The teacher’s aim should be health—physical, mental and moral.During the whole of school life, a girl’s physical frame is so entirely in the making that considerations of health should outweigh everything else. She is building the house in which she is to live all the rest of her life, and it is far more important what sort of house she builds than how much she employs herself with the various occupations that she can pursue at leisure, throughout her tenure of this “house”. Any study can be followed up in later life, if health demand its cessation during these growing years, but no after-study can repair early impoverishment or damage of the physical frame.
Of course it stands to reason that the object of this house-building is that the householder may be unhampered in after years and able to lead a large and noble life. We should have small value for the physical frame if it were tenanted by an imbecile mind, or a nature without moral sense. Therefore, when we say that the body is the main consideration in youth, we do so because soundness of body is the surest means of securing moral and mental soundness. Fortunately, body, mind and spirit are so intertwined that what is good for one is usually good for all. We can hygienically insist on good hard mental work, because it is essential to bodily health that there should be routine and effort and concentration of mind. We can insist on self-denial and self-control, for these are as essential to bodily health as to spiritual. The teacher who believes herself to be an educator, not merely an instructor, finds all the apparently conflicting elements of a peculiar case, wonderfully harmonised by giving predominance to the moral aim. If your first object in life is to increase a child’s chance of becoming an even-tempered Christian woman, you will not let considerations of examination successes tempt you to allow overstrain; while, at the same time, you will be inexorable in demanding, as moral training, the steady effort and the willing work, which will probably bring the successes.
The power of the teacher in moulding character.Do not let the day school teacher feel as if undue burden were being laid on her, when we speak of the whole future of the child as thus depending on the teacher’s breadth of aim. It is difficult to place any limit to the possibilities of the teacher’s influence, even at a day school, where she only has the child for four hours out of the twenty-four. It is true that the mother and the home, during the first six or seven years of the child’s life, have determined the main elements of its nature; but in dealing with these elements, at a later stage, there are endless possibilities of combination, of encouraging some and repressing others. Though we teachers do not, as a rule, get children at the early stage when most can be done with them, yet in schoolroom days we find their brains still plastic enough for us to work cheerfully and hopefully, in the teeth of the many hereditary evils which would crush our efforts, were it not that we believe education to be able to cope on fairly equal terms with heredity. Every time we induce children to make an effort for the right, or to think accurately, we make a groove in their brain which serves as a railway line along which thoughts of the same kind will pass more easily next time. Every time we excite a wrong feeling—irritation, obstinacy, irreverence, or allow a deviation from some acknowledged standard of duty—we lay cross lines of rail in the wrong direction, which will hinder their progress in the right path, now and in the future.[28]
[28] See Miss Mason’s Home Education.
Bracing influence of school
(a) resulting from uniformity of treatment.The art of concealing art is nowhere more necessary than in this incessant watchfulness required of the teacher, as it is very bad for the child to feel that its little world turns on its own moral and physical well-being. The chief good of school lies in the uniformity of the routine, in the absence of special exemptions; it rests and braces the child to feel under inexorable Laws of Nature which know no favourites.
At the same time, while we in our larger world feel under fixed laws, we yet believe in a special providence which arranges for our welfare, even though we are unconscious of its action; the teacher should play the part of unseen providence to the child.
It is perfectly possible in a high school to consider each individual girl, and to arrange matters more or less for her interests, though this possibility rests on the fact that exceptional cases are not proper subjects for high school education. Even an ordinary child has her peculiarities, which should be allowed for, but, in the main, it is the regularity and uniformity of the school routine which make the most valuable part of her education.
(b) Wholesome competition.The child learns at school to be unself conscious, to appreciate others; to bear being surpassed without depression, and to stand success without undue exultation; and she learns these valuable lessons mainly through standing on the same platform with her companions, and having to fight on equal terms. When parents beg that some of the subjects taken by the rest of the class may be excused to their child, they do not realise that, by interfering with the equal terms of contest, they destroy half the value of school life. The value of a high school lies not merely in its instruction (though this is probably given by a trained specialist in each subject), but even more, in “the give and take” on equal terms which teaches a child to know her own powers and her own weaknesses. A child subject to undue self-appreciation, or self-depreciation, would probably gain much from going into the miniature world of a high school, as would also the dreamy child; in the latter case particularly the value of the school lessons lies in their difficulty, and children suffer if they are excused or helped with a lesson because they have failed to understand the teaching in class. (c) Concentration of faculties.Instant concentration of the faculties on the matter in hand is one of the most valuable lessons learnt in school, and to repeat information, or explanations, to the absent-minded child, is to encourage a fatal weakness. Of course the blank in the child’s mind (which makes a pitying mother beg that the lesson may be excused) may be caused by irrelevancy or indistinctness of voice, or of mind, on the teacher’s part. But if three-quarters of the class have followed the lesson, it may be safely taken for granted that effort and practice will bring success to the remaining quarter; a success which will mean not merely the knowledge of the Euclid or geography in question, but victory over a habit of mind that, if unchecked, will neutralise any talent the child may possess.
Dangers of school worldliness.The child’s efforts after concentration of mind need careful co-operation on the part of the teacher (who, from her own carelessness, is apt to indulge the child’s carelessness), whereas the equally valuable qualities of diligence and perseverance are almost evolved of themselves by the competition of any school which has a good working spirit. The teacher needs to be even more alert in counteracting the mistaken forms which school diligence is apt to take, than in rousing the spirit itself. Emulation, eagerness for marks, putting school opinion before those of home—all these are very real dangers. The better the school, the more acute the danger, and the more need is there that the authorities should act as a drag on the coach. Emulation is a natural quality in the child and a very useful one to the teacher; but there is great danger in its degenerating into personal rivalry. Something may be done to soften this spirit of competition by setting before the children a fence which all may leap, not a throne which only one can occupy. The fence can be as high as you will, but if the opportunity of clearing it be open to all, the class will exult in the number of successes, without any feeling in the many of personal loss involved in the gain of the few. Marks do not necessitate rivalry.“Marks” can be so arranged as to obviate the temptation to personal rivalry which is often supposed to be inseparable from them. When the weekly marks are added up, letters are in some schools assigned, according to the percentage of marks gained, arranged in decades. The exact number of marks is not brought before the child, but only the question to which decade she belongs. A red A denotes 90 per cent., a black A 80 per cent.; B means 70 per cent., and so on through the alphabet. Every member of the class who deserves it can attain the “red A”. The same system can be pursued in prizes; all who reach a certain standard of marks in term work or in examinations, or in both combined, can gain one. Thus esprit de corps to some extent takes the place of personal triumph—the whole class is proud of its number of “red A” members and prize-winners, instead of suffering from the temptation to feel a little bitter, which must exist when there is only one place of honour to be had.
Advantages of religious lessons in school.The value of moral and religious lessons in school is especially great because of the almost universal disposition on the part of girls to consider home exhortation as nagging. What is said in a school lesson goes home to the conscience with no friction, because the teacher cannot have known of that last peccadillo at home, and the mother is not at hand to look the fatal phrase, “I told you so!”