Home education Charlotte M. Mason 1386 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Home education
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Home education

Author: Charlotte M. Mason

Release date: July 2, 2023 [eBook #71087]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner,
& Co., Ltd., 1906

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71087

Credits: Carol Brown, Tim Lindell, Turgut Dincer and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive).

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOME
EDUCATION ***

Home Education

‘Home Education’ Series

By CHARLOTTE M. MASON

Each Volume 3s. 6d. net

I. HOME EDUCATION.

II. PARENTS AND CHILDREN.

III. SCHOOL EDUCATION.

IV. “OURSELVES, OUR SOULS AND BODIES.”
This volume is also published in two parts, 2s. net each part.

V. SOME STUDIES IN THE FORMATION OF CHARACTER.

kegan paul, trench, trübner, & co., ltd.

Dryden House
43 Gerrard Street, London, W.

‘Home Education’ Series
VOLUME I.

Home Education

By

Charlotte M. Mason

FIFTH EDITION (Revised and Enlarged)
(Eighth and Ninth Thousand)

london

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER, & CO., LTD.
Dryden House, Gerrard Street, W.
1906

The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved

The Education of Children under
Nine Years of Age

“O maraviglia! ché qual egli scelse
l’umile pianta, cotal si rinacque
Subitamente là onde la svelse.”

We read in the Purgatorio, Canto I., how Virgil was directed to prepare
Dante for his difficult ascent:
“Va dunque, e fa che tu costui ricinghe
d’un giunco schietto, e che gli lavi il viso
sì che ogni sucidume quindi stinghe:
* * * * *
Questa isoletta intorno ad imo ad imo,
laggiù, colà dove la batte l’onda,
porta de’ giunchi sopra il molle limo.
Null’altra pianta, che facesse fronda
o indurasse, vi puote aver vita,
però che alle percosse non seconda.
* * * * *
Venimmo poi in sul lito diserto,
* * * * *
Quivi mi cinse sì come altrui piacque:
o maraviglia! ché qual egli scelse
l’umile pianta, cotal si rinacque
Subitamente là onde la svelse.”

“Go, then, and see thou gird this one about
With a smooth rush, and that thou wash his face,
So that thou cleanse away all stain therefrom.
* * * * *
This little island round about its base,
Below there, yonder where the billow beats it,
Doth rushes bear upon its washy ooze;
No other plant that putteth forth the leaf,
Or that doth indurate, can there have life,
Because it yieldeth not unto the shocks.
* * * * *
Then came we down upon the desert shore.
* * * * *
There he begirt me as the other pleased;
O marvellous! for even as he culled
The humble plant, such it sprang up again
Suddenly there where he uprooted it.”
(Longfellow’s Translation.)

Preface to the ‘Home Education’
Series
The educational outlook is rather misty and depressing both at home and
abroad. That science should be a staple of education, that the teaching of
Latin, of modern languages, of mathematics, must be reformed, that nature
and handicrafts should be pressed into service for the training of the eye and
hand, that boys and girls must learn to write English and therefore must
know something of history and literature; and, on the other hand, that
education must be made more technical and utilitarian—these, and such as
these, are the cries of expedience with which we take the field. But we have
no unifying principle, no definite aim; in fact, no philosophy of education.
As a stream can rise no higher than its source, so it is probable that no
educational effort can rise above the whole scheme of thought which gives
it birth; and perhaps this is the reason of all the ‘fallings from us,
vanishings,’ failures, and disappointments which mark our educational
records.
Those of us, who have spent many years in pursuing the benign and
elusive vision of Education, perceive that her approaches are regulated by a
law, and that this law has yet to be evoked. We can discern its outlines, but
no more. We know that it is pervasive; there is no part of a child’s home-life
or school-work which the law does not penetrate. It is illuminating, too,
showing the value, or lack of value, of a thousand systems and expedients.
It is not only a light, but a measure, providing a standard whereby all things,
small and great, belonging to educational work must be tested. The law is
liberal, taking in whatsoever things are true, honest, and of good report, and
offering no limitation or hindrance save where excess should injure. And
the path indicated by the law is continuous and progressive, with no
transition stage from the cradle to the grave, except that maturity takes up
the regular self-direction to which immaturity has been trained. We shall
doubtless find, when we apprehend the law, that certain German thinkers—
Kant, Herbart, Lotze, Froebel—are justified; that, as they say, it is

