Spontaneous Activity in Education Part 20

There was one of these charlatans who was making a fortune; he sold an ointment from China which enlarged the eyes, decreased the size of the mouth, lengthened noses that were too short, and shortened those that were too long, De Sartine, Chief of the Police, called up this charlatan to have him imprisoned, and said to him:

"Mariolo, how do you manage to attract so many people and gain so much money?"

"Sir," replied the other, "how many persons, do you suppose, cross the bridge in one day?"

"From ten to twelve thousand," replied de Sartine.

"Well, sir, how many intelligent persons do you suppose there are among them?"

"A hundred," replied the official.

"That's a liberal allowance," said the charlatan, "but let us leave it at that. I will rely on the other nine thousand nine hundred for my living."

The situation has so far changed between those days and our own that there are now more intelligent and fewer credulous persons. Education, therefore, should not be directed to credulity but to intelligence. He who bases education on credulity builds upon sand.

I know of an incident which is perhaps reproduced in our society thousands of times. Two girls of n.o.ble family had been educated in a convent, where, to safeguard them from the seductions and vanities of the life for which they were destined, the nuns had persuaded them that the world is full of deceit, and that if, when people praise us, we could conceal ourselves and listen to what they say when we have disappeared, we should hear very chastening things. When they were of an age to be presented in Society, the two youthful princesses made their first appearance at an evening reception, to which their mother had invited a great many guests. All lavished praises on the charming young girls. In the drawing-room there was an alcove concealed by a large curtain. Curious to hear what would be said of them when they disappeared, the two agreed to slip out and hide behind the curtain.

Scarcely had the attractive objects of the general admiration vanished when the praises which had been kept within due bounds in their presence, were redoubled. The two girls told me that they experienced an indescribable revulsion of feeling at the moment; they thought that everything the nuns had made them believe was false; they renounced religion there and then, and made up their minds to throw themselves into the pleasures of society. "We afterwards had to reconstruct our lives ourselves, embrace the truths of religion afresh, and understand for ourselves the emptiness of social brilliance."

Credulity gradually disappears with experience, and as the mind matures: _instruction_ helps towards this end. In nations as in persons, the evolution of civilization and of souls tends to diminish credulity; _knowledge_, as is commonly said, dispels the _darkness_ of ignorance. In the void which is ignorance, the fancy easily wanders, just because it lacks the support which would enable it to rise to a higher level. Thus the Pillars of Hercules disappeared when the Straits of Gibraltar became the gates of the oceans; and no Columbus could now persuade the Red Indians, whom the great American spirit of democracy receives into its civilizing schools, that the heavens are obedient to him, darkening the sun at his command; for eclipses are phenomena as well known to them as to the white races.

Is this illusory imagination, based upon credulity, a thing we ought to "develop" in children? We certainly have no wish to see it persist; in fact, where we are told that a child "no longer believes in fairy-tales," we rejoice. We say then: "He is no longer a baby." This is what _should_ happen and we await it: the day will come when he will no longer believe these stories. But if this maturation takes place, we ought to ask ourselves: "What have _we_ done to help it?

What support did we offer to this frail mind to enable it to grow straight and strong?" The child overcomes his difficulties _in spite_ of our endeavor to keep him in ignorance and illusion. The child overcomes himself and us. He goes where his internal force of development and maturation lead him. He might, however, say to us: "How much you have made us suffer! The work of raising ourselves was hard enough already, and you oppressed us." Would not such conduct be much as if we compressed the gums to prevent the teeth from coming, because it is characteristic of babies to be toothless, or prevented the little body from standing erect, because at first the characteristic of the infant is that it does not rise to its feet?

Indeed, we do something of the same sort when we deliberately prolong the poverty and inaccuracy of childish speech; instead of helping the child by making him listen intently to the distinct enunciation of speech sounds, and watch the movements of the mouth, we adopt _his_ rudimentary language, and repeat the primordial sounds he utters, lisping and perverting the consonants in the manner habitual to those making first efforts to articulate words. Thus we prolong a formative period full of difficulty and exertion for the child, thrusting him back into the fatiguing infant state.

And we are behaving in exactly the same manner to-day with regard to the so-called education of the imagination.

