Schoolchild

“ When a boy has reached the age of eleven or twelve, another consideration presents itself which is a source of serious perplexity to parents. Shall he be educated at home—that is, attend school in his own city or town—or be sent to one of the boarding-schools or academies which are ready to open their doors to him and fit him for college? ”

“ Every child on attaining the age of six must now attend a Common Elementary School, where during a four years' course instruction is given in morals, reading, writing, arithmetic, the rudiments of technical work, gymnastics, and poetry. ”

“ Even if your boy has never seen the inside of a school-book, before the age of thirteen or fourteen, that need not prevent him from being prepared for college, just as well and at about the same time, as the average boy who has been attending school from the age of five, or six. ”

“ But it is to the next age—from three years old and upwards—that the Kindergarten becomes the desideratum, if not a necessity. The isolated home, made into a flower-vase by the application of the principles set forth in the Gifts above mentioned, may do for babies. But every mother and nurse knows how hard it is to meet the demands of a child too young to be taught to read, but whose opening intelligence and irrepressible bodily activity are so hard to be met by an adult, however genial and active. ”

“ Because the city boy is surrounded with schools and the comforts of home he has much time on his hands. The boy is active, and if his activity is not turned on useful things, it will be turned on useless things. The young boy goes to the grammar school, and the daylight hours, outside of school hours, are devoted to play. This is right and as it should be, but when the boy gets along to twelve or fourteen years of age, the parents should arrange for him some little duties, some regular task to perform. The youngster will get accustomed to this, and it is decidedly beneficial. ”

“ As a matter of general observation, normal children with a natural environment, who do not enter the traditional school until about nine years, are able to proceed with children of their own age who have spent three years in school. The former children pick up reading at home, and have acquired the physical development, power of initiative, and expression, which enable them to cope fully as well as, if not better than the earlier entering children, with the problems of the school curriculum and of life. ”

“ Training of the Human Plant. J. Mark Baldwin: Mental Development in the Child and the Race. G. Stanley Hall: Aspects of Child Life and Education. Irving King: Psychology of Child Development. [Pg 299]
The school life of the child should be discussed from the standpoint of both parent and teacher. The watchful care over the child's morals is an important topic. The child's home work, how much should be done; and at what hours, is a subject for discussion. The school dress of little girls, the tidiness of both boys and girls, school lunches, the plays of the noon-hour, are all suggestive. ”

“ That this subject of early training is a vitally interesting one to thinking people cannot be denied. The kindergarten has become the fashion, you say, cynically. This is scarcely true; but it is a fact that the upper, the middle, and the lower classes among us begin to recognize the existence of children under six years of age, and realize that far from being nonentities in life, or unknown quantities, they are very lively units in the sum of progressive education. ”

“ At the school, the child is treated as a man. The fresh air, the blue sky, the bright and happy hilarity of boyhood are too often proscribed indulgences. And this is called, not murder, but education. ”

“ But, when the infant leaves the lap of its mother, and other duties divide her care, it is then necessary that a teacher, equally affectionate and equally efficient, be provided; for children seek, and will find, teachers of good or of evil in every scene, and in every playmate. It is now that the Infant School must mature the education which the mother has, or ought to have, begun. ”

“ Indeed before the school time begins, and in the hours out of school, children are as a rule taken by a maid servant to walk or to skate and so on. Children of the upper classes in most cases receive just as much, perhaps more, of their education from the nursery maid or from the school than from the mother. The father need not be mentioned at all, for as a rule he is an only occasional and unessential factor in the education of the child. ”

“ The first two years of a child's schooling may be passed profitably in an infant school; at any rate, if the child enters as early as six years of age. Indeed, we think the variety embodied in the infant-school system is one of its most pleasing and useful features. ”

“ I, too, would gladly help you with your studies, but I agree with Uncle about the proper time for such things. If there were no good schools for you to attend, we should engage a governess for you; but such an arrangement is not always best, either. In a schoolroom, a child learns much from hearing the others recite, and is taught many, many things not in books. At school, too, she has playmates of her own age. ”

“ It has been the author’s purpose to show the possibilities within the power of a parent of supplementing the work of the teacher, to show what is distinctly the teacher’s work and what the parent’s duty and privilege. “The pedagogue studies the laws of childhood; the parent, the temperament and needs of his particular child; the school-teacher advances the children in regiment, lock-step; the parent in their natural gait, in their strugglings and self-directed sprawlings.” ”

“ One, after all, cannot wonder at this change, when he contrasts the scenery of the interior of an infant school with that of the generality of poor homes. The child, making, as it were, its first voyage in life, has here been introduced, not merely to a society conducted on principles of gentleness and kindness, but to a fairyland of marvels for the fascination of its intellectual faculties. ”

“ The parent must see that lessons are prepared, that the [Pg 248] child is properly provided with books, that the meal times and the other arrangements of the household are such as to help forward the child's studies. There are a hundred things which the father and mother can do to help or to hinder the work of the school. ”

“ Still, even the most miserly and most stubborn and most ignorant of parents can sometimes be made to see the wisdom of keeping a child in school until he is sixteen. They are won to the Job Lady's point of view by a statement of the increased opportunity open to the child who is sixteen. Or they are brought to see that the schools are for all children, and that work, on the contrary, is very bad for some children. ”

