STUDIES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Abstract Studies
There may easily be too many studies and too many accomplishments in the life of any child. As our schools are constituted there are certainly too many studies of the wrong kind being carried on every day. But there are also too few studies of the right kind. In one of our large cities a test was once made as to how much the children who left school at the fifth grade, as 70 per cent of them do, had actually learned in a way that would be of practical value to them, and the results were most discouraging. These city children who could recite their tables of measurements with glibness, and who performed with a fair degree of success several hundred examples dealing with units of measure, could not tell whether their school-room floor contained one acre or two hundred and forty! None of them suspected that it contained less than an acre. Although they could bound the States of the Union, and give the principal exports and imports, they knew next to nothing of their own city and of its actual relation to the countries which they studied in their geography lessons. The teachers, in explanation, laid much of the blame for this state of affairs upon the parents, saying that they took but little interest in their children's studies, and never attempted to link them to the things of every-day life. But while this claim might be justified to some extent, it was by no means sufficient to cover the facts of the case. The truth is, it was quite as much the teachers' duty to link these abstract studies with concrete facts, as it was the parents'.
Dead Knowledge
Such an experience, however, suggests the manner in which parents can best help on the work of children in school. So long as these studies are still taught in the dead, monotonous way common to text-books, children will be racked nervously, and not benefited mentally in the effort to master them. Fathers and mothers who by the exercise of some ingenuity manage to show the child that his arithmetical knowledge is of actual help in solving the questions of every-day life; that his history has bearings upon the progress of events around him, and that his geography relates to actual places which, perhaps, father and mother may have seen, or which their books tell about—such fathers and mothers will make their children's school work easier, at the same time that they increase the sum of their children's knowledge. It is dead knowledge only—knowledge wrenched from its living content—that is difficult of digestion.
The New Education
It is natural for a young mind to like to learn, as it is for a healthy stomach to be supplied with food; but knowledge, like the food, must be fit for the use that is to be made of it and for the organ that is to receive it; and the brain, like the stomach, has a signal which it flies to show whether the food is what it wants or not. The brain exhibits interest exactly as the stomach exhibits appetite. The object of scientific education is to discover what the spontaneous, universal interest of children of certain ages is, and to meet that interest with the fullest possible supply of knowledge in every conceivable form.
Scientific education does not depend upon text-books or upon merely verbal explanations, but gets the idea home to the child by the means of a varied appeal to all the senses and sensibilities. For this reason the most advanced schools have many more studies and what are commonly called accomplishments than the public or parochial schools. That is, they add to the three r's—reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic—drawing, modeling, painting, manual training, physical culture, dramatic representation, music, field trips, and laboratory work.
Correlation of Studies
Yet this apparently great increase of subjects in the number of studies actually lessens the amount of work required of the child, because all these different activities, by means of what is called correlation, are brought to bear upon the same subject. For example, the class which goes out for a field trip to visit a near-by brook sees the water actually at work, cutting its way to the river, and thence to the sea. They measure its force and note its effects; they make a water-color sketch of some curve of it; they notice what birds and insects are about; what flowers grow there; what indications there may be of burrowing animals. When they get back to school they model, perhaps, some bird that they have noticed; or in the geographical laboratory, with streams of water try to reproduce in miniature the action of the brook upon the soil through which it flows.
For their arithmetic lesson they estimate the number of years the brook must have been flowing to have cut its valley to its present depth. They make a full report and description of their day's work for their reading and writing lesson. They have thus gained an immense amount of information, and have done a great deal of hard work; but instead of being nervously exhausted, they are bright and exhilarated. Such fatigue as they know is wholesome and fits them for a sound night's sleep.
Home Expedients
When it is impossible to send the child to such a school as this, something may be done by supplementing the ordinary school by some of these procedures. The clay jar, the crayons, and the paints have already been suggested, and with the parents' interest in the child's studies, helping him to model and paint things which he studies at school, he will instantly show the good effect of the home training and encouragement. As for field trips, the regular Sunday walk, or evening stroll, may be made to take its place. If you think that you do not know enough to teach your child on these walks, give him then the privilege of teaching you. He will work the harder in order to rise to the occasion.
