The Education of the Child Part 3

By a realisation of all this in an entirely new way, by seeing the whole process in the light of the religion of development, the twentieth century will be the century of the child. This will come about in two ways. Adults will first come to an understanding of the child's character and then the simplicity of the child's character will be kept by adults. So the old social order will be able to renew itself.

Psychological pedagogy has an exalted ancestry. I will not go back to those artists in education called Socrates and Jesus, but I commence with the modern world. In the hours of its sunrise, in which we, who look back, think we see a futile Renaissance, then as now the spring flowers came up amid the decaying foliage. At this period there came a demand for the remodelling of education through the great figure of modern times, Montaigne, that skeptic who had so deep a reverence for realities. In his Essays, in his Letters to the Countess of Gurson, are found all of the elements for the education of the future. About the great German and Swiss specialists in pedagogy and psychology, Comenius, Basedow, Pestalozzi, Salzmann, Froebel, Herbart, I do not need to speak.

I will only mention that the greatest men of Germany, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Kant and others, took the side of natural training. In regard to England it is well known that John Locke in his Thoughts on Education, was a worthy predecessor of Herbert Spencer, whose book on education in its intellectual, moral, and physical relations, was the most noteworthy book on education in the last century.

It has been noted that Spencer in educational theory is indebted to Rousseau; and that in many cases, he has only said what the great German authorities, whom he certainly did not know, said before him. But this does not diminish Spencer's merit in the least. Absolutely new thoughts are very rare. Truths which were once new must be constantly renewed by being p.r.o.nounced again from the depth of the ardent personal conviction of a new human being.

That rational thoughts on the subject of pedagogy as on other subjects, are constantly expressed and re-expressed, shows among other things that reasonable, or practically untried education has certain principles which are as axiomatic as those of mathematics. Every reasonable thinking man must as certainly discover anew these pedagogical principles, as he must discover anew the relation between the angles of a triangle. Spencer's book it is true has not laid again the foundation of education. It can rather be called the crown of the edifice founded by Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau, and the great German specialists in pedagogy. What is an absolutely novel factor in our times is the study of the psychology of the child, and the system of education that has developed from it.

In England, through the scientist Darwin, this new study of the psychology of the child was inaugurated. In Germany, Preyer contributed to its extension. He has done so partly by a comprehensive study of children's language, partly by collecting recollections of childhood on the part of the adult. Finally he experimented directly on the child, investigating his physical and psychical fatigue and endurance, acuteness of sensation, power, speed, and exactness in carrying out physical and mental tasks. He has studied his capacity of attention in emotions and in ideas at different periods of life. He has studied the speech of children, a.s.sociation of ideas in children, etc. During the study of the psychology of the child, scholars began to subst.i.tute for this term the expression "genetic psychology." For it was found that the big-genetic principle was valid for the development both of the psychic and the physical life. This principle means that the history of the species is repeated in the history of the individual; a truth substantiated in other spheres; in philology for example. The psychology of the child is of the same significance for general psychology as embryology is for anatomy. On the other hand, the description of savage peoples, of peoples in a natural condition, such as we find in Spencer's Descriptive Sociology or Weitz's Anthropology is extremely instructive for a right conception of the psychology of the child.

It is in this kind of psychological investigation that the greatest progress has been made in this century. In the great publication, Zeitschrift fur psychologie, etc., there began in 1894 a special department for the psychology of children and the psychology of education. In 1898, there were as many as one hundred and six essays devoted to this subject, and they are constantly increasing.

In the chief civilised countries this investigation has many distinguished pioneers, such as Prof. Wundt, Prof. T. H. Ribot, and others. In Germany this subject has its most important organ in the journal mentioned above. It numbers among its collaborators some of the most distinguished German physiologists and psychologists. As related to the same subject must be mentioned Wundt's Philosophischen Studien, and partly the Vierteljahrschrift fur Wissenschaftlichie Philosophie. In France, there was founded in 1894, the Annee Psychologique, edited by Binet and Beaunis, and also the Bibliotheque de Pedagogie et de Psychologie, edited by Binet. In England there are the journals, Mind and Brain.

