A child’s capacities, however, are not centred in his intellect. On the passional side of his being, his spontaneous impulses of desire, fear, joy, grief, love, hatred, jealousy, etc., have to be studied, and educative forces found for their guidance and control. Moreover, the ultimate aim is not his subjection to fixed rules of life, but the establishment within the heart of the child of a supreme rule over all his passions. And again, every child has characteristics indicative of the course of development undergone by the special race to which he belongs. The geographical position and primitive industry of that race, its conquests and failures in struggling upwards from savagery to a measure of civilization—all have left an impress in specific effects.
In respect of our formal methods of giving instruction there is much that is open to discussion; but the points usually raised are the best means of teaching grammar, history, geography, arithmetic, and so forth, not the far more important question of how best to achieve an all-round development in face of the organic unity and marvellous multiplicity of qualities in the child of a civilized race. Great improvement has taken place in every branch of school teaching both as regards the knowledge of teachers and the methods they adopt in imparting the knowledge; nevertheless, these improvements are minor matters as compared with the general question before us.
During the rise and progress of our industrial system based on individualism, the constant fluctuations of trade, the competing of machinery against human labour, the perpetual danger of getting thrown out of work, the utter failure of thrift as any protection from intermittent poverty—have been factors eminently calculated to produce a highly nervous type of humanity. Children of that type may happily prove bright and eager amid wretched surroundings, but it were folly to expect them to show any impulse towards a high standard of living, any outlook beyond the immediate present, or any inherent check upon action socially immoral.
On the other hand, our city workers have sprung mainly from an agricultural class whose scattered families presented the defects of a low order of life reared in isolation. Many of these defects have been counteracted by segregation within towns, however unfavourable in other directions that may have proved. The close proximity of beings affected by the same fateful conditions, the actual sorrowing and rejoicing together have expanded the emotional nature and engendered true sympathy. Professor Huxley once said, “It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.” Yet we have an immense population of workers, often hungry, and at all times environed more or less by squalor, whose average character is not violent and gross, but distinctly humane.
Turning from the masses to the classes we find some points of difference between the rich and the poor, viz. differences following from the diverse industrial conditions. Leisure, as commanded by the rich, has made mental development possible wherever desire prompted intellectual effort, and the magnificent record of last century’s achievements in discovery of truth, acquisition of knowledge, and promotion of artistic skill, is a gain to the world at large—a gain made possible by accumulation of wealth unequally distributed. But intellectual faculty has frequently been depraved through its devotion to wealth production. The true aims of life are lost sight of by chiefs of industry whose emotional nature has hardened under the daily spectacle of struggling fellow-beings, on whose labour their fortunes are built up. The dignity of useful labour has had no vogue in general education. An opposite principle—that the highest dignity consists in being served by others and in possessing the means of constraining and exploiting the labour of others, is impressed on the children of our classes by the whole play of circumstance around them. The property-sense has become unduly developed, and a selfish mammon-worship holds the place which an altruistic public spirit ought to hold in the inner life of a civilized people. It is true that a showy charity—a patronage by the rich of the poor—is everywhere present throughout society, but that which creates and supports it is a sentiment wholly different from the simple kindness of the poor to the poor. It is without the essential features of that charity that “vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, seeketh not her own ... thinketh no evil.”
Now the scientific spirit of to-day, in observing the uncontrolled play of middle-class children, has discovered how great is their interest and joy in the spontaneous exercise of the faculty of make-believe. Costly toys will readily be thrown aside to take part in a game of “pretended” housekeeping or shopkeeping, or acting the part of father, mother, nursemaid, or cook. And herein there lies, says one of our advanced teachers, “a powerful hint how to keep children’s attention alive while cultivating to the utmost their imaginative, observing, constructive and correlating faculties. We must dramatize our school education and connect school ideally with real life.” (Mr. Howard Swan; his introductory lecture at the opening of Bedford Park School.)
But the “powerful hint” goes deeper. It points to an instinct or a deeply implanted desire and capacity for actual work on the part of children of a practical race. To play at work is pleasurable, to do work more pleasurable still. Yet in blindness to the fact that in drawing out into action every rudimentary faculty favourable to happy life lies the true path of education or an all-round development, society has shut off middle and upper-class children from the sight and hearing of household labour. In nurseries, amid artificial toys, their daily routine is to seek amusement self-centred; and as in these days of small rather than large families, nursery children are often solitary, there is a systematic repression both of natural activities and infolded natural emotions. The same repressions are carried forward into school life. Dramatized teaching may connect school ideally with real life, but it cannot satisfy a child’s cravings for the real, and the companionship of children of similar age will never call out the complex forces of a many-sided emotional nature. It is not playing at life that is required for education, it is the sharing of life’s duties of service, and constant opportunity given for the practice of varied humanities.
The children of our superior workers may perchance fare better if the mother is a capable woman, and the home not overcrowded. The lighter parts of her work are shared by the little ones, and to help mother in sweeping and dusting, washing cups and saucers, and placing them neatly in the cupboard, etc., are not only interesting and useful occupations, they are educative, for they imply a simultaneous training of the eye, the fingers, the mental faculties and the heart. But overcrowding, the miserable housing of the poor, and the early age at which infant school-life begins, makes such home-training difficult even to the best of mothers, while to the upper classes—frost-bound in artificial domestic customs, all home-training seems impossible.
Nothing, however, should deter a student of evolution from proclaiming that the home-life of our people will largely decide the nation’s future. Unless the great problem of the housing of the poor is rightly solved, and unless educated women become roused to the necessity of a changed home-life in the interests of their children, and set themselves voluntarily to the task of domestic reform within their own circle, the social state can never be greatly improved.
All children born in a civilized nation have a right to education. That this principle has been fully acknowledged is evidenced by our Educational Acts and the innumerable Board Schools that stud the country. But as long as population among the masses rises without check, the highest aim of education, viz. the development and elevation of individual character must, as regards their children, remain in abeyance. The only practicable line of action is to gather them together into large schools, and while bestowing general instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., to subject them to some hours of systematic guidance and control. This signifies obedience to rule and order—a useful discipline to juveniles of Bohemian nature, and it is the only method of restraining tendencies to licence, without rousing a spirit of revolt. Fresh air, wholesome food, ample bathing, and the play of sunlight and colour upon nerves of sensation—these stimulate bodily health, while music, and the personal influence of high-minded teachers, throw into vibration finer nerves of sensibility, and elevate the mental and moral tone. But beyond this point, large schools are incapable of scientific adaptation to the needs of a modern education in a rapidly socializing community.