‘necessary’ to believe in God; that, therefore, the knowledge of God is the
principal knowledge, and the chief end of education. By one more character
shall we be able to recognise this perfect law of educational liberty when it
shall be made evident. It has been said that ‘The best idea which we can
form of absolute truth is that it is able to meet every condition by which it
can be tested.’ This we shall expect of our law—that it shall meet every test
of experiment and every test of rational investigation.
Not having received the tables of our law, we fall back upon Froebel or
upon Herbart; or, if we belong to another School, upon Locke or Spencer;
but we are not satisfied. A discontent, is it a divine discontent? is upon us;
and assuredly we should hail a workable, effectual philosophy of education
as a deliverance from much perplexity. Before this great deliverance comes
to us it is probable that many tentative efforts will be put forth, having more
or less of the characters of a philosophy; notably, having a central idea, a
body of thought with various members working in vital harmony.
Such a theory of education, which need not be careful to call itself a
system of psychology, must be in harmony with the thought movements of
the age; must regard education, not as a shut-off compartment, but as being
as much a part of life as birth or growth, marriage or work; and it must
leave the pupil attached to the world at many points of contact. It is true that
educationalists are already eager to establish such contact in several
directions, but their efforts rest upon an axiom here and an idea there, and
there is no broad unifying basis of thought to support the whole.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; and the hope that there may be
many tentative efforts towards a philosophy of education, and that all of
them will bring us nearer to the magnum opus, encourages me to launch one
such attempt. The central thought, or rather body of thought, upon which I
found, is the somewhat obvious fact that the child is a person with all the
possibilities and powers included in personality. Some of the members
which develop from this nucleus have been exploited from time to time by
educational thinkers, and exist vaguely in the general common sense, a
notion here, another there. One thesis, which is, perhaps, new, that
Education is the Science of Relations, appears to me to solve the question of
a curriculum, as showing that the object of education is to put a child in
living touch with as much as may be of the life of Nature and of thought.
Add to this one or two keys to self-knowledge, and the educated youth goes

forth with some idea of self-management, with some pursuits, and many
vital interests. My excuse for venturing to offer a solution, however
tentative and passing, to the problem of education is twofold. For between
thirty and forty years I have laboured without pause to establish a working
and philosophic theory of education; and in the next place, each article of
the educational faith I offer has been arrived at by inductive processes; and
has, I think, been verified by a long and wide series of experiments. It is,
however, with sincere diffidence that I venture to offer the results of this
long labour; because I know that in this field there are many labourers far
more able and expert than I—the ‘angels’ who fear to tread, so precarious is
the footing!
But, if only pour encourager les autres, I append a short synopsis of the
educational theory advanced in the volumes of the ‘Home Education
Series.’ The treatment is not methodic, but incidental; here a little, there a
little, as seemed to me most likely to meet the occasions of parents and
teachers. I should add that in the course of a number of years the various
essays have been prepared for the use of the Parents’ Educational Union in
the hope that that Society might witness for a more or less coherent body of
educational thought.
“The consequence of truth is great; therefore the judgment of it
must not be negligent.”
Whichcote.
1. Children are born persons.
2. They are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for good
and evil.
3. The principles of authority on the one hand and obedience on the
other, are natural, necessary and fundamental; but—
4. These principles are limited by the respect due to the personality of
children, which must not be encroached upon, whether by fear or love,
suggestion or influence, or undue play upon any one natural desire.
5. Therefore we are limited to three educational instruments—the
atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of
living ideas.

