[Footnote 19: The Freudian Wish, Edwin Holt.]
[Footnote 20: The Freudian Wish, Edwin Holt.]
Professor Earl Barnes always used to describe the child mind as "scrappy." How can we best aid development into the wholeness or healthiness and the scope of sanity and wisdom? For it may well be that this widening and ordering of experience, of consciousness, of behaviour into moral behaviour is our most important task as teachers. Froebel emphasised the "crying need" for connection of school and life, pointing out how the little child desires to imitate and the older to share in all that, as Professor Dewey puts it, is "surcharged with a sense of the mysterious values that attach to whatever their elders are concerned with." This is one of the points to which Professor Dewey called attention in his summing up of Froebel's educational principles, this letting the child reproduce on his own plane the typical doings and occupations of the larger, maturer society into which he is finally to go forth.
It is in this connection that he says the Kindergarten teacher has the opportunity to foster that most important "sense of continuity." In simple reproduction of the home life while there is abundant variety, since daily life may bring us into contact with all the life of the city or of the country, yet, because the work is within a whole, "there is opportunity to foster that sense which is at the basis of attention and of all intellectual growth, a sense of continuity."
Since Professor Dewey gave to the world the results of his experimental school, all the Kindergartens and most of the Infant Schools in England have tried to carry out their accustomed reproduction of home surroundings, more or less on the lines of the Primary Department of his experimental school. They have extended their scope, and in addition to the material already taken from workman and shop, from garden and farm, have also with much profit to older children used his suggestions about primitive industries.
Reproduction of home surroundings can be done in many ways, one of which is to help the children to furnish and to play with a doll's house. But the play must be play. It is not enough to use the drama as merely offering suggestions for handwork, and one small doll's house does not allow of real play for more than one or two children.
Our own children used to settle this by taking out the furniture, etc., and arranging different homes around the room. I can remember the never-ending pleasure given by similar play in my own nursery days, when the actors were the men and boys supplied by tailors' advertisements. Many and varied were the experiences of these paper families, families, it may be noted, none of whom demeaned themselves so far as to possess any womankind. For that nursery party of five had lost its mother sadly early and was ruled by two boys, who evidently thought little of the other sex.
Professor Dewey tells us that "nothing is more absurd than to suppose that there is no middle term between leaving a child to his unguided fancies, or controlling his activities by a formal succession of dictated directions." It is the teacher's business to know what is striving for utterance and to supply the needed stimulus and materials.
To show how under the inspiration of a thoroughly capable teacher this continuity may be secured and prolonged for quite a long period, an example may be taken from the work of Miss Janet Payne, who is remarkably successful in meeting and stimulating, without in any way forcing the "striving for utterance" mentioned by Dewey. On this occasion Miss Payne produced a doll about ten inches high, dressed to resemble the children's fathers, and suggested that a home should be made for him. The children adopted him with zeal, named him Mr. Bird, and his career lasted for two years.
Mr. Bird required a family, so Mrs. Bird had to be produced with her little girl Winnie, and later a baby was added to the family. Beds, tables and chairs, including a high chair for Winnie, were made of scraps from the wood box, and for a long time Mr. Bird was most domesticated. Miss Payne had used ordinary dolls' heads, but had constructed the bodies herself in such a way that the dolls could sit and stand, and use their arms to wield a broom or hold the baby. After some time, one child said, "Mr. Bird ought to go to business," and after much deliberation he became a grocer. His shop was made and stocked, and he attended it every day, going home to dinner regularly. One day he appeared to be having a meal on the shop counter, and it was explained that he had been "rather in a hurry" in the morning, so Mrs. Bird had given him his breakfast to take with him. The Bird family had various adventures, they had spring cleanings, removals, visited the Zoo and went to the seaside. One morning a little fellow sat in a trolley with the Bird family beside him for three-quarters of an hour evidently "imagining." I did inquire in passing if it was a drive or a picnic, but the answer was so brief, that I knew I was an interruption and retired. But a younger and bolder inquirer, who wanted to conduct an experiment in modelling, ventured to ask if Mr. Bird wanted anything that could be made "at clay modelling." "Yes, he wants some ink-pots for his post-office shop," was the answer, with the slightly irate addition, "but I wish you'd call it the china factory."