(2174)
NEGATIVE TEACHING
Professor Estabrook, the well-known educator, once told this story to teachers for the purpose of showing them the discouraging results that attend the negative form of command. A mother once sent her little boy to buy some eggs. “Take this basket,” she said, placing it in his small hand, “and don’t spill one or drop the basket. And don’t fall down.” As he was passing through the gate, she called after him, “Don’t be gone long and don’t break the eggs.” After the little fellow had his order filled and started home all he could think about was not breaking or spilling the eggs. A vivid picture of broken shells filled his mind. With a fearful looking into the basket as if afraid they would jump out of themselves, he did not notice the large stone in his path and naturally fell over it, spilling and breaking the contents of the basket.
Our human tasks are done most safely and effectively not while we are concerned with the task, but while we keep in mind the exemplary Way by whose guidance all tasks are made plain.
(2175)
The writer, some years ago, heard an educational worker at a teachers’ institute tell the story of the mother who, on going away from home for a while, called her children for a few final precautionary prohibitions. Her conference with the children ran as follows:
“Children, you are not to go up-stairs while I am away. But if you do go up-stairs, you are not to go into the back room. But if you do go into the back room, you are not to play with the beans piled there. But if you should play with the beans, do not put any into your noses.”
There is no need to finish the narrative for any persons who know child-life. The physician eventually succeeded in preventing the nasal cavities from becoming vegetable gardens.
The story seemed to have been made to order. But it is not at all improbable. The writer knows of kittens having been put “into the Baltimore heater,” and of little pigs having been run through a windmill after thoughtful parents had enjoined upon their children not to do these things. Thus does the law operate, as any fireside will abundantly verify.—A. B. Bunn Van Ormer, “Studies in Religious Nurture.”