Psychology and parenthood

by H. Addington Bruce

“Much pity has been expressed over the dreary, cheerless existence that the child must have led, cut off from all boyish amusements and companionship, working day after day on his father’s treadmill; but a childhood and boyhood spent in the enlargement of knowledge, with the continual satisfaction of difficulties conquered, buoyed up by day-dreams of emulating the greatest of human benefactors, need not have been an unhappy childhood, and Mill expressly says that his was not unhappy. It seems unhappy only when we compare it with the desires of childhood left more to itself, and when we decline to imagine its peculiar enjoyments and aspirations. Mill complains that his father often required more than could be reasonably expected of him, but his tasks were not so severe as to prevent him from growing up a healthy, hardy, and high-spirited boy, though he was not constitutionally robust, and his tastes and pursuits were so different from those of other boys of the same age.”

Mill was never a college student, and was for the most part self-educated after his sixteenth year. But had he been sent to college at an early age, as his home training amply warranted, there is every reason to think he would have acquitted himself as brilliantly as did the Thomson boys, and as did Karl Witte, another noteworthy example of the possibilities open to all parents. Indeed, Witte’s case is in some respects the most interesting and instructive on record. For one thing his father has left a minutely detailed account of the methods employed in his education; and there is ground to suspect that at the outset of life Karl Witte was below rather than above the average in mentality.

Born in July, 1800, in the German village of Lochau, near Halle, he was the son of a country clergyman, likewise named Karl Witte, who had long been regarded as somewhat “eccentric.” In especial the elder Witte was known to hold “peculiar” views on education. It was his firm belief, just as it was the belief of James Thomson and James Mill, that only by beginning the educational process in infancy could one make sure of developing children into really rational men and women. Looking at the world about him, and noting the extent to which people wasted their lives in hopeless inefficiency and reckless dissipation, he said to himself, in effect:

“These poor people do not reason, do not use their God-given intellects. If they did they would conduct themselves altogether differently. The trouble must be that they have not been educated aright. They have not been taught how to think, and what to think about. They have been started wrong in life. The schools and universities are to blame, but far more their parents are to blame. If love of the good, the beautiful, and the true had been implanted in them in youth, if they had been trained from the first in the proper use of their minds, they would not now be living so foolishly.”

Holding these views, Pastor Witte promised himself that if God blessed him with children he would make their education his special care. His first child, however, died in early infancy. Then came Karl, at birth so unprepossessing and “stupid” in appearance that his father wondered in what way he had offended God that he should be afflicted with a witless child. The neighbours, sympathising, held out what hopes they could, but secretly agreed that Pastor Witte’s boy was undoubtedly an idiot.

Thus matters stood until one day the father fancied that he detected in the child signs of intelligence. There and then he set about “making a man of him,” as he expressed it. He began, even before Karl could speak, by naming to him different parts of the human body, objects in his bedroom, etc. Later, as soon as the child was old enough to toddle about, he gradually broadened the horizon of his knowledge, taking him for walks through the streets and fields of Lochau, and calling his attention to all sorts of interesting things. Encouraging him to ask questions he went in his replies as fully as possible into the essential details of the subject under discussion. Above all, he avoided giving superficial answers, for it was his great aim to impress on Karl the importance of reasoning closely, of appreciating relationships and dissimilarities. If the child asked him something to which he could not respond intelligently, he frankly confessed his ignorance, but suggested that by working together they might obtain a satisfactory answer.

Also, in his daily walks and conversations with his son, “baby talk” had no place. It was part of Pastor Witte’s theory, as it is part of Doctor Berle’s to-day, that this mode of addressing children, however it may appeal to the sentimental side of fathers and mothers, is intellectually enervating to their little ones. The child who would think correctly, he argued, must be taught to speak correctly.

For this reason he not only drilled Karl in the correct pronunciation and use of words, but insisted that all who talked with the child should be careful how they spoke to him. Besides which, with an intuitive appreciation of the formative value of even the seemingly most trivial details of the home environment, he arranged the household furnishings so that they too, by the subtle influence of suggestion, should contribute powerfully to Karl’s development. As he tells us in his own account, of which an abridged translation into English has recently been made by Professor Leo Wiener, of Harvard University:[1]

“I tolerated as far as possible nothing in my house, yard, garden, etc., that was not tasteful, especially nothing that did not harmonise with its surroundings. If anything was not harmonious, I was uneasy about it until it was removed. All my rooms were papered with wall-paper of one colour, the fields being surrounded by pleasing borders. In every room there was but little furniture, but such as there was, was carefully selected. On all the walls hung paintings or etchings, but none of these was tastelessly glaring in colours, or represented an unpleasant subject. Our yard and garden were in bloom from earliest Spring to very late in the Fall. Snowbells and crocuses started the procession, and winter asters were crushed only by the snow or a severe frost. We ourselves were always dressed cleanly but simply.”