Mary L. Read

“ What young man would be likely to fall in love with a girl, however pretty, even charming, whom he knew could be the mother only of sickly, peevish, stupid children to inherit his name and perpetuate his family, or who would refuse to assume the burden of motherhood? What normal young woman would be attracted by any “fairy prince”, however romantic, wealthy, handsome, if she were aware that his children, should he have any, would be doomed to early death, weakness, or imbecility, and that she herself would be made a sufferer for life? ”

“ Of greater potency for æsthetic training is the beauty and harmony of the child’s own home, and especially of his own room. Here inexpensive but beautiful colored pictures hung low enough for him to see them easily, and charming little plaster casts, will feed his mind and his soul, as does the daily singing. He is learning that art is for the daily life, not merely for unusual places and occasions as in the museum. ”

“ There is no essential contradiction between romantic love and eugenics. Indeed, sincere, deep and enduring love of parents for each other and for their children is an essential in a eugenic ideal. A young woman knows a hundred young men, but is in love with only one (or possibly none) because the others do not embody the ideal that she has fashioned. Every young man and woman has such an ideal, perhaps only vaguely defined but certainly felt, with which they are in love, for which they search, and with which they sometimes invest an acquaintance only to discover later their illusion. ”

“ Too early insistence upon technique crushes. Teachers have so long put form above content that they little suspect the innate power and love of children for this kind of work. Above all, teaching should be to encourage and not to repress the tendency to exaggerate each new trait, and should have regard not to the finished product and should pay little attention to symmetry or to an artistic whole. Uniformity, too, should be cast to the winds and the teacher should encourage the deep instinctive tendency of pupils to perfect each item as it looms into the center of interest. ”

“ But why should not every man understand the principles of hygiene and foods as a matter of his general knowledge quite as much as for coöperation with the mother in the children’s régime? Why should he not with equal zest make a study of growth and development during childhood? [Pg 6] Even more, why should he not be intimately acquainted with child psychology and the fundamental principles of child training and education, that he may understand his own children and coöperate sympathetically in their upbringing? ”

“ To ignore the higher relationships and base marriage simply on the biological or material is to revert back to a lower stage in human development. A marriage based simply on physical attraction soon loses its glamour, and is as a house built upon the sands. The enduring ties are those of spiritual comradeship. It is this spiritual-biological [Pg 15] love, evolving with the personality and soul of man, that has inspired the great wealth of spiritual creations in poetry, music, drama, and painting. ”

“ The chief guide in the child’s self-activity is his interest. In this connection interest signifies not a passing whim or fancy but the child’s needs, the inner urgings of his instincts, his nerves, and muscles. Probably no one can know so well as the individual child exactly what his needs and interests are at any given time. The best the teacher can do is to know the typical interests of children at the same stage of development, and then to supply an environment that will provide stimulus and the most valuable means for exercise. ”

“ Nursing, within fifty years, has become a profession, and to-day it is almost impossible for a woman to find employment as a nurse unless she has had a special training for three years. Yet nursing has only to do with sick folk, usually in a hospital, which is still a far cry from the daily care, hygiene, and training of the normal child in a home. ”

“ The ideal which has animated all my own feeble educational endeavor, and without which I should be without hope in the world of pedagogy, is the reconstruction of education based not so much on existing conditions in society as on child-nature. It is one thing to fit the child for a preëxisting social condition, and a very different thing to develop all his own latent powers to their uttermost and trust to their development for all future reforms. ”

“ In the “true” myth, fairy tale, or allegory, Right eventually triumphs as it actually does in the universe, although possibly long delayed; wrong is punished; error and ignorance bring their unhappy consequences; wisdom and skill conquer circumstances; and the forces of the universe (whether presented as natural forces or as gods, fairies, or Providence) assist those who strive for righteousness and to assist their fellows.
It must next be vital. No less vicious and undermining than the untrue story is the weak, sentimental, mawkish, dull, or mediocre tale. ”

