What Is and What Might Be Part 6

Love is an unerring light, And joy its own security.

It recently happened that on a certain day one of the a.s.sistant-teachers had to go to a hospital, that another had to take her there, that the third was ill in bed, and that Egeria--the only available member of the staff--was detained by one of the managers for half-an-hour on her way to school. The school was thus left without a teacher. On entering it, Egeria found all the children in their places and at work. They had looked at the time-table, had chosen some of the older scholars to take the lower cla.s.ses, and had settled down happily and in perfect order. This incident proves to demonstration that the _morale_ of the school has somehow or other been carried far beyond the limits of what is usually understood by discipline. I have seen historical scenes acted with much vigour by some of the children in the first cla.s.s, and applauded with equal vigour by their cla.s.s-mates, while all the time the children in the second cla.s.s, who were drawing flowers in the same room, never lifted their eyes from their desks. Yet no children can laugh more merrily or more unrestrainedly than these, or make a greater uproar when it is fitting that they should do so.

And if there is no need for punishment, or any other form of repression, in this school, it is equally true that there is no need for rewards. To one who has been taught to regard compet.i.tion in school as a sacred duty, and the winning of prizes as a laudable object of the scholar's ambition, this may seem strange. But so it is. No child has the slightest desire to outstrip his fellows or rise to the top of his cla.s.s. Joy in their work, pride in their school, devotion to their teacher, are sufficient incentives to industry.

Were the stimulus of compet.i.tion added to these, neither the zeal nor the interest of the children would be quickened one whit, but a discordant element would be introduced into their school life. Happy as he obviously is in his own school life, it would add nothing to the happiness of the Utopian to feel that he had outstripped his cla.s.s-mates and won a prize for his achievement. So far, indeed, are these children from wishing to shine at the expense of others, that if they think Egeria has done less than justice to the work of some one child, the rest of the cla.s.s will go out of their way to call her attention to it. If some children are brighter, cleverer, and more advanced than others, the reward of their progress is that they are allowed to help on those who lag behind. This is especially noticeable in Drawing, in which the pre-eminence of one or two children has again and again had the effect of lifting the work of the whole cla.s.s to a higher level. But the laggards are as far from being discouraged by their failure as are the more advanced scholars from being puffed up by their success. From the highest to the lowest, all are doing their best and all are happy together.

From morals to manners the transition is obvious and direct. Be the explanation what it may, the whole atmosphere of this school is evidently fatal to selfishness and self-a.s.sertion; and in such an atmosphere good manners will spring up spontaneously among the children, and will scarcely need to be inculcated, for the essence of courtesy is forgetfulness of self and consideration of others in the smaller affairs of social life. The general bearing of the Utopian children hits the happy mean between aggressive familiarity and uncouth shyness,--each a form of self-conscious egoism,--just as their bearing in school hits the happy mean between laxity and undue constraint. They welcome the stranger as a friend, take his goodwill for granted, take him into their confidence, and show him, tactfully and unostentatiously, many pretty courtesies. And they do all this, not because they have been drilled into doing it, but because it is their nature to do it, because their overflowing sympathy and goodwill must needs express themselves in and through the channels of courtesy and kindness. There is no trace of sullen self-repression in this school. Accustomed (as we shall presently see) to express themselves in various ways, the children cannot entertain kindly feelings without seeking some vent for them. But whether their kindly feelings lead them to dance in a ring round their own inspector, singing "For he's a jolly good fellow," or to escort another visitor, on his departure, through the playground with their arms in his, their tact,--which is the outcome, partly of their self-forgetfulness, partly of the training which their perceptive faculties are always receiving,--is unfailing, and they never allow friendliness to degenerate into undue familiarity.

