Study of Child Life Part 11

What holds true of the pictorial art holds equally true of the plastic art. As Prof. Veblin of the University of Chicago has scathingly declared, our ideals of the beautiful are so mingled with worship of expense that few of us can see the genuine beauty in any object apart from its expensiveness. For this reason as well as, perhaps, because of a remnant of barbarism in us, we love gold and glitter, and a great deal of elaboration in our vases, and are far from being over-critical of any piece of statuary which costs a respectable sum.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RELIEF MEDALLION

By Andrea della Robbia, in Foundling Hospital, Florence.]

A certain appreciation, however, of the real value of a good plaster-cast has been gaining among us of late years, and many public schools, especially in the large cities, have been establishing standards of good taste in this respect. Good casts and bas-relief, decorate their halls and cla.s.s-rooms. There are few homes that cannot afford to follow their example. But in buying these things be not misled by sales and advertised bargains. It is more than seldom that the placques, casts, and vases thus obtained are such as could have any valuable influence whatever upon the young lives with which they are brought in contact. Meretricious and showy ornaments, designed to look as if they cost more than they really do, have no business in the sincere home where the children are being sincerely educated.

[Sidenote: Music]

The same general laws apply to music. No art has a greater and more insinuating influence. The very songs with which the mother sings the baby to sleep have an occult influence which is later revealed and made plain. Such songs, then, should be simple. They may be nothing but improvisations, the mother's mind and heart making music, but they should not be melodramatic songs of the music-hall order. No such mawkish sentimentalism as that shown in "The Gypsy's Warning," for example, or other songs which belong to the cheap theater should have a place in the holy of holies--that inmost self of the child--which responds to music.

The simple folk-songs of all nations, Eleanor Smith's and most of Mrs. Gaynor's songs, already mentioned, and the songs collected by Reinecke, called "Fifty Children's Songs," are excellent for this purpose. The old-fashioned nonsense songs, such as "Billy Boy," "Mary had a Little Lamb" and "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle,"

may also have a pleasant and harmless place of their own.

Instrumental music should be on the same general order, not loud and showy, but clear, simple, sweet, and free from startling effects.

Dashing pieces, rag-time pieces, marches, two-steps, and familiar tunes with variations, instead of bringing about a spirit of gentleness and harmony, actually tend to produce self-a.s.sertiveness and quarrelsomeness. Let any mother who does not believe this try the effort of an hour of the one kind of music on one evening, and an hour of the other kind on another evening. The difference will be immediately apparent.

[Sidenote: The Drama]

The influence of the drama must not be forgotten. This form of art, fallen so low among us since the time of the Puritans that it can scarcely be called an art at all, is, nevertheless, the art which perhaps above all others has an immediate and yet lasting influence.

Children are themselves instinctively dramatic. They like to compose and act out all sorts of dramas of their own, from playing house (which is nothing but a drama prolonged from day to day), to such dramatic games as Statue-posing and Dumb Crambo. All children like to dress up, to wear masks, and to imitate the peculiarities of persons about them; to try on, as it were, the world as they see it, and discover thereby how the actors in it feel. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister has already been referred to. In this--his great book on education--he practically bases all education upon the drama, and even throws the treatise itself into dramatic form.

This does not mean, however, that all children should be permitted to go to the theater as freely as they like. No; the plays which they compose and act for themselves have a far higher value educationally than most of the spectacular presentations of the old fairy tales with which they are usually regaled, and certainly more than the sensational melodramas which give them false ideas of art and morality. They should go sometimes to the theater to see really good and simple plays, but they should be oftener encouraged to get up for themselves plays at home. If, as they grow older, they are helped to think out their costumes with something of historical accuracy, to be true to the spirit and scenery of the times in which the representations are laid, the activity can be made to increase in value to them as the years go by. There is no other art, perhaps, by which the child so intimately links the world spirit with his own spirit. It is for this reason that the School of Education in the University of Chicago is equipped with small theaters in which the children act.

[Sidenote: Literature]

As for the art of literature, not all children love reading, perhaps, but certainly all children love to hear stories told, and the skilful mother will direct this spontaneous affection into a love for reading. No other single love, except perhaps the love of nature, so emanc.i.p.ates the child from the thrall of circ.u.mstances. If he can escape from the small ills of life into fairy-land merely by opening the covers of a book, be sure that these ills will not have power to crush him, unless they be very great ills indeed.

[Sidenote: Fairy Tales]

There are those who still believe that fairy-tales and fiction of all sorts are nothing but lies. Poor souls, with their faces against the stone wall of hard facts, they can never look up into the sky and see the winged and beautiful thoughts freely disporting there. They make no distinction between truth and fact, yet truth is of the spirit and fact of the flesh; and truth, because it is of the spirit, may appear under many forms, even under the form of play. All rightly told and rightly conceived fairy-tales are true just as a good picture is true.

