The Child under Eight Part 14

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Granting this arrangement we must be clear how play as a method can still hold.

It does not hold in the informal incidental sense of the Nursery School: there are periods in the Transition Cla.s.s when the children know that they are working for a definite purpose which is not direct play--as in reading; and there are times when they are dissatisfied with their performances of skill and ask to be shown a better way, and voluntarily practise to secure the end, as in handwork, arithmetic and some kinds of physical games. The remainder is probably still pursued for its own sake. How then can this play spirit be maintained side by side with work?

First of all, the children should not be required to do anything without having behind it a purpose that appeals to them; it may not be the ultimate purpose of "their good," but a secondary reason may be given to which they will respond readily, generally the pretence reason.

Arithmetic to the ordinary person is a thing of real life; we count chiefly in connection with money, with making things, with distributing things, or with arranging things, and we count carefully when we keep scores in games; in adult life we seldom or never count or perform arithmetical operations for sheer pleasure in the activity, but there are many children who do so in the same spirit as we play patience or chess. And all this is our basis. The arithmetical activities in the Transition Cla.s.s should therefore be based on such everyday experiences as have been mentioned, else there will be no a.s.sociations made between the experiences of school and those of life outside. The two must merge.

There is no such thing as arithmetic pure and simple for children unless they seek it; they must play at real life, and the real life that they are now capable of appreciating.

Skill in calculation, accuracy and quickness can be acquired by a kind of practice that children are quite ready for, if it comes when they realise the need; most children feel that their power to score for games is often too slow and inaccurate; as store clerks they are uncertain in their calculations; they will be willing to practise quick additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions, in pure arithmetical form, if the pretence purpose is clearly in view, which to them is a real purpose; the same thing occurs in writing which should be considered a side issue of reading; meaningless words or sentences are written wearily and without pains, but to write the name of a picture you have painted, at the bottom of it, or to write something that Cinderella's G.o.dmother said, or bit by bit to write a letter, will be having a purpose that gives life to an apparently meaningless act, and thoroughness to the effort.

In handwork, too, at this stage, practice takes an important place: a child is willing to hem, to try certain brush strokes, to cut evenly, and later on to use his cardboard knife to effect for the sake of a future result if he has already experimented freely. This is in full harmony with the spirit of play, when we think of the practiced "strokes" and "throws" of the later games, but it is a more advanced quality of play, because there is the beginning of a purpose which is separated from immediate pleasure in the activity, there is the hint of an end in view though it is a child's end, and not the adult or economic one.

The training of the mother tongue can be made very effective by means of games: in the days when children's parties were simple, and family life was united, language games in the long dark evenings gave to many a grip of words and expressions. Children learnt to describe accurately, to be very fastidious in choice of words, to ask direct questions, to give verbal form to thought, all through the stress of such games--Man and his Shadow, Clumps, Subject and Object, Russian Scandal, the Minister's Cat, I see a Light, Charades, and acting of all kinds. No number of picture talks, oral compositions, or observations can compete in real value with these games, because behind them was a purpose or need for language that compelled the greatest efforts.

Physical development and its adjustment to mental control owes its greatest stimulus to games. When physical strength, speed, or nimble adjustability is the pivot upon which the game depends, special muscles are made subservient to will: behind the game there is the stimulus of strong emotion, and here is the greatest factor in establis.h.i.+ng permanent a.s.sociations between body and mind; psychologists see in many of these games of physical activity the evolution of the race: drill pure and simple has its place partly in the same sense as "practice" in number or handwork, and partly as a corrective to our fallacious system of education by listening, instead of by activity: and we cannot in a lifetime acquire the powers of the race except by concentrated practice.

But no amount of drill can give the all-round experience necessary for physical readiness for an emergency, physical and mental power to endure, active co-operation, where self-control holds in check ambitious personal impulses: and no drill seems to give grace and beauty of motion that the natural activity of dancing can give. It is through the games that British children inherit, and by means of which they have unconsciously rehea.r.s.ed many of the situations of life, that they have been able to take their place readily in the life of the nation and even to help to save it. Again, as in other directions, children must be made to play the game in its thoroughness, for a well-played game gives the right balance to the activities: drill is more specialised, and has specialisation for its end: a game calls on the whole of an individual: he must be alert mentally and physically; and at the same time the sense of fairness cannot be too strongly insisted on; no game can be tolerated as part of education where there is looseness in this direction, from the skittles of the nursery cla.s.s to the cricket and hockey of the seventh standard, and nothing will so entirely outrage the children's feelings as a teacher's careless arbitration. In physical games, too, the social side is strongly developed: leaders.h.i.+p, self-effacement and co-operation are more valuable lessons of experience than fluent reading or neat writing or accurate additions: but they have not counted as such in our economic system of education; they have taken their chance: few inspectors ask to see whether children know how to "play the game," and yet they are so soon to play the independent game of life. But the individual output of reading and sums of a sneaking and cowardly, or a.s.sertive and selfish child, is as good probably as that of a child that has the makings of a hero in him. And then we wonder at the propensities of the "lower cla.s.ses." It is because we have never made sure that they can play the game.

