Mary Everest Boole

“ A writer on education [2] has said that a human being comes into the world not chiefly to acquire knowledge or to develop his faculties, but to establish relations; and I would add that a child comes into science, not only to learn facts and to develop the faculty for doing things, but primarily to establish relations with the laws of nature, by which we mean—if we truly mean anything—the laws according to which the world is governed. And in order that relations may be properly established, the adults who are directing the child must, at proper times, keep silence even from good words. ”

“ A modern child must of course acquire some sympathy with the desire for rapid achievement; but there are better ways of introducing him to it than stunning him with the racket of rapidly whirring wheels. ”

“ What kind of teachers do least harm in the way of neglecting to provide material for unconscious cerebration in science? Those are most neglectful of it who have 'got up' the elements of several sciences, simply in order to be free to advertise themselves as able to teach, and who have no other connexion with, or interest in, science than that. The best science teacher is usually a thorough-going enthusiast in the science itself, who, in the intervals of regular teaching, gets his pupils to assist him in his own investigations or pursuits. ”

“ The love of very rapidly whirring machinery is an acquired taste, and, for a child, an essentially unhealthy one. It is bad for nerves and eyesight; and if a child does like it, it is in the kind of mood in which, if he got into the same later on, he would not be likely to make a scientific discovery; he would be more likely to take to drink, or gambling, or sensationalism in politics, or to startling the public with violent attacks on sacred things, or, in short, to anything in the world which is most emphatically not science. ”

“ The first thing we must do is to resolve seriously that a good deal of time before the age of ten, and of the vacations afterwards, shall be resolutely dedicated to the training of the unconscious mind. We must not only discourage the setting of holiday lessons by masters; we must also check in ourselves the tendency to overflow into being amateur professionals, so to speak, spoiling the future work of the professional teacher by premature and amateurish teaching. ”

“ I said that children can have worse friends than a steam piston. One of these worse friends is the person who interrupts their fascinated contemplation by saying, 'It is waste of time to watch this old slow-coach affair; if you want to see machines, I'll take you to see one that will turn out a gross of diagrams while this lumbering old thing makes one. a mile of rope while this makes a yard.' If a child is left to his natural instincts he will prefer to be able to follow what is going on. ”

“ There is no more cleverness in a child drawing a curve than in the pendulum of the harmonograph doing so; in both cases alike an implement has heen set moving according to a certain law, and beauty has resulted, not from understanding but from obedience. As for any strain to the brain, stitching a curve from its tangents is not more straining to the brain and nerves than stitching round a printed outline, not nearly as much so as working the fine cross-stitch samplers of our grandmothers. ”

“ Some of these designs have been noticed in the Inspector's report that he had 'found that the teaching of the calculus was leading to a most interesting evolution of design.'
The beauty of some of the designs is unquestionable; and there can be no second opinion about the value of the method, as training, from the point of view of geometry as well as from that of art. What is not quite so obvious at first sight is its bearing on the training of the unconscious mind for science. ”

“ Euclid was, in his day, a sort of Darwin of geometry. He wrote not a geometry for beginners, but a book about the logical concatenation of geometric facts for men already geometers; just as our Darwin wrote a book about the concatenation of biologic forms for people already biologists, to the extent at least of knowing that horses prance and dogs bark and wag tails; that worms creep and birds fly; that some flowers have scent; that some fruits are sweet and others are sour. ”

“ The difference is that working a sampler and following a ready-drawn outline cultivate only neatness and dexterity, but the act of evoking a curve 'out of the everywhere into here,' by simple obedience to a rhythmic law, lodges an impression on the unconscious mind which will be ready to surge up in ten years' time, and perhaps make some class-teacher at College wonder why this boy or girl, though not very studious and full of all sorts of interests outside the curriculum, never had the least difficulty in grasping the idea of the differential calculus. ”

“ The practice of playing with such toys as the sling and stone, the sucking-valve, the old-fashioned rope-maker's wheel, and the bandalore, may be made a means of accustoming children's nerves to the feeling of Nature's opposing tendencies, and may prepare the organization for receiving knowledge, later on, into the conscious brain. By training the hand to trace out Nature s action, we train the unconscious mind to act spontaneously in accordance with Natural Law; and the unconscious mind, so trained, is the best teacher of the conscious mind. ”

“ It is far better for a child of seven to be stitching round the outline of an animal or a house on the ordinary kindergarten cards, or even working a sampler as our grandmothers did, than to be stimulating his brain with abstract mathematics.' The third comment is one of scornful incredulity. ”

“ Children may legitimately run races for a prize, or compete together as to speed and accuracy in working out sums by methods already quite familiar; but whenever the business on hand is revelation, whether by learning to understand a mental process, observing a natural fact, or tuning the nervous system into harmony with Nature's rhythmic law, the idea and feeling of competition should be entirely absent. ”

“ And if the one thing is not as simple, as restful, and as unpretentious as the other, it must be because some one is making a needless muddle about what might be a perfectly normal element of child life. ”

“ Many a life of intellectual muddle and intellectual dishonesty begins at the point where some teacher explains the rule for Greatest Common Measure to a child who has not had the proper basis of sub-conscious knowledge laid in actual experiences. ”

“ It is a common mistake to suppose that no preparation for science is needful or possible, except early teaching of what are called scientific subjects. Early attitude is far more important than early teaching. ”

“ If we excite him to allow himself to be swung higher than he likes, either by competition with other children or by the injudicious comments of adults, we do something to turn what should be a preparation for future revelation into a preparation for future vice or brain-disease. The element of competition has its place, and a very important one, in education ”

