Parent and Child - Child Study and Training Part 13

11. What should receive the highest award in the gift of a people?

12. How did Greece train her children?

13. What evil practices should be prohibited in a community?

14. What reforms should be national rather than local?

15. How may the few lawless individuals be restrained?

16. What is the duty of the citizen towards self-improvement and education?

PART II

SUPPLEMENTAL STUDIES

MAN'S PARTNERSHIP WITH NATURE[1]

_Dr. John M. Tyler_

_Nature will bear our burdens for us, if we will obey her laws and heed her suggestions_.

[Footnote 1: These supplemental studies are based on lectures by Dr. John M. Tyler, given before the Utah Educational a.s.sociation, by whose permission they are used. Parents will find Dr. Tyler's book on Growth in Education of great interest. It is listed with other books at the close of this volume.]

How has all the material progress of the nineteenth century come about? I think we shall find that it was due to man's intelligently and carefully and scrupulously going into partnership with Nature by obeying her laws.

Not so very many years ago messages were sent across this continent by pony-riders; it was a slow process and a very expensive one. Now I step into an office here and I say, "I wish to send a message to my wife way out yonder in Ma.s.sachusetts." The man touches a b.u.t.ton and says, "Your message is in Ma.s.sachusetts, sir." It is a miracle. The lightning has run with my message. Electricity not only carries our messages, it lights our houses; it turns many a wheel of machinery; it serves us beneficiently just as long as we obey the laws of electricity; but when we offend against these laws, it thwarts us or very likely destroys us. "Obey, and I will do anything for you in the world," says Nature, "disobey and you cannot move me one single inch." Coal hurries our great locomotives and long trains of merchandise and carries men and women across this continent without any great amount of human labor. The engineer and the brakeman do not get behind and push those great palace cars of ours; it is Nature which drives the train as if it were sport. Man guides and directs the water pouring down our hillsides, turning wheels of countless factories. A few ounces of gasoline send the automobile down the street, polluting the air and endangering our lives. The power of Nature is absolutely irresistible and unlimited; and furthermore, she is always working towards some great and good end.

When I was a child I used to hear that Nature was bad, and we used to have sermons to the natural man. They were excellent sermons, too, but they ought to have been preached to the unnatural man. The natural child was considered a child of wrath, and, having that reputation, he quite frequently lived up to it; but Nature is beneficient, as long as we let her be so, and she is always working toward great and grand ends. She has been working towards a higher and n.o.bler and a better race of men than you and I are to-day. She is working for a race of men and women who shall tower above us as the sages and prophets in Athens and Jerusalem towered above their slaves. Can we not trust her just a little?

Did you ever think that it is the most marvelous thing in the world that such a thing as a chicken ever comes out of such a thing as an egg? If only one chicken were hatched in a century, we would go from here to the Himalaya mountains to see the miracle of that chicken coming out of that egg. You put an egg under a very stupid old hen, and all the hen does is to keep that egg warm, and leave it alone; after twenty days there comes out a chicken. How in the world did that chicken ever frame that body? How did it build the skeleton and string the muscles, and spin the nerves? If every nerve in that body did not make just the right connection, that chicken would be paralyzed. If you could watch the development of that chicken in the egg, your hair would stand on end. Isn't it Nature that makes those chickens? You and I can't make them. Nature puts a sh.e.l.l around the egg with the express purpose that we are to keep our fingers out and let her alone. She says: "I am on very important business now and I am going to do some strange things; if you could watch me you would interfere with me, and if you interfere with me, you will ruin me or ruin the chicken, so I want you to stand to one side and leave me entirely alone; and while I might do a good many things that you don't like, I shall bring a chicken out of that egg;" and she does; she has been making them for thousands of years in that same old stupid way, but she brings the chicken out all right.

Sometimes she seems to blunder still worse. She takes an egg which we suppose is going to turn into a frog, and she brings out of it a tadpole--neither fish, flesh nor fowl nor anything else. After a while the tadpole gets legs and has a long tail; it must lose that tail in order to become a frog. A benevolent zoologist one day started in to help the tadpole by snipping off the tadpole's tail; he made a frog of him in a hurry, but the strange thing was that that frog never was able to leap properly. Nature had been relying on the material that was in the tail. She was going to shift it forward and put it in the hind legs, but when the zoologist cut it off, she couldn't build the hind legs right after that.

A good deal of our education seems to me like trying to make frogs in a hurry by cutting off their tails. Nature can make chickens; she can make frogs. She can make bugs that will eat up everything which human ingenuity ever tried to raise. She will make weeds which you and I can't possibly kill even though we fight against them all summer long. We can trust Nature to form these things; isn't it fair to trust her with the children for a little while at least? Wouldn't it be well--I never heard of this experiment being tried, but I should like to see it tried very much indeed--I do wish that sometime somebody would leave a baby alone for twenty minutes and see what it would do if it were left to itself.