6. By the saying, education is an atmosphere, it is not meant that a child
should be isolated in what may be called a ‘child environment,’ especially
adapted and prepared; but that we should take into account the educational
value of his natural home atmosphere, both as regards persons and things,
and should let him live freely among his proper conditions. It stultifies a
child to bring down his world to the ‘child’s’ level.
7. By education is a discipline, is meant the discipline of habits formed
definitely and thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or body. Physiologists
tell us of the adaptation of brain structure to habitual lines of thought—i.e.,
to our habits.
8. In the saying that education is a life, the need of intellectual and
moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas,
and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.
9. But the mind is not a receptacle into which ideas must be dropped,
each idea adding to an ‘apperception mass’ of its like, the theory upon
which the Herbartian doctrine of interest rests.
10. On the contrary, a child’s mind is no mere sac to hold ideas; but is
rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite
for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with which it is prepared to deal,
and which it can digest and assimilate as the body does foodstuffs.
11. This difference is not a verbal quibble. The Herbartian doctrine lays
the stress of education—the preparation of knowledge in enticing morsels,
presented in due order—upon the teacher. Children taught upon this
principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with little knowledge;
and the teacher’s axiom is, ‘What a child learns matters less than how he
learns it.’
12. But, believing that the normal child has powers of mind that fit him
to deal with all knowledge proper to him, we must give him a full and
generous curriculum; taking care, only, that the knowledge offered to him is
vital—that is, that facts are not presented without their informing ideas. Out
of this conception comes the principle that,—
13. Education is the science of relations; that is, that a child has natural
relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we must train him
upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many

living books; for we know that our business is, not to teach him all about
anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of—
‘Those first-born affinities
That fit our new existence to existing things.’

14. There are also two secrets of moral and intellectual self-management
which should be offered to children; these we may call the Way of the Will
and the Way of the Reason.
15. The Way of the Will.—Children should be taught—
(a) To distinguish between ‘I want’ and ‘I will.’
(b) That the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts from that
which we desire but do not will.
(c) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of or do some
quite different thing, entertaining or interesting.
(d) That, after a little rest in this way, the will returns to its work
with new vigour.
(This adjunct of the will is familiar to us as diversion, whose
office it is to ease us for a time from will effort, that we may
‘will’ again with added power. The use of suggestion—even
self-suggestion—as an aid to the will, is to be deprecated, as
tending to stultify and stereotype character. It would seem that
spontaneity is a condition of development, and that human
nature needs the discipline of failure as well as of success.)
16. The Way of the Reason.—We should teach children, too, not to ‘lean’
(too confidently) ‘unto their own understanding,’ because the function of
reason is, to give logical demonstration (a) of mathematical truth; and (b) of
an initial idea, accepted by the will. In the former case reason is, perhaps,
an infallible guide, but in the second it is not always a safe one; for whether
that initial idea be right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable
proofs.
17. Therefore children should be taught, as they become mature enough
to understand such teaching, that the chief responsibility which rests on
them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of initial ideas. To help them

in this choice we should give them principles of conduct and a wide range
of the knowledge fitted for them.
These three principles (15, 16 and 17) should save children from some
of the loose thinking and heedless action which cause most of us to live at a
lower level than we need.
18. We should allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual
and ‘spiritual’ life of children; but should teach them that the divine Spirit
has constant access to their spirits, and is their continual helper in all the
interests, duties and joys of life.

The ‘Home Education’ Series is so called from the title of the first
volume, and not as dealing, wholly or principally, with ‘Home’ as opposed
to ‘School’ education.

Preface to the Fourth Edition
My attempt in the following volume is to suggest to parents and teachers
a method of education resting upon a basis of natural law; and to touch, in
this connection, upon a mother’s duties to her children. In venturing to
speak on this latter subject, I do so with the sincerest deference to mothers,
believing that, in the words of a wise teacher of men, “the woman receives
from the Spirit of God Himself the intuitions into the child’s character, the
capacity of appreciating its strength and its weakness, the faculty of calling
forth the one and sustaining the other, in which lies the mystery of
education, apart from which all its rules and measures are utterly vain and
ineffectual.”[1] But just in proportion as a mother has this peculiar insight as
regards her own children, she will, I think, feel her need of a knowledge of
the general principles of education, founded upon the nature and the needs
of all children. And this knowledge of the science of education, not the best
of mothers will get from above, seeing that we do not often receive as a gift
that which we have the means of getting by our own efforts.
I venture to hope that teachers of young children, also, may find this
volume of use. The period of a child’s life between his sixth and his ninth
year should be used to lay the basis of a liberal education, and of the habit
of reading for instruction. During these years the child should enter upon
the domain of knowledge, in a good many directions, in a reposeful,
consecutive way, which is not to be attained through the somewhat exciting
medium of oral lessons. I hope that teachers may find the approach (from a
new standpoint), to the hackneyed “subjects of instruction” proper for little
children at any rate interesting and stimulating; and possibly the methods
which this fresh standpoint indicates may prove suggestive and helpful.
The particular object of this volume, as a member of the ‘Home
Education’ Series, is to show the bearing of the physiology of habit upon
education; why certain physical, intellectual, and moral habits are a
valuable asset to a child, and what may be done towards the formation of
such habits. I beg to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr Carpenter’s

