Part 12 (2/2)
”That the interest in this rather exacting work was sustained for two months was doubtless due to the fact that the children had a genuine purpose in canning a large quant.i.ty of vegetables. For early in the work, upon the suggestion of one of the cla.s.s, it had been decided to have a sale and use the proceeds to buy milk for a sick baby. Although I had not thought of this plan myself, I was glad to lend it my support.
”The final preparation for the sale occupied a large share of the time for several weeks. The chief consideration from the children's point of view seemed to be who should take charge of the business of selling. They had conducted a play store intermittently during the fall, but, upon testing, it was found that most of the cla.s.s were ill prepared to act as salespeople.[A] The children readily recognized this fact and willingly went to work to drill on addition and subtraction. The most successful drill was accomplished by means of a dramatic rehearsal of the forthcoming sale, some children impersonating the visitors and the others the salesmen. Real money, correct prices, and the actual jars of vegetables and fruit were used for this play.
[Footnote A: Remember these were second-grade children--most of them seven or eight years old.]
”The need of invitations, of price lists, and of bookkeepers the day of the sale, was also recognized and led to much needed practice in written English. The prices were determined by a study of the latest food catalog, a small group with a teacher undertaking this work. It necessitated the use of an alphabetical index, and in some cases the calculation of the price of pints, when only quarts were listed, as we had used both pint and quart jars.
”Further preparation consisted of the making of labels for the jars and of posters for the room. The art teacher, when called in to advise, taught the children how to make accurate square letters, which they used in various sizes for the labels and posters. The making of fifty or more small labels with half-inch letters proved irksome to the little people, but they showed much persistence in completing the task, because of their interest in the sale. The eight children who made the final large posters did a great deal of intelligent, painstaking work. From the artistic point of view, the posters were not noteworthy, but they represented the children's own suggestions.
”The sale was conducted by the children, who made their own change, kept records of sales and wrapped up purchases. The various duties were agreed upon by the cla.s.s, in accordance with each one's proved ability to carry them out, and everyone had some share.”
In this simple account of an experimental cla.s.s conducted at the Ethical Culture School, in New York, under the direction of Miss Mabel R. Goodlander, are many references to drill and practice. But throughout all of the work it was possible to maintain the interest of the children because, apparently, the attention was not on the drill as an end in itself, but upon the special skill or knowledge as a means to a more remote end. And this remote end was not the formal one of ”pa.s.sing,” or being promoted, or getting a good mark, but the vital, urgent purpose of raising money through the sale for a sick baby's milk. Undoubtedly the ”motives” of the several children in this cla.s.s were varied and mixed--like the motives of good citizens who are united in support of a particular candidate, or a particular platform. But there was enough common purpose to insure cooperation and persistence and effort from every single child in proportion to his ability. The learning of stupid sums and the practice in penmans.h.i.+p are no more attractive to these children than they are to ordinary children in ordinary schools in all parts of the country. But they overcame all internal obstacles, went through with all of the monotony and drudgery, and to that extent triumphed over any disposition to s.h.i.+rk or to loaf or to dawdle or to flit from work to sensation.
And how is it with the learning of responsibility, with acquiring a sense of duty? Many of us have no doubt learned what we have learned of duty and responsibility, through the constant repet.i.tion of ”Thou shalt” and ”Thou shalt not” by our elders during our own growing years. But results at least as valuable have been obtained in the cases of others through the constant rubbing up against their equals in a free give-and-take atmosphere. Children learn to live with others by living with others. They learn to work with others--to ”cooperate”--by working with others. They learn to play the game, to do teamwork, to play fair, to play in good form, to hit hard only by playing according to rule, with others, with worthy opponents, under good supervision. In short, the ”discipline” that makes for power and freedom may be quite as easily obtained through the exercise of freedom as through external coercion--nay, more easily, and more effectively.
It is fair to ask whether training for a game is not quite a.n.a.logous to our idea of training for life; and whether the methods which are found to be effective in the former kind of training are not equally valuable for the latter. a.s.suming the a.n.a.logy, would you have a child learn the rules of such games as baseball or tennis from a book before allowing him to handle a ball, or before letting him see a game? Would you expect him to cooperate in teamwork after a long period of drill upon the _rules_ governing team cooperation? Would you expect him to hit hard because he has learned the correct answer to the question, How should a player hit?
This may not seem a fair comparison to some of the ”training” that has actually been tried. Perhaps a more familiar a.n.a.logy would be in teaching a child correct movements for the game to be mastered, separated from any experience with real games. Boys are ”practicing”
for a game, and each one is drilling on some special detail, hitting, catching, running bases, long throws, or what not; each one of them has in mind as part of his moving purpose not only his team's success and glory, but his own individual responsibility.
Contrast this with the same boys required to drill at precisely the same movements on the theory that the ”exercise” will do them good, or that some time in the future they might have to meet a situation in which a long throw or a swift run would be significant. Do you expect the same enthusiasm and energy to be developed in both cases?
And if not the same enthusiasm and energy, can we expect the same results--whether we view the results as so much skill or technic, whether we view the results as so much ”training in drudgery,” or whether we consider the results from the viewpoint of moral values as so much devotion, self-sacrifice, restraint? The ”moral” values that have been for years attributed to athletics appear after all to be the effects of intense, enthusiastic, and interested partic.i.p.ation in teamwork--that is, in purposeful and energetic concern with joint undertakings.
