Child study

“ It is for this reason that the results of child study are important to all who have to do with children—whether as teachers or as parents, whether as club leaders or as directors of institutions, whether as social workers or as loving uncles and aunts. ”

“ As there are many classes and varieties of children, whose needs must be studied, while bodily strength and mental faculty differ with the age and surrounding, "child study must be a matter of primary interest to the teacher and others engaged in the care of children as affording a basis for the methods of education; giving a source of perpetual interest to work in school, an interest in the individual child, and a means of working out, in practice, the best that can be done with the child in various phases of life. ”

“ One book must be studied closely by the teacher, and that is his pupils. During the last thirty years human nature in all its stages, as child, as youth, during adolescence, and in maturity—especially in the earlier periods—has been investigated as never before. The student in our time can enter into the results of special study upon these subjects. He needs to know what the best books can give him of child study and mind study; and to supplement book-knowledge in this department with watchful eyes and close thought upon the traits which he finds in his own scholars. ”

“ Besides the anthropometric and psycho-physical investigations of the child carried on in the scientific laboratory with exact instruments and unexceptionable methods, there is another field of "Child-Study" well worthy our attention for the light it can shed upon some of the dark places in the wide expanse of pedagogical science and the art of education. ”

“ Thru the child-study movement the teacher comes to know child nature so well that direct application can be made to the individual child and an intimate knowledge gained of his tastes, capacities, ambitions, and dominant interests. ”

“ The student of child study who is familiar with the material that has been collected in the past two decades on this subject cannot but be impressed with the great difference which exists between the theory of education which this child study investigation suggests on the one hand and the theory which lies much of the actual school work on the other. ”

“ The curriculum that this report recommends to us, and the methods that it outlines, are arrived by an analysis made from the adult point of view. Are we, then, to understand that child study is to be given no hearing? Are we shut up to formal analysis as the sole method in evolving a practical school plan? The newer education answers this question directly in the negative. It is putting the child in the place of honor and asking him to tell us what his nature demands and in what order it demands it. ”

“ It is the duty of every mother to know the nature of her child, in order that she may assist in the development of all of his possibilities. Child Study is a new science, but old enough to give us great help through what the experts have found out about "child nature." But the experts do not know your child; they have studied the problems of childhood, and their results you can use in learning to know your child. Your problem is always an individual problem; the problem of the scientist is a general one. ”

“ Although as a science, child study seeks to discover the common characteristics of all children at each stage of development, yet the first results of child study have been increased emphasis upon the great differences between individual children and the need of recognizing those differences. ”

“ Child-study.—The physical, psychological and educational development of children, from birth till adulthood, has provided material in recent years for what has come to be regarded as almost a distinct part of comparative anthropological or sociological science, and the literature of adolescence (q.v.) and of “child-study” in its various aspects has attained considerable proportions. ”

“ In truth, his learnings and achievements are fluid and moving. They change from day to day and from hour to hour.
It will do harm if child-study leave in the popular mind the impression that a child of a given age has a positive equipment of purposes and interests to be cultivated just as they stand. ”

“ Special attention is being directed to the subject of child language, and pupils and old students are supplied with small indexed books for records in this particular department. Further opportunities for daily observation and experiment in certain lines of child-study and in teaching are offered in a newly organized children’s class or kindergarten. ”

“ The study of childhood possesses a fascination for the student commensurate with its importance to humanity. It is both easier and pleasanter to study the child in the concrete than children in the abstract. But it is obvious that no comprehensive conclusions on the subject of child-training can be [4] deduced from the study of a single child. ”

“ I feel sure that the boy who commences his studies at ten will far outrun the one who commences study at six. Every child should commence his lessons in the best kindergarten, the nursery. Let object lessons be his primer—let him be taught by word of mouth—then, when his brain is what it should be for a boy of ten, his eyes will be the better able to bear the fatigue of the burdens which will be forced upon him. Listen to what Milton has left on record as a warning to those young boys or girls who insist upon reading or studying at night with bad illumination. ”

“ Not only scientific workers, but teachers and parents throughout the country, are beginning to realize the important bearing of child-study upon all educational questions, and nowhere is their enthusiasm for matters educational more shown than in their united devotion to the solution of this new problem. ”

“ At five or six years of age the pupil comes to the primary school. His experience is very limited; his senses are open to the impressions of color and sound and touch, and he eagerly or timidly mixes in the social group which is often to him bewilderingly large and strange. The key to the understanding of this period is to be found in the simple psychological principle that out of all the bewildering mass of childish experience it is persons who attract the child’s most vivid attention. ”

“ If it is essential that the teacher approach her work with a clear view of the ends which it is desirable for her to achieve, it is quite as necessary that she be conscious of the factors which condition the teaching process. The school, with its limitations and its advantages, the community and home life of the child, and, above all else, the child himself, his instincts, impulses, and abilities must be the subject of most careful study. Much progress has been made in recent years because of a better understanding and a more sympathetic attitude toward children. ”

“ Then they will be prepared for study, and begin it with infinite zest, because they comprehend its meaning. Having had that beautiful beginning, every later step will seem glad to the child; he will not see knowledge "through a glass darkly, but face to face," in her most charming aspect. ”