There is one other feature of the school life which I cannot pa.s.s over. I have never been in a school in which the love of what is beautiful in Nature is so strong or so sincere as in this. The aesthetic sense of the Utopian child has not been deliberately trained, but it has been allowed, and even encouraged, to unfold itself; and the appeal that beauty makes to the heart meets in consequence with a ready response. Of the truth of this statement I could, if necessary, give many proofs. One must suffice. The children, who are adepts at drawing with brush and pencil, wander in field and lane with sketch-books in their hands; and one of them at least was so moved by the beauty of a winter sunrise, as seen from his cottage window, that, in his own words, he felt he _must_ try to paint it, the result being a water-colour sketch which I have shown to a competent artist, who tells me that the _feeling_ in the sky is quite wonderful.

In this brief preliminary sketch of the more salient features of the Utopian school, I have, I hope, said enough to show that its scholars differ _toto coelo_ from those who attend that familiar type of school which I have recently described. Yet the Utopian children are made of the same clay as the children of other villages. If anything, indeed, the clay is heavier and more stubborn in Utopia than elsewhere. Some ten or twelve years ago, when Egeria took charge of the school, the children were dull, lifeless, listless, resourceless.

Now they are bright, intelligent, happy, responsive, overflowing with life, interested in many things, full of ability and resource. How has this change been wrought? Not by veneering or even inoculating the children with good qualities, but simply by allowing their better and higher nature to evolve itself freely, naturally, and under favourable conditions.

That the child's better and higher nature is his real nature, is the a.s.sumption--let me rather say, the profound conviction--on which Egeria's whole system of education has been based. In basing it on this a.s.sumption, she has made a bold departure from the highway which has been blindly followed for many centuries. We have seen that the basis of education in this country, as in Christendom generally, is the doctrine of original sin. It is taken for granted by those who train the child that his nature, if allowed to develop itself freely, will grow in the wrong direction, and will therefore lead him astray; and that it is the function of education to counteract this tendency, to do violence to the child's nature, to compel it by main force to grow (or make a pretence of growing) in the right direction, to subject it to perpetual repression and constraint. The wild whoops to which children so often give vent, when released from school, show that a period of unnatural tension has come to an end; and in these, and in the further conduct of the released child--in the roughness, rudeness, and bad language, of which the pa.s.ser-by (especially in towns) not infrequently has to complain--we see a rebound from this state of tension, an instinctive protest against the constraint to which he has been subjected for so many hours. The result of all this is that the child leads two lives, a life of unnatural repression and constraint in school, and a life--also unnatural, though it is supposed to be the expression of his nature--of reaction and protest out of school. Such a dislocation of the child's daily life is not likely to conduce to his well-being; while the teacher's a.s.sumption that his _role_ in school is essentially active, and that of the child essentially pa.s.sive, will lead at last to his turning his back on the root-idea of growth, to his forgetting that the child is a living and therefore a growing organism, to his regarding the child as clay in his hands, to be "remoulded" by him "to his heart's desire," or even as a _tabula rasa_, on which he is to inscribe words and other symbols at his will.

In Utopia the training which the child receives may be said to be based on the doctrine of original goodness. It is taken for granted by Egeria that the child is neither a lump of clay nor a _tabula rasa_, but a "living soul"; that growth is of the very essence of his being; and that the normal child, if allowed to make natural growth under reasonably favourable conditions, will grow happily and well. It is taken for granted that the potencies of his nature are well worth realising; that the end of his being--the ideal type towards which the natural course of his development tends to take him--is intrinsically good; in fine, that he is _by nature_ a "child of G.o.d" rather than a "child of wrath." It is therefore taken for granted that growth is in itself a good thing, a move in the right direction; and that to foster growth, to make its conditions as favourable as possible, to give it the food, the guidance, and the stimulus that it needs, is the best thing that education can do for the child.

It is further taken for granted that the many-sided effort to grow which is of the essence of the child's nature is the mainspring of, and expresses itself in, certain typical instincts which no one who studies the child with any degree of care can fail to observe; and that by duly cultivating these instincts,--_expansive_ instincts, as one may perhaps call them, since each of them tends to take the child away from his petty self,--the teacher will make the best possible provision for the growth of the child's nature as a whole.