What is the great characteristic of all living things? It is that they grow; we cannot make them grow, but they grow of themselves. The farmer plants his crop of corn. He doesn't get a jackscrew and put under every hill of corn, and go around every morning and give the screw a turn and a twist and hoist the hill up in the air. He prepares the soil as best he can. He puts in the seed; he keeps down the weeds; he keeps out things and living beings which will injure the crop as far as he can; then he leaves it alone to G.o.d and Nature to make that corn grow, and in time he gets a bountiful harvest.

I believe that education some day will be somewhat like raising a crop of corn. We shall learn to keep the child under the best condition possible.

We shall learn to keep down harmful and injurious surroundings or forces so far as they can interfere with him. We shall stimulate growth in every possible way; that I grant you; and when we have done that, we shall leave the rest calmly to Nature and to the good Lord who made that child for some good purpose.

It is a grand thing to have the child learn to see for himself the glories of this magnificent world. I verily believe that when you and I go home, while the good Lord will be very merciful with us because of our sins, I don't see how he can forgive many of us for not having had a great deal better time in this glorious world in which He has put us. When you open the child's eyes to the beauties and the glories of Nature you have done a great thing for it. But, after all, that is not the grandest thing to my mind. The grandest part is that every wave of vibration that goes in through the eyes as the child looks at Nature, and pours into the brain, stimulates that brain to a larger growth than it would otherwise possibly have attained, and the child is a larger and a grander child for that Nature study.

We believe in manual training because it gives us skilled fingers and enables us to do deftly and well a great many things which we otherwise could not do at all, and which most of us men have to go to our wives and ask them to do for us. But that is not the grandest part of manual training; the grandest part is the reaction from the finger upon the brain, stimulating the brain to realize all its ideals, and stimulating it so that whenever it sees good work of any kind in this world it shall appreciate it heartily and enjoy it with the joy of the artist.

We speak of physical training and physical training is brain training in the end, it is training in growth. It is very evident, however, that the growth and development of a baby is something different from the growth and development of a child; and the growth in the child is very different from that in the youth and that of the youth from that of the adult. In the baby the vital organs are growing faster. In the young child the muscular system is coming to the front, and he runs and plays and through the stimulus of that muscular exercise he brings out every organ in the body and gains that magnificent health which he so much needs.

Then, after a time, the brain comes to the front and grows and develops more rapidly than any other part of the body. Our business as teachers is always so to stimulate, by proper exercise, the growing organs that they shall grow faster and further than they ever could without our aid. We are not to always hasten it. This is one thing we must bear in mind: precocity is the worst foe of a sound education. It is the boy and the girl who mature slowly but mature surely that in the end possess the earth. We must not hasten the process, but when we find the organ is ready to grow and develop, then we must give it adequate stimulus. In other words, the stimulus must be of the right kind, and there must be just enough of it, just enough blood to stimulate the muscles, just as much study as will best stimulate the growing and very immature intellectual centers in the brain.

Then we will increase the stimulus as the power increases and demands the stronger exercise, and so stimulating the growing parts by adequate exercise, we bring one part after another up to such development that we have one harmonious whole of perfect health.

You remember that when the old deacon in Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem started in to build the one-horse shay, he said, "Every shay that has ever been made has broken down, because there was always a weakest spot in it; now I am going to make a shay that never will break down, because I am going to make the weakest part just as strong as the rest." We cannot always do that, but if we can make that part somewhere near as strong as the rest, we are past masters in education.

If we obey Nature's laws, all of her powers will be on our side; and with all her powers on our side and the very stars in their courses fighting for us, we cannot possibly fail, there is absolutely nothing which is impossible to us. We must be strong and of good courage, if we are to guide these little people into the land sworn unto their fathers before them.

LESSON I

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What is meant by the expression, "Man's partnership with Nature?"

Ill.u.s.trate how man makes Nature serve him.

2. In what way can man enter into a partnership with Nature regarding his own body?

3. What can man do best when it comes to making things grow?

4. What do you think of the "hurry" methods in education?

5. What is the most we can do in providing for the education of the child?

6. How does Nature help us in the training process?

7. What does Nature try to make sure of first in the child?

8. When does the brain of the child begin to develop rapidly?

9. What advice would you give about precocity in children? Why?

10. What should we study in our children to give them a strong and even development?

CONSERVATION OF THE CHILD

_By Dr. J.M. Tyler_

When the good Lord sets out to develop a child, the first organ with which He starts is the stomach. The stomach is the foundation of all greatness.

It is a matter of daily observation if not of experience that a man can get along very well with very few brains, but a man can't get along at all without a good digestive system. The digestive system furnishes all the material for growth and the fuel which is continually burned or consumed in our nerves and muscles. Now, any furnace requires besides fuel, a good draught. When we burn the fuel, by uniting it with the oxygen thus brought in, we get the energy which draws our locomotives and our great ships.

Similarly in our bodies, our lungs bring in the oxygen and the heart and blood-vessels carry the fuel and the oxygen to every part of the body. But every furnace requires a smoke-stack to carry off the waste, and, similarly, we must have in our bodies an excretory system to remove the waste of the burned-up material and of the used-up tissue of the heart, muscles and nerves. This const.i.tutes the digestive system; the lungs, the excretory system and the circulatory system are absolutely necessary to support the combustion which is going on in nerve and muscle and without which energy is impossible.