The preparation of the child’s educators must begin many years before his birth, that they may be ready to meet this responsibility as soon as it comes. An adequate preparation should include: (1) careful study of the principles and purposes of education, that these may be discerned clearly and applied with consistency and discretion; (2) long schooling in habits which will fit them to be worthy examples in character, in social and mental traits, in tastes and languages; (3) some experience with little children in daily life, in order to learn to interpret and sympathize with child nature, to acquire some facility in their education and discipline, and to collect some fund of nursery lore.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] See Preface, page [xiii].
[26] Literally “to put into” from the Latin in and struo.
[27] Literally “to lead out of” from the Latin e and duco.
CHAPTER XI
STUDYING THE INDIVIDUAL CHILD
“Would you know how to lead the child? See and observe the child; he will teach you what to do.”
—F. Froebel.
“The ideal which has animated all my own feeble educational endeavor, and without which I should be without hope in the world of pedagogy, is the reconstruction of education based not so much on existing conditions in society as on child-nature. It is one thing to fit the child for a preëxisting social condition, and a very different thing to develop all his own latent powers to their uttermost and trust to their development for all future reforms. Holding, then, as I do, that childhood has in it indefinite possibilities that are some realized, some repressed or crippled, nipped in the bud in a way for which home, school, and church must share responsibility, and that if every spring of possible knowledge and power were touched, even by the lightest suggestion at its nascent psychological hour, we should in a few generations develop a superior race of men, we have in this faith in the possibilities of childhood and youth the most central and impregnable of all the fortresses of optimism.”
—G. Stanley Hall.