Above all, it is taken for granted that the growth which the child makes must come from within himself; that no living thing can grow vicariously; that the rings of soul-growth, like the rings of tree-growth, must be evolved from an inner life; that the teacher must therefore content himself with giving the child's expansive instincts fair play and free play; and that, for the rest, he must as far as possible efface himself, bearing in mind that not he, but the child, is the real actor in the drama of school life.

But though so much is left to the child in Utopia, and so much demanded of him, it is not feared that the effort to grow will be repugnant to him. On the contrary, it is taken for granted that in growing, in developing his expansive instincts, the child will be following the lines and obeying the laws of his own nature; that he will be fulfilling the latent desires of his heart; that he will be seeking his own pleasure; in fine, that he will be leading a happy life.

All this is taken for granted in Utopia, and the child's life is therefore one of unimpeded, though duly guided and stimulated, activity. Every instinct that makes for the expansion and elevation (for growth is always upward as well as outward) of the child's nature is given the freest possible play, and the whole organisation of the school is subordinated to this central end.

In order to find out what are the instincts which make for the expansion and elevation of the child's nature, and which education ought therefore to foster, we must do what Egeria has always done, we must observe young children, and study their ways and works. Now every healthy child wants to eat and drink, and to run about. Here are two instincts--the instinctive desire for physical nourishment, and the instinctive desire for physical exercise--through which Nature provides for the growth of the body. How does she provide for the growth of what we have agreed to call the soul? We need not be very careful observers of young children in order to satisfy ourselves that, apart from physical nourishment and exercise, there are six things which the child instinctively desires, namely:

(1) to talk and listen: (2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word): (3) to draw, paint, and model: (4) to dance and sing: (5) to know the why of things: (6) to construct things.

Let us consider each of these instincts, and try to determine its meaning and purpose.

(1) The child instinctively desires to enter into communion with other persons,--his parents, his brothers and sisters, his nurse, his governess, his little friends. He wants to talk to them, to tell them what he has done, seen, felt, thought; and he wants to hear what they have to tell him,--not only of what they themselves have done, but also of what other persons and other living things have done, in other times, in other countries, in other worlds. Later on, the desire to talk and listen will develop into the desire to write and read; but the desire will still be one for communion, for intercourse with other lives.

We will call this the _communicative instinct_.

(2) The child desires, not only to enter into communion with other persons and other living things, but also, in some sort, to identify his life with theirs. Watch him when he is playing with other children, or even when he is alone, except for the companionship of his dolls and toys. He is pretty sure to be _acting_, playing at make-believe, pretending to be something that he is not, some grown-up person of his acquaintance, some hero of history or romance, some traveller or other adventurer, some giant, dwarf, or fairy, some animal, wild or tame. He plays the part of one or other of these, and his playmates play other parts, and so a little drama is enacted. If he has no playmates, his dolls have to play their parts, or his toy animals have to be endowed with life, so that they may become fellow-actors with him on the stage that he has selected.

No instinct is more inevitable, more sure to energise, than this.

We will call it the _dramatic instinct_.

In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand his being, by going out of himself, through the medium of sympathy and imagination--twin aspects of the same vital tendency--into the lives of other living beings. We will therefore call these the _Sympathetic Instincts_, and place them in a cla.s.s by themselves.

(3) From his very babyhood the child delights in colour, and at a very early age he learns to love and understand pictures. Then comes the desire to make these for himself. Give him pencil and paper, give him chalk, charcoal, a paint-box, and other suitable materials, and he will set to work of his own accord to depict what he sees or has seen, either with his outward or his inward eye. Give him a lump of clay, and he will try to mould it into the likeness of something that has either attracted his attention, or presented itself to his imagination. In all these attempts he is trying, unknown to himself, to express his perception of, and delight in, the visible beauty of Nature. This instinct will expand, in the fullness of time, into a strong and subtle feeling for visible beauty, and into a restless desire to give expression to that feeling.

We will call this the _artistic instinct_, the word _artistic_ being used, for lack of a more suitable term, in its narrow and conventional sense.

