gets dry and sifts all about the house, but if a corner of the cellar, where there is a good light, can be given up for a strong table and a jar of clay mixed with some water, it will be found a great resource for rainy days. If modeling aprons of strong material, buttoned with one button at the neck, be hung near the jar of clay, the children may work in this material without spoiling their clothes. Clay-modeling is an excellent form of manual training, developing without forcing the delicate muscles of the fingers and wrists, and giving wide opportunity for the exercise of the imagination.

[Sidenote: Digging]

Earth may be played with in still another way. Children should dig in it; for all pass through the digging stage and this should be given free swing. It develops their muscles and keeps them busy at helpful and constructive work. They may dig a well, make a cave, or a pond, or burrow underground and make tunnels like a mole. Give them spades and a piece of ground they can do with as they like, dress them in overalls, and it will be long before you are asked to think of another amusement for them.



[Sidenote: Gardens]

In still another way the earth may be utilized, for children may make gardens of it. Indeed, there are those who say that no child's education is complete until he has had a garden of his own and grown in it all sorts of seeds from pansies to potatoes. But a garden is too much for a young child to care for all alone. He needs the help, advice, and companionship of some older person. You must be careful, however, to give help only when it is really desired; and careful also not to let him feel that the garden is a task to which he is driven daily, but a joy that draws him.

[Sidenote: Kites Windmills Soap-bubbles]

(2) The Air. The next important plaything is the air. The kite and the balloon are only two instruments to help the child play with it. Little windmills made of colored paper and stuck by means of a pin at the end of a whittled stick, make satisfactory toys. One of their great advantages is that even a very young child can make them for himself. Blowing soap-bubbles is another means of playing with air. By giving the children woolen mittens the bubbles may be caught and tossed about as well as blown.

(3) Water. Perhaps the very first thing he learns to play with is water. Almost before he knows the use of his hands and legs he plays with water in his bath, and sucks his sponge with joy, thus feeling the water with his chief organs of touch, his mouth and tongue. A few months later he will be glad to pour water out of a tin cup. Even when he is two or three years old, be may be amused by the hour, by dressing him in a woolen gown, with his sleeves rolled high, and setting him down before a big bowl or his own bath-tub half full of warm water. To this may be added a sponge, a tin cup, a few bits of wood, and some paper. They should not be given all at once, but one at a time, the child allowed to exhaust the possibilities of each before another is added. Still later he may be given the bits of soap left after a cake of soap is used up. Give him also a few empty bottles or bowls and let him put them away with a solid mass of soap-suds in them and see what will happen. When he is older—past the period of putting everything in his mouth—he may be given a few bits of bright ribbons, petals of artificial flowers, or any bright colored bits of cloth which can color the water.

Children love to sprinkle the grass with the hose or to water the flowers with the sprinkling can. They enjoy also the metal fishes, ducks, and boats which may be drawn about in the water by means of a magnet. Presently they reach the stage when they must have toy-boats, and next they long to go into real boats and go rowing and sailing. They want to fish, wade, swim, and skate.

[Sidenote: Dangerous Pastimes]

Some of those pastimes are dangerous, but they are sure to be indulged in at some time or other, with or without permission. There never grew a child to sturdy manhood who was successfully kept away from water. The wise mother, then, will not forbid this play, but will do her best to regulate it, to make it safe. She will think out plans for permitting children to go swimming in a safe place with some older person. She will let them go wading, and at holiday time will take them boat-riding. If she permits as much activity in these respects as possible, her refusal when it does come will be respected; and the child will not, unless perhaps in the first bitterness of disappointment, think her unfriendly and fussy. Above all, he is not likely to try to deceive her, to run off and take a swim on the sly, and thus fall into true danger.

[Sidenote: Precaution with Fire]

(4) Fire is another inevitable plaything. Miss Shinn reports that the first act of her little niece that showed the dawn of voluntary control of the muscles was the clinging of her eyes to the flame of a candle, at the end of the second week. The sense of light and the pleasure derived from it is of the chief incentives to a baby's intellectual development. But since fire is dangerous the child must be taught this fact as quickly and painlessly as possible. He will probably have to be burned once before he really understands it, but by watching you can make this pain very small and slight, barely sufficient to give the child a wholesome fear of playing with unguarded fire. For instance, show that the lamp globe is hot. It is not hot enough to injure him, but quite hot enough to be unpleasant to his sensitive nerves. Put your own hand on the lamp and draw it away with a sharp cry, saying warningly, "Hot, hot!" Do not put his hand on the lamp, but let him put it there himself and then be very sympathetic over the result. Usually one such lesson is sufficient. Only do not permit yourself to call everything hot which you do not want him to touch. He will soon discover that you are untruthful and will never again trust you so fully.

[Sidenote: Bonfires]

Under proper regulations, however, fire may be played with safely. Bonfires with some older person in attendance are safe enough and prevent unlawful bonfires in dangerous places. The rule should be that none of the children may play with fire except with permission; and then that permission should be granted as often as possible that the children may be encouraged to ask for it. A stick smouldering at one end and waved about in circles and ellipses is not dangerous when elders are by, but it is dangerous if played with on the sly. Playing with fire on the sly is the most dangerous thing a child can do, and the only way to prevent it is to permit him to play with fire in the open. A beautiful game can be made from number of Christmas tree candles of various colors and a bowl of water. The candles are lighted and the wax dropped into the water, making little colored circles which float about. These can be linked together such a fashion as to form patterns which may be lifted out on sheets of paper.

[Sidenote: Magic Lantern]

The magic lantern is an innocent and comparatively cheap means of playing with light. If it is well taken care of and fresh slides added from time to time it can be made a source of pleasure for years. Jack-o'-lanterns are great fun, and when pumpkins are not available, oranges may be used instead.

