“Train not thy child,” says Emerson, “so that at the age of thirty or forty he shall have to say, ‘This great work could I have done but for the lack of a body.’” Elizabeth Harrison, after quoting Emerson, adds, “Is not this carelessness as to health one of the ways in which we are not conserving the forces that make for righteousness and truth, one of the ways in which we are neglecting to build up ‘a great personality’ in our children?”[69]
Up to this point our study of The Child in non-Christian lands has shown that the missionary must touch the home life, the customs and ideals handed down from remote ancestors, the play and work and education and physical development of the child, in order to give him his inalienable rights, while in the next chapter we shall dwell on his right to know of Jesus Christ, the children’s Friend. It may seem to the reader (as it does to the writer) that the chapters overlap one another in spite of the heroic effort to treat each subject by itself. But most of us find,—do we not?—that it is a bit difficult to attend to the spiritual culture of our boys when they are clamoring to go out and play ball, or to get our little girls to tell what they learned at school, when they are hungry for their dinner. The mother must train all parts of her child’s nature by attending to the need that is uppermost at the time,—the missionary must do the same for her foster children, and the woman at home, behind the missionary, has to recognize the same inseparable inter-relation of body, mind, and soul in the little ones of whom she is studying. Our divisions into “subjects” must be more or less artificial. However, to this particular subject of “The Child at School” belong naturally two more matters which must be touched on briefly.
The need for good literature.
When the Turkish girl has learned to read, when six thousand boys have annually been trained in that great chain of Anglo-Chinese schools started by the Methodists in Malaysia, when Korean children have acquired a taste for reading and study, where are they to find suitable, interesting books? The Cyclopedia of Education pays a wonderful tribute to what one Book has done for Korea, saying that “the translation of the Bible into Korean and its rapid distribution, and revivals marked with habitual study of the Bible, compelled many to learn the alphabet to master a sacred library so rich, and has constituted a national school of intelligence and culture.” But other books than the Bible must be translated and written in order to give clean, interesting, wholesome literature to the children of countless thousands who never had any use for a literature for themselves. As Miss Lilian Trotter of Algiers says,—“Those who have been patiently toiling over the schooling of Moslem girls and women begin to feel that the powers of reading gained in school days should be used as a means to an end, not left to lapse in the first years that ensue for want of following up. Letters from the whole reach of the Moslem world give the same refrain,—the girls drop their reading largely because there is nothing published that interests them. The few upper class women who read, read little but newspapers and French novels. Could not some one who understands child minds work out bright beginnings for the use of their waking powers in stories and pictures with colored lettering and borders? Easterns must have color to make them happy!”[70]
Here is a call to missionary work for some one who never dreamt that her particular literary and artistic talents are absolutely needed today by the children of the East.
Industrial training in mission schools.
The second matter mentioned above is the need for industrial training. Great progress has been made in this respect in recent years, but much more progress is needed, and trained teachers and suitable equipment are required. As a missionary in Persia says when urging that more industrial training be given the school girls,—“A woman may be able to read, but, if unable to bake or prepare a good meal, her husband will not care if she reads about the Bread of Life. She may play the organ, but, if she cannot wash, mend, make the children’s clothes, and make a happy home, he will have little interest in hearing her play or sing ‘The Home over there.’”
Extent of American missionary education.
There is abundant testimony to prove that America is already doing great things in the line of missionary education. Here is the testimony of a traveler and newspaper man.
The number of mission schools and colleges supported by Americans with American money is nearly as large as that of all the schools conducted by the missionaries of all other countries combined. We have approximately 10,000 schools in lands that are not under our flag and from which we receive not a cent of revenue.
If a man in quest of material for an American educational exhibit were to sail out of San Francisco Bay with a phonograph recorder, he would come up on the other side of Sandy Hook with a polyglot collection of records that would give the people of the United States a new conception of their part in the world’s advance toward light. His audience might hear a spelling class recite in the tuneful Hawaiian tongue or listen to Moros, Tagalogs, and Igorrotes reading from the same “McGuffey’s Reader.” A change of records might bring the sound of little Japanese reciting geography, or of Chinese repeating the multiplication table in a dozen dialects. Another record would tell in quaint Siamese the difference between a transitive or an intransitive verb, or conjugate the verb “to be” in any one of the languages of India. One might hear a professor from Pennsylvania lecturing on anatomy to a class of young men in the ancient kingdom of Darius; or a young woman from Massachusetts explaining the mysteries of an eclipse to a group of girls in Constantinople; or a Princeton man telling in Arabic the relation between a major and a minor premise. And when the audience had listened to all this and to “My country, ’tis of thee” in Eskimo and in Spanish, the exhibit of American teaching would have only begun.[71]