Part 4 (1/2)
The child clears it all away, and with the dying flowers something else is cleared away, something that will no more live again than will the faded flowers.
Be generous of praise--it is the dew that waters the budding flowers of kindness and love and unselfishness: it is to all that is best in the child the true Elixir of Life.
CHAPTER IX
Praise and Punishment
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OTHER HALF OF THE CITY.
82]]
WHILE admitting that no pains can be too great, no labours too arduous to spend upon the education of the child, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that the sacrifice of the grown-up may often be better for him--or much more often her--than it is for the child for whom that sacrifice is made. There is a certain danger that the enthusiastic educator, pa.s.sionately desiring to sacrifice her whole life, may incidentally, and quite without meaning it, sacrifice something very vital in the child. For the child whose every want is antic.i.p.ated, whose every thought is considered, who is surrounded by the softness of love and the sweetness of sympathy, is not unlikely to disappoint and dismay the fond parent or guardian, pastor or master, by growing up selfish, cowardly, heartless and ungrateful; with no capacity for obedience, no power of endurance, no hardihood, no resource--whining in adversity and intolerable in success. The object of education is to fit the child for the life of the man. Once it was held that a rigorous discipline, enforced by violence, was the best preparation for the life which is never too easy or too soft. Now we have changed all that, and there is some danger that the pendulum may swing too far, and that the aim of education may come to mean only the ensuring of a happy childhood, without arming the child for the battle of life. It is right that to the educator the child should be the prime object, the centre of the universe, the prime consideration to which every other consideration must give way. But there is the danger that the child may become his own prime object, not only the centre of his own universe, but its circ.u.mference, and cherish, deeply rooted in his inmost soul, the conviction that all other considerations should and will give way to his desires.
Life, we know, will teach him, in her rough, hard school, that he is only the centre of his own universe in that sense in which the same is true of us all--that far from being the prime object of the world which surrounds him, he himself counts for little or nothing, except to those who love him--and that the consideration he receives will not be, as was the consideration lavished on him in his childhood, free, ungrudging, and invariable, but will be conditioned by the services he renders to others and the extent to which he can be to them pleasant or useful.
Life, it is true, will teach him all this, but if her teaching be a course of lessons in a wholly new subject, they will be very difficult to learn, and the learning will hurt. Whereas if, from the very beginning, the child is taught to understand the interdependence of human beings, the fact that rights involve duties and that duties confer rights, he will be able to apply and to use for his own help the lessons which later life will teach him. More, he will have at the outset of life the advantage which one with a clear conception of rights and duties has over one who only sees life as a muddle and maze of things that are ”jolly hard lines.” They suffer as without hope who see that the world needs mending, and have never made up their minds what sort of world they would like. Whereas the child to whom, quite early, the lesson of human solidarity has been taught will, when he shall be a man, know very well what he wants, and will be able, however humbly, to help, in his day and generation, to re-mould the world to the fas.h.i.+on of his desire.
It is not difficult to teach children the duties of kindness and helpfulness to others, and the duty of public spirit and loyalty to their fellow-men. A healthy child is active, energetic, and deeply desirous of using his senses and his faculties. It is possible to a.s.sign to quite a small child certain duties, but the wise educator will manage to make such duties privileges and not tasks. The system of sentencing children to the performance of useful offices by way of punishment is abominable. It gives them for ever a distaste for that particular form of social service.
If we must punish, let us not permit the punishments to trench on the province of useful and, in good conditions, pleasant tasks. Give the boy an imposition rather than an order to weed the shrubbery walk; set the girl to learn a French verb rather than to hem dusters. The consciousness of being useful is very dear to children--it is worth while to feel and to show grat.i.tude to them for all services rendered, and though it may be, as they say, more trouble than it is worth to teach the children to help effectually, that only means that it is more trouble than the help they give is worth. What is really valuable is the cultivation of the sense that it is a good and pleasant thing to help mother to wash up, to help father to water the geraniums, and, further, a thing which will make father and mother pleased and grateful.
Children, like the rest of us, love to feel themselves important. Is it not well that they should feel themselves important as givers, and not as claimants only?
The tale of their public obligations may well begin with the lesson that it is part of the duty of a citizen to help to keep his city, his country, clean and beautiful. Therefore, we must not leave nasty traces of our presence in street or meadow--such traces as orange-peel, banana-skins, and the greasy bag that once held the bun or the bull's-eye. And it is quite as important to learn what we should as what we should not do. The idea and organisation of the Boy Scouts is a fine object-lesson in the way of training children to be good citizens. The duties of a citizen should be taught in all schools: they are more important than the lat.i.tude of Cathay and the industries of Kamskatka.
Even the smallest children could learn something of this branch of education. I should like to write a little book of Moral Songs for Young Citizens, only I wouldn't call it that. The songs in it might take the place of ”Mary had a little lamb” or whatever it is that they make the infants learn by heart. One of them might go something like this:
I must not steal, and I must learn Nothing is mine that I do not earn.
I must try in work and play To make things beautiful every day.
I must be kind to every one And never let cruel things be done.
I must be brave, and I must try When I am hurt never to cry, And always laugh as much as I can And be glad that I'm going to be a man, To work for my living and help the rest, And never do less than my very best.
Another might begin:
I must not litter the park or the street With bits of paper or things to eat: I must not pick the public flowers They are not _mine_, but they are _ours_... .
