"If not trained to obedience, what shall the child be trained to?" naturally demands the outraged parent. To inculcate that first of virtues has taken so much time and effort that we have overlooked the subsequent qualities which require our help, and feel rather at sea when this sheet anchor is taken from us. But it is not so hard a problem, when honestly faced. A child has a body and a mind to be nourished, sheltered, protected, allowed to grow, and judiciously trained. We are here considering the brain training; but that is safely comparable to—is, indeed, part of—the body training, for the brain as much as the lungs or liver is an organ of the body. In training the little body, our main line of duty is to furnish proper food, to insure proper rest, and to allow and encourage proper exercise. Exactly this is wanted to promote right brain growth. We do not wish to overstimulate the brain, to develope it at the expense The office of the brain we are here considering is to receive, retain, and collate impressions, and, in retaining them, to hold their original force as far as possible, so that the ultimate act, coming from a previous impression, may have the force of the original impulse. The human creature does not originate nervous energy; but he does secrete it, so to speak, from the impact of natural forces. He has a storage battery of power we call the will. By this high faculty we see a well-developed human being working steadily for a desired object, without any present stimulus directed to that end, even in opposition to prevent stimulus tending to oppose that end. This width of perception, length of retention, storage of force, and power of steady, self-determined action distinguish the advanced human brain. Early forms of life had no brains to speak of. They received impressions and transmitted them in expressions without check or discrimination. With the development of more complex organisms and their more complex activities came the accompanying complexity of brain, which could co-ordinate those activities to the best advantage. Action is the main line of growth. Conditions press upon all life, but life is modified through its own action under given conditions. And the relative wisdom and success of different acts depend on the brain power of the organism. The superiority of races lies in better adaptation to condition. In human life, in the long competition among nations, classes, and individuals, superiority still lies in the same development. Power to receive and retain more wide, deep, and subtle impression; power to more accurately and judiciously collate these impressions; power to act steadily on these stored and selected impulses rather than on immediate impulses,—this it is which marks our line of advance. The education of the child should be such A very little child does this in his narrow range exactly as does the adult in wider fields. He receives impressions, such as are allowed to reach him. He stores and collates those impressions with increasing vigour and accuracy from day to day; and he acts on the sum of those impressions with growing power. Naturally, his range of impression is limited, his power of retention is limited, his ability to relate the impression retained is limited; and his action is at first far more open to immediate outside stimulus, and less responsive to the inner will-force, than that of an adult. That is the condition of childhood. It is for us to gently, delicately, steadily surround the child with such conditions as shall promote this orderly sequence of brain function rather than to forcibly develope and retain his more primitive methods. Before going further, let us look at the average mental workings of the human creature, and see if it seems to us in smooth running order. We have made enormous progress in brain development, and we manifest wide differences in brain power. But clearly discernible through all the progress and all the difference is this large fault in our mental machinery,—a peculiar discrepancy between the sum of our knowledge and the sum of our behaviour. Man being conscious and intelligent, it would seem that to teach him the desirability of a given course of action would be sufficient. That it is not sufficient, every mother, every teacher, every preacher, every discoverer, inventor, reformer, knows full well. Instruction may be poured in by the ton: it comes out in action by the ounce. You may teach and preach and pray for two thousand years, and very imperfectly Christianise a small portion of the human race. You may exhort and command and reiterate; and yet the sinner, whether infant or adult, remains obdurate. No wonder we imagined an active Enemy striving to oppose us, so What does that simple saying mean? That one learns better by observation than by instruction, especially when instruction is coupled with command. This being a clearly established fact, why have we not profited by it? Because our brains, all of our brains from the beginning of time, have been blurred and blinded and weakened by the same mistake in infant education. What is this mistake? What is it we have done so patiently and faithfully all these years to every one of the human race which has injured the natural working of the brain? This: we have systematically checked in our children acts which were the natural sequence of their observation and inference; and enforced acts which, to the child's mind, had no reason. Thus we have carefully trained a world of people to the habit of acting without understanding, Observe, too, that our most intelligent progress is made in those arts, trades, professions, sciences, wherein little children are not trained; and that our most palpable deficiencies are in the morals, manners, and general personal relations of life, wherein little children are trained. The things we are compelled to do in obedience we make no progress in. They are either obeyed or disobeyed, but are not understood and improved upon: they stand like the customs of China. The things we learn by understanding and practising are open to further knowledge and growth. A normal human act, as distinguished The sun's heat pours upon the earth, and passes through whatever substance it strikes, coming out transformed variously, according to the nature of the substance. Man receives his complement of energy, like every other creature,—physical stimulus from food and fire, psychical stimulus from its less known sources; and these impressions tend to flow through him into expression as naturally as, though with more complexity than, in other creatures. The song of the skylark and Shelley's "Skylark" show this wide difference in the amount and quality of transmission, yet are both expressions of the same impressions, plus those wider impressions to which the poet's organism was open. The distinctive power of man is that of This power, in cases of immediate danger, we call "presence of mind." Similarly, when otherwise intelligent persons do visibly foolish things, we call it "absence of mind." The brain, as an organ, is present in both cases; but in the former it is connected with action, in the latter the connection is broken. The word "thoughtless," as applied to so large a share of our walk and conversation, describes this same absence of the mind from the place where it is wanted. In training the brain of the child, first