The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

I should like to see not only the kindergarten but the preparatory school transferred to the home. There things can be considered that are never taken into account in a general school. The child need not have the nourishment he does not want, and which he does not need, at the time he now generally receives it. In the home school, one child can put off reading to a later age, another can be taught reading early. The desire for action in one child can be satisfied; the book-hunger of the other encouraged. Bodily development, the desire to make a real acquaintance with external nature can be considered in home work, play, and out-of-door activities. Then we can begin to teach when the child himself asks for teaching; that is, when he wishes to hear or do something in which knowledge alone can assist him. The child can twice as easily learn at ten years, under these conditions, what he now learns at eight; at eight what he now learns at six, if he comes to his study with developed powers of observation and an eager desire for action. Schools can never attain a full insight into the peculiar character of personality, into the ways in which knowledge must be placed before different individuals, into the right time for taking a subject or giving it up. The home school must be considered the ideal method where the child studies with a small group of well-selected companions. Individuality can be considered, plans of study and courses can be neglected. Through such neglect only, is a real living instruction possible. The advantages the modern school has over the home are hardly worth discussing. The order of the school, its method, system, and discipline, so much praised by its advocates as advantages, are, from my point of view, nothing but disadvantages. Habits of fulfilling duties, or work, orderly and punctual activity, that belong to a sound education, can be attained in the home school through far less artificial means. Of course it is urged as another advantage of the school that the school child becomes a member of a small community where he learns social duties. But the home is the natural community where the child, in full seriousness, learns the real social duties of readiness to help, and readiness to act, while the present-day school artificially replaces that domestic social education, of which the child is now robbed by studies at school and preparation at home. The real value of school life among companions can be had from the home school without its ordinary dangers. These dangers are not only evil influences, but, more than anything else, that collective process of reaching a standard of stupidity, due to the pressure of public opinion that comes from association in masses. The fear of common opinion, of being laughed at, is created in the receptive years of childhood, so open to such influences. The slightest deviation in dress, or taste, is criticised unsparingly. If an investigation were conducted on the sufferings of children through the tyranny of their fellows, a tyranny which sometimes takes harsher, sometimes milder forms, it would upset the prejudice that the usefulness of the school in this respect cannot be replaced.

Besides there is the levelling pressure of a uniform discipline, which stunts personality from above, while life with school companions restricts it on all sides. Every criticism on this formal pedantry is met with the answer, "In a school it is absolutely impossible to permit children to do what can be done in the household; only fancy if all children in the school were to sharpen their lead pencils or erase words in their exercises." There is no need to insist further on this point. Hundreds of petty rules must exist, we are told, for the sake of discipline. And even if the rules could be reduced to a fourth of their present cubic contents, even the best schools would still feel the pressure of uniformity. The more this pressure is resisted by individuals, so much the better.

Education in the first years must aim to strengthen individuality. The whole of biographical literature supplies an almost uniform proof of the importance of not commencing too early the levelling social education of the school. Early attendance at school is one of the reasons why we so frequently meet, as Dumas says, so many clever children, and so many stupid adults.

Almost all great men and women, who have thought and created for themselves, have received either no education in school at all, or have gone to school at a rather later period, with longer or shorter interruptions, or have been trained in different schools. In most cases it was an accident, some living point of view, a book read in secret, a personal choice of subject that gave these exceptional beings their training. In this respect Goethe's education was ideal, considered apart from some pedantry due to his father's influence. At his mother's work-table he learnt to know the Bible; French he learnt from a theatrical company; English from a language master, in company with his father; Italian, because he heard his sister being taught the language; mathematics from a friend in the household, a study which Goethe applied immediately, first in cardboard diagrams, later in architectural drawings. His essays he prepared in the form of a correspondence in different languages between different relatives, scattered in various parts of the world. Geography he eagerly studied in books of travel in order to be able to give his narrative local colour. He knocked about with his father, learnt to observe different kinds of handwork, and also to try himself small experiments of his own skill.

But some one may say, all men are not geniuses, and accordingly the majority without distinct talent need the school. Is it possible that the connection between originality and irregular attendance at school is merely accidental? How often does the school sin in its watering down of originality! As for unoriginal people, the argument urged here is an application of the biblical axiom, that from him who has nothing even the little will be taken away. I mean the individual who has no distinct personality will be forced in the school to give up the little that he can call his own. The old-fashioned school where a few subjects were learnt by heart, where the teachers were often badly prepared, where the students could go to sleep or pretend to learn, where the courses were simple and attention concentrated on Latin, seems barbarous to us. But it had less danger for the personality than the present-day school with its thorough preparation, its interest in readings, its perfected methods, its capital instructors who take every little stone out of the student's road, and prepare as much delightful intellectual nourishment as possible, sometimes even in a cooked-up form. This "good school" with its over-insistence on versatility is responsible for the nervousness of our day. Its general intellectual apathy has caused the negativeness of our times.

