The child is indeed quite apt to acquire a precise knowledge of the natural objects around him, of flowers and plants and to some extent of animals, objects which to the savage also are of absorbing interest. In this way, under wise guidance, the caprices of his imagination may be indirectly restrained and the lessons of life taught, while at the same time he is thus being directly prepared for the serious studies which must occupy so much of his later youth.
The child, we thus have to realize, is, from the educational point of view of social hygiene, a being of dual nature, who needs ministering to on both sides. On the one hand he demands the key to an imaginative paradise which one day he must leave, bearing away with him, at the best, only a dim and haunting memory of its beauty. On the other hand he possesses eager aptitudes on which may be built up concrete knowledge and the sense of human relationships, to serve as a firm foundation when the period of adolescent development and discipline at length arrives.
[163] De Quincey in his Confessions of an Opium Eater referred to the power that many, perhaps most, children possess of seeing visions in the dark. The phenomenon has been carefully studied by G.L. Partridge (Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898) in over 800 children. He found that 58.5 of them aged between thirteen and sixteen could see visions or images at night with closed eyes before falling asleep; of those aged six the proportion was higher. There seemed to be a maximum at the age of ten, and probably another maximum at a much earlier age. Among adults this tendency is rudimentary, and only found in a marked form in neurasthenic subjects or at moments of nervous exhaustion. See also Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams, chap. II.
[164] G. Stanley Hall, "The Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School," Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1891.
[165] "The mother's face and voice are the first conscious objects as the infant soul unfolds, and she soon comes to stand in the very place of God to her child. All the religion of which the child is capable during this by no means brief stage of its development consists of these sentiments—gratitude, trust, dependence, love, etc.—now felt only for her, which are later directed towards God. The less these are now cultivated towards the mother, who is now their only fitting if not their only possible object, the more feebly they will later be felt towards God. This, too, adds greatly to the sacredness of the responsibilities of motherhood." (G. Stanley Hall, Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1891, p. 199).
[166] J. Morse, American Journal of Religious Psychology, 1911, p. 247.
[167] Lobsien, "Kinderideale," Zeitschrift für Päd. Psychologie, 1903.
[168] Mr. Edmond Holmes, formerly Chief Inspector of Elementary Education in England, has an instructive remark bearing on this point in his suggestive book, What Is and What Might be (1911, p. 88): "The first forty minutes of the morning session are given in almost every elementary school to what is called Religious Instruction. This goes on, morning after morning, and week after week. The fact that the English parent, who must himself have attended from 1500 to 2000 Scripture lessons in his schooldays, is not under any circumstance to be trusted to give religious instruction to his own children, shows that those who control the religious education of the youthful 'masses' have but little confidence in the effects of their system on the religious life and faith of the English people." Miss Harriet Finlay-Johnson, a highly original and successful elementary school teacher, speaks (The Dramatic Method of Teaching, 1911, p. 170) with equal disapproval of the notion that any moral value attaches to the ordinary school examinations in "Scripture."
[169] If it were not so, England, after sixty years of National Schools, ought to be a devout nation of good Church people. Most of the criminals and outcasts have been taught in Church Schools. A clergyman, who points this out to me, adds: "I am heartily thankful that religion was never forced on me as a child. I do not think I had any religion, in the ethical sense, until puberty, or any conscious realization of religion, indeed, until nineteen." "The boy," remarks Holmes (op. cit., p. 100), "who, having attended two thousand Scripture lessons, says to himself when he leaves school: 'If this is religion I will have no more of it,' is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. He is to be honoured rather than blamed for having realized at last that the chaff on which he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain which, unknown to himself, his inmost soul demands."
[170] La Nouvelle Héloïse, Part V, Letter 3. In more recent times Ellen Key remarks in a suggestive chapter on "Religions Education" in her Century of the Child: "Nothing better shows how deeply rooted religion is in human nature than the fact that 'religious education' has not been able to tear it out."