(4) While the child is still a baby in arms, his mother will sing to him, and dance him on her knee. This is her first attempt to initiate him into the mystery of music; and the response that he makes to her proves that she is a wise teacher, and is appealing to a genuinely natural faculty. It will not be long before he begins to dance and sing for himself. Watch the children in a London court or alley when a barrel-organ appears on the scene. Without having any one to direct or teach them, they will come together and dance in couples, often with abundant grace and charm. Nature is their tutor. Her own rhythm, of which the musician must have caught an echo, is pa.s.sing through their ears into their hearts and into their limbs. No instinct is so spontaneous as this. A child will whistle or sing while his mind is engaged on other things. If he is happy he will dance about as naturally, and almost as inevitably, as the leaves dance when the breeze pa.s.ses through them.

We will call this the _musical instinct_. So elemental is it that man shares it, in some degree, with other living things. The birds are accomplished musicians, and their movements, and those of many other creatures, are full of rhythm and grace.

In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand his being, by going out of himself, in response to the attractive force of beauty, into that larger life which is at the heart of Nature, but which is not ours until we have made it our own. We will therefore call these the _aesthetic Instincts_, and place them in a cla.s.s by themselves.

(5) From a very early age the child desires to know the why and wherefore of things, to understand how effects are produced, to discover new facts, and pa.s.s on, if possible, to their causes. In response to the pressure of this instinct, the child breaks his toys in order that he may find out how they work, and asks innumerable questions which make him the terror and despair of his parents and the other "Olympians." No instinct is more insistent in the early days of the child's life. No instinct is more ruthlessly repressed by those to whom the education of the child is entrusted. No instinct dies out so completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type has done its deadly work. It has been said that children go to school ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. This gibe is the plain statement of a patent truth.

We will call this the _inquisitive instinct_.

(6) After a.n.a.lysis comes synthesis. The child pulls his toys to pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct them, and so be the better able to control the working of them. The ends that he sets before himself are those which Comte set before the human race,--"savoir pour prevoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour deduire, afin de construire." The desire to make things, to build things up, to control ways and means, to master the resources of Nature, to put his knowledge of her laws and facts to a practical use, is strong in his soul. Give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours in building and rebuilding houses, churches, towers, and the like. Set him on a sandy sh.o.r.e, with a spade and a pail, and he will spend hours in constructing fortified castles with deep, encircling moats into which the sea may be duly admitted. Or he will make harness and whips of plaited rushes, armour of tea-paper, swords of tin-plate, boxes and other articles of cardboard, waggons, engines, and other implements of wood.

We will call this the _constructive instinct_.

In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand his being, by going out of himself, through the correlated channels of theory and practice, into what I may call the machinery of Nature's life,--an aspect of that life which reveals its mysteries to reason rather than to emotion, or (to use the language of Eastern philosophy) to the faculties that try to find order in the Many, rather than to those which try to hold intercourse with the One.[16]

Whichever channel he may use,--and indeed they are not so much two channels as one, for each in turn is for ever leading into and then pa.s.sing out of the other,--his concern is always for "facts," for the actualities of things, for "objective truth." We will therefore call these the _Scientific Instincts_, and place them in a cla.s.s by themselves.

There are six instincts, then,--six formative and expansive instincts--which Nature has implanted in every normal child, and which education, so far as it aims at being loyal to Nature, should take account of and try to foster. Two of these are _sympathetic_; two are _aesthetic_; two are _scientific_. In and through the sympathetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of _love_. In and through the aesthetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of _beauty_. In and through the scientific instincts the soul grows in the direction of _truth_. It is towards this triune goal that Nature herself is ever directing the growth of the growing child. The significance of this conclusion will unfold itself as we proceed.