Mental Physiology for valuable teaching on the subject of habits contained
in some two or three chapters of that work. Also, I would renew my grateful
thanks to those medical friends who have given careful and able revision to
such parts of the work as rest on a physiological basis.
I should add that some twenty years ago (1885) the greater part of this
volume was delivered as ‘Lectures to Ladies,’ in which form the papers
were originally published (1886) under the title which is still retained.
Lectures VII. and VIII. and the Appendix of the original volume have been
transferred from this to other volumes of the Series. The whole has been
very carefully revised, and much new matter introduced, especially in Part
V., ‘Lessons as Instruments of Education,’ which now offers a fairly
complete introduction to methods of teaching subjects fit for children
between the ages of six and nine.
The rest of the volume attempts to deal with the whole of education from
infancy until the ninth year of life.
C. M. MASON.
Scale How, Ambleside,
1905.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Rev. F. D. Maurice.

Contents

PART I

some preliminary considerations

PAGE
Children are public trusts—​Mothers owe ‘a thinking love’ to
their children—​The training of children ‘dreadfully
defective’—How parents usually proceed 1

i. a method of education

Traditional methods of education—​Method a way to an end—
A system easier than a method 6

ii. the child’s estate

The child in the midst—​Code of education in the Gospels 11

iii. offending the children

Children are born law-abiding—​They must perceive that their
governors are law-compelled—​Parents may offend their
children by disregarding the laws of health—​And of the
intellectual life—​And of the moral life 13

iv. despising the children

Children should have the best of their mothers—​Nurse—​
Children’s faults are serious 17

v. hindering the children

A child’s relationship with Almighty God—​Nursery theology 19

vi. conditions of healthy brain-activity

All mind-labour means wear of brain—​Exercise—​Rest—​Rest
after meals—​Change of occupation—​Nourishment—​
Certain causes affect the quality of the blood—​Concerning
meals—​Talk at meals—​Variety in meals—​Air as important
as food—​‘The children walk every day’—​Oxygen has its
limitations—​Unchanged air—​‘I feed Alice on beef tea’—​
Wordsworth’s Lucy—​Indoor airings—​Ventilation—​Night
air wholesome—​Sunshine—​Free perspiration—​Insensible
perspiration—​Daily bath and porous garments 20

vii. ‘the reign of law’ in education

Common sense and good intentions—​Law-abiding lives often
more blameless than pious lives—​‘Mind’ and ‘matter’
equally governed by law—​Antagonism to law shown by
some religious persons—​Parents must acquaint themselves
with the principles of physiology and moral science 37

PART II

out-of-door life for the children

i. growing time

Meals out of doors—​For dwellers in towns and suburbs—​
Possibilities of a day in the open—​No story-books 42

ii. ‘sight-seeing’

How to see—​Educational uses of ‘sight-seeing’—​
Discriminating observation 45

iii. ‘picture-painting’

Method of—Strain on the attention—​Seeing fully and in
detail—​A means of after solace and refreshment 48

iv. flowers and trees

Children should know field crops—​Field flowers and the life-
history of common plants—​The study of trees—​The
seasons should be followed—​Leigh Hunt on flowers—​
Calendars—Nature diaries 51

v. ‘living creatures’