“ If there is any further need for the kindergarten in the near or distant future, let it be a place where children may have the same freedom as cats or dogs, to play by themselves, and for themselves, to think out something of their own, where they can be provided with means to carry out their own plans, where they have companions to play with them. A sensible woman may be near at hand to look on or to supervise, but only to interfere when the children are likely to hurt themselves. ”

“ The kindergarten is mainly distinguished from the later instruction of the school by making the knowledge of facts and the cultivation of the memory subordinate to the development of observation and to the appropriate activity of the child, physical, mental, and moral. Its aim is to utilize the now almost wasted time from four to six years, a time when all negligent and ignorant mothers leave the child to chance development, and when the most careful mother cannot train her child into the practice of social virtues so well as the truly wise kindergartner who works with her. ”

“ The Mother the best Kindergärtnerin.—​It is hardly necessary, here, to discuss the merits of the Kindergarten School. The success of such a school demands rare qualities in the teacher—high culture, some knowledge of psychology and of the art of education; intense sympathy with the children, much tact, much common sense, much common information, much ‘joyousness of nature’ and much governing power;—in a word, the Kindergarten method is nicely contrived to bring the child en rapport with a superior intelligence. ”

“ We know that we agree in all essentials, though our experience has differed. We both desire to see the best conditions for development provided for all children, irrespective of class. We both look forward to the time when the conditions of the Public Elementary School, from the Nursery School up, will be such—in point of numbers, in freedom from pressure, in situation of building, in space both within and without, and in beauty of surroundings—that parents of any class will gladly let their children attend it. ”

“ I take it that your boy is an average boy, as bright or brighter than his father was at his age. If he is an average boy, this will represent his chances. Fools and dudes are exceptions to all rules.
4. A good high school course will give a broader field of activity to your boy.—In every walk of life the demands are more and more for men and women with more than a common school education. ”

“ The younger boy, Bill, is six years younger and still at school, and having been a delicate child, or as his mother puts it, 'enjoying bad health,' is not promising for farm-work, and, being fond of his book and a favourite at school, his mother cherishes hopes of his becoming a school-teacher in days to come. ”

“ And I am confident that the parents who have intrusted their children to us for any length of time will agree in saying that, while the children like, or love, to come to school, yet work, and not amusement, has been the spirit and teaching of the school ”

“ So much for the part played by the parent. The school system stands on a different plane altogether, and must be considered by itself. For parents there is, as has been pointed out, a certain amount of excuse. ”

“ In unifying the various parts of school education, and in bringing them into close connection with children's other experiences, the school life fulfills one of its chief duties.
Among other things tending toward consistency of character there must be harmony between the school and home life of a child. At home or among companions, perhaps unknown to the teacher, a boy or girl may be forming an habitual tendency and desire, more powerful than any other force in his life, and yet at variance with the best influence of the school. ”

“ Once more, the Kindergarten professes to take account of the joyousness of the child’s nature: to allow him full and free expression for the glee that is in him, without the ‘rampaging’ which follows if he is left to himself to find an outlet for his exuberant life. ”

“ For the well-born, normal-minded, healthy-bodied child, who has wise and careful guardians or parents to assist in his mental guidance, the public school forms a good basis on which to build an education. ”

“ But children under the age of twelve require very different educational surroundings from those between twelve and sixteen. The Junior school may well be a mixed village school as close to mother as possible, a small school, bright and homelike. ”

“ The educator wants the child to be finished at once, and perfect. He forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to duty, a sense of honour, habits that adults get out of with astonishing rapidity. Where the faults of children are concerned, at home and in school, we strain at gnats, while children daily are obliged to swallow the camels of grown people. ”

“ You will see for yourselves that this simple, natural, motherly instruction of babyhood cannot be transplanted bodily into the primary school, where the teacher has fifty or sixty children who are beyond the two most fruitful years which the kindergarten demands. Besides, the teachers of the lower grades cannot introduce more than an infinitesimal number of kindergarten exercises, and at the same time keep up their full routine of primary studies and exercises. ”

“ As the “formation of the mind must be begun very early, and the temper, in particular, requires the most judicious attention,” a child’s training should be undertaken, not from the time it is sent to school, but almost from the moment of its birth. Therefore a few words as to the relations between parents and children are an indispensable introduction to the larger subject of education, properly so called, which prepares the young for social life. ”

“ On the whole, we may say that some of the principles which should govern Kindergarten training are precisely those in which every thoughtful mother endeavours to bring up her family; while the practices of the Kindergarten, being only ways, amongst others, of carrying out these principles, and being apt to become stereotyped and wooden, are unnecessary, but may be adopted so far as they fit in conveniently with the mother's general scheme for the education of her family. ”

“ Probably the world has never seen a finer body of educationalists than those who at the present moment man our schools, both Boys' and Girls'. But the originality, the fine initiative, of these most able men and women is practically lost. The schools are examination-ridden, and the heads can strike out no important new lines. Let us begin our efforts by believing in one another, parents in teachers and teachers in parents. Both parents and teachers have the one desire, the advance of the child along the lines of character. ”