The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought - Alexander F. Chamberlain (best way to read an ebook txt) 📗

the children’s happiness. These ideas, essential as they are to true civilization, are not many centuries old. It is a purely modern conception the French Encyclopaedist expresses when he says, ‘Le pouvoir paternel est plutot un devoir qu’un pouvoir’” (166. 239).

 

The Child at School.

It was in this spirit also that Count Czaky (when Minister of Education in Hungary), replying to the sarcastic suggestion of one of the Deputies, during the debate on the revision of the curriculum of classical studies, that “the lazy children should be asked whether they liked to study Greek or not,” said that “when it became necessary, he would willingly listen to the children themselves.” That children have some rights in the matter is a view that is slowly but surely fixing itself in the minds of the people,—that the school should be something more than an intellectual prison-house, a mental and moral tread-mill, a place to put children in out of the way of the family, a dark cave into which happy, freedom-loving, joyous childhood must perforce retire from that communion with nature which makes the health of its body and the salvation of its soul. This false theory of education is vanishing, however tardily, before the teachings of the new psychology and the new anthropology, which demand a knowledge of what the child is, feels, thinks, before they will be party to any attempt to make him be, feel, think, something different. The school is but a modified form of society, of its fundamental institution, the family. Dr. Eiccardi, in the introduction to his Antropologia e Pedagogia,-in which he discusses a mass of psychological, sociological, and anthropological observations and statistics,—well says (336. 12):—

“The school is a little society, whose citizens are the scholars. The teacher has not merely to instruct the pupil, but ought also to teach him to live in the little school-society and thus fitly prepare him to live in the great society of humanity. And just as men are classified in human society, so ought to be classified the scholars in the little school-society; and just as the teacher looks upon the great human world in movement upon the earth, so ought he also to look upon that little world called the school, observing its elements with a positive eye, without preconceptions and without prejudices. The teacher, therefore, in regard to the school-organism, is as a legislator in regard to society. And the true and wise legislator does not give laws to the governed, does not offer security and liberty to the citizens, until after he has made a profound study of his country and of society. Let the teacher try for some time to take these criteria into his school; let him try to apply in the school many of those facts and usages which are commonly employed in human society, and he will see how, little by little, almost unnoticeably, the primitive idea of the school will be modified in his mind, and he will see how the school itself will assume the true character which it ought to have, that is, the character of a microscopic social organism. This legislator for our children, by making the children and youths clearly see of themselves that the school is nothing else but a little society, where they are taught to live, and by making them see the points of resemblance and of contact with the great human society, will engender in the minds of the pupils the conscience of duty and of right; will create in them the primitive feeling of justice and of equity. And the pupils, feeling that there is a real association, feeling that they do form part of a little world, and are not something merely gathered together by chance for a few hours, will form a compact homogeneous scholastic association, in which all will try to be something, and of which all will be proud. In this way will the assemblage of disparate, diverse, heterogeneous elements, with which the school begins the year, be able to become homogeneous and create a true school organism. And if the teacher will persevere, whether in the direction of the school, in the classification of the pupils, or in the different contingencies that arise, in applying those criteria, those ideas, those forms, which are commonly employed in society, he will be favouring the homogeneity of the little organism which he has to instruct and to educate. He will thus have always before his mind all the organic, psychic, and moral characteristics of human society and will see the differences from, and the resemblances to, those of the school-organism. In so far will he have an example, a law, a criterion, a form to follow in the direction of the little human society entrusted to him, with its beautiful and its ugly side, its good and its bad, its vices and its virtues. This idea of the school as an organism, however much it seems destined to overturn ideas of the past, will be the crucible from which will be turned out in the near future all the reforms and many new ideas.”

This view of the school as an organism, a social microcosm, a little society within the great human society, having its resemblances to, and its differences from, the family and the nation, is one that the new development of “child-study” seems bound to promote and advance. Rank paternalism has made its exit from the great human society, but it has yet a strong hold upon the school. It is only in comparatively recent times that motherhood, which, as Zmigrodzki says, has been the basis of our civilization, has been allowed to exercise its best influence upon the scholastic microcosm. Paternalism and celibacy must be made to yield up the strong grasp which they have upon the educational institutions of the land, and the early years of the life of man must be confided to the care of the mother-spirit, which the individual man and the race alike have deified in their golden age. The mother who laid so well the foundations of the great human society, the originator of its earliest arts, the warder of its faiths and its beliefs, the mother, who built up the family, must be trusted with some large share in the building of the school.

 

Child-Sociology.