Special laboratories for experimental psychology with psychological apparatus and methods of research are found in many places. In Germany the first to be founded was that of Wundt in the year 1878 at Leipzig.

France has a laboratory for experimental psychology at Paris, in the Sorbonne, whose director is Binet; Italy, one in Rome. In America experimental psychology is zealously pursued. As early as 1894, there were in that country twenty-seven laboratories for experimental psychology and four journals. There should also be mentioned the societies for child psychology. Recently one has been founded in Germany, others before this time have been at work in England and America.

A whole series of investigations carried out in Kraepelin's laboratory in Heidelberg are of the greatest value for determining what the brain can do in the way of work and impressions.

An English specialist has maintained that the future, thanks to the modern school system, will be able to get along without originally creative men, because the receptive activities of modern man will absorb the cooperative powers of the brain to the disadvantage of the productive powers. And even if this were not a universally valid statement but only expressed a physiological certainty, people will some day perhaps cease filing down man's brain by that sandpapering process called a school curriculum.

A champion of the transformation of pedagogy into a psycho-physiological science is to be found in Sweden in the person of Prof. Hjalmar Oehrwal who has discussed in his essays native and foreign discoveries in the field of psychology. One of his conclusions is that the so-called technical exercises, gymnastics, manual training, sloyd, and the like, are not, as they are erroneously called, a relaxation from mental overstrain by change in work, but simply a new form of brain fatigue.

All work, he finds, done under conditions of fatigue is uneconomic whether one regards the quant.i.ty produced or its value as an exercise.

Rest should be nothing more than rest,--freedom to do only what one wants to, or to do nothing at all. As to fear, he proves, following Binet's investigation in this subject, how corporal discipline, threats, and ridicule lead to cowardice; how all of these methods are to be rejected because they are depressing and tend to a diminution of energy. He shows, moreover, how fear can be overcome progressively, by strengthening the nervous system and in that way strengthening the character. This result comes about partly when all unnecessary terrorising is avoided, partly when children are accustomed to bear calmly and quietly the inevitable unpleasantnesses of danger.

Prof. Axel Key's investigations on school children have won international recognition. In Sweden they have supplied the most significant material up to the present time for determining the influence of studies on physical development and the results of intellectual overstrain.

It is to be hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the child, those absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical and psychical maltreatment, still called by conscientious and thinking human beings in schools and in homes, education.

By Helen Key

The Century of the Child

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CONTENTS: The Right of the Child to Choose His Parents, The Unborn Race and Woman's Work, Education, Homelessness, Soul Murder in the Schools, The School of the Future, Religious Instruction, Child Labor and the Crimes of Children. This book has gone through more than twenty German Editions and has been published in several European countries. "A powerful book."--N. Y. Times.

The Education of the Child

Reprinted from the Authorized American Edition of "The Century of the Child," With Introductory Note by EDWARD BOK.

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"Nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been brought into print. To me this chapter is a perfect cla.s.sic; it points the way straight for every parent, and it should find a place in every home in America where there is a child."--EDWARD BOK, Editor of the Ladies' Home Journal.

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Ellen Key is gradually taking a hold upon the reading public of this country commensurate with the enlightenment of her views. In Europe and particularly in her own native Sweden her name holds an honored place as a representative of progressive thought.

New York G. P. Putnam's Sons London

Clever, original, and fascinating The Lost Art of Reading Mount Tom Edition New Edition in Two Volumes

I. The Child and the Book

A Manual for Parents and for Teachers in Schools and Colleges

II. The Lost Art of Reading or, The Man and The Book

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By Gerald Stanley Lee

"I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthusiasm I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the most brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were laid aside. The t.i.tle does not hint at any more than a fraction of the contents. It is a highly original critique of philistinism and gradgrindism in education, library science, science in general, and life in general. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive, and as if furnished with long antennae of suggestiveness. I do not know who Mr.

Lee is, but I know this--that if he goes on as he has been, we need no longer whine that we have no worthy successors to the old Brahminical writers of New England.

"I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. It is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes me believe that after all we have n't a great kindergarten about us in authors.h.i.+p, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can conceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be the date of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long been scanning the horizon."--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY in Boston Transcript.