We are amused by the illusions, the ignorance, and the errors of the immature mind, just as at no very remote date we were amused to see an infant _laugh_ when it was tossed up and down, a proceeding now condemned by infantile hygiene as wrong and dangerous in the extreme.

In short, it is _we_ who are amused by the Christmas festivities and the credulity of the child. If we confess the truth, we must admit that we are somewhat like the fine lady who took a superficial interest in a hospital for poor children, but who kept on declaring: "If there were to be no more sick children, I should be quite unhappy." We, too, might say: "If the credulity of children were to cease, a great pleasure would be taken from our lives."

It is one of the careless errors of our day to arrest artificially a stage of development for our amus.e.m.e.nt; as in the ancient courts the bodily growth of certain victims was arrested to make them dwarfs and the pastime of the king. Such a statement may seem severe, but it rests on an actual fact. We are unconscious of it, it is true; yet we speak of it continually when we say among ourselves with lofty scorn of the age of immaturity: "Really, we are not children." If we would refrain from prolonging the child's immaturity in order to be able to contemplate his inferior state in immobility, and would, on the contrary, allow free growth admiring the marvels of his progression ever on the road of higher conquests, we should say of him, with Christ: "He who would be perfect must become as a little child."

If what is called infant imagination is the product of "immaturity" of the mind, combined with the poverty in which we leave the child and the ignorance in which he finds himself, the first thing to do is to enrich his life by an environment in which he will become the owner of something, and to enrich his mind by knowledge and experience based on reality. And having given him these, we must allow him to _mature_ in _liberty_. It is from freedom of development that we may expect the manifestations of his imagination.

To enrich the child, who is the poorest among us, because he has nothing and is the slave of all--this is our first duty towards him.

It will be said: Must we, then, give horses, carriages, and pianos to all children? By no means. Remedies are never direct when a complex life is in question. The child who has nothing is the one who dreams of things the most impossible of attainment. The dest.i.tute dream of millions, the oppressed of a throne. But he who possesses something attaches himself to that which he possesses to preserve and increase it reasonably.

A person without employment will dream of becoming a prince; but a teacher in a school dreams of becoming a head master. Thus the child who has a "house" of his own, who possesses brooms, rubbers, pottery, soap, dressing-tables and furniture, is happy in the care of all these things. His desires are moderated, and the peace he derives from them opens up a life of expansion to his internal creative activities.

It is "living among real possessions of his own" which calms the child, and a.s.suages those desires which consume his precious powers in the vanity of illusion. Such a result is not to be achieved by _imagining_ that he is living among possessions of his own. Some teachers in charge of a model orphanage once said to me: "We too make our children perform the exercises of practical life which you describe; come and see." I went. Some of the authorities were also present, and a university professor of pedagogy.

Some children seated at a little table with playthings were laying the table for a doll's meal; their faces were quite without expression. I looked in amazement at the persons who had invited me; they seemed quite satisfied; they evidently thought that there was no difference between laying a table in play and laying it for an actual meal; for them imaginary life and real life were the same thing. May not this subtle form of error be instilled in infancy and afterwards persist as a mental att.i.tude? It was perhaps this error which caused a famous Italian pedagogist to say to me: "Liberty a new thing? Pray read Comenius--you will find that it was already discussed in his times." I replied: "Yes, many talk of it, but the liberty I mean is a form of liberty actually realized." He seemed not to understand the difference. I ought to have asked: "Do you not believe that there is any difference between him who talks of millions and him who possesses them?"

To be contented with the imaginary, and to live as if what we imagine actually existed; to run after illusion, and "not to recognize"

reality, is a thing so common that scarcely is it apprehended, and the cry of alarm raised: "Awake to truth, O man!" when the consciousness becomes aware of a kind of gnawing parasite which has wormed itself subtly into our intelligence.

The power to imagine always exists, whether or not it has a solid basis on which to rest and materials with which to build; but when it does not elaborate from reality and truth, instead of raising a divine structure it forms incrustations which compress the intelligence and prevent the light from penetrating thereto.

How much time and strength man has lost and is losing by this error!

Just as vice, which is an exercise of function without purpose, wastes the body until it becomes diseased, so imagination unsustained by truth consumes the intelligence until it a.s.sumes characteristics akin to the mental characteristics of the insane.