These instincts manifest themselves in various ways, but chiefly in the direction that they give to that very serious occupation of young children which we call play. It is clear, then, that if these instincts are to be duly cultivated, the work of the school must be modelled, as far as possible, on the lines which children, when at play, spontaneously follow. This Egeria, with her inspired sagacity, has clearly seen; and she has taken her measures accordingly. In Utopia the school life of the child is all play,--play taken very seriously, play systematised, organised, provided with ample materials and ample opportunities, encouraged and stimulated in every possible way. Each of the fundamental instincts that manifest themselves in the child's play, and in doing so give a clear indication of Nature's aims in the child's life, and of the directions in which she wishes him to grow, is duly ministered to in this school, the current that wells up in and through it being skilfully guided into a suitable channel, and every obstacle to its free development being carefully removed. But the guidance which Egeria gives tends, as we shall see, to foster rather than fetter the freedom of the child. When the current has been led into a suitable channel, it is expected to shape its own further course, and even to impose on itself the limits--the containing walls--which are needed if its depth and strength are to be maintained.

Let us now consider each of the six instincts in turn, and see what special steps Egeria takes to foster its growth.

(1) _The Communicative Instinct_.

Through this instinct the child goes out of himself into the lives of other persons and other living things. The desire is in its essence one for intercourse, for communion, for the interchange of thoughts, of feelings, of experiences. The normal child is, as we all know, an inveterate chatterbox; but he is also a rapt listener. If he desires, as he certainly does, to tell others about himself, he desires, in no less a degree, to hear about others, either from themselves, or from those who are best able to tell him about them. The balance between the two desires is well maintained by Nature; and it should be carefully maintained by those who train the young, if the communicative instinct as a whole is to make healthy growth.

In too many elementary schools the instinct is systematically starved, the scholars being strictly forbidden to talk among themselves, while their conversational intercourse with their teacher is limited to receiving a certain amount of dry information, and giving this back, collectively or individually, when they are expressly directed to do so. The child's instinctive desire to converse, being deprived by education of its natural outlets, must needs force for itself the subterranean and illicit outlet of whispering in cla.s.s, either under the teacher's nose, if he happens to be un.o.bservant or indolent, or behind his back, if he happens to be vigilant and strict. And as the child is forbidden to talk about things which are wholesome and interesting, it is but natural that in his surrept.i.tious conversations he should talk about things which are less edifying, things which are trivial and vulgar, or even unwholesome and unclean. Children are naturally obedient and truthful; but in their attempts to find outlets for healthy activities which are wantonly repressed, they will go far down the inclined plane of disobedience and deceit.

In Utopia free conversation is systematically encouraged. No elementary school is supposed to open before 9 a.m.; but Egeria is in the habit of coming to school at 8.45 or earlier, so that the children who wish to do so may come and talk to her freely about the things that interest them,--what they have observed on their walks to or from school, what they have heard or read at home, what they think about things in general, and so on. The school has a good library of books which are worth reading, both in prose and verse. These the children read in school and out of school, and are thus brought into communication with other minds, with other times, with other lands.

They are also accustomed to talk freely to one another about the books that they are reading. Whatever lesson may be going on, they are encouraged to ask questions about the matter in hand, and even to express their own views about it. They go out into the playground in groups and make up games and plays, discussing things freely among themselves. When they are preparing to act an historical scene or a pa.s.sage from some dramatic author, they hold a sort of informal parliament, in which the actors are selected and various important questions are provisionally settled. They write letters in school to real people. The older girls take the little ones in hand, and talk to them and draw them out. When an interesting phenomenon is noticed, _e.g._ in a Nature ramble, the children are accustomed to discuss it in groups, and to try to think out among themselves its cause and its meaning. Gossip is of course discouraged; but it is scarcely necessary for Egeria to proscribe it; for idle talk has no attraction for children who are allowed to talk freely and frankly, at all times and in all places, about things that are really worth discussing.

Life is full of interest for children who are allowed, as these are, to take an active interest in it; and subjects of conversation are therefore ever presenting themselves, in school and out of school, to the happy children of Utopia. This means that the life of each individual child is overflowing through many channels, an overflow which will carry the out-welling life into the lives of other living beings--human and infra-human, actual and imaginary--and even beyond these, when it has been met and reinforced by other surging currents, into the impersonal life of Humanity and of Nature.