“ It is governed by the laws of learning, or readiness, exercise, and effect, just as truly as any other ability is. If adults are to know how to study, if they are to use the technique of the various kinds of study efficiently, children must be taught how. Nor can we expect the upper grammar grade or the high school teachers to do this. Habits of study must be formed just as soon as the responses to which it leads are needed. Beginning down in the kindergarten with study in connection with physical and mental habits, the child should be taught how to study. ”

“ The child can twice as easily learn at ten years, under these conditions, what he now learns at eight; at eight what he now learns at six, if he comes to his study with developed powers of observation and an eager desire for action. Schools can never attain a [Pg 246] full insight into the peculiar character of personality, into the ways in which knowledge must be placed before different individuals, into the right time for taking a subject or giving it up. The home school must be considered the ideal method where the child studies with a small group of well-selected companions. ”

“ The course of study, too, will furnish more useful hints for bulletins, exhibitions, reading-lists, and other forms of advertising, than can come from any other source; and not only in supplementing the school work, but also in directing the children in their general reading, is an intimate knowledge of the course of study an invaluable aid, as it gives you the unit of measurement for any child which enables you to correlate his reading along certain lines to that which has gone before, and to that which is to follow. ”

“ Whatsoever the parent desires in his child in the nature of attainment or skill, of character or ideal, if not foreign to the nature of the child, may be realized through attention to habit. But the training in right habits should be accomplished during the golden age of childhood when body and soul are plastic and impressions are easily made. Too early the character hardens like cement and thereafter becomes well nigh impossible to change. Think how difficult it is for the adult, but how easy for the child, to acquire skill in music, or facility in speaking a foreign language. ”

“ Fathers and mothers who by the exercise of some ingenuity manage to show the child that his arithmetical knowledge is of actual help in solving the questions of every-day life; that his history has bearings upon the progress of events around him, and that his geography relates to actual places which, perhaps, father and mother may have seen, or which their books tell about—such fathers and mothers will make their children's school work easier, at the same time that they increase the sum of their children's knowledge. ”

“ There it is first sought to develop the child's intellectual faculties, prepare it for school, inculcate habits of cleanliness and morality, and instruct it in the rudiments of reading and writing. Between the ages of six and fourteen children are admitted into the schools, and, nominally at least, go through the plan of study drawn up by the board of primary education, and which is as follows: Reading, writing, geography, spelling, arithmetic, compendium of sacred and French history, linear drawing, singing, the rudiments of physics, geometry and natural history, and calligraphy. ”

“ Has the school met the legitimate demand for a suitable education of the adolescent? The answer is that the school has been slow in meeting this situation. The archaic form of school organization which attached the seventh and eighth grades to the elementary school has hindered greatly a proper recognition of the special needs of adolescence. The child of twelve or thirteen does not need a review of the elementary work so much as a preparation for the active life of adulthood. The adolescent needs to be given an insight into the organization of society. ”

“ If natural forces in the child are recognized and utilized they facilitate the learning process and make school activities profitable and delightful. It is a well attested fact that at certain periods in the psychological development of a child mastery of special phases of learning is easy for him. Courses of study and plans of instruction should be prepared in such a way that the different phases of work included may be presented and stressed while the nascent period of interest is on. ”

“ Since what a child becomes is determined so largely by its inborn capacities, it is of the utmost importance that teachers and parents realize something of the nature of such aptitudes before they begin to awaken them. For education consists in large measure in supplying the stimuli necessary to set going these potentialities and of affording opportunity for their expression. ”

“ Parents should not be expected to take a hand in teaching their children how to study, for that is altogether too large a task, and involves too much special preparation. If they observe that a child does not know how, they would better leave him alone, directing him to apply to his teacher for instruction. Parents are more bent upon obtaining results and getting rid of their children—so far as school work is concerned—than are teachers, so that the duties assigned to them should be few and of a simple character. ”

“ So he who neglects important fields of knowledge lacks something that is peculiar to them. Each study helps every other, and before special training begins each is to be used, up to the time when the student becomes conscious of its meaning. By contact with nature and society, the child, before the school period, gets an all-around education. He distinguishes numerically, observes natural phenomena, notes the deeds of his fellows, gains the thoughts of others, and begins to perceive the qualities of beauty and right. The kindergarten promotes all lines of growth ”

“ The brain exhibits interest exactly as the stomach exhibits appetite. The object of scientific education is to discover what the spontaneous, universal interest of children of certain ages is, and to meet that interest with the fullest possible supply of knowledge in every conceivable form.
Scientific education does not depend upon text-books or upon merely verbal explanations, but gets the idea home to the child by the means of a varied appeal to all the senses and sensibilities. ”

“ Put in positive terms, the pre-school training may be described as training in language and in personal independence of a very elementary type.
This statement can be applied to the kindergarten, where the purposes of the pre-school training have been brought to fairly clear consciousness. The kindergarten gives the child much opportunity to play with things that are given to him. He must learn to distinguish objects for himself; he must learn to handle them with enough skill so that he becomes an independent individual. ”