The painter uses oil, turpentine, and pigment to represent the wool of a sheep, the water of a pond, the green spears of gra.s.s. Some literal-minded person might say that he was lying because he pretented that his little square of canvas truthfully represented grazing sheep at the brook-side, but most of us recognize that he is really telling the truth only in another than an every day form. In the same way the writer of fairy-tales tells the truth, using the pigments of the imagination.

If children ask whether a given story is true or not, answer without hesitation, "yes." It is true, but it is a fairy kind of truth; it is inside truth. There is magic in it and a mystery. The child who is never allowed to read fairy tales, the man or the woman who prefers the newspaper to a good book of fiction, misses much in life. It is not only that the imagination--the divinest quality of man, because the quality that makes man in his degree a creator--does not receive culture, and that he misses the indescribable intellectual ecstasy that comes only with the setting free of the wings of the mind, but that also he is inevitably shorn of his sympathy and shut up to a narrow circle of interests.

[Sidenote: Imagination and Sympathy]

For sympathy, above all moral qualities, is dependent upon imagination. If you cannot imagine how you would feel under your neighbor's conditions, you cannot deeply sympathize with him. The person of unimaginative mind sympathizes only with those whose experience and habits are similar to his own. He never escapes from the narrow circle of his own personality. But the man whose imagination has been kept flexible and ready from earliest childhood has within him the power of sympathizing with whatever is human--yes!

even with creatures and things below the human level. Without imagination, therefore, it is not possible for a man to be a great scientist, for science demands sympathy with processes and objects which are not yet human. It is not possible, obviously, for him to be a great artist of any kind, for all art is interpretation of the world by means of the imagination. It is not possible for him, even, to be a good man in any broad sense, for the man whose sympathies are narrow is often found to be guilty of injustice toward those who lie outside the pale of those sympathies.

By all means, then, encourage the love of reading in your children, and get them the best of story-books to read, and subscribe to the best magazines. Read with them. Let some reading enter into every day's life; talk over what has been read at the dinner-table, and so avoid harmful personalities and disagreeable criticisms.

[Sidenote: Books]

As to the books to choose, choose the best. Generally speaking, the best are those that have some dignity of age upon them. As in music you chose the folksongs, so in children's literature also choose the old fashioned fairy stories, such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm and by Andrew Lang. Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Stories of course are cla.s.sics. Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales give excellent suggestions as to the right use to be made of the old mythologies.

Many of the supplementary readers now being so widely used in the public schools are good, simple versions of these old stories which helped to make the world what it should be. For the rest there are two standard children's magazines which help to form a good taste in literature and which are continually suggestive of the right sort of reading material. These are The Youth's Companion and St. Nicholas.

[Sidenote: Nature Study]

Finally, all appreciation of literature and art depends upon a love of and some knowledge of nature. Fairy stories and mythology especially are so dependent upon nature for their inner meaning and significance as scarcely to be intelligible without some knowledge of natural processes and laws. Of course, it is true that art in its turn idealizes nature and fills her beautiful form with a beautiful soul; so that the child who is being developed on all sides needs to take his books and his pictures out of doors in order to get the full good of them.

[Sidenote: Art and Nature]

No amount of music, art, and literature can make up for the free life in the fields and under the sky which all these arts describe and interpret. If he should be so unhappy as to have to choose between nature and art, it would be better for him to choose nature, because then, perhaps, art might be born in his own soul. But there is happily no need for such a painful choice. He can sing his little song out of doors with the birds and notice how they join in the chorus. He can paint evening sunsets with the pine-trees against it far better out of doors than indoors with copy perched before him. He can look down the aisles of the real woods to watch for the enchanted princess, or for the chivalrous knight whose story he is reading. Art and nature belong together in the unified soul of the child. Well for him and for the world in which he lives if they are never divorced, but he goes on to the end loving them both and seeing them both as one.

CHILDREN'S a.s.sOCIATES

If the child was intended to grow into a man of family, merely, family training might be sufficient for him, but since he must grow into a member of society, social training is as necessary for him as family training. Failure to recognize this truth is at the bottom of the current misconceptions of the Kindergarten. There are still thousands of persons who suppose it is only a superior sort of day-nursery where children may be safely kept and innocently employed while the mother gets the housework done.

[Sidenote: The Kindergarten]

While this might be a laudable enough function to perform, it is by no means the function of the Kindergarten. This method of instruction aims at much more. It aims to lay foundations for a complete later education, and especially to make firm in the child those virtues and apt.i.tudes which, when they are held by the majority of men, const.i.tute the safety and welfare of society. For this reason no home, however well ordered, can supply to the child what the Kindergarten supplies.

