For the almost superhuman effort necessary to use reason about a fact the outlines of which are dulled by familiarity, I was rewarded many times over by the discovery of a “sensory exercise” which apparently is of the highest value. The child in question, provided with a pan of water, and various cups and jelly-molds of different sizes, which I snatched at random from the kitchen-shelf, was in a state of silent bliss. She filled the little cups up to the brim, she lifted them with an anxious care which no exhortation of mine could have induced her to apply, she drank from them, she poured their contents into each other, discovering for herself that the smaller ones must be emptied into the bigger ones and not vice versa, she filled them again with a spoon. At first she did all this very clumsily, although always with the most painstaking care, but as the days went on with repetitions of this game, her dexterity became astonishing, as was her eternal interest in the monotonous proceeding.
Now she is not only kept quiet and happy for about an hour a day by this amusement, and she has not only learned to fill and handle her little cups and jelly-molds very deftly, but the operation of drinking out of a water-glass at the table is of a simplicity fairly beneath her contempt. I smile to see our guests gasp and dodge in dismay as, with the reckless abandon of her age, she grasps her water-glass with one hand, not deigning even to look at it, and conveys it to her lips. But as a matter of fact, no matter how hastily or carelessly she does this, she almost never spills a drop. The control of utensils containing liquids has been so thoroughly learned by her muscles in the long hours of happy play with her little cups that it is perfectly automatic. She no more spills water from her glass than I fall down on the floor when I cross a room, even though I may be quite absent-minded about that undertaking.
CHAPTER XI
MORE ABOUT DISCIPLINE, WITH SPECIAL REGARD TO OBEDIENCE
I MUST stop at this point and devote a paragraph or two to laying the ghost of another Puritan ancestor who demands, “But where does the discipline come in here, if it is all automatic and unconscious? Why sneak exactitude of muscular action into the child’s life by the back door, so to speak? Would it not be better for her moral nature to command her outright not to spill the water from her glass at table, and force her to use her will-power by punishing her if she does?”
There are several answers to this searching question, which is by no means so simple and direct as it sounds. The most obvious one is the retort brutal, i.e., that a great many generations have experimented with that simple method of training children, with the result that family life has been considerably embittered and the children very poorly trained. In other words, that practical experience has shown it to be a very bad method indeed and in use only because we know no better one.
One of the reasons why it is bad is because it confuses two radically different activities in the child’s life, including both under one far too-sweeping command. The child’s ability to handle a glass of water is an entirely different function from its willingness to obey orders. To require of its nascent capacities at the same instant a new muscular skill and the moral effort necessary to obey a command is to invite almost certain failure. Worse than this, and in fact as bad as anything can be, the result of this impossibly compendious command is to bring about a hopeless confusion in the child’s mind which means unnecessary nervous tension and friction and the beginning of an utterly deplorable mental habit of nervous tension and irritated resistance in the child’s mind, whenever a command is given. That this instinct of irritated resistance is not a natural one is proved by the happily obedient older children in the Casa dei Bambini in Rome. Furthermore, anyone who will, under ordinary circumstances, try the simple experiment of asking a little child (too young to have acquired this bad mental habit) to perform some operation which he has thoroughly mastered, will be convinced that obedience in itself involves no pain to a child.
As to the second demand of my Puritan ancestor, which runs, “And force her to use her will-power by punishment,” the same flat denial must be given that proposition. Experience proves that you can prevent a child from performing some single special action by means of external punishment, but that stimulating the proper use of the will-power is something entirely different. Apparently the will-power is more apt to be perverted into grotesque and unprofitable shapes by the use of punishment than to be encouraged into upright, useful, and vigorous growth.
And here it is well to question our own hearts deeply to make sure that we really wish, honestly, without mental reservations, to stimulate the will-power of our children—their will-power, be it remembered, not our own. Is there, in the motives which actuate our attempts at securing obedience from children, a trace of the animal-trainer’s instinct? For, though it is true that children are little animals, and that they can be successfully trained by the method of the animal-trainer, it is not to be forgotten that they are trained by those methods only to feats of exactly the same moral and intellectual caliber as those performed by trick dogs and cats. They are forced to struggle blindly, and wholly without aid, towards whatever human achievements they may later accomplish, with the added disadvantage of the mental habit either of sullen dissembled revolt or crushed mental servility, according to their temperaments.