Diana Palmer Long Tall Texans 32 Boss Man
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046. Alexander Meg Dziecko miĹoĹci
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home, or visits a friend, or goes for a picnic on the river or in the
woods ? I see nothing else for it; when that ideal chair has
been found, our child will have to carry it about with him
wherever he goes.
In the second place, how is it possible for this ideal chair to
H
92 Race Culture and the Training of the Children
be miraculously adaptable to every age and type of child?
Are we to treat children as plastic lumps of clay to be fitted to
the model insisted upon by the lines of our ideal chair; or are
we to study and measure each individual and have a chair built
to his measure, once a year, say, until he is adult ?
No, what we need to do is not to educate our school furniture,
but to educate our children. Give a child the ability to adapt
himself within reasonable limits to his environment, and he will
not suffer discomfort, nor develop bad physical habits, whatever
chair or form you give him to sit upon. I say, " within
reasonable limits," for it is obviously absurd to expect a Brob-
dingnagian child to use a Lilliputian chair. But let us waste no
valuable time, thought, or invention in designing furniture,
when by a smaller expenditure of those three gifts we may train
the child to win its own conscious control, and rise superior to
any probable limitations imposed by ordinary school fittings.
For the problem to be solved in education is that same
problem which needs solution in the social, political, religious,
industrial, economic, ethical, aesthetic, and other spheres of
progressive human activity. In every sphere of life we have
for years given " effects " the significance of " causes " and have
made worthy attempts to put matters right on this unsound
basis. In the case of education certain symptoms have been
recognized as more or less harmful, and the whole blame has
been placed upon the method or methods of education involved.
For at least half a century the method of the social worker
was conceived on the lines of giving money, food, and clothing
to the poor, in an attempt to ameliorate their condition. The
evils of this false policy came home to them in a practical way,
and nowadays the object of the social worker is to give the poor
the " means whereby " of general advancement and of getting
money, clothes, and food by their own efforts.
The same principle holds good in the treatment of the
children. Hitherto educationalists have given them what they
considered they needed. What we must do in the future is to
give them the " means whereby " they may themselves satisfy
their needs and command their own advancement.
The adoption of new methods is a procedure which always
demands a due and proper consideration of the thing, person,
or persons to which they are to be applied. Investigation along
these lines would probably have revealed the real cause of the
Race Culture and the Training of the Children 93
difficulties to be faced in the education of the child of to-day,
which is that the process of civilized life has gradually changed
the child's psycho-physical condition at birth. In this process
much has been gained and much lost. From the educator's
point of view the losses have been stupendous as compared with
the gains, for the all-important kinaesthetic systems have been
deteriorated by man's attempt to pass from the lower (animal)
to the higher stages of the evolutionary plane while depending
on a subconsciously controlled organism.
I have still very much more to say on this subject of educa-
tion, and I hope to have an opportunity in the near future of
elaborating my methods and of setting them out so that they
may be practically and universally applied. But if by these few
remarks I can arouse some interest in this world problem, I shall
have done something towards its solution. It is a problem
which is very urgent at the present time, and is growing more
urgent every day. All that we have done up to the present
time is to enforce one rule or another upon the children as an
experiment, for all the rules have been rigid in their enforce-
ment, however unscientific in their conception. In place of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