A field of interest and delight—​Children should be
encouraged to watch—​The force of public opinion in the
home—​What town children can do—​Nature knowledge the
most important knowledge for young children—​Mental
training of a child naturalist—​Nature work especially
valuable for girls 56

vi. field-lore and naturalists’ books

Reverence for life—​Rough classification at first hand—​Uses
of ‘Naturalists’ books—​Mothers and teachers should know
about Nature 62

vii. the child gets knowledge by means of his senses

Nature’s teaching—​Over-pressure—​Object-lessons—​A child
learns from things—​The sense of beauty comes from early
contact with Nature—​Most grown men lose the habit of
observation 65

viii. the child should be made familiar with natural objects

An ‘observant child’ should be put in the way of things worth
observing—​Every natural object a member of a series—
Power will pass more and more into the hands of scientific
men—Intimacy with Nature makes for personal well-being 69

ix. out-of-door geography

mall things may teach great—​Pictorial geography—​The
position of the sun—​Clouds, rain, snow, and hail—​Distance
—​Direction—​East and west—​Practice in finding direction
—​Compass drill—​Boundaries—​Plans—​Local geography 72

x. the child and mother nature

The mother must refrain from too much talk—​Making a new
acquaintance—​Two things permissible to the mother 78

xi. out-of-door games

The French lesson—​Noisy games—​Rondes—​Skipping-rope
and shuttlecock—​Climbing—​Clothing 80

xii. walks in bad weather

Winter walks as necessary as summer walks—​Pleasures
connected with frost and snow—​Winter observations—​
Habit of attention—​Wet weather tramps—Outer garments
for—​Precautions 85

xiii. ‘red indian’ life

couting—​‘Bird-stalking’ 88

xiv. the children require country air

The essential proportion of oxygen—​Excess of carbonic acid
gas—​Unvitiated, unimpoverished air—​Solar light—​A
physical ideal for a child 92

PART III

‘habit is ten natures’

i. education based upon natural law

A healthy brain—​Out-of-door life—​Habit, the instrument by
which parents work 96

ii. children have no self-compelling power

An educational cul-de-sac—​Love, law, and religion as
educational forces—​Why children are incapable of steady
effort—​Young children should be saved the labour of
decision 98

iii. what is ‘nature’?

All persons born with the same primary desires—​And
affections—​Content of the most elemental notion of human
nature—​Nature plus heredity—​plus physical conditions—​
Human nature the sum of certain attributes—​The child
must not be left to his human nature—​Problem before the
educator—Divine grace works on the lines of human effort
—​The trust of parents must not be supine 100

iv. habit may supplant ‘nature’

Habit runs on the lines of Nature—​But habit may be a lever—​
A mother forms her children’s habits involuntarily—​Habit
forces Nature into new channels—​Parents and teachers
must lay down lines of habit 105

v. the laying down of lines of habit

Begin it, and the thing will be completed’—​Direction of lines
of habit—​We think as we are accustomed to think—​Habit
and free-will—​Habit rules ninety-nine in a hundred of our
thoughts and acts—​Habit powerful even where the will
decides 107

vi. the physiology of habit

Growing tissues form themselves to modes of action—​
Therefore children should learn dancing, swimming, etc., at
an early age—​Moral and mental habits make their mark
upon physical tissues—​Persistent trains of thought—​
Incessant regeneration of brain tissue—​Artificial reflex
actions may be acquired—​Intellectual and moral education
—​Character affected by modification of brain tissue—​
Outside influence 111

vii. the forming of a habit—‘shut the door after you’

Do ye next thinge’—​Habit a delight in itself—​Tact,
watchfulness, and persistence—​Stages in the formation of a
habit—​The dangerous stage 119

viii. infant ‘habits’

ome branches of infant education—​A sensitive nose—​The
baby is ubiquitous—​Personal cleanliness as an early habit
—​Modesty and purity—​The habit of obedience and the
sense of honour—​Order essential—​The child of two should
put away his playthings—​Neatness akin to order—​
Regularity—​Habits of time and place 124

ix. physical exercises

mportance of daily—​Drill in good manners—​Training of the
ear and voice—​The habit of music—​Let children alone 132

PART IV

some habits of mind—some moral habits

A science of education—​Education in habit favours an easy
life—​Training in habits becomes a habit—​Habits inspired
by the home atmosphere 135

i. the habit of attention

A mind at the mercy of associations—​Wandering attention—​
The habit of attention to be cultivated in the infant—​
Attention to things, words a weariness—​Lessons attractive
—​Time-table, definite work in a given time—​A natural
reward—​Emulation—​Affection as a motive—​
Attractiveness of knowledge—​What is attention?—​Self-
compelled attention—​The secret of over-pressure—​The
schoolboy’s home-work—​Wholesome home treatment for
‘mooning’—​Rewards and punishments should be relative
consequences of conduct—​Natural and educative
consequences 137

ii. the habits of application, etc.