To summarise: play in the Nursery School stage is unorganised, informal, and pursued with no motive but pleasure in the activity itself; it is mainly individual. Play in the Transition Cla.s.s is more definitely in the form of games, _i.e._ organised play, efforts of skill, mental or physical; it becomes social. Play in the Junior School is almost an occasional method, because the work motive is by this time getting stronger.

CHAPTER XIX

THE UNITY OF EXPERIENCE

"We find in the child's spontaneous choice the nature of the surroundings and of the activities he craves for; in other words, he makes his own curriculum, and selects his own subject matter."

The next problem we have to solve is how to unify the bewildering variety of ideas and activities that a child seeks contact with during a day. We found that the curriculum of the Infant School of to-day presented a rather confusing variety of ideas, not necessarily arranged as the children would have chosen; they would certainly not have chosen to break off some intense interest, because an arbitrary timetable hurried them to something else, and they would have been right. If we asked the children their reasons for choosing, we would find no clue except that they chose what they wanted to, neither could they tell us why they spent so much more time over one thing than another. If a similar study were to be made of a child from a slum also free to arrange his day, we should find that while certain general features were the same others would be different: he would ask for different stories, probably play different games, or the same games in a different way, his back-yard would present different aspects, the things he made would be different.

It is evident that the old correlation method has little or nothing to do with the matter; a child may or may not draw the rabbit he feeds, he certainly does not play a rabbit game because of the rabbit he has fed, nor does he build a rabbit-hutch with his bricks. He might try to make a real one if the rabbit really needed it, but that arises out of an obvious necessity. If he could put his unconscious promptings into words, he would say he did the things because he wanted to, because somebody else did them, or because of something he saw yesterday, and so on; but he would always refer back to _himself_. The central link in each case is in the child, with his special store of experiences derived from his own particular surroundings; he brings to new experiences his store of present experiences, his interests not always satisfied, his powers variously used, he interprets the new by these, and seeks for more in the line of the old. It is life he has experienced, and he seeks for more life.

How then can we secure for him that the new experiences presented to him in school will be in line with the old? We will take three typical cases of children to ill.u.s.trate the real nature of this problem.

The first is the case of a child living in a very poor district of London or of any large town. The school is presumably situated in a narrow street running off the High Street of the district, the street where all the shopping is done; at the corner is a hide factory with an evil smell. Most of the dwelling-houses abut on the pavement, some with a very small yard behind, some without any. Several families live in one house, and often one room is all a family can afford; as that has to be paid for in advance the family address may change frequently. The father may be a dock labourer with uncertain pay, a coster, a rag and bone merchant, or he may follow some unskilled occupation of a similarly precarious nature; in consequence the mother has frequently to do daily work, the home is locked up till evening, and she often leaves before the children start for morning school. It is a curious but very common fact that, free though these children are, they know only a very small radius around their own homes. They are accustomed to be sent shopping into High Street, where household stores are bought in pennyworths or twopennyworths, owing to uncertain finance and no storage accommodation.

Generally there is one tap and one sink in the bas.e.m.e.nt for the needs of all the families in the house. There is usually a park somewhere within reach, but it may be a mile away; in it would, at least, be trees, a pond, gra.s.s, flowers. But an excursion there, unless it is undertaken by the school, can only be hoped for on a fine Bank Holiday; there is neither time nor money to go on a Sat.u.r.day, and Sunday cannot be said to begin till dinner-time, about 3 P.M., when the public-houses close, and the father comes home to dinner.

It is difficult to imagine the conversation of such a household; family life exists only on Sunday at dinner-time; the child's background of family life is a room which is at once a bedroom, living room and laundry. There is nearly always some part of a meal on the table, and some was.h.i.+ng hanging up. Outside there are the dingy street, the crowded shops, the pavement to play on, and both outside and in, the bleaker and more sordid aspects of life, sometimes miserable, sometimes exciting. On Sat.u.r.day night the lights are brilliant and life is at least intense.

Bed is a very crowded affair, in which many half-undressed children sleep covered with the remainder of the day's wardrobe.