The responsibilities we wish to develop, the sense of duty, no less than the application and persistence, no less than knowledge and skill, are types of habits which are best formed under the glow of satisfying experience. Far from a.s.suming a soft life for the child, the idea of interest a.s.sumes the most strenuous kind of life. And the experiences of all who have tried it justifies the a.s.sumption.
The experimental cla.s.s already mentioned, similar experiments by Mrs. Marietta Johnson at Fairhope, Alabama and elsewhere, experimental cla.s.ses at the Lincoln School and at the Horace Mann School, at various ”play” schools in this country and in England, all show more continuous application of the children to whatever they happen to have in hand, longer periods of intense activity, and no sign whatever of loafing or s.h.i.+rking. The activities selected by the children themselves involve just as much ”discipline” as anything that can be selected for them.
In these schools the children never hear the teacher call for ”attention,” for although everybody knows that attention is an essential of effective work, the attention takes care of itself where the children already feel a genuine concern in the outcome.
And this concern insures satisfactory application, since the children look forward to satisfying results. This does not mean, of course, that either the work itself or the result is necessarily ”pleasant,” in the ordinary sense. Often, indeed, it is quite the reverse, as when the racer is exerting every last reserve of his energy in the final spurt, or when the contestants are in suspense awaiting the decision of the judges as to which is the best cake.
And the endless grind of practice and preparation is no more ”pleasant” to the child who knows the purpose and approves the purpose of his efforts (having taken part in selecting the undertaking) than similar exertion is to the child whose work is all planned and directed by outsiders; but the satisfactions connected with the exertions are different in the two cases, and the corresponding results are correspondingly different.
The principle of interest as a guide to the training of children can be applied in the home as well as in the school. It means, first of all, taking into account the interests, tastes, preferences of the children. As has already been suggested in earlier chapters, there are many occasions when the child may be consulted or given a choice of action, of amus.e.m.e.nts, of purchases, and so on--situations in which it is a matter of indifference to older people, but in which the making of a decision or a choice is both satisfying and valuable to the child. Even where the decision is not an indifferent one, our own should not be imposed in an arbitrary manner; when it differs from that of the child, we can get his a.s.sent and cooperation, where an arbitrary choice leaves him cold or even resentful.
The games children play, whether by themselves or with other children, are only in part manifestations of tastes: they represent to a degree stages of development. For the reason, therefore, that interests develop, we shall find that what is a favorable time for one child is not necessarily a favorable time for another child to learn a particular thing. This is very well shown by the great differences found among children, as to learning school subjects like reading or writing. In some the interest is aroused very early, and for them this is the best time; with others the interest does not appear until the third or fourth grade, or even later, and for such children this is the best time. There is no one period that is best for all children; by attempting to treat all alike, therefore, we not only waste a great deal of energy and good feeling, but we often defeat our purpose by antagonizing the children and thus making them resist the very things we want them to hug to themselves. And this is just as true of what we try to do in the home as it is of school teaching.
To discover the interests of the children requires that they be given an opportunity to express themselves. This means in most cases much more freedom than children have heretofore enjoyed. But it means also constant vigilance on the part of the elders, not so much to guard against the freedom being abused, as to guard against the opportunity being wasted. The taste in games or in reading, the choice of companions or of leisure time occupations must not only show themselves to be indulged; they must be seized upon by those who guide the children, as means for giving drive and direction to further development. A child who devotes too much time to athletics and too little to literature, may be drawn to reading through books about athletic contests of the cla.s.sics, or through modern stories of college life. On the other hand, the boy who is p.r.o.ne to get his satisfactions vicariously and to neglect active partic.i.p.ation in games and other activities, must be led through his reading, properly selected and unostentatiously placed under his nose, to more direct concern with producing practical effects in his environment. The interest, once discovered, must be the means for stimulating to greater exertion and to closer unification of the child's activities.
One of the things that presents a difficulty in every generation is the fact that the social and moral ideals change from age to age. We are thus constantly tempted to put into the characters of our children those traits that were valued highly by our parents, without always considering the importance of each item for the days in which our children will play their parts. Thus it comes about that many of the virtues that have a traditional value may be questioned when offered as staples for citizens of to-morrow.
Obedience, for example, is a permanent necessity in a society that rests upon the a.s.sumption that one or a few chosen men represent the will of the G.o.ds on earth, but has only a transitory value in a democracy. As someone has said, obedience in childhood must be considered as a scaffold that is useful while the lasting parts of the structure are being put in place; when the desired structure is completed, obedience is naturally removed as of no further service.
Now the kind of discipline required in a democracy calls for an att.i.tude or disposition that makes cooperation with others come as a matter of course; it calls for the making of decisions, or the forming of opinions, on the basis of facts; and it calls for the habit of taking due account of the rights of others. The training for this cla.s.s of habits is best obtained through methods that take full account of children's interests.
Just as the older outlook turned to ”discipline” as a means for obtaining freedom, the new psychology utilizes freedom as a means for obtaining discipline. In both cases the end is of course the same--that is, the liberation of the human spirit and the organizing of the individual's powers to the greatest good. But as our ideas of human relations and of values have changed, science has given us new methods for attaining the final goals that we set ourselves.
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