The Children: Some Educational Problems

by Alexander Darroch

Moreover, since the early acquisitions of the child are the bases upon which all further knowledge and practice are founded, we must realise how important these first experiences are for the whole future development of the child. Further, we have seen that all education—all acquiring and organising of experience in early life—must be motived by the felt desire to satisfy some instinctive need of the child's nature, and that it is these instinctive needs which determine the nature and scope of his early activities.

Later, indeed, acquired interests may be grafted upon the innate and instinctive needs, but at the beginning and during his first years the child's whole life is determined by the primitive desires of human nature.

Now, the first instinctive need which requires the aid of education is the need felt by the child to acquire some measure of control over his bodily movements and over the things in his immediate physical environment. Hence the first stage in education is the regulation of the process by which the child acquires and organises those experiences which shall give him this control. Nature herself indeed provides the means for the attainment of this end, but education can do much to aid in the attainment and to shorten the period of incomplete attainment. By means of the assistance given, the control exercised and the direction afforded, we enable the child to organise the lower centres of the nervous system which have to do with the control of the larger bodily movements, and thus establish organised systems of means for the attainment of certain definite ends.

The second stage supervenes when the need is felt by the child for some measure of control over his social environment. For the young child soon realises that it is only in so far as he can exert some influence over the persons intimately connected with his welfare that he can make his wants known and find means for the satisfaction of his desires. Hence arises the need for some method of communication with his fellows, and from this springs the desire for some system of signs and for a language to enable him to make his wants known. Chiefly by means of the educative process of imitating the experiences of others, he gradually acquires a language and finds himself at home in his social world.

During this period the centres called into activity, developed, and organised are mainly those connected with the lip and speech centres, and a certain stage of organisation having been attained, the opportunity is now afforded for the fuller functional development of the higher centres entrusted with the duty of receiving, discriminating, and co-ordinating the data of the special organs of sense.

The period during which the child is gradually acquiring control over his immediate physical and social environments may roughly be said to extend to the end of his third year.

From that time onwards the worlds of nature and of society for their own sake become objects of curiosity to the child. Every new object presents him with a variety of fresh sensations. He feels, tastes, and bites everything that comes within his reach, and so acquires a world of new experiences. Hence for "the first six years of his life a child has quite enough to do in learning its place in the universe and the nature of its surroundings, and to compel it during any part of that period to give its attention to mere words and symbols is to stint it of the best part of its education for that which is only of secondary importance, and to weaken the foundations of its whole mental fabric."[33]

If, then, during this period the child is left wholly to gather his experiences as he may, he no doubt acquires by his own self-activity a world of new ideas, but the result of this unregulated process will be that the knowledge gained will be largely unsystematised, and much of the experience acquired may be of a nature which may give a false direction to his whole after-development. Hence arise three needs. In the first place, we must endeavour to see that new experiences are presented to the child in some systematic manner, in order that the knowledge may be so organised that it may serve as means to the attainment of ends, and so render future activity more accurate and more efficient. In the second place, we must endeavour to prevent the acquisition of experiences which if allowed to be organised would give an immoral direction to conduct; and in the third place, we must endeavour to establish early in the mind of the child organised systems of means which may hereafter result in the prevalence of activities socially useful to the community.

Now, these three aims are or should be the aims of the Kindergarten School, and we shall now inquire into the ends which the Kindergarten School sets before it, and for this purpose we shall state the fundamental principles which Froebel himself laid down as the guiding principles of this stage of education.