What store of experiences does a child from such a neighbourhood bring to school, to be a.s.similated with the new experiences provided there?

What do such terms as home, dinner, bed, bath, birth, death, country, mean to him? They mean _something_.[34]

[Footnote 34: See _Child Life_, October 1916.]

Not a mile away we may come to a very respectable suburb of the average type; and what is said of it may apply in some degree to a provincial or country town or, at least, the application can easily be made. The school probably stands at the top corner of a road of houses rented, at 25 to 35 per annum, with gardens in front and behind. The road generally runs into a main road with shops and traffic. Here and there in the residential road are little oases of shops, patronised by the neighbourhood, and some of the children may live over these. The home life is more ordinary and needs less descriptive detail, but there are some features that must be considered. The decencies, not to say refinements of eating, sleeping and was.h.i.+ng are taken for granted: there is often a bath-room and always a kitchen. The father's occupation may be local, but a good many fathers will go to town; there is generally a family holiday to the sea, or less often to the country. In the house the degree of refinement varies; there are nearly always pictures of a sort, books of a sort, and the children are supplied with toys of a sort. They visit each other's houses, and the observances of social life are kept variously. Often the horizon is very narrow; the mother's interest is very local and timid; the father's business life may be absolutely apart from his home life and never mentioned there. The family conversation while quite amiable and agreeable may be round very few topics, and the vocabulary, while quite respectable, may be most limited. Children's questions may be put aside as either trivial or unsuitable. In one sense the slum child may be said to have a broader background, the realities of life are bare to him on their most sordid side, there is neither mystery nor beauty around life, or death, or the natural affections. The suburban child may on the contrary be balked and restricted so that unnecessary mystery gives an unwholesome interest to these things and conventionality a dishonest reserve.

A suburb of this type is described by Beresford in _Housemates_:--"In such districts (as Gospel Oak) I am depressed by the flatness of an awful monotony. The slums vex me far less. There I find adventure and jest whatever the squalor; the marks of the primitive struggle through dirt and darkness towards release. Those horrible lines of moody, complacent streets represent not struggle, but the achievement of a worthless aspiration. The houses, with their deadly similarity, their smug, false exteriors, their conformity to an ideal which is typified by their poor imitative decoration, could only be inhabited by people who have no thought or desire for expression.... The dwellers in such districts are cramped into the vice of their environment. Their homes represent the dull concession to a state rule; and their lives take tone from the grey, smoke-grimed repet.i.tion of one endlessly repeated design.

The same foolish ornamentation on every house reiterates the same suggestion. Their places of wors.h.i.+p, the blank chapels and pseudo-Gothic churches rear themselves head and shoulders above the dull level, only to repeat the same threat of obedience to a gloomy law.... The thought of Gospel Oak and its like is the thought of imitation, of imitation falling back and becoming stereotyped, until the meaning of the thing so persistently copied has been lost and forgotten."

A third case is that of the country child, the child who attends the village school. Many villages lie several miles from a railway station, so that the younger children may not see a railway train more than once or twice a year. The fathers may be engaged in village trades, such as a shoemaker, carpenter, gardener, general shop merchant, farm labourer, or farmer. The village houses are often cramped and small, but there is wholesome s.p.a.ce outside, and generally a good garden which supplies some of the family food; milk and eggs are easily obtainable, and conditions of living are seldom as crowded as in a town. The country children see more of life in complete miniature than the slum or the suburban child can do, for the whole life of the village lies before him. The school is generally in the centre, with a good playground, and of late years a good school garden is frequent. The village church, generally old, is another centre of life, and there is at least the vicarage to give a type of life under different social conditions.

The home intellectual background may vary, but on the whole cannot be reckoned on very much; though in some ways it is more narrow than the suburban one, it is often less superficial. In a different way from the slum child, but none the less definitely, the country child comes face to face with the realities of life, in a more natural and desirable way than either of the others. It is difficult to estimate some of the effects of living in the midst of real nature on children; unconsciously, they acquire much deep knowledge impossible to learn through nature study, however good, a kind of knowledge that is part of their being; but how far it affects them emotionally or enters into their scheme of life, is hard to say. As they grow up much of it is merely economic acquirement: if they are to work on the land, or rear cattle, or drive a van through the country, it is all to the good; but one thing is noticeable, that they take very quickly to such allurements of town life as a cinema, or a picture paper or gramophone, and this points to unsatisfied cravings of some sort, not necessarily so unworthy or superficial as the means sought to satisfy them.

