Spontaneous Activity in Education Part 23

It is probable that this will be brought about by that science which studies the health and the maladies of the soul. If this should discover that the soul, too, is corruptible, subject to disease and death, that it has its laws of health and its _vis medicatrix naturae_, treatments tending to respect and aid this precious force of life should multiply immeasurably; and at the same time the mysterious source whence it gushes should impose itself on modern medicine, as the question of immunity has done. Then life, morality and religion will be indissolubly united.

Let us now turn to children of two and a half and three years old, who touch everything, but especially those objects which they evidently prefer, the most simple objects, as, for example, a square block of paper, a square inkstand, or a round, s.h.i.+ny bell. All things which "are not meant for them."

Then the mother comes and takes them away; half caressing, and at the same time tapping the little hands, she calls out, "Don't touch!

naughty!" I once was present at one of these many family scenes, which pa.s.s unnoticed. The father, who was a doctor, was sitting at the writing-table; the mother was holding in her arms a very small child, who was stretching out its little hands to the various objects upon the table. The doctor said, "That child is incorrigibly naughty, although it is so young. However much its mother and I try to cure it of this fault of touching my things, we never succeed." "Naughty!

naughty!" repeated the mother, holding its little hands tightly, while the child threw itself back, howling, and throwing its feet about as if it wished to kick.

When children are three or four years older, the struggle becomes more severe: they want to _do_ things. Those who observe them carefully discover that they have some "tendency." They wish to imitate what their mother does, if their mother is a housewife. They willingly follow her into the kitchen, they wish to share her work, to touch her things, and they try furtively to knead and cook and wash clothes, and sweep the floor. The mother feels wearied by them; she keeps on repeating, "Be quiet; leave it alone. Don't tease me. Go away." Then the child makes a great noise, throws himself on the ground, and kicks; but then he begins again to do as much as he can without being seen, as quickly as possible; and by trying to wash things in a hurry, gives himself a bath; trying to conceal some contraband ragout, he makes the floor dirty. The mother's anger, cries, and reproofs increase; and the child reacts with naughtiness and tears; but begins again almost at once.

Where the mother does not do her own work, the child, if intelligent, is still more unfortunate. He looks for something which he cannot find, and cries for no reason, he flies into a pa.s.sion for which no one can account; some fathers lament this, almost with despair. "My child is very intelligent, but so naughty! nothing will satisfy him.

It is no use to buy toys for him, he is really overdone with them; nothing is of any use."

The mother asks anxiously, "What do you advise me to do when the child is naughty? and when he gets into pa.s.sions? He is so naughty, he never keeps still; I cannot contend with him any more."

It is rare to hear a mother say, "My baby is good--it is always asleep." Who has not heard some poor mother shout in a threatening voice to the crying babe in her arms, "Be quiet, be quiet, I tell you!" and then, naturally the child is frightened, and redoubles its cries.

This is the first contest of the man who enters the world: he has to struggle with his parents, with those who have given him life. And this occurs because his infant life is "different" from that of his parents; the child has to form himself, whereas his parents are already formed. The child must move about a great deal, to coordinate his movements, which are not yet under control; the parents, on the other hand, have their voluntary mobility organized, and can control their movements; perhaps also they are often tired after their work.

The child's senses are not yet fully developed; his powers of accommodation are insufficient, and need help from touching and feeling, in order to take account of objects as well as of s.p.a.ces; and his eyes are rectified by the experience of his hands. The parents, on the contrary, have developed senses, and have already corrected the primitive illusions of these; their powers of accommodation are perfect, if they have not spoilt them by abuse; in every way cerebral activity leads the senses to receive an exact impression; they have no need to touch. Children are anxious to get knowledge of the external world; their parents know it too well already.

Therefore they do not understand each other.