“ It is a great responsibility of early education to cultivate and plant many centers of normal interest, both of thought and feelings. The wider the range of the child’s normal interests and feelings, the greater the scope of richness in his life. Intensive development of interests has its period in youth and in later adolescence.
Any effort to force an interest is likely to result in a reaction against the subject; an effort to force any motor activity, as speech, walking, dancing, is likely to result in strain of muscles and nerves, and ultimate retardation. ”

“ In education there is danger of overemphasizing some one, especially the thinking, of neglecting the spiritual, the feeling and willing, and of ignoring the doing, the motor expression of the thought. ”

“ It is wearisome to even try to imagine the procession of brides, since those early days of the cavemen, who had no choice in the matter of their husbands. For what countless millions of brides was the marriage arranged by barter between their fathers and their future household lords, sometimes the father requiring a purchase price, sometimes the bridegroom demanding a dowry. What millions of girls have been selected while mere children as the future wives and slaves of their husbands and the family drudges of the household. ”

“ Drawing teachers usually demand complete visual control, but the children draw lines symbolizing the direction birds fly, draw the wind, draw a zigzag line representing the dance a person is engaged in, and even gross errors are repeated after correction and explanation, showing how dominant muscle habits are. Young children draw anything with abandon and pleasure. They do not use their eyes much, no matter how difficult the theme, but draw their own image of it with about as good success as if there were no model. Children care nothing for accuracy here, which is the ideal of the methodists. ”

“ Historically, marriage and monogamy are the result of children. The social stigma upon illegitimacy is not artificial or unreasonable. It is the deep appreciation by the social experience of humanity that parental responsibility and solicitude is at the very foundation of society; that the selfish, reckless use of this creative power, or a cuckoo-like disregard for the child’s life, is undermining to society as well as to the character of the man, the woman, and their child. ”

“ Drudgery becomes irritating when it is not appreciated in its relation to an interest, as when it is a task set by some one else, with no relation to the life of the doer; or is the performance of labor for others merely for pay, without any personal interest in the work or its results.
The child must learn to perform many duties in his own personal care, in the life of the household, the family, and the community. It is of greater value to put imagination and the play spirit into these, to learn to make games of them, than it is to make dull, unimaginative drudgery of them. ”

“ On the other hand, intensive acquaintance with only a few people or nationalities is better. After four or five years of age, he is able to stand the excitement of traveling, and the risk of dust and crowds, and he is ready to profit by seeing other people, cities, customs, ways of traveling, industries. The least journey to a new environment is valuable, to enlarge his perspective and his sympathies. Even at three or four he likes to see pictures of other children in other countries, and how they live,—their houses, clothes, food, toys, pets. ”

“ Normal children in a normal environment do not wish to be amused, but they are full of ideas of their own that they wish to express. The adult very often desires to amuse children,—not primarily for their benefit but for his personal pleasure in watching them and participating with them; he (or she) needs a training in self-control and a deeper understanding of child nature, that he may come to find as keen satisfaction in standing aside and watching the child’s self-development, bringing forward his own personality only where it will be of educational or social value. ”

“ How the family income should be divided, what share the wife shall have for household use and for her personal use, is so diplomatic and acute a problem that it should be as sincerely and frankly discussed as all these other phases.
Whether the wife should undertake work besides managing the home-making is a moot question. Certainly her first responsibility is to make a home not only comfortable but inspiring. ”

“ Through the study of plants, gardening, the care of birds and pets, enough of the principles of heredity, anatomy, and physiology should be given the child before seven years to satisfy his curiosity, to give him a scientific attitude toward reproduction before the development of sex-consciousness, and to enable him to classify the development of a new generation among the natural processes of nature, instead of overemphasizing and distorting its perspective. Emphasis should be placed upon the care of the young and forethought for their protection, rather than upon organs and processes. ”