importance lies in cultivating this connection between the mind and the behaviour. The potential attitude of mind involved in our method is shown in that perfect expression As a feature in brain-training, this, of course, works absolute harm. It prolongs the infant weakness of the racial brain, keeps us credulous and open to all imposture, hinders our true growth. What we should do is to help the child to question and find out,—teach him to learn, not to believe. He does learn, of course. We cannot shut out the workings of natural laws from him altogether. Gradually he discovers that fire is hot and water wet, that stone is hard to fall on, and that there are Given such a child, with such and such an inheritance of constitution and tendency, submit him to certain impressions, and he behaves accordingly. He has felt. He has thought. He is about to do. Here comes in our universal error. We concern ourselves almost wholly with what the child does, and ignore what he feels and thinks. We check the behaviour which is the logical result of his feeling and thinking, and substitute another and different behaviour for his adoption. Now it is a direct insult to the brain to try to make the body do something which the brain does not authorise. It is a physical shock: it causes a sort of mental nausea. There are many subconscious activities which go on without our recognition; but to call on the body to consciously go through certain motions, undirected by previous mental processes, is an affront to any We demand consistency in others, and scoff at the lack of it, even in early youth. "What yer talkin' about, anyway?" we cry. "There's no sense in that!" We expect consistency of ourselves, too. It is funny, though painful, to see the ordinary warped brain trying to square its own conduct with its own ideals. Square they The slowness, the inertia, the opaque conservatism, and the openness to any sort of external pressure, easiest, of course, on the down side,—which so blocks the path of humanity,—largely come back to that poor child's surname, Mary Don't. It is thoroughly beaten into us when young, and for Also, the work of those who seek to educate our later youth, and of those who are forever pouring out their lives to lead the world a little higher, is rendered million-fold more difficult by this same gulf, this terrible line of cleavage which strikes so deep to the roots of life, and leaves our beautiful feelings and wise thoughts to mount sky-high in magnificent culture, while our action, which is life's real test, grovels slowly along, scarce moved by all our fine ideas. A more general discourager of our racial advancement than this method of brain-training we could hardly have invented. It is universal in its application, and grinds down steadily on all our people during the most impressionable years of life. That we grow as we do in spite of it is splendid proof of the beneficent forces of our unconscious life, always stronger than our conscious efforts; and that our American children grow more freely, and so have more power "But what else can we do?" will ask the appalled parents. Without authority they feel no grip upon the child, and see themselves exposed to infant tyranny, and the infant growing up neglected and untrained. This shows how little progress we have made in child-culture, how little grasp we have of the real processes of education. Any parent, no matter how ignorant, is wiser than a baby and larger. Therefore, any parent can direct a child's action and enforce it, to some extent. But to understand how to modify the child's action by such processes as shall keep it still his own, to alter his act by first altering his feeling and thought and so keeping the healthy sequence unbroken, that is a far more subtle and difficult task. A typical instance of this difference in method may be illustrated in that common and always difficult task, teaching a child table manners. Here is a case in which there is no instinct in the child to be appealed to. The noise, clumsiness, and carelessness to which we object But there is a far safer and better way. Carefully work out in your own mind the real reason why you wish the child to conform to this particular code of table ethics. It is not wholly on the ground of displeasing you by the immediate acts. The main reason why they displease you, and why you Reasons why table manners exist at all, or are what they are, require further study; but the point at issue is not why it is customary to eat with the fork instead of the knife, but why your child should do so. When he gets to the point of analysing these details, and asks why he should fold his napkin in one case and leave it crumpled in another, you will of course be prepared with the real reasons. Meanwhile the real reason why the child should learn not to do these undesirable things is that such manners, if pursued, will deprive him of desirable society. We usually content ourselves with an oral statement to this effect: "Nobody will want to eat with you if you do so!" Right here let a word be said to those who are afraid of over-stimulating a child's brain by a more rational method of training. Training by His most desirable society is usually that of his parents; and his first entrance upon that plane should be fairly conditioned upon his learning to play the game as they do. No compulsion, no penalties, no thought of "naughtiness," merely that, if he wants to eat with them, why, that is the way they eat, and he must do so, too. If he will not, exit the desirable society. By very gradual steps,—not by long, tiresome grown-up meals, but by a graduated series of exercises that should recognise the physical difficulty As we do these things now, pulling this string and that, appealing to feelings half developed, urging reasons which find no recognition, using compulsion which to the child's mind is arbitrary and unjust, we may superinduce a tolerable system of table manners, but we have more or less injured the instrument in so doing. A typewriter could, perhaps, be worked with a hammer; but it would not improve the machine. We have had far more consideration for "the machinery of the household" than for the machinery of a child's mind, and yet the real foundation claim of the home is that it is necessary to rear children in. If the ordinary conditions of household life are unsuitable to convey the instruction we desire, it is for us to so arrange those conditions as to make them suitable. There are cases, many cases, in a child-time, where we cannot command the conditions It is our business to make plain to him the desirability of the behaviour we wish produced, carefully establishing from day to day his perceptions of the use and beauty of life, and his proven confidence in us as interpreters. The young brain should be regularly practised in the first easy steps of sequential reasoning, arguing from the interesting causes we so carefully provide to the pleasant or not too painful effects we so honestly let it feel, always putting two and two together as it advances in the art and practice of human conduct. Then it will grow into a strong, clear, active, mature brain, capable of relating the facts of life with a wider and juster vision than has been ours, and acting unflinchingly from its own best judgment, as we have striven to do in vain these many years. |