(2) _The Dramatic Instinct_.

Whatever else young children may be, they are all born actors; and in a school which bases its scheme of education on the actualities of child life, it is but natural that the dramatic instinct should be fostered in every possible way. "Work while you work, and play while you play," is one of those trite maxims which have been unintelligently repeated till they have lost whatever value they may once have possessed. "Work while you play, and play while you work,"

seems to be Egeria's subst.i.tute for it; and she would, I think, do well to write those words over the porch of her school.

In the ordinary elementary school a fair amount of acting goes on in the infant department, and an occasional attempt is made, in one of the higher cla.s.ses of the upper department, to act a scene from Shakespeare or an episode in English history. But during the five years or so of school life which intervene between the infant department and "Standard VI," the dramatic instinct is as a rule entirely neglected; and the consequent outgrowth of self-consciousness in the children is too often a fatal obstacle to the success of the spasmodic attempts at dramatisation which are made in the higher cla.s.ses.

In Utopia "acting" is a vital part of the school life of every cla.s.s, and every subject that admits of dramatic treatment is systematically dramatised. In History, for example, when the course of their study brings them to a suitable episode, the children set to work to dramatise it. With this end in view, they consult some advanced text-book or historical novel or other book of reference, and having studied with care the particular chapter in which they are interested, and having decided among themselves who are to play what parts, they proceed to make up their own dialogues, and their own costumes and other accessories. They then act the scene, putting their own interpretation on the various parts, and receiving the stimulus and guidance of Egeria's sympathetic and moeutic criticism. Their cla.s.s-mates and the rest of the children in the main room look on, with their history books open in front of them, and applaud; and, by gradually familiarising themselves with the various parts, qualify themselves half-unconsciously to act as under-studies in the particular scene, and in due course to play their own parts as interpreters of some other historical episode. I know of no treatment of history which is so effective as this for young children. The actual knowledge of the facts of history which a child carries away with him from an elementary school cannot well be large, and is, in many cases, a negligible quant.i.ty. But the child who has once acted history will always be interested in it, and being interested in it will be able, without making a formal study of it, to absorb its spirit, its atmosphere, and the more significant of its facts. Nor do the advantages of the dramatic treatment of history end with the subject itself. The actors in these historical scenes are, as I have said, expressing their own interpretation of the various parts, and their own perception of the meaning of each episode as a whole. This means that they are training their imaginative sympathy,--a sovereign faculty which of all faculties is perhaps the most emanc.i.p.ative and expansive,--and training it, as I can testify, with striking success; for the dramatic power which they display is remarkable, and can have been generated by nothing less than sympathetic insight into the feelings of the various historical personages and the possibilities of the various situations.

It is probable that History lends itself more readily to dramatic treatment than any other subject, but it is by no means the only subject that is dramatised in Utopia. An interest in Geography is awakened by scenes in foreign lands and episodes from books of travel being acted by the children. An interest in Arithmetic, by a shop being opened, which is well equipped with weights, measures, and cardboard money, and in which a salesman stands behind the counter and sells goods to a succession of customers. An interest in Literature by the acting, with improvised costumes, of pa.s.sages from Shakespeare's plays, or scenes from Scott's and d.i.c.kens' novels.

Simple plays to ill.u.s.trate Nature-study are acted by the younger children; while the Folk Songs, which, as we shall see, play a prominent part in the musical life of the children, are acted as well as sung.

However rude and simple the histrionic efforts of the children may be, they are doing two things for the actors. They are giving them a living interest in the various subjects that are dramatised; and, by teaching them to identify themselves, if only for a moment, with other human beings, they are leading them into the path of tolerance, of compa.s.sion, of charity, of sympathy,--the ever-widening path which makes at last for Nirvanic oneness with the One Life.[17]

(3) _The Artistic Instinct_.