Psychology and parenthood

by H. Addington Bruce

Some few educators in this country have already tentatively approved the new ideas in child-training as exemplified by the methods pursued and the results obtained in the case of these youthful Harvard students. For the most part, however, their promulgation has been greeted skeptically, even with caustic criticism. On the one hand, it is alleged that the parents cannot positively prove that the achievements of their boys are not the result of inherited gifts rather than the special education given them; and, on the other hand, the position is taken that, assuming the correctness of their fathers’ contention in this respect, it is by no means evident that such training is desirable.

In the words of one critic, to begin the education of a child at two or three is to rob that child of his childhood. The training in question is described as a “forcing” system, much talk is heard of “mind strain,” and the prediction is freely made that the ultimate outcome can only be to drive children thus educated into an asylum for the insane, or into an early grave.

My own belief is that the critics are wrong. I have long been acquainted with all three of these students, and in one case have had opportunity to observe rather closely the process of mental and physical development for upward of eight years. All three are sturdy, strong young fellows; if anything above the average for their years in stature and weight. Time alone, of course, can tell whether they will live to a good old age. But if they should die or become insane, I am satisfied that neither misfortune could justly be attributed to their parents’ educational methods. On the contrary, the principles underlying these methods seem to me for the most part so beneficial that I believe the time will come when they will be quite generally adopted.

Decidedly, though, I should not express myself with such assurance were it not for the fact that these same principles have long ago been put to the test and impressively vindicated. I wonder if the name of James Thomson of Annaghmore has ever been heard by those who have so hastily condemned the parents of the three Harvard students? Doubtless not, else they would surely have moderated their denunciations.

Thomson, who was born in the year 1786, the son of a Scotch-Irish farmer, was pre-eminently a “self-made” man. Seemingly doomed to the obscure existence of an ordinary farm-labourer, he had emancipated himself by dint of an extraordinary energy. With but slight aid he contrived, while a mere child, to teach himself to read, write, and cipher. In the fields, and by candle-light in his farm home, at every opportunity, he studied little text-books that were to him the most fascinating things in the world because they gave him knowledge. He was determined to become an educated man, and continually he urged his father to let him go to school.

To school eventually he went, in the neighbouring village of Ballykine, and there, as in his childhood, he found his greatest delight in the study of mathematics. He must, he told himself, know more about this great science; he must know everything that could be learned about it. Also, being of a religious turn of mind, he planned to fit himself to become a clergyman. Obviously, whether to learn higher mathematics, or to qualify for the ministry, it was necessary to go to college. And to college he did go; but, so difficult were his circumstances, not until he was a man full-grown.

From 1810 to 1814—that is, from the age of twenty-four to twenty-eight—he spent six months of every year at the University of Glasgow. The other six months he spent earning his living. Finally he received the coveted M.A. degree, and having in the meantime become more enamoured of mathematics than of a clerical career, he accepted appointment to the teaching staff of an academy in Belfast, where, married to a sweetheart of his Glasgow days, he soon entered upon the additional task of bringing up a family.

It is at this point that he becomes of special interest to us. For, looking back at the stupendous obstacles he himself had had to overcome in gaining an education, he resolved to do everything in his power to make the road to learning easy for his children.

To do this, it seemed to him, the proper course to pursue was to begin their education as soon as they showed an intelligent interest in the world about them. For, he argued, quite in the manner of the fathers of the three Harvard students of to-day, it is because the education of children begins too late that they find it hard to learn, and strain their minds in the attainment of knowledge. Let a child get accustomed to using his mind to good purpose in early childhood, and study will never be a tax on him but a perpetual joy. This, thought he, is the way all children should be brought up.