“ To feed a child so as to produce one hundred per cent. efficiency in his health to-day and fifty years from to-day should be the ambition of every one who has the care of that child,—not merely to keep him from death or present illness. This is not an easy matter, nor to be learned in a day or a month. It requires careful and earnest study of food composition, food values, the physiology of digestion, dietetics, cooking; and then patience, thoroughness, and practicability to put this knowledge into use three to five times a day, seven days in the week, every week in the year. ”

“ It will be for their guardians a good training in patience, adaptability, and sympathy. What if their work is crude, with many mistakes and mishaps? They are learning motor coördinations, manual dexterity, a knowledge of homely routine, the meaning of labor and service, the joy of workmanship and creation, the satisfaction of self-reliance, the happiness of intimate comradeship with mother and father. Their character development is the great consideration, not the materials they are handling or the petty work they are accomplishing. ”

“ Hundreds of thousands of mothers with young children are seeking in vain for assistants of desirable personality and efficient training. For such workers there has been no adequate opportunity for training and no standardizing of working conditions. In all this, America is far behind both Germany and England.
What does mothercraft require in its practitioners? First, personality: love of children and sympathy with child-nature, responsibility, patience, thoroughness in the minute details day in and day out, self-control, good judgment, adaptability, the play spirit. ”

“ To allow a child to rattle off a prayer, or say it inattentively, flippantly, or to show off, or to permit him to treat any sacred place, objects, or rites flippantly, is to foster irreverence and weaken the religious sense. Service to God, to an ideal, to people, as an integral part of religion, is an association that is [Pg 221] not instinctive, but one that the child needs to be taught by example, precept, and training. ”

“ The teacher needs to beware of the fallacy of reading to children or telling to them things which they can learn through their own experience, experimenting, or observation. Many informational books of this kind are at hand, both in science and history. The temptation often is strong, especially for the teacher who is eager that the child shall learn much, and who has not clearly distinguished between mere erudition, encyclopedic accumulation of facts and, on the other hand, the vital, living experiences of life, with the growing power to observe, interpret, and enjoy for one’s self. ”

“ During his fourth or fifth year the child can begin to comprehend the values of these tasks, in self-dependence, service to others, coöperation in the advancement of human life, and that he has the part of a worker to play in the great game of life.
Learning, intellectual study, art, should by all means be forms of self-expression, a development of personality, a source of happiness in their acquirement,—play in a large sense. ”

“ The Crude Tastes of Childhood. Little children, like savages, have not developed fine discriminations in color. This is largely a matter of education. The little child shows a preference for vivid color, and no sense of harmony in color. His color sense is as undeveloped as his spoken language, and needs training, especially through good examples, for its refinement. A glass prism hung in the sunlight will give him pure spectrum hues while delighting even his baby days. ”

“ If they cannot agree sincerely and heartily on economic, social, physiological, and psychological adjustments before the wedding ceremony, when each has the altruism of romance and the spur of the game, how can they expect to adjust themselves amicably afterwards, in the severe test of everyday needs and situations? ”

“ The Purposes of Education. Education is as comprehensive as life itself. The education of the child begins as soon as he is born. Every moment thereafter is bringing influences that are shaping his character and his mental life. ”

“ The ordinary Sunday Supplement page for children is a clever combination of all the crudities that children enjoy—vivid color, crude drawing, bad manners, defiance of authority, clownish humor. Of course children cry for it, as they do for drugs that have dulled their nerves and set up perverted tastes. If it is kept from the child until his teens, and meanwhile his taste is being trained by natural, daily means, the probabilities are that he will then find it offensive; at least he will have passed the age when it can pervert his taste and ideals. ”

“ The teacher of the very little child must first know what are the fundamental facts in science. Too often the traditional school training has given an intensive acquaintance with one or two sciences, so detailed that the fundamental foundations are obscured. The teacher of the very little child needs, instead, a comprehensive knowledge of many sciences, in their broad basic outlines,—especially physics, chemistry, nature-study, biology, physical geography, geology, astronomy, industrial geography and industrial processes, the story of primitive life and industries. ”