Mental Training.—The object of the teacher is to teach to think. The pupil thinks enough, but he thinks loosely, incoherently, indefinitely, and vaguely. He expends power enough on his mental work, but it is poorly applied. The teacher points out to him these indefinite or incoherent results, and demands logical statements of him. Here is the positive advantage the teacher is to the pupil. The prevailing habit of slovenly reading is largely due to the slovenly way in which children are taught to read at school. Be very careful about this; teach scholars to read with precision and understanding, thinking of every word, getting the sense of each sentence, and grasping the full meaning of any piece that may be before them.
There can be no greater mistake than to imagine that all children develop at the same rate during the corresponding years of their existence. In a group or class of children, each of whom is 11 years old, there will be many shades of difference of development. It follows, therefore, that the drawing of a hard and fast line as to acquisitions appropriate to any special year of a child’s life is a mistake both from an educational and from a medical point of view.
To urge a child to great mental exertion while it is passing through a period of bodily growth is to put an undue strain upon its powers. A dull child will be rendered more dull and hopeless because it cannot perform its task, and the urging to exertion may produce nothing but a sullen resistance to authority. An eager, docile child will respond to the impulse, and will exert itself beyond its powers; and then an exhaustion will follow which may permanently injure both bodily and mental health. It would, however, be unwise to conclude that, because a child is unable to make great mental exertion while growing, it is not to be required to make any exertion at all.
If an adult can apply himself to the acquisition of knowledge in one direction for only 1 hour (and how much longer can an audience listen to a lecture?), the child can evidently do very much less. At the ages of 5 to 7 he can attend to one subject—a single lesson—for 15 minutes; a child from 7 to 10 years of age, about 20 minutes; from 10 to 12 years, about 25 minutes; from 12 to 18 years, about 30 minutes. (Chadwick.) Hence great care is demanded to avoid engaging the brains of pupils in work for more than very short periods, and to provide intervals during which there may be rest of the centres specially taxed. Much may be done by changing the kind of work frequently. No growing child should be kept longer than ½-¾ hour at even the same description of work. Again, the great centres of relation should not be overtaxed. Vision, hearing, the speech centre, and the centre specially concerned with written language, whether in writing or reading, should not be wearied. Brain weariness is the first indication of exhaustion. The faculty of “attention” is perhaps one of the most easily vulnerable of all the parts or properties of brain-function. It is the faculty which most readily becomes permanently enfeebled, and, when weakened, entails most trouble in adult life. In children it is difficult to catch and fix the attention. No effort should be spared to secure this fixity of thought; but in order to avoid weakening the power of “thinking” as distinguished from “thought-drifting,” the teacher should not strive, or desire, to hold the attention by any effort on his part longer than it is voluntarily given by the child—the slightest indication of exhaustion should at once be met by a change of task. If these hints, general as they are, can be reduced to practice, there is little fear of “overwork” or harm from brain activity. Desultory and insufficient work is more to be feared by far than “overwork,” because the brain, like every other part of the organism, grows as it feeds, and it can only feed as it works. (Lancet.)
Children, especially at the age of 10-17, should not be over-taxed, and girls in particular should not be pressed to work at periods when they are naturally languid and exhausted. The work to be done should be mainly done in school; night-work and night-lessons should be short. Nor should children be made to do much work in the morning before breakfast, nor immediately after food. The books given to young children ought to be light to hold in the hand; the paper should be clean, white, and smooth. The letters should be large in proportion to the youth of the child, well formed, and well printed. The spaces between the lines and the interspaces of the words should be relatively wide. The lines should not be too long. The light should be abundant, and should enter from the left. In writing he should sit upright and square to the desk. The desk itself should be inclined, and there should be a due proportion between the height of the desk and the bench or stool on which the child is sitting. Reading small print by a dim light is to be discountenanced, and reading should not be permitted in bed. The work given to girls to learn sewing should not be too fine, and no black work should be given, especially at night.