[Sidenote: Rhythmic Movements]

Besides these elemental playthings the child gets much valuable pleasure out of the rhythmic use of his own muscles. All such plays Plato thought should be regulated by music, and with this Froebel agreed, but in the Household this is often impossible. The children must indulge in many movements when there is no one about who has leisure to make music for them. Still, when they come to the quarrelsome age, a few minutes' rhythmic play to the sound of music will be found to harmonize the whole group wonderfully. For this purpose the ordinary hippity-hop, fast or slow according to the music, is sufficient. It is as if the regulation of the body to the laws of harmony reacted upon minds and nerves. Such an exercise is particularly valuable just before bed-time. The children go to sleep then with their minds under the influence of harmony and wake in the morning inclined to be peaceful and happy.

[Sidenote: Songs]

A book of Kindergarten songs, such as Mrs. Gaynor's "Songs of the Child World" and Eleanor Smith's "Songs for the Children," ought to be in every household, and the mother ought to familiarize herself with a dozen or so of these perfectly simple melodies. Of course the children must learn them with her. When once this has been done she has a valuable means of amusing them and bringing them within her control at any time. She may hum one of the songs or play it. The children must guess what it is and then act out their guess in pantomime, so that she can see what they mean. Perhaps it is a windmill song; their arms fly around and around in time to the music, now fast, now slow. Perhaps it is a Spring song; the children are birds building their nests. Other songs turn them into shoemakers, galloping horses, or soldiers.

[Sidenote: Dramatic Plays]

Dramatic plays, whether simple, like this, or elaborate, are, as Goethe shows in Wilhelm Meister, of the greatest possible educational advantage. In them the child expresses his ideas of the world about him and becomes master of his own ideas. He acts out whatever he has heard or seen. He acts out also whatever he is puzzling about, and by making the terms of his problem clear to his consciousness usually solves it.

[Sidenote: Dancing]

As for dancing, Richter exclaims: "I know not whether I should most deprecate children's balls or most praise children's dances. For the harmony connected with it (dancing) imparts to the affections and the mind that material order which reveals the highest, and regulates the beat of the pulse, the step, and even the thought. Music is the meter of this poetic movement, and is an invisible dance, as dancing is a silent music. Finally, this also ranks among the advantages of his eye and heel pleasure; that children with children, by no harder canon than the musical, light as sound, may be joined in a rosebud feast without thorns or strife." The dances may be of the simplest kind, such as "Ring Around a Rosy," "Here We Go, To and Fro," "Old Dan Tucker" and the "Virginia Reel." The old-fashioned singing plays, such as "London Bridge," "Where Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow," and "Pop Goes the Weasel" have their place and value. Several collections of them have been made and published, but usually quite enough material may be found for these plays in the memories of the people of any neighborhood.

[Sidenote: Toys]

All these plays, it will be noticed, call for very simple and inexpensive apparatus, in most cases for no apparatus at all. Nevertheless there is a place for toys. All children ought to have a few, both because of the innocent pleasure they afford and because they need to have certain possessions which are inalienably their own. A simple and inexpensive list of suitable toys adapted to various ages is given at the end of this section. Most of them are exactly the toys that parents usually buy. But it will be noticed that none of them are very elaborate or expensive, and that the patrol wagon is not among them. This is because the patrol wagon directly leads to plays that are not only uneducational but positively harmful in their tendencies. The children of a whole neighborhood were once led into the habit of committing various imitation crimes for the sake of being arrested and carried off in miniature patrol wagon. It any such expensive and elaborate toys are bought, it may well be the plain express wagon or the hook and ladder and fire engine. The first of these leads to plays of industry, the second to those of heroism.

LIST OF TOYS SUITABLE FOR VARIOUS AGES.

Ball, rubber ring, soft animals and rag dolls ......... Before 1 year Blocks and Bells ............................................. 1 year Small chair and table ....................................1 1/2 years Noah's Ark .................................................. 2 years Picture books ............................................... 2 years Materials and instruments .............................. 2 to 3 years Carts, stick-horses, and reins ..................... 2 1/2 to 3 years Boats, ships, engines, tin or wooden animals, dolls, dishes, broom, spade, sand-pile, bucket, etc ................ 3 years Hoop, games and story books ................................. 5 years



OCCUPATIONS

[Sidenote: Home Kindergarten]

There are a number of books designed to teach mothers how to carry the Kindergarten occupations over into the home; but while such books may be helpful in a few cases, in most cases better occupations present themselves in the course of the day's work. The Kindergarten occupations themselves follow increasingly the order of domestic routine. For example, many children in the Kindergarten make mittens out of eiderdown flannel in the Fall, when their own mothers are knitting their mittens, and make little hoods either for themselves or for their dolls. At other periods they put up little glasses of preserves or jelly, and study the industry of the bees and the way they put up their tiny jars of jelly. Their attention is called also to the preparations that the squirrels and other animals make for winter, and to that of the trees and flowers. In other words, the occupations in the Kindergarten are designed to bring the children into conscious sympathy with the life of nature and of the home.

[Sidenote: Kindergarten Methods]

That mother who keeps this purpose in mind and applies it to the occupations that come up naturally in the course of a day's work, will thereby bring the Kindergarten spirit into her own home much more truly than if she invests in a number of perforated sewing cards and colored strips of paper for weaving. Not that there is any harm in these bits of apparatus, provided that the sewing cards are large and so perforated as not to task the eyes and young fingers of the sewer. But unless for some special purpose, such as the making of a Christmas or birthday gift, these devices are unnecessary and better left to the school, which has less richness of material at hand than has the home.