Parents want their children to do as they do, and any diversity is called "naughtiness." Think of the mother who drags her child along with her; he has to run while she walks; his legs are short, while hers are long; weak, while hers are strong, he has to bear the weight of his body and his disproportionately large head, while the mother has a head and body which are proportionally lighter and smaller. The child is tired and stands and cries, and the mother exclaims, "Come on, you naughty little thing! I won't have any nonsense. Do you want me to carry you, lazybones? No, I won't give in to you."

Or again, we see mothers who, when their children sit down on the ground--or lay themselves flat on their stomachs with their feet in the air, and support themselves on their elbows, while they look round them, call out, "Off the ground! You are making yourself dirty, naughty child."

All this may be translated in this way: "The child is different from the adult. The formation of his body is such that his head and his body are enormously large in comparison with his small, slender legs, because they are the part which will grow most. Hence the child cannot endure walking, and prefers to lie at full length, which is the most healthy position for him. He has a wonderful tendency towards development; he gets his first ideas of external life and a.s.sists his senses of sight and hearing by touching, in order to realize the forms of objects and distance. He moves continually, because he must coordinate and adapt his mobility. Hence he moves a great deal, walks very little, throws himself on the ground, and touches everything, and these are signs that he is alive, and that he is growing." No--all this is looked upon as naughtiness.

This is evidently not a moral question. We do not seek for means to correct these depraved tendencies of the man who is but just born. No, it is not a moral question. It is, however, a question of life.

The child seeks to live and we want to hinder him. In that sense it does become a moral question, as regards ourselves, since we have begun to examine those errors on our part which do harm, and infringe the rights of others. Moreover, our own egotism is concealed beneath our errors of treatment; what we really resent in the child is that he gives us trouble; we struggle against him in order to protect our own comfort, our own liberty. How often at the bottom of our hearts we have felt that we have been unjust, but have stifled this impression.

The little rebel does not accuse us or bear us malice. On the contrary; just as he persists in his "naughtinesses" which are forms of life, so does he persist in loving us, in forgiving us everything, in forgetting our offenses, in longing to be with us, to embrace us, to sit upon our knees, to fall asleep on our bosom. This, too, is a form of life. And we, if we are tired or satiated, repulse him, masking this excess of selfishness under a hypocritical pretense of concern for the child himself: "Don't be so silly!" Insult and calumny are always on our lips in the eternal refrain: "Naughty, naughty." And yet the figure of the child might stand for that of perfect goodness, which "thinketh no evil, delighteth not in iniquity, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things." As to us--no, we cannot always say as much of ourselves.

If the struggle between the adult and the child could be brought to an end in "peace," and the adult, accepting the conditions of infant life, would seek to help the child, the former would be able to advance towards one of the most sublime enjoyments which Nature can bestow: that of following the natural development of the child, and seeing the man evolved. If the opening rosebud has become a commonplace of poetry, how much greater is the poetry of the infant soul in its manifestations? Now this ineffable gift which was placed beside us, in order that the miracle might accompany us and comfort us, we trample under foot in our wrath, blaspheming as if demented.

When the child desires to touch and to act, in spite of "punishments of every kind," he persists in exercises necessary "to his development," and displays a strength of will in the matter against which we are often powerless; he shows the same persistence as in breathing, in crying when he is hungry, and in raising himself when he wants to walk. Thus the child turns to external objects which respond to his needs: if he finds them, he displays his powers in muscular or sensory exercises, and then he is joyous; and if he does not find them, he is restless as when his desires are unsatisfied. Toys are too light to satisfy arms which require to make the efforts necessary in lifting and moving objects; they are too complex to satisfy senses which need to a.n.a.lyze a single sensation. They are vanity, and in themselves they represent simulacra and parodies of actual life. And yet they form the world of our children, in which they are constrained to "consume" their potential powers in a continuous exasperation, which incites them to destroy things.