How vastly would the world benefit if the hours wasted on Bible history, dead languages, and higher mathematics (except for special objects, of course), were given to modern languages and useful (as distinguished from pure) science. How many “educated” men know a word of French or German, or a score of the physical facts which govern our existence, or anything about the structure of their own bodies, or of the names, properties, and uses of our native plants?
The work performed by girls, especially when young, is not beneath the attention of the surgeon. There cannot be a doubt that every girl should be taught the use of the needle and thread; but it is by no means necessary that the work which is put into their hands should be of a nature to make a severe strain upon their eyes. That such strain applied to the eyes in this particular way is injurious is well known from the effects of lace-making in Belgium and France, which is admitted on all hands to seriously impair the vision of many workers annually. In moderately fine calico there are about 72 threads to the inch; and if two of these are taken up at every stitch, the work is done to 1/36 in., which is even so very small. But finer kinds of cambric run to 150 or more to the inch, and must be very trying to the eye. Weber observes:—“Who need trouble himself about a girl learning to knit a stocking requiring 35,000 or even 60,000 loops, when the whole article can be finished by machine work in an hour or two?” But, as Cohn remarks, if the girl is, instead of knitting stockings, occupied with Greek characters or conic sections, she is not much better off. On the whole, it appears that no child should be given work to do which requires to be held closer to the eye than 1 ft., and with this all due care should be taken in regard to light and other particulars.
The special culture of the senses is too much neglected in modern busy life. Probably at no previous period of human history has the nervous system generally, and more particularly, have the sense-organs been so severely taxed as they are now, but never have they been less carefully cultivated. This is, in part, if not wholly the cause of the progressive degeneracy of the faculties of special-sense which is evidenced by the increasing frequency of the recourse to spectacles, ear-trumpets, and the like apparatus, designed to aid the sense-organs. The mere use of faculties will not develop strength—it is more likely to exhaust energy. Special training is required, and this essential element of education is wholly neglected in our schools, with the result we daily witness—namely, early weakness or defect in the organs by which the consciousness is brought into relation with the outer world. It is not necessary to adduce proofs, or to argue at length or in detail. The truth of the proposition laid down is self-evident. On the one hand we see the neglect of training, and on the other the increasing defect of sense-power. The matter is well worthy of the attention of the professional educators of youth. Muscular exercise wisely regulated and apportioned to the bodily strength is felt to be a part of education. Sense-culture, by appropriate exercises in seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, would, if commenced sufficiently early in life, not merely prevent weakness of sight, deafness, loss of the sense of feeling, and impairment of the sense of smell, long before old age; but by its reflected influence on the nutrition of the brain and upper portion of the spinal cord, would do much to reduce the growing tendency to paralytic diseases, which are very decidedly on the increase. (Lancet.)
Physical Comfort and Training.—Attention should be directed more than at present to the physical side of school life in its relations to the ordinary bodily wants and processes. Many children suffer much from a fear or dislike of asking for temporary leave of absence from their classes. They suffer pain, and often cause serious illness, by this somewhat natural aversion to “asking out.” Foolish teachers have sharply reproved pupils because they appeared to demand absence from the class-room too frequently. The teacher evidently imagined there was some attempt at malingering; whereas the pupil was really in pain, suffering from an irritable digestive system, which demanded rest. Such pupils should not be sent to school, it is true; but if they are allowed to take their place in a class, they should not be treated as if their demands were dictated by foolishness or frivolity. The wise teacher is one who, seeing a pupil evidently suffering, will investigate the cause of the discomfort, and set the child’s mind and body at rest. Education under physical suffering is, at its best, the merest farce. You need not be prudish; nor fear any rebuke from common sense, when you think that children have bodies which, as well as minds, are placed temporarily under the teacher’s care. (Wakeham.)
There is a risk at the present day that the claims of intellectual education, which are being so strongly put forward, may have the effect of postponing, or causing to be neglected, the care and cultivation of the bodily powers. In some respects we have rushed from a state in which too little care was given to mental development into one where intellectual work predominates. Children must have several hours’ play daily in the open air; this is much better than calisthenics or gymnastics for the generality of children; and girls should be allowed to play as vigorously as boys do.