Part 5 (2/2)

There is another and profound reason why words should follow, and not precede things, in a child's memory. It will have a tendency to preclude the unconscious sophistry which takes the place of real logic in so many minds; and at all events will give the power to detect sophistry; for it necessitates the mind to demand an image, or an idea, for every word. It gives the habit of thinking things and principles, instead of thinking words merely;--of looking through rhetoric after truth and reality.

There is nothing perhaps which would conduce more to sound morality and earnestness of character, in this country, than that object-teaching, as proposed in Mr. Sheldon's ”ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION,” should pervade the primary schools. It would require a volume to go into object-teaching, in such detail as to serve as a manual for teachers; and happily the work of Mr. Sheldon's, just named, precludes the necessity of my doing so. It is published broadcast over our northern States; and every teacher, especially every Kindergarten teacher, should procure it, and give days and nights to the study of it, until its methods and matter are completely mastered. I have one or two exceptions to take, in respect to it myself, as will be seen in the sequel; yet I consider it not only an invaluable manual, but that it goes far to supply the place of the training school for teachers on the Pestalozzian plan, ”for whose use I believe it was primarily intended.”

Object-teaching should precede as well as accompany the process of learning to read. In Germany, even outside of Kindergarten, _thinking schools_ have long preceded _reading schools_, and yet learning to read German, in which every sound is represented by a different letter, and every letter has one sound, cultivates the cla.s.sifying powers, as learning to read English cannot. With children whose vernacular is English, it is absolutely injurious to the mind to be taught to read the first thing. I must speak of the reasons of this in another place, my purpose here being to show that object-teaching is necessary, in order to make word-teaching, whether by teacher's discourse, or by the reading of books, a means of culture at any period.

Every child should have the object to examine, and in turn each should say what is spontaneous. Out of their answers series of questions will be suggested to the teacher, who should also be prepared with her own series of questions,--questions full of answers.

The first generalization to which children should be led is into the animate and inanimate,--what lives and what exists without manifestation of life. The next generalization will be into mineral, vegetable, animal, and personal.

But you can begin with chairs, tables, paper, cloth, &c., coming as soon as possible to natural objects. Mrs. Aga.s.siz's ”First Lesson in Natural History” is an excellent hint. Sea anemones, star-fishes, clams, and oysters are easily procured. If sea anemones, taken into a bottle of salt water, clinging to stones, look like mere mosses at first, on the second day it is pretty certain, that in their desire for food they will spread themselves out, displaying their inward parts in the most beautiful manner. Every child in the cla.s.s should have his turn at the object, if there are not objects enough for each,--should tell what he sees, and be helped to words to express himself. This, I must repeat, is the true way of learning the meaning of words; and leaves impressions, which no dictionary, with its periphrases and mere approximations to synonymes can give. Let a child himself hammer out some substance with a mallet, and he will never forget the meaning of malleable; and so of other words. As far as possible we should always use Saxon words, but it is the words that come from the Latin and Greek, which it is most necessary to teach the meaning of; and they should be taught by things themselves, which have them for names or qualities.

A good linguist will have an advantage here, by being able to trace the words through the original language up to nature; for every word is, in the last a.n.a.lysis, either a picture, whose original in nature is its definition, or a poem, which can be recognized by the general imagination. A child whose vernacular is English will easily see that a _bit_ is something bitten off, and so is smaller than the mouth; but that _morsel_ means a bit is not so obvious to one who does not know that _morsus_, also, is the perfect participle of the Latin verb for bite. That _acute_ means _sharp_ is plainer to a child who knows that _acu_ is the Latin for needle.

No time is lost which is given to this definition of words by the objects of nature and art, from which, or from whose attributes, words are derived. In words are fossilized the sciences, that is, the knowledge mankind has already attained of nature; and he who understands all the words in use, would know all that is known, nay, much that has been once known and long forgotten. But the study of objects not only gives significance to words, it educates the senses, and produces the habit of original attention and investigation of nature. These do not come of themselves, as we see in the instance of country children, who are ignorant of what is around them, because left to grow up among the objects of nature, without having their attention called to things in their minutiae, or their relations in extensu; nor led to clothe with words their perceptions, impressions, and reasonings.

