The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

Take some examples of the worst blunders of this type; the small child is often called vain who studies, full of interest, his own identity in the glass; the child who, from fear or confusion at a hard or incomprehensible question, does not answer or obey is called stubborn; the child that cannot explain his actions in those small things which adults every day entirely forget is looked upon as lying; and even before the child has a conception of the right of property, when he pilfers, he is called thievish. The child who says that he knows that he is naughty, and wants to be naughty, is called obdurate and impertinent, while this statement is really a self-confession and shows a character to which one may appeal with the best results. The child, sunk in thought, who forgets the small things of daily life, people call thoughtless. Even when a child is really selfish and is really lying or lazy, these characteristics are treated as if they were something individual, while actually they are caused often by some serious fault which must be dealt with. These characteristics can proceed from a good quality which may be destroyed, if the fault is not treated suitably.

But even parents who now observe their children with more psychological insight than was used in earlier times are not able to study them, if their children go to school and kindergarten at an early age. This want of insight produces mistakes which often cause deep antagonisms between children and their parents, the sort of thing which now embitters so many households. Only fathers and mothers who reverence the individuality of their children, and combine with this feeling a careful observation of them through their whole life, are able to avoid this typical fault of our own time. People expect to gather grapes from thistles, instead of being satisfied with haws. Parents must see that they cannot create where there is no material to be created. But they must be capable of developing the characteristics which they discover in the nature of their children. This work they must undertake with optimism and resignation, for it represents the teaching of real psychological study. This will stop those efforts, painful alike for children and parents, that are applied in directions which offer no reward to effort.

But the study of the psychology of the child, begun at its birth, continued in its play, its work, its rest, means a daily comparative study, and requires the undivided attention of one person. It can only be done by a person who has charge of but a few children; in a crowd it is impossible. It is all the more impossible because children in a crowd resemble one another more or less; and this makes observation more difficult.

The kindergarten is only a factory. Children learn in it to model, instead of making mud pies according to their own taste. This process is typical of what these small atoms of humanity go through themselves. From the first floor of the factory the objects that have been turned out there are sent to the next floor above, the school; and from this they then go out put up in packages.

The aim of school training is to carry out, with all its might, production by quantities that expresses the demands of our time in all spheres. The invention of individual school methods may reduce the influence of "canned education."

As long as there are large cities, poor children in them must be able to obtain the possibilities of country children. Their playthings must be made out of the world which surrounds them. The obligations of their own home must supply them with work. This is altogether different from the play work of the kindergarten that has no connection with the seriousness of reality. A wise mother or teacher will adopt from the kindergarten system just so much as will enable her to teach children to observe nature and their surroundings; will take from it what enables her to make them combine their activity with some useful end; their amusement with some kind of knowledge.

The Froebel dictum, "Let us live for the children," must be changed into a more significant phrase, "Let us allow the children to live." This, among other things, means "let them be emancipated from the burden of learning by heart," from the forms of system, from the pressure of the crowd, in those years while the quiet, secret work of the soul is as vital for them as the growing of the seed in the earth. The kindergarten system is opposed to this; it is forcing up the seed to life on a plate, where it looks very pretty, but only for the time being.

The school with its esprit de corps opens the way public lack of conscience. Modern society manages thus to reproduce the crimes of every past period; manages too, to reproduce them through men who are conscientious in their own private life. For those without consciences, who lead criminal movements, would never be able to put the masses of people in motion, unless they were just masses and nothing more; unless they were made to follow collective laws of honour, collective patriotic feelings, collective conceptions of duty. The child learns to be obedient to his school, to be loyal to his comrades, just as later on in life he learns these qualities as they are presented in his university, his student society, and his profession. All of this he learns sooner than to reverence his conscience, his feeling of right, his individual impulse. He learns to wink at, pardon, and disguise the sins committed by his own circle of companions, his own club, and his own country.

This is the way the world produces its "Dreyfus Affairs," its Transvaal Wars. If the aim is to create men and not masses, we should follow the educational programme of the great statesman Stein—"to develop all those impulses on which the value and strength of mankind depend." This is only possible when the child is taught, at the earliest age, the freedom and danger of his own choice, the right and responsibility of his own will, the conditions and duties of being put to the test himself. All of these elements of character are unconsciously opposed by the kindergarten; the home alone can develop them. The highest result of education is to bring the individual into contact with his own conscience. This does not mean that the individual cannot experience by degrees the happiness and the necessity of being a factor in the service of the whole, first in his home, then among his companions and in his country, and finally in the world. The difference is this: in the first case the man is a living cell, co-operating and building up living forms; in the other he is a piece of cut stone used in artificial construction.

Both for the development of individuality, as well as for the cultivation of the emotions, the home is to be preferred to the kindergarten and to the school. In the limited small circle of the home the emotional element can be deepened and tenderness can be developed, by the acts called for in the realities of domestic life. The kindergarten first, and then the school, free children from their natural individual obligations and put in their place demands that can only be fulfilled en masse. The child enters into a number of superficial relations. This situation tends to make his emotions superficial; here is the great danger of beginning school life at a tender age. On the other hand a one-sided home life brings with it the danger of concentrating the emotions to an excess. Education at home in the years when the emotions become harmonious and receive their decisive training is just as important for the child as is later on a pleasant sociable life with others of the same age, after the twelfth year is passed. All intellectual cultivation done according to the most excellent method, all social feelings, are worthless unless they have as their basis an individual development of the emotions. Somewhere in our body we must have a heart, to act as a real balance against our head. Only the man who has learnt to love a few, deep enough to die for them, is able to live profitably for the many.