[Sidenote: Helping Mother]

In allowing the children to enter a workers into the full life of the home several good things are accomplished. (1) The eager interest of the developing mind is utilized to brighten those duties which are likely to remain permanent duties. Not does this observation apply only to girls. Domestic obligations are supposed to rest chiefly upon them, but the truth is that boys need to feel these obligations as keenly as the girls, if they are to grow into considerate and helpful husbands and fathers. The usual division of labor into forms falsely called masculine and feminine is, therefore, much to be deplored. Moreover, at an early age children are seldom sex-conscious, and any precocity in this direction is especially evil in its results; yet many mothers from the beginning make such a division between what they require of their boys and of their girls as to force this consciousness upon them. All kinds of work, then, should be allowed in the beginning, however it may differentiate later on, and little boys as well as little girls should be taught to take an interest in sewing, dish-washing, sweeping, dusting, and cooking—in all the forms of domestic activity.

This is so far recognized among educators that the most progressive primary schools now teach cooking to mixed classes of boys and girls, and also sewing. These activities are recognized as highly educational, being, as they are, interwoven with the history of the race and with its daily needs. When they are studied in their full sum of relationship, they increase the child's knowledge of both the past and the living world.

[Sidenote: Teaching Mother]

(2) Besides the deepening of the child's interest in that work which in some form or other he will have with him always, is the quickening of the mother's own interest in what may have come to seem to her mere daily drudgery. Any woman who undertakes to perform so simple an operation as dish-washing with the help of a bright happy child, asking sixteen questions to the minute, will find that common-place operation full of possibilities; and if she will answer all the questions she will probably find her knowledge strained to the breaking point, and will discover there is more to be known about dish-washing than she ever dreamed of before; while in cooking, if she will make an effort to look up the science, history, and ethics involved in the cooking and serving of a very simple meal, she will not be likely to regard the task as one beneath her, but rather as one beyond her. No one can so lead her away from false conventions and narrow prejudices as a little child whom she permits to help her and teach her.

[Sidenote: The Love of Work]

(3) The child's spontaneous joy in being active and in doing any service is being utilized, as it should be, in the performance of his daily duties. We have already referred to the fact that all children in the beginning love to work, and that there must be something the matter with our education since this love is so early lost and so seldom reacquired. If when young children wish to help mother they are almost invariably permitted to do so, and their efforts greeted lovingly, this delight in helpfulness will remain a blessing to them throughout life.

[Sidenote: To Make "Helping" of Benefit]

But in order to get these benefits from the domestic activities two or three simple rules must be observed. (1) Do not go silently about your work, expecting your child to be interested and to understand without being talked to. Play with him while you work with him, and see the realization of youthfulness that comes to yourself while you do it. Many tasks fit for childish hands are in their nature too monotonous for childish minds. Here your imagination must come into play to rouse and excite his activity. For instance, you are both shelling peas. When he begins to be tired you suggest to him, "Here is a cage full of birds, let us open the door for them;" or you may tell a story while you work, but it should be a story about that very activity, or the child will form the habit of dreaming and dawdling over his work. Such stories may be perfectly simple and even rather pointless and yet do good work; the whole object is to keep the child's fly-away imagination turned upon the work at hand, thus lending wings to his thought, and lightness to his fingers. Moreover, the mother who talks with her child while working is training in him the habit of bright unconscious conversation, thus giving him a most useful accomplishment. Making a game or a play out of the work is, of course, conducive to the same good results. When the story or the talk drags, the game with its greater dramatic power may be substituted.

[Sidenote: Fatigue]

(2) Children should neither be allowed to work to the point of fatigue nor to stop when they please. Fatigue, as our latest investigators in physiological psychology have conclusively proved, is productive of an actual poison in the blood and as such is peculiarly harmful to young children. But while work—or for that matter play either—must never be pushed past the point of healthful fatigue, it may well be pushed past the point of spontaneous interest and desire: the child may be happily persuaded by various hidden means to do a little more than he is quite ready to do. By this device, which is one of the recognized devices of the Kindergarten, mothers increase by imperceptible degrees that power of attention which makes will power.

[Sidenote: Willing Industry]

(3) Set the example of willing industry. Neither let the child conceive of you as an impersonal necessary part of the household machinery, nor as an unwilling martyr to household necessities. Most mothers err in one or the other of these two directions, and many of them err in both: they either, (a) perform the innumerable services of the household so quietly and steadily that the child does not perceive the effort that the performance costs and, therefore, as far as his consciousness is concerned, is deprived of the force of his mother's example, or (b) they groan aloud over their burdens and make their daily martyrdom vocal. Either way is wrong, for it is a mistake not to let a child see that your steady performance of tasks, which cannot be always delightful, is a result of self-discipline; and it is equally a mistake to let him think that this discipline is one against which you rebel. For in reality you are so far from being unwilling to bind yourself in his service that if he needed it you would promptly double and quadruple your exertions. It is exactly what you do when he is sick or in danger; and if he dies the sorest ache of your heart is the ache of the love that can no longer be of service to the beloved.

[Sidenote: Monotony]

(4) Remember that monotony is the curse of labor for both child and adult, but that monotony cannot exist where new intellectual insights are constantly being given. Therefore, while the daily round of labor, shaped by the daily recurring demands for food, warmth, cleanliness, and sleep, goes on without much change, seize every opportunity to deepen the child's perception of the relation of this routine to the order of the larger world. For instance, if a new house is being built near by, visit it with the children, comparing it with your own house, figure out whether it is going to be easier to keep clean and to warm than your house is and why. If you need to call in the carpenter, the plumber, the paper-hanger, or the stoveman, try to have him come when the children are at home, and let them satisfy their intense curiosity as to his work. This knowledge will sooner or later be of practical value, and it is immediately of spiritual value.