Besides Mr. Sheldon's ”Elementary Instruction,” there is the ”Child's Book of Nature,” by Worthington Hooker, in three parts, which will be a great help to an object-teacher. It is published by the Harpers, and is the very best introduction of children to flowers.[D] Mrs. Mann's ”Flower People” is also full of facts, carefully studied out. This is a charming book for children to read in, when they shall come to read. It is a great pity that the latest edition, published by Ticknor and Fields in 1862, is not ill.u.s.trated by the flowers spoken of. But perhaps these may be lithographed, and published in a card-case, to accompany it. Both the science and cultivation of flowers comes very naturally into the Kindergarten.

The greatest difficulty about object-teaching is, that it requires personal training, and wide-awake attention in teachers, of a character much more thorough than they commonly have. When it shall become general, as it certainly must, it will no longer be supposed that any ordinary person who can read and write, and is obliged to do something for a living, will be thought fit to keep a school for small children!

The present order of things will be reversed. Ordinary persons, with limited acquirements, will be obliged to confine themselves to older pupils, who are able to study books and only need to have some one to set their lessons and hear them recited; while persons of originality and rich culture will be reserved to discover and bring out the various genius and faculty which G.o.d has sown broadcast in the field of the race, and which now so often runs into the rank vegetation of vice, or wastes into deserts of concentrated mediocrity. Then this season of education will command the largest remuneration, as it will secure the finest powers to the work; and because such work cannot be pursued by any one person for many years, nor even for a short time without a.s.sistance, relieving from the ceaseless attention that a company of small children requires, for little children cannot be wound up to go like watches; but to keep them in order, the teacher must constantly meet their outbursting life with her own magnetic forces; while their employments must be continually interchanged, and mingled with their recreations.

Children ought to continue these Kindergarten exercises from the age of three to nine; and if faithfully taught, they could then go into what is called scholastic training, in a state of mind to receive from it the highest advantages it is capable of giving; free from the disadvantages which are now so obvious as to have raised, in our practical country, a party prejudiced against cla.s.sical education altogether.

The preceding chapter and the one on Geometry, which succeeds, are rather for the direction of children in the last than the first years of the Kindergarten; for they go over into the second stage of education.

Object-lessons, addressed more to the heart and imagination, grow directly out of the plays, as we have seen.

And, without any of the terms of Geometry, the sticklaying and the folding of paper give the child geometrical facts in a practical way; as well as counting, and all of arithmetic that precedes Colburn's ”First Lessons,” some of which can be taught even before teaching to read.

FOOTNOTE:

[D] Gray's _How Plants Grow_, is invaluable for a teacher.

CHAPTER IX.

GEOMETRY.

REV. DR. HILL, the present President of Harvard College, in his articles in Dr. Barnard's ”Journal of Education,” has set forth the importance of Geometry in the earliest education, giving the Science of Form precedence to that of numbers. Of course he does not mean that logical demonstration is to form one of the exercises of little children! but that observation of differences and resemblances of shape, and the combination of forms, should be inwoven with the amus.e.m.e.nts of children.

He invented a toy on the principle of the Chinese tanagram, (published by Hickling, Swan & Co., in Boston,) to further an exercise which begins in the cradle with the examination of the hands and feet.

The blocks are the first materials. Take the cube and ask how many faces it has; how many corners; and whether one face is larger than another or equal; and finally, lead the child to describe a cube as a solid figure with six equal sides, and eight corners. Then take a solid triangle from the box and draw out by questions that it has five sides and six corners, that three of its sides are equal, and two others equal; that the three larger sides are four-sided, and the two smaller sides are three-sided; and that the corners are sharper than those of a cube.

Make a.n.a.logous use of all the blocks, and of the furniture of the room, of the sphere and its parts, the cylinder, &c. Do not require the definition-formulas at first, but content yourself with opening the children's eyes to the facts which the formula afterwards shall declare.

Paper-folding can be made subservient to another step, just short of abstraction.

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