“ A child who supplies the family with small salad at stated intervals has to water it in dry weather, shelter it from very scorching sun, grow it in pots in town, and in the hardest frosts on a flannel near, but not too near, the stove; he thus becomes accustomed to the feeling that Nature's unvarying laws of growth present multifold difficulties to finite man. ”

“ If there is any one about, a relative or intimate friend, who knows some science subject well and is not a professional teacher—an uncle electrician or photographer, a friend who owns a star telescope, an aunt with a hobby for collecting seaweeds or growing ferns, a nice friendly carpenter or blacksmith in the place where you go for holidays, let the children spend as much of their spare time with this person as they and the person wish. ”

“ Most children delight in machinery which moves with a slow, steady, rocking motion. Let them waste as much time as they like in watching it. A hayband twister such as is still in use in remote country places, the spinner of an old-fashioned rope-walk, the rocking piston of a steam ferry-boat, becomes quite a familiar friend of children who have the opportunity of cultivating its acquaintance. ”

“ It is curious and painful to observe how many things have been proposed by true educationalists, simply for the purpose of ministering to the action of the unconscious mind, and afterwards perverted, by persons possessed with the teaching mania, to the purpose of stuffing into children's minds some idea which is in the teacher's mind. ”

“ Let the children have such homely plants as thrive without very skilled care, and attend to them themselves. Let them also grow such things as mustard and cress for the family use. I wish to call special attention to the advisability of children doing such things as a contribution to the family's resources. It is advisable, not only on moral grounds, as tending to promote unselfishness, but because it makes it easier to secure repeated performance of the same task, with slight variations. Incessant novelty stimulates the conscious brain too much; monotony tends to dull the whole brain ”

“ The habit of using tools quite experimentally on a variety of material will be useful. The science of mechanics deals largely with resistances and strains. When the teacher begins talking of these things it is advisable that his class should have ready a basis of subconscious experience of the resistance of various woods to the hammer and saw. If you turn the children loose in company of some nice person of the artisan class, you may wish to make some compensation for any waste of his time the children may cause ”

“ If you know where lives one of these old harmonographs, cultivate the acquaintance of the owner, and get leave to let the little ones see the big, ugly, lumbering monster creating the most fairy-like beauty by simple obedience to rhythmic law. Do not preach or try to explain; let the motion itself lay its spell on their souls and preach a sermon too eloquent to be translated into human speech. ”

“ They might have many worse friends. But a better one still is the Sympalmograph or Harmonograph, especially the old-fashioned kind, made of two pendulums swinging different ways, and holding between them a pen, which traces exquisite curves that suggest wings, and flames, and strange unknown flower-forms. ”

“ The time for establishing relations is the Sabbath of the I Am, the Jubilee when the land is lying fallow. Sabbath does not mean any sort of conscious exertion. But on the other hand it does not mean useless idleness. A mathematical writer on logic [3] of the nineteenth century wrote, that to listen to the voice of the Eternal Teacher we must make silence from conscious learning or even thinking; and adds, 'In these days we need repose far more than we need work. Repose is the brother of silence. We are sterile for lack of repose far more than for lack of work. ”

“ In the old days of classical education the training of the unconscious mind was necessarily little connected with school subjects; one can learn nothing about a dead language except by reading books or being told things. ”

“ Choose as pets animals to whom you can give some sort of real natural life. Give the children something to do in connexion with the animals. If you cannot entrust the feeding or cleaning of the pets to the children, you can at least make it their business to give the horse his daily treat of fruit or sugar or bread, the dog his bath or swim. If you have birds in cages—a thing which I cannot believe is right where there are children, as I think it gives them a false start as to the rationale of our power over the lower creatures ”

“ At the same age at which the child begins to realize that a tadpole grows into a frog, a boy into a man, a seedling into a flowering plant, let him have the opportunity of watching also how one geometrical type-form grows out of, or flows into, another. ”

“ If there is a seltzogene in the house, let the children see it made up; not once only, with an elaborate explanation of the action of acids on alkalies—that appeals to consciousness; let them see it done as often as they wish, till they become saturated with the sense of the invariableness of the action; till they are sure that, though mother can make mistakes, the chemicals never do, and that when anything goes wrong it is because the human agent has been wrong. ”

“ Now there are few places in which a child can do so many things wrong, without injury to himself or annoyance to anyone else, as in a carpenter's shop. He can begin to make something out of wood that has a flaw, or that is too soft for his purpose ”

“ And, indeed, there is much reason to believe that the amount learned by children might be very much increased without the least injury to their health of body or mind, and with much less exertion than is now imposed on them and on their teachers, if the cultivation of the unconscious and that of the conscious portions of the organism were kept properly balanced and adjusted to each other. ”

“ We now come to the subject of geometry, the condition of which affords, it seems to me, a standing warning against directing educational care too exclusively to the conscious mind, and neglecting to provide food for unconscious mental action. ”

“ There are some conceptions in physical science which present no difficulty to one who, years before he hearis any discussion about matter and force, has made a long series of experiments with the same object rotating under varied conditions. ”

“ There seems to be evidence that, in ancient times, all people in good society were expected to know simple truths about geometric forms, in the same way as we all know simple facts in natural history. The elementary properties of the triangle, parallelogram, circle, ellipse, and spiral seem to have been familiar to ordinary people. They were not expected to know much about geometry, but they were expected to have and to use ordinary faculties of observation on facts within every one's reach. ”

“ What is emphatically not wanted is that unscientific mothers and nurses should learn something about geometry and teach it before the school age; what is wanted is that we should deal with those type-forms which are the subjects of geometry on the same principles as we ought to deal, and to a great extent do deal, with the other classes of form: the living forms evolved by nature, and the artificial forms created by man for his use, such as furniture, domestic appliances, and ornaments. ”