[Sidenote: Beautiful Work]

(5) Beautify the work as much as possible by letting the artistic sense have full play. This rule is so important that the attempt to establish it in the larger world outside of the home has given rise to the movement known as the arts and crafts movement, which has its rise in the perception that no great art can come into existence among us until the common things of daily living—the furniture, the books, the carpets, the chinaware—are made to express that creative joy in the maker which distinguishes an artistic product from an inartistic one. This creative joy, in howsoever small degree, may be present in most of the things that the child does. If he sets the table, he may set it beautifully, taking real pleasure in the coloring of the china and the shine of the silver and glass. He ought not to be permitted to set it untidily upon a soiled tablecloth.

[Sidenote: The Right Spirit]

(6) This is a negative rule, but perhaps the most important of all: DO NOT NAG. The child who is driven to his work and kept at it by means of a constant pressure of a stronger will upon his own, is deriving little, if any, benefit from it; and as you are not teaching him to work for the sake of his present usefulness, which is small at the best, but for the sake of his future development, you are more desirous that he should perform a single task in a day in the right spirit, than that he should run a dozen errands in the wrong spirit.

(7) Besides a regular time each day for the performance of his set share in the household work, give him warning before the arrival of that hour. Children have very incomplete notions of time; they become much absorbed in their own play; and therefore no child under nine or ten years of age should be expected to do a given thing at a given time without warning that the time is at hand.

[Sidenote: "Busy Work"]

Besides these occupations which are truly part of the business of life come any number of other occupations—a sort of a cross between real play and steady work, what teachers call "busy work"—and here the suggestions of the Kindergarten may be of practical value to the mother. For instance, weaving, already referred to, may keep an active child interested and quiet for considerable periods of time. Besides the regular weaving mats of paper, to be had from any Kindergarten supply store, wide grasses and rushes may be braided into mats, raffia and rattan may be woven into baskets, and strips of cloth woven into iron-holders. A visit to any neighboring Kindergarten will acquaint the mother with a number of useful, simple objects that can be woven by a child. Whatever he weaves or whatever he makes should be applied to some useful purpose, not merely thrown away; and while it is true that a conscientious desire to live up to this rule often results in a considerable clutter of flimsy and rather undesirable objects about the house, still, ways may be devised for slowly retiring the oldest of them from view, and disposing of others among patient relatives.

[Sidenote: Sewing]

Sewing is another occupation ranch used in the Kindergarten as well as in the home. Beginning with the simple stringing of large wooden beads upon shoe-strings, it passes on to sewing on buttons, and sewing doll clothes to the making of real clothing. This last in its simplest form can be begun sooner than most parents suppose, especially if the child is taught the use of the sewing machine. There is really no reason why a child, say six years old, should not learn to sew upon the machine. His interest in machinery is keen at this period, and two or three lessons are usually sufficient to teach him enough about the mechanism to keep him from injuring it. Once he has learned to sew upon the machine, he may be given sheets and towels to hem, and even sew up the seams of larger and more complex articles. He will soon be able to make aprons for himself and his sisters and mother. Toy sewing machines are now sold which are really useful playthings, and on which the child can manufacture a number of small articles. Those run by a treadle are preferable to those run by a hand crank, because they leave the child's hands free to guide the work.

[Sidenote: Drawing Cutting Pasting]

Drawing, painting, cutting and pasting are excellent occupations for children. A large black-board is a useful addition to the nursery furnishings, but the children should be required to wash it off with a damp cloth, instead of using the eraser furnished for the purpose, as the chalk dust gets into the room and fills the children's lungs. Plenty of soft pencils and crayons, also large sheets of inexpensive drawing paper, should be at hand upon a low table so that they can draw the large free outlines which best develop their skill, whenever the impulse moves them. If they have also blunt scissors for cutting all sorts of colored papers and a bottle of innocuous library paste, they will be able to amuse themselves at almost any time.

[Sidenote: Painting]

Some water colors are now made which are harmless for children so young that they are likely to put the paints in their mouths. Paints are on the whole less objectionable than colored chalks, because the crayons drop upon the floor and get trodden into the carpet. If children are properly clothed as they should be in simple washable garments, there is practically no difficulty connected with the free use of paints, and their educational value is, of course, very high.



TEST QUESTIONS

The following questions constitute the "written recitation" which the regular members of the A.S.H.E. answer in writing and send in for the correction and comment of the instructor. They are intended to emphasize and fix in the memory the most important points in the lesson.



STUDY OF CHILD LIFE PART II



Read Carefully. In answering these questions you are earnestly requested not to answer according to the text-book where opinions are asked for, but to answer according to conviction. In all cases credit will be given for thought and original observation. Place your name and full address at the head of the paper; use your own words so that your instructor may be sure that you understand the subject.



1. State Fichte's doctrine of rights and show how it applies to child training. If possible, give an example from your own experience.

2. What is the aim of moral training?

3. What two sayings of Froebel most characteristically sum up his philosophy?

4. What is the value of play in education?

5. What are the natural playthings? Tell what, in your childhood, you got out of these things, or if you were kept away from them, what the prohibition meant to you.

6. What do you think about children's dancing? And acting?

7. Do you agree with those who think that the Kindergarten makes right doing too easy? State the reasons for your opinion.

8. What can you say of commands, reproofs, and rules?

9. Should you let the children help you about the house, even when they are so little as to be troublesome? Why? If they are unwilling to help, how do you induce them to help?

10. What would you suggest as regular duties for children of 4 to 5 years? Of 7 to 8 years?

11. Which do you consider the more important, the housework or the child?

12. Wherein may the mother learn from the child?

13. What is the difference between amusing children and playing with them? What is the proper method?

14. Mention some good rules in character building.

15. From your own experience as a child what can you say of teaching the mysteries of sex?

16. Are there any questions you would like to ask, or subjects which you wish to discuss in connection with this lesson?

Note.—After completing the test sign your full name.



