Accordingly, we send him to school where he must behave himself and “do what the teacher says.” “What the teacher says” is presumably what he should know for his future good—including a great deal that it would never occur to him to find out for himself. The mysteries of the three R’s in particular are not so much revealed and clarified, as they are forced upon him and drilled into him, the assumption being that somehow prac-tice in these black arts will in time bring mastery and comprehension in its wake.
Yet how little we understand child-life if we permit such a view to guide our educational methods! Instead of starting his education when he enters school, the child has already achieved in the first six years of his life far more than he will, or ever can, achieve thereafter in any similar period of time, or even in the entire remainder of his career.
Instead of the assumption that an infant is a groping aimless creature, stumbling here and there upon an appropriate mode of behavior which his environment selects for him, a true insight will show the creative efforts and achievements of infancy to be more tremendous in their effects and more far-reaching in their consequences than anything which later life can accomplish.
To many readers this statement will seem dogmatic; for a contrary view that education is essentially a matter of habit-formation is widespread, and has furnished the basis of many methods of instruction, and many theories of education. The criticism of this view will occupy us later on. At present we shall consider what we know about the kingdom of the child.
The idea is not at all a new one; indeed most of the current movements in education have the avowed purpose of liberating the child to follow his own will and intention; yet this laudable undertaking suffers now quite as it did in the hands of the great reformer, Jean Jacques Rousseau, who startled the world in 1762 with the publication of his treatise on education entitled Émile. It is one thing to maintain in general terms, as Rousseau did, that “nature is right,” and quite another thing to understand how and when and why she is right.
Although more than one hundred and sixty years have elapsed since Rousseau turned the thought of educators “back to nature,” his doctrine has served to quicken the imagination of educators without, however, being able to define the facts of child-life and human development. The rise of a science of human nature undoubtedly owes much to this impetus; but we are still at the beginning of a long journey into a mysterious region, for we have yet to discover the precise place of mind in nature.
Read More : The Nature of Childhood Education