The quietest, most obedient child is thought the best pupil, that is, the most impersonal individual is the model. So we see how the school confuses its conception of values. The more the soul and body are passive, are willing to be controlled and receptive, so much the better are the results from the school standpoint. Mischievous children, obstinate characters, one-sided and original natures, are always martyrs at school because of their desire for action, their spirit of opposition, their so-called "stupidity." Only the easy-going, amiable, commonly endowed natures can keep some of their own individual tendencies, slip through the school, and at the same time get good certificates of industry, moral character, order, and progress. In the first-class modern school, the mobile structure of personality is forced into shape—or rather it is knocked about by wind and waves, like a pebble on the seashore. It is struck by one wave after another, day by day, term by term; on they come—forty-five minutes for religious instruction, the same period for history, then French, then sloyd, then natural history; the next day new subjects in new, small doses. In the afternoon, there is preparation at home, and writing exercises, previously arranged and marked out, then corrected with care, and the prepared readings made the basis of questioning by the most approved methods, the mother having at home first gone over them with the child. These powerful billows stupefy the brain, and take the edge off the souls of both teacher and scholar. Even the most active teachers move along fettered by requirements and prejudices, unconditional necessities and methodical principles. Only occasionally is a soul saved from this fate by total skepticism. Some exalt this pettifogging professionalism to a plan of salvation, others are untiringly busy in changing details, in discussing minor improvements. Every real thoroughgoing reform affecting the principle, not the methods alone, goes to pieces, because it conflicts with the system supported by the state. It fails, through the obedient acceptance of the system on the part of parents, through the incapacity of teachers to look at the whole results of the system, through their disinclination to all radical methods of improvement.

The school, like the home and society, in general should aim to fight more vigorously and more successfully the influences belittling life, and should further its development towards ever higher forms. This end is opposed by the modern schools. It is a gross mistake to hold up their excellent material and their number as proofs of popular culture. How the people are educated in the schools, how the material is used, what subjects are pursued in them are the momentous questions.

Goethe's saying that "fortune is the development of our capacities" is as applicable to children as to adults. What these capacities are can be determined soon in the case of the talented child; his future can be secured by obtaining for him the possibility of such a development. But there are common capacities, proper to every normal human being, and from their development, fortune too can be the outcome. Among such capacities is memory, which modern man has nearly destroyed. "We throw ashes," says Max Muller, "every day on the glowing coals of memory while men of past ages could retain in their minds the treasures of our present literature." To these capacities belong, among others, power of thought, not in the sense of philosophic thinking, but in the simpler use of the word, gifts of observation, ability to draw conclusions and to exercise judgment. Of the common universal human faculties the emotions suffer most at the hand of the modern school.

One of the fundamentally wrong pedagogical assumptions, is that mathematics and grammar develop the understanding. This is only true after a higher stage is reached in these courses. But there is no one who seriously maintains that, so far as nature or man is concerned, he has used directly or indirectly, in a single observation, conclusion, or exercise of judgment, the theses, hypotheses, statements, problems, the rules and exceptions, of mathematics and grammar, with which his childish brain was burdened. I have heard from mathematicians and philologians the same heresy that I am proclaiming, that mathematics and grammar, when they are not pursued as sciences, must be reduced to a minimum. Provided a person has mathematical talent, the study of mathematics is naturally agreeable, through the development of a capacity in a certain direction. If one has the gift for languages, the same is true of linguistic study. But without such special talent, these subjects have no educational value, because the powers of observation, drawing conclusions, exercising judgment, are just as undeveloped as they were before the mathematical problem was solved or the grammatical rules learned.

Life—the life of nature and of man—this alone is the preparation for life. What the world of nature and the world of man offers in the way of living forms, objects of beauty, types of work, processes of development, can, by natural history, geography, history, art, and literature, give real value to memory; can teach the understanding to observe, to judge and distinguish; can train the feeling to become intense, and through its intensity combine the varying material in that unity which alone is education. In brief, real things are what the home and school should offer children in broad, rich, and warm streams. But the streams should not be taken off in canals and dammed up by methods, systems, divisions of courses, and examinations.