STUDY OF CHILD LIFE



PART III



ART AND LITERATURE IN CHILD LIFE

The influence of art upon the life of a young child is difficult of measurement. It may freely be said, however, that there is little or no danger in exaggerating its influence, and considerable danger in underrating it. It is difficult of measurement because the influence is largely an unconscious one. Indeed, it may be questioned whether that form of art which gives him the most conscious and outspoken pleasure is the form that in reality is the most beneficial; for, unquestionably, he will get great satisfaction from circus posters, and the poorly printed, abominably illustrated cheap picture-books afford him undeniable joy. He is far less likely to be expressive of his pleasure in a sun-shiny nursery, whose walls, rugs, white beds, and sun-shiny windows are all well designed and well adapted to his needs. Nevertheless, in the end the influence of this room is likely to be the greater influence and to permanently shape his ideas of the beautiful; while he is entirely certain, if allowed to develop artistically at all, to grow past the circus poster period.

This fact—the fact that the highest influence of art is a secret influence, exercised not only by those decorations and pictures which flaunt themselves for the purpose, but also by those quiet, necessary, every-day things, which nevertheless may most truly express the art spirit—this fact makes it difficult to tell what art and what kind of art is really influencing the child, and whether it is influencing him in the right directions.

[Sidenote: Color]

Until he is three years old, for example, and often until he is past that age, he is unable to distinguish clearly between green, gray and blue; and hence these cool colors in the decorations around him, or in his pictures, have practically no meaning for him. He has a right, one might suppose, to the gratification of his love for clear reds and yellows, for the sharp, well-defined lines and flat surfaces, whose meaning is plain to his groping little mind. Some of the best illustrators of children's books have seemed to recognize this. For example, Boutet de Monvil in his admirable illustrations of Joan of Arc meets these requirements perfectly, and yet in a manner which must satisfy any adult lover of good art. The Caldecott picture books, and Walter Crane's are also good in this respect, and the Perkins pictures issued by the Prang Educational Co. have gained a just recognition as excellent pictures for hanging on the nursery wall. Many of the illustrations in color in the standard magazines are well worth cutting out, mounting and framing. This is especially true of Howard Pyle's work and that of Elizabeth Shippen Green.

[Sidenote: Classic Art]

Since photogravures and photographs of the masterpieces can be had in this country very inexpensively, there is no reason why children should not be made acquainted at an early age with the art classics, but there is danger in giving too much space to black and white, especially in the nursery where the children live. Their natural love of color should be appealed to do deepen their interest in really good pictures.



Nevertheless, it is a matter of considerable difficulty still to find colored pictures which are inexpensive and yet really good. The Detaille prints, while not yet cheap, are not expensive either, and are excellent for this purpose; but the insipid little pictures of fairies, flowers, and birds may be really harmful, as helping to form in the young child's mind too low an ideal of beauty—of cultivating in him what someone has called "the lust of the eye."

[Sidenote: Plastic Art]

What holds true of the pictorial art holds equally true of the plastic art. As Prof. Veblin of the University of Chicago has scathingly declared, our ideals of the beautiful are so mingled with worship of expense that few of us can see the genuine beauty in any object apart from its expensiveness. For this reason as well as, perhaps, because of a remnant of barbarism in us, we love gold and glitter, and a great deal of elaboration in our vases, and are far from being over-critical of any piece of statuary which costs a respectable sum.



A certain appreciation, however, of the real value of a good plaster-cast has been gaining among us of late years, and many public schools, especially in the large cities, have been establishing standards of good taste in this respect. Good casts and bas-relief, decorate their halls and class-rooms. There are few homes that cannot afford to follow their example. But in buying these things be not misled by sales and advertised bargains. It is more than seldom that the placques, casts, and vases thus obtained are such as could have any valuable influence whatever upon the young lives with which they are brought in contact. Meretricious and showy ornaments, designed to look as if they cost more than they really do, have no business in the sincere home where the children are being sincerely educated.

[Sidenote: Music]

The same general laws apply to music. No art has a greater and more insinuating influence. The very songs with which the mother sings the baby to sleep have an occult influence which is later revealed and made plain. Such songs, then, should be simple. They may be nothing but improvisations, the mother's mind and heart making music, but they should not be melodramatic songs of the music-hall order. No such mawkish sentimentalism as that shown in "The Gypsy's Warning," for example, or other songs which belong to the cheap theater should have a place in the holy of holies—that inmost self of the child—which responds to music.

The simple folk-songs of all nations, Eleanor Smith's and most of Mrs. Gaynor's songs, already mentioned, and the songs collected by Reinecke, called "Fifty Children's Songs," are excellent for this purpose. The old-fashioned nonsense songs, such as "Billy Boy," "Mary had a Little Lamb" and "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle," may also have a pleasant and harmless place of their own.

Instrumental music should be on the same general order, not loud and showy, but clear, simple, sweet, and free from startling effects. Dashing pieces, rag-time pieces, marches, two-steps, and familiar tunes with variations, instead of bringing about a spirit of gentleness and harmony, actually tend to produce self-assertiveness and quarrelsomeness. Let any mother who does not believe this try the effort of an hour of the one kind of music on one evening, and an hour of the other kind on another evening. The difference will be immediately apparent.

[Sidenote: The Drama]

The influence of the drama must not be forgotten. This form of art, fallen so low among us since the time of the Puritans that it can scarcely be called an art at all, is, nevertheless, the art which perhaps above all others has an immediate and yet lasting influence. Children are themselves instinctively dramatic. They like to compose and act out all sorts of dramas of their own, from playing house (which is nothing but a drama prolonged from day to day), to such dramatic games as Statue-posing and Dumb Crambo. All children like to dress up, to wear masks, and to imitate the peculiarities of persons about them; to try on, as it were, the world as they see it, and discover thereby how the actors in it feel. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister has already been referred to. In this—his great book on education—he practically bases all education upon the drama, and even throws the treatise itself into dramatic form.