Happily, children do not hear the p.r.o.nouncement of the common formula, that children have an "instinct" for destruction. Nor are they familiar with the other axiom which contradicts this: That the instinct of "property," in other words, selfishness, is strongly developed in them. On the contrary, the child has merely the overpowering instinct to "grow," and therefore to raise and to perfect himself; in every period of life he seeks instinctively to prepare himself for the next period. This fact is very much more comprehensible than the strange instincts we calumniously attribute to him.

Just try the experiment of allowing children to act for themselves; they are at once "transformed." In the Guerrieri Gonzaga Children's House, it sufficed to provide a comb, to transform the naughtiest, most rebellious of the children, the one whom the teacher designated as in need of "taming," into a lively and attractive little girl, who combed the hair of her companions most carefully, with evident delight. We had only to say to an awkward, lethargic child, who came forward holding out her arms to have her sleeves pulled down for her: "Do it yourself," and there was a flash of intelligence in her eyes, her weary face was lighted up by an expression of satisfied pride and amazement, and she began to pull down her sleeves with positive delight. When these children were given a little basin and a piece of soap, how carefully they emptied and replaced the receptacle, fearing to break it, and how caressingly they handled the soap, laying it down very gently! It seemed as if the task had been confided to a mechanism of moving figures, with an accompaniment of music: the figures were the children, the music was their own joy.

These children, occupied in dressing, cleaning, was.h.i.+ng, combing, cleansing, and arranging their environment, work _themselves_. As a result, they love useful objects so much that they will preserve a piece of paper for years, and instead of knocking against furniture, and breaking objects, they perfect their movements.

But we place ourselves beside these lives which are hastening triumphantly to their salvation, and seek to bind them to ourselves, in spite of the struggle which has begun and the fear we have already provoked. We approach them gently and seductively; and because when a child breaks things he is obviously grieved, and therefore would endeavor to correct and perfect his movements, we spare him this grief, which would be in the nature of "an act of repentance on the part of the muscles which have transgressed," and give him unbreakable objects: plates, basins, and drinking vessels made of metal, toys made of stuff, woolly bears, india-rubber dolls. Henceforth his "errors"

will be concealed. Every error of the muscles will pa.s.s unnoticed by the child: he will no longer feel the pain of evil-doing, repentance, an effort to perfect himself. He will be able to sink into error; behold him, clumsy, heavy, without expression in his face, a stuffed bear in his arms! He is now bound fast to vanity and error, and has lost all consciousness thereof.

The adult hems him in ever more closely: he does everything for the child, dresses him, even feeds him. But the child's desire is not to be dressed and materially nourished: his deep desire is to "do," to exercise his own powers intelligently, and thus to rise to his higher level. With what subtle insinuations does the adult seek to confound him! You are exerting yourself and why? That you may be washed? That you may put on your pinafore? You can have all this done for you without any effort. You will find it all done with greater perfection and ease. Without moving a finger you shall have a hundred times more done for you than you could accomplish for yourself, even with all the exertion of which you are capable. You need not even put the bread into your mouth, you shall be spared even this trouble, and you will take in nourishment all the more copiously.

The devil was less cruel when he tempted Christ in the wilderness, showing Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. "All these things will I give Thee if thou wilt fall down and wors.h.i.+p me."

But the child has not the power to answer like Christ: "Get thee hence, Satan; for it is written: Thou shalt wors.h.i.+p the Lord thy G.o.d, and Him only shalt thou serve." The child ought to obey G.o.d, who has prescribed that his nature shall demand action; and that he should conquer his world as he has conquered life, to the end that he may elevate himself and not to the end that he may acquire external splendor and comfort. When tempted, however, he cannot resist. He ends by possessing the objects, the pretty, ready-made things; his soul makes no progress; he loses sight of the goal. Behold the child clumsy, unsteady, inept, enslaved! Those incapable muscles encase a captive soul. He is oppressed far more by this fatal inertia than by the physical contests which initiated his relations with the adult.