From these rather extreme cases we get near the solution of the problem; it is quite evident that each of these children brings to school very different contributions of experience on which to build, though their general needs and interests are similar. Therefore the curriculum of the school will depend on the general surroundings and circ.u.mstances of the children, and all programmes of work and many questions of organisation will be built on this. The model programme so dear to some teachers must be banished, as a doctor would banish a general prescription; no honest teacher can allow this part of her work to be done for her by any one else.

Therefore the central point is the child's previous experience, and on this the experience provided by school, _i.e._ curriculum and subject matter, depends. One or two examples of the working out of this might make the application clearer. Probably the realities of life in relation to money differ greatly. The kind of problem presented to the poor town child will deal with shopping in pennyworths or ounces, with getting coals in pound bagfuls. Clothes are generally second-hand, and so ordinary standard prices are out of the question. Bread is bought stale and therefore cheaper, early in the morning. Preserved milk only is bought, and that in halfpenny quant.i.ties. Only problems based on these will be real to this child at first.

The suburban child's economic experience may be based on his pocket-money, money in the bank, and the normal shopping of ordinary life.

The country child is frequently very ignorant of money values; probably it will be necessary to take the country general shop as the basis. He could also begin to estimate the produce of the school garden.

THE NURSERY SCHOOL PROGRAMME

It is quite obvious from the nature of play at this stage that a time-table is out of the question and in fact an outrage against nature.

Only for social convenience and for the establishment of certain physical habits can there be fixed hours. There must be approximate limits as to the times of arrival and departure, but nothing of the nature of marking registers to record exact minutes. Little children sometimes sleep late, or, on the other hand, the mothers may have to leave home very early; all this must be allowed for. There should be fixed times for meals and for sleep, and these should be rigidly observed, and there should be regular times for the children to go to the lavatories; all these establish regularity and self-control, as well as improving general health. But anything in the nature of story periods, games periods, handwork periods, only impedes the variously developing children in their hunger for experiences.

Their curriculum is life as the teacher has spread it out before them; there are no subjects at this stage; the various aspects ought to be of the nature of a glorious feast to these young children. Traherne says in the seventeenth century:--

"Will you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness? Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had in my infancy, and that divine light wherewith I was born, are the best unto this day wherein I can see the Universe.... Verily they form the greatest gift His wisdom can bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain. They are unattainable by books and therefore will I teach them by experience....

Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I was a child.

"All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys.... I knew by intuition those things which since my apostasy I collected again by the highest reason.... All things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious.... I saw in all the peace of Eden.... Is it not that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?

"The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it stood from everlasting to everlasting.

The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me: ... the skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine: and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.... So that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of this world, which I now unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of Heaven."

If this is what life means to the young child, and Traherne only records what many of us have forgotten there is little need for interference: we can only spread the feast and stand aside to watch for opportunities.

The following extract is given from a teacher's note-book: it shows how many possibilities open out to a teacher, and how impossible it is to keep to a time-table, or even to try to name the activities. The children concerned were about five years old, newly admitted to a poor school in S.E. London. The records are selected from a continuous period, and do not apply to one day:--

PLANS FOR THE DAY WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

_Number Occupations._--This will The children played, freely be entirely free and the children chalking most of the time; those will choose their own toys and threading beads were most put them away. interested. Again I noticed the lack of idea of colour; I found one new boy placing his sticks according to colour, without knowing the names of the colours.

The boys thought the soldiers belonged to them, and laughed at a little girl for choosing them.

_Language Training._--I have I realised this was a failure, discovered that they love to for I asked the children to use imitate sounds, so we will play their boards and chalks for a at this. They could draw a cat definite drawing, and they should and say "miauw," and a duck and have had the time to use them say "quack." They could also freely and discover their use. I imitate the wind. got very little information about their vocabulary.

_Language Training_ (_another I found that many children day_).--I shall try to induce the p.r.o.nounced words so strangely children to speak to me about their that I could only with difficulty homes, in order to discover any recognise them. One said she difficulties of p.r.o.nunciation and had a "bresser" with "clates"

to make them more fluent. on it and "knies" Others spoke of "manckle," "firebrace," "forts."

One child speaking of curly hair called it "killeyer." We had no time for the story.

_Playing with Toys._--The Noah's arks, dolls, and bricks children will choose their own toys, were used, and I found that the and as far as possible I will put girls who had no dolls at home a child who knows how to use them were delighted to be able to dress next to one who desires to sit and undress them and put them still. to bed. One little girl walked backwards and forwards before the cla.s.s getting her doll to sleep; the boys were making a noise with their arks and she remarked on this, so we induced them to be silent while the dolls were put to sleep. The boys arranged their animals in long lines. The bricks were much more carefully put away to-day.