This does not mean, however, that all children should be permitted to go to the theater as freely as they like. No; the plays which they compose and act for themselves have a far higher value educationally than most of the spectacular presentations of the old fairy tales with which they are usually regaled, and certainly more than the sensational melodramas which give them false ideas of art and morality. They should go sometimes to the theater to see really good and simple plays, but they should be oftener encouraged to get up for themselves plays at home. If, as they grow older, they are helped to think out their costumes with something of historical accuracy, to be true to the spirit and scenery of the times in which the representations are laid, the activity can be made to increase in value to them as the years go by. There is no other art, perhaps, by which the child so intimately links the world spirit with his own spirit. It is for this reason that the School of Education in the University of Chicago is equipped with small theaters in which the children act.

[Sidenote: Literature]

As for the art of literature, not all children love reading, perhaps, but certainly all children love to hear stories told, and the skilful mother will direct this spontaneous affection into a love for reading. No other single love, except perhaps the love of nature, so emancipates the child from the thrall of circumstances. If he can escape from the small ills of life into fairy-land merely by opening the covers of a book, be sure that these ills will not have power to crush him, unless they be very great ills indeed.

[Sidenote: Fairy Tales]

There are those who still believe that fairy-tales and fiction of all sorts are nothing but lies. Poor souls, with their faces against the stone wall of hard facts, they can never look up into the sky and see the winged and beautiful thoughts freely disporting there. They make no distinction between truth and fact, yet truth is of the spirit and fact of the flesh; and truth, because it is of the spirit, may appear under many forms, even under the form of play. All rightly told and rightly conceived fairy-tales are true just as a good picture is true. The painter uses oil, turpentine, and pigment to represent the wool of a sheep, the water of a pond, the green spears of grass. Some literal-minded person might say that he was lying because he pretented that his little square of canvas truthfully represented grazing sheep at the brook-side, but most of us recognize that he is really telling the truth only in another than an every day form. In the same way the writer of fairy-tales tells the truth, using the pigments of the imagination.

If children ask whether a given story is true or not, answer without hesitation, "yes." It is true, but it is a fairy kind of truth; it is inside truth. There is magic in it and a mystery. The child who is never allowed to read fairy tales, the man or the woman who prefers the newspaper to a good book of fiction, misses much in life. It is not only that the imagination—the divinest quality of man, because the quality that makes man in his degree a creator—does not receive culture, and that he misses the indescribable intellectual ecstasy that comes only with the setting free of the wings of the mind, but that also he is inevitably shorn of his sympathy and shut up to a narrow circle of interests.

[Sidenote: Imagination and Sympathy]

For sympathy, above all moral qualities, is dependent upon imagination. If you cannot imagine how you would feel under your neighbor's conditions, you cannot deeply sympathize with him. The person of unimaginative mind sympathizes only with those whose experience and habits are similar to his own. He never escapes from the narrow circle of his own personality. But the man whose imagination has been kept flexible and ready from earliest childhood has within him the power of sympathizing with whatever is human—yes! even with creatures and things below the human level. Without imagination, therefore, it is not possible for a man to be a great scientist, for science demands sympathy with processes and objects which are not yet human. It is not possible, obviously, for him to be a great artist of any kind, for all art is interpretation of the world by means of the imagination. It is not possible for him, even, to be a good man in any broad sense, for the man whose sympathies are narrow is often found to be guilty of injustice toward those who lie outside the pale of those sympathies.

By all means, then, encourage the love of reading in your children, and get them the best of story-books to read, and subscribe to the best magazines. Read with them. Let some reading enter into every day's life; talk over what has been read at the dinner-table, and so avoid harmful personalities and disagreeable criticisms.

[Sidenote: Books]

As to the books to choose, choose the best. Generally speaking, the best are those that have some dignity of age upon them. As in music you chose the folksongs, so in children's literature also choose the old fashioned fairy stories, such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm and by Andrew Lang. Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Stories of course are classics. Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales give excellent suggestions as to the right use to be made of the old mythologies. Many of the supplementary readers now being so widely used in the public schools are good, simple versions of these old stories which helped to make the world what it should be. For the rest there are two standard children's magazines which help to form a good taste in literature and which are continually suggestive of the right sort of reading material. These are The Youth's Companion and St. Nicholas.

[Sidenote: Nature Study]

Finally, all appreciation of literature and art depends upon a love of and some knowledge of nature. Fairy stories and mythology especially are so dependent upon nature for their inner meaning and significance as scarcely to be intelligible without some knowledge of natural processes and laws. Of course, it is true that art in its turn idealizes nature and fills her beautiful form with a beautiful soul; so that the child who is being developed on all sides needs to take his books and his pictures out of doors in order to get the full good of them.

[Sidenote: Art and Nature]

No amount of music, art, and literature can make up for the free life in the fields and under the sky which all these arts describe and interpret. If he should be so unhappy as to have to choose between nature and art, it would be better for him to choose nature, because then, perhaps, art might be born in his own soul. But there is happily no need for such a painful choice. He can sing his little song out of doors with the birds and notice how they join in the chorus. He can paint evening sunsets with the pine-trees against it far better out of doors than indoors with copy perched before him. He can look down the aisles of the real woods to watch for the enchanted princess, or for the chivalrous knight whose story he is reading. Art and nature belong together in the unified soul of the child. Well for him and for the world in which he lives if they are never divorced, but he goes on to the end loving them both and seeing them both as one.