Often he has fits of rage like the sinner; he bites the bear that he cannot break, cries desperately when he is washed and has his hair combed, rebels and struggles when he is dressed. The only movements allowed by the devil are those of anger. But gradually he sinks into the depression of impotence. Adults say: "Children are ungrateful; they have none of the higher feelings as yet; they care only for their own pleasure."

Who has not seen patient mothers and nurses, "bearing" from morning till night the humors of four or five discontented children, who are screaming and playing pranks with their metal plates and rag dolls?

They seem to say: "Children are like this," and a benevolent compa.s.sion takes the place of the natural reaction of impatience. Of such persons we say: "How good they are! how patient they are!"

But the devil, too, is patient after this fas.h.i.+on: he too can contemplate the agonies and impotent rebellions of the souls which are in his power, which are prostrate among vanities, oppressed by a great quant.i.ty of means, the ends of which they have lost, souls in which the consciousness of sin is extinguished, and which are gradually sinking into an abyss of mortal error. He is patient in contemplating them, in supporting their cries--and he too offers them bears and rubber dolls, and feeds them, stuffing them, that is to say, with new vanities which mask their errors, and nourish their bodies.

He who, seized with doubt, should ask concerning these mothers and nurses: "Are they really good?" might get an idea from the reply of Christ: "None is good save G.o.d," that is, the Creator. Goodness is the attribute of G.o.d. He who creates is good, only creation is good. Hence he only is good who helps creation to achieve its ends.

Now we come to the school. Conceptions of goodness and naughtiness must be very definite here, for when a teacher has to leave the cla.s.s-room, she calls one of the children, who, during her absence, is charged to write the names of the "Good" and the "Naughty" in two columns on the blackboard under these headings. The child, however, who is called out is quite capable of judging, for nothing is easier than to distinguish between goodness and naughtiness in schools. The good are those who are quiet and motionless; the naughty are those who talk and move. The results of the cla.s.sification are not very serious.

The teacher gives good or bad "conduct marks." The consequences are not disastrous; they are, so to speak, akin to the social judgments pa.s.sed upon men whose conduct is appraised as good or bad. This does not affect society, and the judgment entails neither honors nor imprisonment. It is merely a p.r.o.nouncement. But "esteem" and even "honor" depend upon it, things which have a high moral value. In school "good conduct" means inertia, and "bad conduct" means activity.

The "esteem" of the head mistress, of the teacher and of schoolfellows, the whole "moral" part, in fact, of the system of rewards and punishments, depend upon these appreciations. As in society, they require no "judicial qualifications," no "authority" in those who form them; they are based on something that "all" can see and judge; they are the true moral judgment of the environment; indeed, any one of the children themselves, or even the cla.s.s-room attendant, may write the list on the blackboard. There is, in fact, nothing mysterious or philosophical in conduct; it is the sum of acts committed, the facts of life itself, accessible to all, which determine it. And all can see it and p.r.o.nounce upon it.

On the other hand, there are much more serious acts, the consequences of which affect the community and touch those principles of justice on which all are ent.i.tled to rely; they therefore require "authoritative judgments" against which there is no appeal; a kind of Supreme Court hastily convoked.

When in an examination the children, seated side by side, have there and then to give samples of what they have learnt, that is, to hand in that veritable legal doc.u.ment, an evidence visible and accessible to all judgments, the written task, be it dictation, composition or problem; if then one child helps another, he is not merely naughty, but wicked, for he has not only displayed activity, but activity for the benefit of another. The punishment may be very serious: the annulment of the examination, which may sometimes mean the loss of a whole year's schooling, the repet.i.tion of that year's course. A child who can help another is kind; well, he may be punished by having to pa.s.s the examination again, several months later, or even by having to go back for a whole year of his life and begin over again. There are many cases of this kind: the family of this kind-hearted child may have been very poor, and the child may have been making a great effort to come out well, and so to be able soon to help his family by his own childish work; who knows how his comprehension of this family condition may touch the heart of a child? He may have seen in his bewildered schoolfellow another poor boy in like circ.u.mstances. How often some quarrel in his home, or insufficient food, may have caused him to lie in bed, sleepless and excited, for hours? In the morning his mind was confused. Perhaps his unfortunate schoolfellow had been in like case just on the eve of the examinations.