For the home is necessarily limited to the members of one family, while the Kindergarten, on the contrary, makes plain to the child the claims upon him of society not made up of his kinsfolk. It is the wide world in miniature, and if it is a properly organized Kindergarten, it will contain within itself a wide variety of children--children of wealth and of poverty, of ignorance and of gentle breeding--and will bring them all under one just rule. For only by this commingling of many characters upon a common level and under the strict reign of justice can the child be fitted practically, and by means of a series of progressive experiments, for citizenship in a genuine democracy.

[Sidenote: Exclusive a.s.sociates]

Parents sometimes so far miss the aim of the Kindergarten as to desire that instead of such a commingling there shall be a narrow limit set; that in the Kindergarten shall be only such children as the child is accustomed to a.s.sociate with. But if the Kindergarten acceded to this demand, as it seldom does, it would lose much of its usefulness, for every one knows that children cannot be permanently sheltered from contact with the outside world, nor can they be always reared in an atmosphere of exclusiveness. A wisdom greater than the mother's has ordered that no child shall be so narrowly nourished. If he has any freedom whatever, any naturalness of life, he must and will enlarge his circle of acquaintances beyond the limit of his mother's calling list.

Indeed, even those Kindergartens which are professedly exclusive, and which confine their ministrations to the children of one particular neighborhood, are obliged by the nature of things to contain nascent individualities of almost every type. For no neighborhood, however equal in wealth and fashion, ever produced children of an unvarying quality. In any circle, no matter how exclusive, there are mischievous children, children who use bad language, children who have sly, mean tricks, children who do not speak the truth, and who are in other ways quite as undesirable as the children of the poor and ignorant. It is often a.s.serted, indeed, that the children of exclusive neighborhoods very often show more varieties of badness than the children of the open street. The records of the private Kindergarten as compared with the public Kindergarten amply prove this statement.

[Sidenote: Evil Example]

Since, then, whether you confine your child to the limits of your own circle or not, you cannot successfully keep him from playing with children who are more or less objectionable, what are you going to do to keep him from the harm of such a.s.sociation? You have to make him strong enough to withstand temptation and resist the force of evil example. Of course, he must have as little of the wrong example, especially in his younger and tenderer years, as can be managed without too greatly checking his activity and curtailing his freedom.

Yet after all he is to be taught a positive and not a negative righteousness, and if his home training is not sufficient to enable him to stand against a certain downward pull from the outside, there is something the matter with it.

While he must not be strained too hard, nor too constantly a.s.sociate with children whose manners put his manners to the test, still he ought by degrees, almost imperceptibly, to be accustomed to holding to the truth, to that which is found good, no matter whether his a.s.sociates find it desirable or not.

[Sidenote: Social Training]

A good Kindergarten is a mother's best help in this endeavor, for there her child meets with all sorts of other children. The very influence of the place, and the ever-ready help of the teacher are on his side. Every effort he makes to do right is met and welcomed. In every stand that he takes against temptation, he is un.o.btrusively reinforced. Moreover, the wrong-doing of his comrades is never allowed to retain the attractive glitter that it sometimes acquires on the play-ground. It is promptly held up to general obloquy, and the good child finds to his surprise that he is not the only one who thinks that teasing, for example, is mean and selfish and that a violent temper is ugly.

[Sidenote: Responsibility to Society]

Moreover, in the Kindergarten the sense of social responsibility is borne in upon him. Perhaps it comes to him first when he is chosen to lead the march and finds that he must be careful not to squeeze through too narrow places, lest someone get into trouble. In dealing out pencils, worsted, and other materials he must be careful to show strict impartiality, and give no preference to his own personal friends. In a hundred small ways he is helped to regulate his own conduct, so that it may conduce to the welfare of the whole school.

Where there are no Kindergartens, the task becomes a more difficult one for the mother, for it becomes necessary, then, that she herself should undertake the social training of her child, and this means that she must know his playmates, not only through his report of them, but through her own observation of them, and that they must be sufficiently at home with her to betray their true characters in her presence. And this means, of course, that she must become her child's playmate. There are few women who think that they have time for this, but there are also few who would not be benefited by it. If anywhere there is a fountain of youth, it gushes up invisibly wherever playing children are, and she who plays with them gets sprinkled by it.

[Sidenote: Sharing the Child's Play]

If there be no time during the busy day when she can justly enter into the children's free play, at least there is a little while in the late afternoon or in the early evening when she can do so, if she will. An hour or two a week spent in active a.s.sociation with children at their games will make her intimately acquainted with all their playmates, and, moreover, const.i.tute her a power of first magnitude among them.

Her motherhood thus extends itself, and she blesses not only her own children, but all those who come near her children. In this respect no Kindergarten can take the place of the mother's own companionship with the child in his social life.

[Sidenote: The Children's Hour]

In an ideal condition the child has his Kindergarten in the morning; his quiet hours, one of them entirely solitary, in the afternoon; his social time, when he, his brothers and sisters and mother, are joined with the other children and mothers in the neighborhood, in the late afternoon, and his family time, with both father and mother, in the evening before going to bed.