=Fable and religion=.--I have frequently heard it said that the education of the imagination on a basis of fancy prepares the soul of the child for religious education; and that an education based on "reality," as in this method we would adopt, is too arid, and tends to dry up the founts of spiritual life. Such reasoning, however, will not be accepted by religious persons. They know well that faith and fable are "as the poles apart," since fable is in itself a thing without faith, and faith is the very sentiment of truth, which should accompany man even unto death. Religion is not a product of fantastic imagination, it is the greatest of realities, the one truth to the religious man. It is the fount and basis of his life. The man without religion is not, certainly, a person without imagination, but rather one who lacks internal equilibrium; compared with the religious man he is less calm, less strong in adversity; not only this, but he is more unsettled in his own ideas. He is weaker and more unhappy; and it is in vain that he catches at imagination to create a world for himself outside reality. Something within him cries aloud in the words of David: "My soul is a-thirst for G.o.d." And if he hopes to reach the goal of his real life by the help of imagination alone, he may feel his feet giving way among quicksands at a supreme moment of effort.

When an apostle seeks to win a soul to religion, where man may plant his faltering feet on a rock, he appeals to understanding, not to imagination, for he knows that his task is not to create something, but to call aloud to that which is slumbering in the depths of the heart. He knows that he must shake off the torpor from a feeble life as he would shake the snow from a living body buried in a drift, not build up a puppet of ice which will melt under the rays of the sun.

It is true that fantastic imagination penetrates religion, but in the guise of error. In the Middle Ages, for instance, epidemics were ascribed with great simplicity, to a direct act of divine chastis.e.m.e.nt; to-day they are attributed to the direct action of microbes. Papin's steam machines suggested diabolical intervention.

But these are precisely the kind of prejudices which, like all fantasies, swarm in the void of ignorance.

All religion is not thus constructed like a fantastic castle erected on a basis of ignorance. Otherwise we should see savage peoples religious and civilized peoples without religion; whereas savages have a frail and fantastic religion, mainly constructed upon the terror inspired by the mysterious activities of Nature, and civilized peoples have a positive religion, which becomes stronger as it becomes purer, while the science of truth, penetrating into Nature, serves to exalt and ill.u.s.trate its mysteries.

And, above all, to-day, when there is a movement in favor of eliminating religion altogether from the school, can we propose to introduce it by cultivating _fable_? It is such a simple matter to open the door directly to religion itself and allow its radiance to penetrate, warming and invigorating life.

But it should enter like the sun into creation, not like the Befana from the chimney-top.

Fable could prepare to some extent for pagan religion, which split up the divinity into innumerable minor G.o.ds, symbolizing the external world; this, being apprehended by the senses, may lend itself to illusion; but fable could certainly never prepare for Christianity, which brings G.o.d into contact with the inner life of man, "one and indivisible," and teaches the laws of a life which is "felt" by men.

If the positive sciences be extraneous to religion, it cannot be said that it is the study of reality in itself which alienates us therefrom. Hitherto the positive sciences have studied the "external world" in its a.n.a.lytical details, and if they could have made a "sympathetic," religion that religion might be the pagan creed.

Indeed, so far science has brought a very perceptive breath of paganism among us. But when it shall have succeeded in _penetrating the inner man_, and there making manifest the laws of life and the realities of existence, a great Christian light will surely s.h.i.+ne upon men; and maybe children, like the angels over Bethlehem, will sing the hymn invoking peace between science and faith.

Saint John in the desert "made straight the way of the Lord" and purged men of the grossest errors. And thus a method which gives internal equilibrium and disperses the grossest errors which suffocate the spiritual energies, makes ready for the reception of truth and the recognition of the "way of life."

=The education of the imagination in schools for older children=.--What is the method adopted in the ordinary elementary schools for the education of the imagination?

The school is, in most cases, a bare, naked place where the gray color of the walls and the white muslin curtains over the windows preclude any alleviation for the senses. The object of this depressing environment is to prevent the distraction of the scholar's attention by stimuli, and concentrate it upon the teacher who speaks. The children, seated, listen motionless hour after hour. When they draw, they have to reproduce another drawing exactly. When they move, it is in obedience to an order given by another person. Their personalities are appraised solely by the standard of pa.s.sive obedience; the education of their wills consists of the methodical renunciation of volition.