CHILDREN'S ASSOCIATES

If the child was intended to grow into a man of family, merely, family training might be sufficient for him, but since he must grow into a member of society, social training is as necessary for him as family training. Failure to recognize this truth is at the bottom of the current misconceptions of the Kindergarten. There are still thousands of persons who suppose it is only a superior sort of day-nursery where children may be safely kept and innocently employed while the mother gets the housework done.

[Sidenote: The Kindergarten]

While this might be a laudable enough function to perform, it is by no means the function of the Kindergarten. This method of instruction aims at much more. It aims to lay foundations for a complete later education, and especially to make firm in the child those virtues and aptitudes which, when they are held by the majority of men, constitute the safety and welfare of society. For this reason no home, however well ordered, can supply to the child what the Kindergarten supplies. For the home is necessarily limited to the members of one family, while the Kindergarten, on the contrary, makes plain to the child the claims upon him of society not made up of his kinsfolk. It is the wide world in miniature, and if it is a properly organized Kindergarten, it will contain within itself a wide variety of children—children of wealth and of poverty, of ignorance and of gentle breeding—and will bring them all under one just rule. For only by this commingling of many characters upon a common level and under the strict reign of justice can the child be fitted practically, and by means of a series of progressive experiments, for citizenship in a genuine democracy.

[Sidenote: Exclusive Associates]

Parents sometimes so far miss the aim of the Kindergarten as to desire that instead of such a commingling there shall be a narrow limit set; that in the Kindergarten shall be only such children as the child is accustomed to associate with. But if the Kindergarten acceded to this demand, as it seldom does, it would lose much of its usefulness, for every one knows that children cannot be permanently sheltered from contact with the outside world, nor can they be always reared in an atmosphere of exclusiveness. A wisdom greater than the mother's has ordered that no child shall be so narrowly nourished. If he has any freedom whatever, any naturalness of life, he must and will enlarge his circle of acquaintances beyond the limit of his mother's calling list.

Indeed, even those Kindergartens which are professedly exclusive, and which confine their ministrations to the children of one particular neighborhood, are obliged by the nature of things to contain nascent individualities of almost every type. For no neighborhood, however equal in wealth and fashion, ever produced children of an unvarying quality. In any circle, no matter how exclusive, there are mischievous children, children who use bad language, children who have sly, mean tricks, children who do not speak the truth, and who are in other ways quite as undesirable as the children of the poor and ignorant. It is often asserted, indeed, that the children of exclusive neighborhoods very often show more varieties of badness than the children of the open street. The records of the private Kindergarten as compared with the public Kindergarten amply prove this statement.

[Sidenote: Evil Example]

Since, then, whether you confine your child to the limits of your own circle or not, you cannot successfully keep him from playing with children who are more or less objectionable, what are you going to do to keep him from the harm of such association? You have to make him strong enough to withstand temptation and resist the force of evil example. Of course, he must have as little of the wrong example, especially in his younger and tenderer years, as can be managed without too greatly checking his activity and curtailing his freedom. Yet after all he is to be taught a positive and not a negative righteousness, and if his home training is not sufficient to enable him to stand against a certain downward pull from the outside, there is something the matter with it.

While he must not be strained too hard, nor too constantly associate with children whose manners put his manners to the test, still he ought by degrees, almost imperceptibly, to be accustomed to holding to the truth, to that which is found good, no matter whether his associates find it desirable or not.

[Sidenote: Social Training]

A good Kindergarten is a mother's best help in this endeavor, for there her child meets with all sorts of other children. The very influence of the place, and the ever-ready help of the teacher are on his side. Every effort he makes to do right is met and welcomed. In every stand that he takes against temptation, he is unobtrusively reinforced. Moreover, the wrong-doing of his comrades is never allowed to retain the attractive glitter that it sometimes acquires on the play-ground. It is promptly held up to general obloquy, and the good child finds to his surprise that he is not the only one who thinks that teasing, for example, is mean and selfish and that a violent temper is ugly.

[Sidenote: Responsibility to Society]

Moreover, in the Kindergarten the sense of social responsibility is borne in upon him. Perhaps it comes to him first when he is chosen to lead the march and finds that he must be careful not to squeeze through too narrow places, lest someone get into trouble. In dealing out pencils, worsted, and other materials he must be careful to show strict impartiality, and give no preference to his own personal friends. In a hundred small ways he is helped to regulate his own conduct, so that it may conduce to the welfare of the whole school.

Where there are no Kindergartens, the task becomes a more difficult one for the mother, for it becomes necessary, then, that she herself should undertake the social training of her child, and this means that she must know his playmates, not only through his report of them, but through her own observation of them, and that they must be sufficiently at home with her to betray their true characters in her presence. And this means, of course, that she must become her child's playmate. There are few women who think that they have time for this, but there are also few who would not be benefited by it. If anywhere there is a fountain of youth, it gushes up invisibly wherever playing children are, and she who plays with them gets sprinkled by it.

[Sidenote: Sharing the Child's Play]

If there be no time during the busy day when she can justly enter into the children's free play, at least there is a little while in the late afternoon or in the early evening when she can do so, if she will. An hour or two a week spent in active association with children at their games will make her intimately acquainted with all their playmates, and, moreover, constitute her a power of first magnitude among them. Her motherhood thus extends itself, and she blesses not only her own children, but all those who come near her children. In this respect no Kindergarten can take the place of the mother's own companionship with the child in his social life.

[Sidenote: The Children's Hour]

In an ideal condition the child has his Kindergarten in the morning; his quiet hours, one of them entirely solitary, in the afternoon; his social time, when he, his brothers and sisters and mother, are joined with the other children and mothers in the neighborhood, in the late afternoon, and his family time, with both father and mother, in the evening before going to bed.

