(5) Writing is ushered in by the elementary drawing that must accompany observation exercises. Writing itself, when once well started, furthers reading.
[216.] But already at this point many fall behind. Puzzled at first by the demand upon them for the dull labor of learning, they surrender themselves later on to the feeling of incapacity. In large schools, where there are always some outstripping the rest, and where the majority are trying to keep up with the pace set, performance can be had more readily, although it is performance by imitation rather than by an inner sequence of thought. And even here we find thoroughly disheartened laggards.
[ CHAPTER III
Boyhood]
[217.] The boundary line between boyhood and early childhood is fixed, so far as this is possible at all, by the fact that the boy, if allowed to do so, will leave the company of adults. Formerly he felt insecure when left alone: now he considers himself fairly well acquainted with his immediate environment, beyond which vistas of all sorts are opening. Accordingly, at this stage it becomes incumbent on the adult to attach himself to the boy, to restrain him, to divide the time for him, and to circumscribe the fancies born of his self-confidence,—a course of action rendered all the more necessary by the circumstance that the boy is a stranger as yet to the timidity with which the youth joins the ranks of men. For boyhood is marked off from adolescence by this, that the boy’s aims are still unsettled; he plays and takes no thought of to-morrow. Moreover, his dream of manhood is one of arbitrary power. The play-impulse remains active for a long time, unless checked by conventionality.
During this period, the work of linking instruction to sense-impression is by no means to be omitted entirely, not even where fair progress has already been made in scholarship. We must make sure of a solid foundation.
[218.] Our chief concern during the age of boyhood must be to prevent the premature fixation of the circle of ideas. It is for instruction to undertake the task of doing so. True, by far the greatest part of the process of learning, however manifold, is performed through the interpretation of words, the pupil supplying the meaning out of the mental store collected previously. But this very fact obviously implies that quantitively the pupil’s stock of ideas is for the most part complete; instruction merely works it up into new forms. Accordingly, such shaping must take place while the material is still in a plastic state; for with increasing years it gradually assumes a more solid character.
[219.] Boys differ from girls, individuals differ from one another; and the subjects taught, together with the methods of teaching them, should be differentiated accordingly. But here the family interposes the interests of rank or station, and claims the right to determine by these how much or how little instruction a boy needs.
Looked at pedagogically, each study calls for a corresponding mental activity to be suited to the general condition of the individual. Its success must not involve exhaustion of the pupil’s powers, nor make demands upon them at the wrong time.