In The Story of a Sand-Pile (255), President G. Stanley Hall has chronicled for us the life-course of a primitive social community-nine summers of work and play by a number of boys with a sand-pile in the yard of one of their parents. Here we are introduced to the originality and imitation of children in agriculture, architecture, industrial arts, trade and commerce, money and exchange, government, law and justice, charity, etc. The results of this spontaneous and varied exercise, which, the parents say, “has been of about as much yearly educational value to the boys as the eight months of school,” and in contrast with which “the concentrative methodic unities of Ziller seem artificial, and, as Bacon said of scholastic methods, very inadequate to subtlety of nature,” Dr. Hall sums up as follows (255. 696):—

“Very many problems that puzzle older brains have been met in simpler terms and solved wisely and well. The spirit and habit of active and even prying observation has been greatly quickened. Industrial processes, institutions, and methods of administration and organization have been appropriated and put into practice. The boys have grown more companionable and rational, learning many a lesson of self-control, and developed a spirit of self-help. The parents have been enabled to control indirectly the associations of their boys, and, in a very mixed boy-community, to have them in a measure under observation without in the least restricting their freedom. The habit of loafing, and the evils that attend it, have been avoided, a strong practical and even industrial bent has been given to their development, and much social morality has been taught in the often complicated modus vivendi with others that has been evolved. Finally, this may perhaps be called one illustration of the education according to nature we so often hear and speak of.”

This study of child-sociology is a rara avis in terra; it is to be hoped, however, that if any other parents have “refrained from suggestions, and left the hand and fancy of the boys to educate each other under the tuition of the mysterious play-instinct,” they may be as fortunate in securing for the deeds of their young offspring, as observant and as sympathetic a historian as he who has told the story of the sand-pile in that little New England town.

Bagehot, in the course of his chapter on “Nation-Making,” observes (395.

91):—

 

“After such great matters as religion and politics, it may seem trifling to illustrate the subject from little boys. But it is not trifling. The bane of philosophy is pomposity: people will not see that small things are the miniatures of greater, and it seems a loss of abstract dignity to freshen their minds by object lessons from what they know. But every boarding-school changes as a nation changes. Most of us may remember thinking,’ How odd it is that this half should be so unlike last half; now we never go out of bounds, last half we were always going; now we play rounders, then we played prisoner’s base,’ and so through all the easy life of that time. In fact, some ruling spirits, some one or two ascendant boys, had left, one or two others had come, and so all was changed. The models were changed, and the copies changed; a different thing was praised, and a different thing bullied.” It was in the spirit of this extract (part of which he quotes), that the editor of the “Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science” happily admitted into that series of monographs, Mr. J. H. Johnson’s Rudimentary Society among Boys(272), a sociological study of peculiar interest and importance—“a microcosm, not only of the agrarian, but of the political and economic history of society.” Mr. Johnson has graphically described the development of society among some fifty boys on the farm belonging to the McDonogh School, not far from the city of Baltimore, Maryland; land-tenure, boy-legislation, judicial procedure, boy-economy, are all treated of in detail and many analogies with the life and habits of primitive peoples brought out, and the author has gone a long way towards realizing the thesis that “To show a decided resemblance between barbarian political institutions and those of communities of civilized children, would be a long step towards founding a science of Social Embryology” (272. 61).

 

“Gangs.”

Mr. Stewart Culin (212) in his interesting account of the “Street Games of Boys in Brooklyn, N.Y.” notices en passant the existence of “gangs” of boys—boys’ societies of the ruder and rougher kind. As evidence of the extent to which these organizations have flourished, the following somewhat complete list of those known to have existed in the city of Philadelphia is given:—

Badgers, Bed Bugs, Bleeders, Blossoms, Bouncers, Buena Vistas, Buffaloes, Bull Dogs, Bullets, Bunker Hills, Canaries, Clippers, Corkies, Cow Towners, Cruisers, Darts, Didos, Dirty Dozen, Dumplingtown Hivers, Dung Hills, Muters, Forest Eose, Forties, Garroters, Gas House Tarriers, Glassgous, Golden Hours, Gut Gang, Haymakers, Hawk-Towners, Hivers, Killers, Lancers, Lions, Mountaineers, Murderers, Niggers, Pigs, Pluckers, Pots, Prairie Hens, Railroad Roughs, Rats, Ramblers, Ravens, Riverside, Eovers, Schuylkill Eangers, Skinners, Snappers, Spigots, Tigers, Tormentors, War Dogs, Wayne Towners.

Of these Mr. Culin remarks: “They had their laws and customs, their feuds and compacts. The former were more numerous than the latter, and they fought on every possible occasion. A kind of half-secret organization existed among them, and new members passed through a ceremony called ‘initiation,’ which was not confined to the lower classes, from which most of them were recruited. Almost every Philadelphia boy, as late as twenty years