And so on. Simple rhymes learned when you are very young stay with you all your life. The duties and refrainings just touched on here might be elaborated in different poems. There might be one on being brave, and another on prompt obedience to the word of command. There is no position in life where the habit of obedience to your superior officer is not of value. To teach obedience without bullying would be quite easy: with very little children it could take the form of a game, in which a series of orders were given--for the performance of such actions as occur in the mulberry bush; and the compet.i.tion among the children to be the first to obey the new order would quicken the child's mind and body, while the habit of obedience to the word of command would be firmly planted, so that it would grow with the child's growth and adapt itself to the needs of life. I would write more than one poem, I think, about the green country and the shame it is that those who should love and protect it desecrate it as they do. Let it be the pride of the child that he is not of the sort of people who leave greasy papers lying about in woods, broken bottles in meadows, and old sardine tins among the rushes at the margin of cool streams. Such people touch no foot of land that they do not desecrate and defile. Wherever they are suffered to be, there they leave behind them the vilest leavings. Filthy papers, the rinds and skins of fruit, crusts and parings, jagged tins, smashed bottles, straw and shavings and empty stained cardboard boxes. They leave it all, openly and shamelessly, making the magic meadows sordid as a suburb, and carrying into the very heart of the country the vulgarities of the street corner. It is time, indeed, that certain of the finer duties of citizens.h.i.+p were taught in all schools, Harrow as well as Houndsditch, Eton as well as Borstal. And one of the first of these is the keeping of the beauty of beautiful places unsmirched, the duty of preserving for others the beauty which we ourselves admire, the duty of burning bits of paper and burying pieces of orange-peel. If there is not time to teach geography as well as the duties and decencies of a citizen, the geography should go, and the duties and decencies be taught. For what is the use of knowing the names of places if you do not know that places should be beautiful, and what is the use of knowing how many counties there are in England unless you know also that every field and every tree and every stream in every one of those counties is a precious gift of G.o.d not to be desecrated by shameless refuse and garbage, but to be cared for as one cares for one's garden, and loved, as one should love every inch of our England, this garden-land more beautiful than any garden in the world?
A child should be taught to read almost as soon as it has learned to speak. I can remember my fourth birthday, but I cannot remember a time when I could not read. Without going into details as to the merits of different methods of teaching, I may say that a good many words may be taught before it is necessary to teach the letters--that reading should precede spelling--that CAT should be presented whole, as the symbol of Cat--and that the dissection of it into C.A.T. should come later. I believe that children taught in this way, and taught young, will not in after life be tortured by the difficulties of spelling. They will spell naturally, as they speak or walk. Of the value of the accomplishment of reading, as a let-off to parents and guardians, it would be impossible to speak too highly. It keeps the child busy, amused, still and quiet.
The value to the child himself is not less. Nor is it only that the matter of his reading stores his mind with new material. To him also it is a good thing that he should sometimes be still and quiet, and at the same time interested and occupied. Of books for little children there are plenty--not fine literature, it is true--but harmless. As the child grows older he will want more books, and different books--and if you insist on personally conducting him on his grand tour through literature he will probably miss a good many places that he would like to go to.
For a child from ten onwards it is no bad thing to give the run of a good general library. When he has exhausted the story books he will read the ballads, the histories and the travels, and may even nibble at science, poetry, or philosophy. I myself, at the age of thirteen, browsed contentedly in such a library--where Percy's anecdotes in thirty-nine volumes or so divided my attention with Hume, Locke and Berkeley. I even read Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and was none the worse for it. It is astonis.h.i.+ng how little harm comes to children through books. Unless they have been taught by servants' chatter how to look for the ”harm,” they do not find it. I do not mean that absolutely every book is fit for a child's reading, but if you allow the reading of the Old Testament it is mere imbecility to insist that all the rest of your child's reading shall ignore the facts of life. You can always have a locked book-case if you choose: only see to it that the doors are not of gla.s.s, for the forbidden is always the desired.
As regards the facts of life, by which I mean the physiological facts about which there is so much needless and vain concealment, there is, it seems to me, only one rule. If your child has learned to love and trust you it will come to you with its questions, instead of going to the housemaid or the groom. Answer all its questions truthfully, even at the cost of a little trouble in formulating your answers. Do not leave the child to learn the truth about its body and its birth from vulgar and tainted sources. There is absolutely nothing that you cannot decently tell a child when it has reached the age when it understands that certain things are not fit subjects for public conversation--and until it has reached that age it will not ask that sort of questions. There is no difficulty in making children understand that their digestive processes are not to be discussed in general society, and it is quite easy to explain to them that other physiological processes are also to be avoided as subjects for general conversation. The Cat and her family will help you to explain all that the child wants to know. The child should be taught that its body is the Temple of the Holy Ghost, and that it is our duty to keep our bodies healthy, clean, and well-exercised, just as we should try to keep our minds strong and active, and our hearts tender and pure. And one need not always ”talk down” to children: they understand far better than you think. They are always flattered by talk that rises now and then above the level of their understanding. And if they do not understand they will tell you so, and you can simplify.
In talking of the subjects which interest them, you need not be afraid of being too clever. For even if they do not ask, your instinct and the child's eyes will, if there be love and trust between you, tell you when you are getting out of its depth. But there must be love and trust: without that all education outside book-learning is for ever impossible.
CHAPTER X