Margaret McMillan

“ In short, the whole body is laid under contribution, and the nervous system specially designed, for a life so great and wonderful that we have not even begun to appreciate it. And in every child born there is the desire to achieve that life. In every child that desire struggles on, glancing through all his impulses, interests, and affinities. It may be balked in myriads, it is balked in myriads. It is arrested, turned back; but it persists while life lasts, so that even the diseased make haste to seize life, to enjoy and advance, and the defective are roused at times and press forward. ”

“ The lower level includes, of course, all the spinal system, whose branches, flung wide and lying deep, have to do with the movements and life of the big organs— the heart, the lungs, the viscera. Strong and stubborn is the grip of life in these underground regions, and in infancy and early childhood the tides of life seem to toss and boil there just as water does in a cavern ere it has forced a way between the cliffs. ”

“ But it is pretty well established now that this haste does not advance things—that to reach the higher levels too quickly is to arrive there with nothing of any value—with nothing to be worked up in the crucible of the higher centres. The great and deep channels of the sympathetic system—the system of nerves that run to all the great organs of the trunk—must have filled and must reverberate with all the swelling tides of life, in order to pour at last into new channels and feed the higher brain centres from their abundance. ”

“ Young, vigorous races, and especially the great men of these, appear to be subject to great shocks and upheavals of every organ, and to be more conscious than are later generations of the intensity of the life fermenting in them. Thus, for example, the Psalmist in his outpourings speaks of his heart, of the viscera, of the bones even, continually, and, as it seems, of necessity. In less primitive people the response of the organism is much less violent and general; and perhaps this is why teachers, for centuries and in every land, have been in such haste to make short cuts to the higher brain. ”

“ That there is a hygiene of instruction in mathematics we know, because children have been injured physically by learning in the wrong way, and strengthened physically and morally by learning in the right one. Moreover, they "hated" the wrong movement, just as they would hate having their fingers twisted backward, but they enjoyed the right one, just as they enjoy walking and jumping. ”

“ In elementary school children the middle brain is having its spring-tide. The spring-tide is short, and it does not return.
And yet this middle brain—the great centre of movement is also the Mecca of the indolent. When some kind of movement or activity has been perfectly learned the upper brain ceases to pay any more attention to it, and is free for other tasks. But if the power of attention is not kept alive, and given a new task, education proper ceases. ”

“ Monotony of work is a kind of privation. The majority to-day have, as we have seen, too small a range of work, of interest, and emotion. The winds of life do not reach the strings of the human instrument freely enough, and nature draws back the gift she was on the point of offering. ”

“ But now it is to be removed we hope, and what is more, the obstruction in the organism itself is to be searched out and removed if possible. The gates are to be lifted up, that the glory of life may enter. ”

“ Many people are not yet well furnished with brain chambers for various kinds of memory. For example, the place for word-memories must be still small in the labourer's brain. He does not need many words. Still he needs more now than formerly, and his brain is modified in consequence. Then his fingers were once too stiff to hold a pen, but now he can write, however stiffly or slowly. In short, many doors which were fast locked before are now being opened. There is probably no brain that is equally well developed in every part. ”

“ There is a hygiene of instruction for drawing as well as singing, for drawing, like other subjects, is a matter depending on nerves, muscles, and a brain. But this fact became clear only when children began to have great difficulty in doing very simple work, and even got ill as the result of such work. ”

“ Arresting power is here, and transforming power is also here, a new power of elaboration, and its exercise is seen in qualities that are more and more dominating the advancing race. And here too there is, almost certainly the same order of provision, the same kind of mechanical arrangements that determine progress of a less inspiring order. ”

“ So it was found that the formal school lesson is, for infants, not only a waste of time, but an unhygienic exercise—that it prevented the full exercise of regions that should be, early in the life history, in full functional activity. "How few young children are allowed to remain with wandering mind on the knees of their good mothers, touching, dreaming in peace ... ”

“ Boole says that the children of ancient Greece had an instinct for geometry, that they had accumulated a store of memories, unconsciously, that made Euclid an easy book comparatively for them, but that our children do not gather such memories of space and place always in the open, so they have less instinct for geometry, and are not prepared to learn it out of books. ”

“ Some things we know of them, that their action for example is largely one of restraint, of inhibition—that, in part at least, they act like the brakes on a machine, powerful brakes that can arrest the headlong course of primitive impulse. ”

“ It was drained off—that energy—in little wearing tasks. This misfortune happened to a generation—but not to many generations, else one cannot tell what would have been the result. For education is openly, almost grossly physical, in its early stages. ”

“ Kerr, "means almost automatic reading, writing, or speaking of a comparatively useless character educationally, as it is done without effort and scarcely rises above the threshold of consciousness." In such exercises the middle brain is working like a machine. ”