In thus sharing her child's social life the mother admits the claim upon her of social responsibility; she sees that her duty is not to her own home alone, but to the other homes with which hers is linked—not to her own child alone, but to all children whose lives touch her child's life. Her own nature widens with the perception, and she enhances her direct teaching with the force of a beautiful example.



STUDIES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

[Sidenote: Abstract Studies]

There may easily be too many studies and too many accomplishments in the life of any child. As our schools are constituted there are certainly too many studies of the wrong kind being carried on every day. But there are also too few studies of the right kind. In one of our large cities a test was once made as to how much the children who left school at the fifth grade, as 70 per cent of them do, had actually learned in a way that would be of practical value to them, and the results were most discouraging. These city children who could recite their tables of measurements with glibness, and who performed with a fair degree of success several hundred examples dealing with units of measure, could not tell whether their school-room floor contained one acre or two hundred and forty! None of them suspected that it contained less than an acre. Although they could bound the States of the Union, and give the principal exports and imports, they knew next to nothing of their own city and of its actual relation to the countries which they studied in their geography lessons. The teachers, in explanation, laid much of the blame for this state of affairs upon the parents, saying that they took but little interest in their children's studies, and never attempted to link them to the things of every-day life. But while this claim might be justified to some extent, it was by no means sufficient to cover the facts of the case. The truth is, it was quite as much the teachers' duty to link these abstract studies with concrete facts, as it was the parents'.

[Sidenote: Dead Knowledge]

Such an experience, however, suggests the manner in which parents can best help on the work of children in school. So long as these studies are still taught in the dead, monotonous way common to text-books, children will be racked nervously, and not benefited mentally in the effort to master them. Fathers and mothers who by the exercise of some ingenuity manage to show the child that his arithmetical knowledge is of actual help in solving the questions of every-day life; that his history has bearings upon the progress of events around him, and that his geography relates to actual places which, perhaps, father and mother may have seen, or which their books tell about—such fathers and mothers will make their children's school work easier, at the same time that they increase the sum of their children's knowledge. It is dead knowledge only—knowledge wrenched from its living content—that is difficult of digestion.

[Sidenote: The New Education]

It is natural for a young mind to like to learn, as it is for a healthy stomach to be supplied with food; but knowledge, like the food, must be fit for the use that is to be made of it and for the organ that is to receive it; and the brain, like the stomach, has a signal which it flies to show whether the food is what it wants or not. The brain exhibits interest exactly as the stomach exhibits appetite. The object of scientific education is to discover what the spontaneous, universal interest of children of certain ages is, and to meet that interest with the fullest possible supply of knowledge in every conceivable form.

Scientific education does not depend upon text-books or upon merely verbal explanations, but gets the idea home to the child by the means of a varied appeal to all the senses and sensibilities. For this reason the most advanced schools have many more studies and what are commonly called accomplishments than the public or parochial schools. That is, they add to the three r's—reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic—drawing, modeling, painting, manual training, physical culture, dramatic representation, music, field trips, and laboratory work.

[Sidenote: Correlation of Studies]

Yet this apparently great increase of subjects in the number of studies actually lessens the amount of work required of the child, because all these different activities, by means of what is called correlation, are brought to bear upon the same subject. For example, the class which goes out for a field trip to visit a near-by brook sees the water actually at work, cutting its way to the river, and thence to the sea. They measure its force and note its effects; they make a water-color sketch of some curve of it; they notice what birds and insects are about; what flowers grow there; what indications there may be of burrowing animals. When they get back to school they model, perhaps, some bird that they have noticed; or in the geographical laboratory, with streams of water try to reproduce in miniature the action of the brook upon the soil through which it flows.

For their arithmetic lesson they estimate the number of years the brook must have been flowing to have cut its valley to its present depth. They make a full report and description of their day's work for their reading and writing lesson. They have thus gained an immense amount of information, and have done a great deal of hard work; but instead of being nervously exhausted, they are bright and exhilarated. Such fatigue as they know is wholesome and fits them for a sound night's sleep.

[Sidenote: Home Expedients]

When it is impossible to send the child to such a school as this, something may be done by supplementing the ordinary school by some of these procedures. The clay jar, the crayons, and the paints have already been suggested, and with the parents' interest in the child's studies, helping him to model and paint things which he studies at school, he will instantly show the good effect of the home training and encouragement. As for field trips, the regular Sunday walk, or evening stroll, may be made to take its place. If you think that you do not know enough to teach your child on these walks, give him then the privilege of teaching you. He will work the harder in order to rise to the occasion.

[Sidenote: Physical Culture]

As for physical culture, if your school is without it, your barn, your parlor, and your lawn may supply it in some sort. In the barn may be a trapeze; there is already the ladder and the hay-loft; on the lawn may be a swing, trees to climb, and the tennis court. In your parlor may be a little home dancing school, where for a half an hour or so, the children march, skip, or two-step to music of your making. In the wood shed may be a carpenter's bench with real tools, where he may work and get some of the good of manual training.

[Sidenote: Showy Accomplishments]

Accomplishments, meaning thereby showy things that children do for the edification of guests, are of doubtful value. It is pleasant, of course, to have your little girl play a piece or two on the piano to entertain your visitors, but it is not nearly so important as health and strength, and a cheerful temper. Sometimes all three of these are sacrificed to the two or three hours' practice a day. Often, too, this extra work after school hours—work full as monotonous and nervous and uninteresting as the school work itself—is just what is needed to transform a healthy young girl into a nervous invalid. This is especially true, if she undertakes, as she usually does, to study music when she is about thirteen years old—the very time when, if wise physicians could regulate affairs to their liking, she would be taken out of school altogether and required to do nothing more than a little light housework every day.