"Our usual pedagogy," said Claparede, "oppresses children with a ma.s.s of information which can never help them to direct their conduct; we make them listen when they have no desire to hear; speak, write, narrate, compose and discourse when they have nothing to say; we make them observe when they have no curiosity, reason when they have no desire to discover anything. We incite them to efforts which are supposed to be voluntary without the preliminary acquiescence of their _ego_ in the task imposed, that inner consensus which alone gives moral value to submission to duty."

The children thus reduced to slavery use their eyes to read, their hands to write, their ears to hear what the teacher says. Their bodies, indeed, are stationary; but their minds are unable to dwell upon anything. They must be continually exerting themselves to run after the mind of the teacher, who, in his turn, is urged on by a program drawn up at random, and which is certainly regardless of childish tendencies. The mind has to pa.s.s from thing to thing. Images fugitive and uncertain as dreams appear from time to time before the eyes of the child. The teacher draws a triangle on the blackboard and then erases it; it was a momentary vision represented as an abstraction; those children have never held a concrete triangle in their hands; they have to remember, by an effort, a contour around which abstract geometrical calculations will presently gather thickly; such a figure will never achieve anything within them; it will not be _felt_, combined with others, it will never be an inspiration. It is the same with everything else. The object would seem to be fatigue for its own sake, that fatigue which has engrossed almost the sum of effort of experimental psychology.

In this environment, where free exercise is prohibited, as also the choice of work, and meditation, where every sentiment is oppressed, and from which every external stimulus which might enrich the intelligence with spontaneous acquisitions is eliminated, an attempt is made to excite the imagination by giving "compositions" to be written. This means that the child has to _produce_ without having the necessary material; to give, without possessing; achieve internal activities which he is prevented from developing. And _production_ is to come from the _exercise of production_; "constant practise in composition" is to develop the imagination; from the sterility of the void the most complex products of the intelligence are to be evolved!

It is well known that "composition" represents the great difficulty of our schools. All teachers have declared that children are "poor in ideas," that they have "disorderly minds," that they are "absolutely without originality." The examination in written composition has always been the most painful of all; every one knows the expression of the child who hears the t.i.tle of an obligatory theme dictated; and who in a few hours must hand in a written composition, a product of the imagination; it is with anguish, with oppression of the heart, with cold hands and eyes anxiously interrogating the clock in terror of the fleeting hour, under the distrustful surveillance of a teacher who for the occasion is transformed into a spy-warder like those in penal prisons, that he undergoes his torture to the end. Woe to him if he does not hand in his composition! He will be ruined, for this is the princ.i.p.al test, the one in which he is _free_ to manifest his own worth, to give the true individual fruit by which others will measure his intelligence. It is in this way that our young generations often find neurasthenia and even suicide. Scholars cannot answer as did the greatest poet of our times, Carducci, when he was requested to write an ode on the occasion of the death of a personage: "It is inspiration, not an occasion, which would make me write an ode."

It is interesting to study the methods by which, in "modern schools,"

where some elements of psychical hygiene have penetrated, attempts are made to help the pupils by diminis.h.i.+ng their exhausting effort and leading them on gradually to composition. Composition (we must pa.s.s over the contradiction in terms for the moment) is "taught." The teacher gives collective lessons in composition, just as she would explain arithmetic: this is called "collective oral composition."

We will allow specialists in this method to speak, giving a pa.s.sage containing a preparation of teachers for such lessons:

METHOD TO BE FOLLOWED IN THE MANNER OF INDICATING THE THEME

"Let us take, by way of ill.u.s.tration, the following brief narrative, which consists of three phases: 1. Ernesto did not know his lesson; 2. The teacher scolded the child severely; 3. Ernesto wept and promised to do better. If we indicate the narrative by the words: 'Ernesto did not know his lesson'

(first fact, cause), the pupil will go on easily to the effect, consisting of the two other phases which, logically and in chronological order, follow the cause. If, on the other hand, we give as the theme the indication corresponding to the second phase: 'The teacher scolded the child,' we oblige the pupil to go back to the cause and to make the third phase follow upon the second. We place the pupil in a more difficult position if we give as the theme: 'Ernesto wept and promised to do better,' since he will then be obliged to go back to the second and thence to the first phase.

"Hence the first phase in every brief narrative ought to serve to indicate the theme.