Physical Culture
As for physical culture, if your school is without it, your barn, your parlor, and your lawn may supply it in some sort. In the barn may be a trapeze; there is already the ladder and the hay-loft; on the lawn may be a swing, trees to climb, and the tennis court. In your parlor may be a little home dancing school, where for a half an hour or so, the children march, skip, or two-step to music of your making. In the wood shed may be a carpenter's bench with real tools, where he may work and get some of the good of manual training.
Showy Accomplishments
Accomplishments, meaning thereby showy things that children do for the edification of guests, are of doubtful value. It is pleasant, of course, to have your little girl play a piece or two on the piano to entertain your visitors, but it is not nearly so important as health and strength, and a cheerful temper. Sometimes all three of these are sacrificed to the two or three hours' practice a day. Often, too, this extra work after school hours—work full as monotonous and nervous and uninteresting as the school work itself—is just what is needed to transform a healthy young girl into a nervous invalid. This is especially true, if she undertakes, as she usually does, to study music when she is about thirteen years old—the very time when, if wise physicians could regulate affairs to their liking, she would be taken out of school altogether and required to do nothing more than a little light housework every day.
Natural Talent
Of course, if she is naturally musical some kind of help and sympathy must be given her in her attempt to master the piano or violin or to manage her own voice. But while she should be allowed to learn as much as her unurged energies permit her to learn, she should not be required to practice more than a very small amount, say half an hour a day. The bulk of her musical education should be acquired in the vacation time, when she can give two hours a day without overstraining.
The same general rules hold good of dancing, painting, the acquirements of foreign languages, a special course of reading, or any other work undertaken in addition to the regular school work. This latter, as it is now constituted, is quite as severe a nervous and intellectual strain as most young people can undergo with safety.
"Enthusiasms"
There is one characteristic in young people which needs to be noted in this connection:—the desire to take up some form of work, to strive with it furiously for a brief while, to drop it unfinished; take up another with equal eagerness, drop that in turn and go on to a third. This performance is peculiarly irritating to all systematic and ambitious parents. Sometimes they rigidly insist that each task shall be finished before a new one is assumed. But in reality, is this necessary? It seems to be as natural for a young mind to set eagerly to work for a short time at each new bit of knowledge, as it is for a nursing child to require refreshments every two or three hours. It is an adult trait to stick to a task, even though a very long one, until it is accomplished. The youthful trait is to take kindly to a clutter of unfinished tasks.
The youthful consciousness is of a world full of jostling interests. Why not let the children alone, and allow them to spring lightly from one enthusiasm to another? Of course you will help them to finish, either at the first sitting or at the second or at the third, the task that was undertaken when that particular enthusiasm was at its height. The drawing which has remained on the easel during the foot-ball season may be suggestively brought to notice again in the quiet times between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The boat begun last summer may well be finished in the days of the succeeding Spring when all the earth is full of the sound of running water. Thus each task, though not completed at once, gets done in the end; and the youthful capacity for many sympathies and many desires has not been narrowed.
Parental Vanity
Such a line of conduct presupposes, of course, that the parent considers only the child's best welfare, and not his own parental vanity. He is not desirous that his son shall do anything so well as to attract the attention and admiration of the neighbors. He is desirous merely that the boy shall grow up wholesomely and happily, showing such superiority as there may be in him when the fitting time and opportunity present themselves. He will not attempt to make a musician of an unmusical child, nor a mechanic of an artistic child. He will not object to the brilliant and impractical dreams of the young inventor, but will help to make them practicable; and though he may squirm at some of the investigations of the budding scientist, he will not forbid them.
Development of Intellect
For such a parent recognizes that the important thing, educationally, is to secure the reaction of expression upon thought and feeling. That is, he is not trying to secure at this time—at any time during youth—perfect expression of any thought or feeling, but only to deepen feeling and clarify thought by encouraging all attempts at expression. He does not wish his child to make a finished picture or a perfect statue, but to acquire a greater sensitiveness to color and form by each attempt to express that color and form which he already knows. Thus whatever studies and accomplishments his child may be in the act of acquiring are seen to be nothing as acquisitions, but the child himself is seen to be growing stage by stage within the clumsy scaffolding.