It is essential to understand certain situations: the mother at home counts the days of each school year that pa.s.ses, because to her these are so many days sacrificed; she is certainly following her boy at the examination with a heart full of anxiety; her face at the window when the child comes in sight asks, when he is yet afar: "How did it go?"

This picture was perhaps present in the heart of the good-natured child when he helped his comrade.

He might, of course, keep all this to himself, perfect his own work, or hand it in first. For justice decrees that the time spent on the work should be counted by the minute, almost as by the chronometers of psychological experiment. Justice is rigorous. On the paper handed in by the child the teacher writes the hour: handed in at 10.32, handed in at 11.5. If two papers are about equal in merit, so that it can hardly be said from the contents which is the better of the two, though both are superior to all the rest, a difficult case arises: it must be decided which is to be the first. It is a matter of great weight, because the prize is in question. When there is a doubt, the hour decides. One paper was handed in at 10.30, the other at 10.35.

The one handed in at 10.30 is p.r.o.nounced the first, because the writer was able to do work of equal merit in five minutes less than his rival. On what may not a prize sometimes depend! Hence a diligent child must be very careful in his preparations for an examination; the two in question were equally clever and equally quick; but one had taken care to have good pens and flowing ink, and the other had not.

Thus his negligence cost him the prize. It is true that the parents and not the children provide the pens. In strict justice all should have the same pens, but here we enter into a sea of scruples which might obscure justice. No, justice must be rigorous, but without scruples. Now the clever child who helped his companion lost time, and so by this alone he lost part of his merit; he therefore "sacrificed" himself for a comrade.

No considerations, no extenuating circ.u.mstances will be allowed to mitigate the punishment. Family conditions, the mother ... nothing can avail against the canceling of an examination. Even in the case of great criminals extenuating circ.u.mstances are admitted in mitigation of punishment. But school is another matter; here we have to deal with definite facts: there has been an infiltration of one mind into another, and we are no longer able to judge the children individually by their work. Moreover, the examination is the individual test. If the canceling occurs at the final examination, the culprit must go through the year again, and when a year is repeated it is the entire year. It is not as with convicts, where months and weeks are taken into account. Here the unit of measurement is the school year. And then there is another point to consider in the case of convicts: their crimes may have been induced by irresistible forces and conditions, driving them to do evil.... But who is there who cannot refrain from doing good? To do good is certainly not an irresistible impulse!

However, to obviate such inconvenient impulses, school educates children to refrain from mutual aid throughout the year. It goes even farther: it directly prevents the children from communicating one with another. What a chase it is! The clever, practical teacher adopts regular strategic tactics, and is familiar with all the child's devices in this covert and deceitful contest. Children are "capable of anything" to support one another and communicate one with another. If "prompting" when one child is repeating a lesson might reach the teacher's ear, we find a companion sitting in front of him with the open book fastened to his shoulders, where the other is able to read it. Or if the wily teacher makes the patient come out from among the desks in order to prevent him from receiving any help, his companions may make signs to him, perhaps by means of the deaf-and-dumb alphabet.

Then we find the teacher using the blackboard as a pretext for turning the pupil with his face to the wall, the while she keeps her burning eyes fixed on the cla.s.s. Thus the patient is isolated. "Nothing escapes" a clever teacher; she is capable of surprising a rolled-up note slipped by one child under the desk of another; and of confiscating a piece of blotting-paper which two children interchange on the pretext of using it, when they have written upon it.

For this reason properly constructed desks should be open in front, because otherwise it is so easy to pa.s.s things under them; whereas with desks which are not only hygienic but "moral," such subterfuges would be difficult to carry out.

"Indeed, these desks which are open in front also facilitate surveillance of the scholars from the moral point of view; because, always seated, placed side by side without any possibility of spiritual communion, their heads dazed by the continuous vociferation of the teacher, these children very often contract vicious habits, such as onanism, which originate in the school itself. These are less openly discussed than spinal curvature, myopia, and exhaustion from overwork, but the evil has long been recognized, even before science entered upon the scene to make a study of the maladies engendered by school conditions. The sedentary habit impedes circulation in the pelvic basin, and induces stagnation of the blood; moreover, what other outlet is provided for the nervous energies? And the evil spreads in an alarming manner.

"But open desks make subterfuges impossible. All moral devices for combating abuses flourish in the school. In the schools in Rome, for example, order and surveillance are so perfect that children are not even allowed to go to the lavatory. It is well known what disorder was caused by this 'question of the lavatory.' If a child became tired of sitting still or listening to the teacher, he asked leave to go out: he was capable of remaining shut up in the lavatory for a considerable time, in order to raise his spirits a little in a place he preferred to that he had just left, for pupils are not allowed to linger in the corridors; the attendants are always on the watch. But these visits to the lavatory had become such an abuse that it was decided to take remedial measures. To-day the physiological time is reckoned more or less exactly, and at a stated hour the whole of the pupils, accompanied by the teacher, marching in line two by two, like soldiers drilling, proceed to the lavatories. The children of the first file enter in succession and the others halt, but continue to mark time; as by degrees the children come out of the lavatory, they form in file again, and begin once more to mark time together with their companions. The movement seems, indeed, appropriate to the occasion. We will say nothing of the state in which the last children in the file of forty or fifty (who did not go in as a pretence, since the 'physiological time' had been reckoned) will find the lavatory; nor will we ask what has become of hygiene. Let us look at the exterior of the lavatories; they have little doors with a large s.p.a.ce above and a large s.p.a.ce below; thus modesty, and at the same time morality, are safeguarded; within, nothing but the proper duty can be performed. The more modern lavatories in schools, however, are made without seats; with an aperture in the ground to obviate contact and ensure hygiene: the uncomfortable position prevents a longer sojourn than is necessary. It appears that this is the best practical method for installations of this kind in common lodging-houses, casual wards, and schools."

School is the place where the "social sentiment" is developed; it is the child's society. As a fact, it is not the school in itself, nor the intercourse of the scholars, but the education given in the manner described above which is designed to develop this sentiment. Hence when my method became known, although I had spoken therein of places where children live together agreeably and work, I was asked in a critical tone: "And how will the social sentiment be developed if each child works independently?" We must therefore conclude that this system of regimentation in which the children do everything at the same moment, even to visiting the lavatory, is supposed to develop the social sentiment. The society of the child is therefore the ant.i.thesis of adult society, where sociability implies a free and well-bred interchange of courtesies and mutual aid, although each individual attends to his own business; in the society of the child it implies ident.i.ty of physical att.i.tudes and uniformity of collective actions, together with a total disregard of all pleasant and courteous relations; mutual help which is a virtue in adult society, is here considered the gravest fault, the worst offense against discipline.

Modern methods of instruction recommend the teacher to conclude every lesson with a moral, like the cla.s.sic fables. Whether the lesson treats of birds, b.u.t.ter, or triangles, it must always end by pointing a moral. "The teacher must miss no opportunity," says the pedagogist; "moralization is the true aim of the school."

"Mutual aid" is the burden of the pedagogistic refrain, for the _leitmotif_ of all moralities, not excepting that of the school, is "to love one another." To exhort children to help one another and show mutual affection the teacher perhaps adopts a psychological method in three periods distinguis.h.i.+ng perception, a.s.sociation, and volition; or she may adopt the method of cause in its relation to effect; this is left to her discretion; but she must always keep her cla.s.s in a state of "discipline" and "goodness," for these are its essential const.i.tuents.

But the factor which affords the most substantial support to the educative organism of the school is the system of prizes and punishments.