Rapid mental effort—​Zeal must be stimulated 149

iii. the habit of thinking

A lion’—Operations included in thinking 150

iv. the habit of imagining

The sense of the incongruous—Commonplace tales; tales of 151
imagination—Imagination and great conceptions—​

Imagination grows—​Thinking comes by practice

v. the habit of remembering

Remembering and recollecting—​A ‘spurious’ memory—​
Memory, a record in the brain substance—​Made under what
conditions—​Recollection and the law of association—​
Every lesson must recall the last—​No limit to the recording
power of the brain—​But links of association a condition of
recollection 154

vi. the habit of perfect execution

The habit of turning out imperfect work—​A child should
execute perfectly 159

vii. some moral habits

Obedience—​The whole duty of a child—​Obedience no
accidental duty—​Children must have the desire to obey—​
Expect obedience—​Law ensures liberty 160

viii. truthfulness, etc.

Three causes of lying—​All vicious—​Only one kind visited on
children—​Accuracy of statement—​Exaggeration and
ludicrous embellishments—​Reverence—​Temper born in a
child—Not temper but tendency—​Parents must correct
tendency by new habit of temper—​Change the child’s
thoughts 164

PART V

lessons as instruments of education

i. the matter and method of lessons

Parents must reflect on the subject-matter of instruction—​
Home the best growing ground for young children—​Three
questions for the mother—​Children learn, to grow—​
Doctoring of the material of knowledge—​Children learn, to
get ideas—​Ideas grow and produce after their kind—​Scott
and Stephenson worked with ideas—​Value of dominant
ideas—​Lessons must furnish ideas—​Children learn, to get
knowledge—​Diluted knowledge—​Dr Arnold’s knowledge
as a child—​Literature proper for children—​Four tests
which should be applied to children’s lessons—​Résumé of
six points just considered 169

ii. the kindergarten as a place of education

The mother the best Kindergärtnerin—​The nursery need not
therefore be a kindergarten—​Field of knowledge too
circumscribed—​Training of a just eye and faithful hand—​
‘Sweetness and light’ in the kindergarten 178

iii. further considerations of the kindergarten

The childhood of Tolstoi—​The Story of a Child​—What we 182
owe to Froebel—​Requirements of a person—​Nature as an
educator—​Danger of undervaluing children’s intelligence
—​We all like to be humoured—​Teachers mediate too much
—​Danger of personal magnetism—​‘Kindergarten’ a false
analogy—​‘Mother-games’ too strenuous for a child—​The
society of his equals too stimulating for a child—​Danger of
supplanting Nature—​Importance of personal initiative—​
Parents and teachers must sow opportunities—​‘Only’
children—​The child should be allowed some ordering of
his life—​Helen Keller—​Miss Sullivan on systems of
education—​The kindergarten in the United States—​Mr

Thistleton Mark on the kindergarten—​Dr Stanley Hall on
the kindergarten

iv. reading

Time of teaching to read—​Mrs Wesley’s plan—​The alphabet
—​Word-making—​Word-making with long vowels, etc.—​
Early spelling—​Reading at sight—​The reading of prose—​
Careful pronunciation—​A year’s work—​Ordinary method 199

v. the first reading lesson

Two mothers confer) 207

vi. reading by sight and by sound

Learning to read is hard work—​Knowledge of arbitrary
symbols—These symbols should be interesting—​Tommy’s
first lesson—​Steps—​Reading sentences—​Tommy’s second
lesson—​Unknown words—​Like combinations have
different sounds—​Moral training in reading lessons 214

vii. recitation

The children’s art’—Memorising 222

viii. reading for older children

The habit of reading—​Reading aloud—​Limitation—​Reading
to children—​Questions on the subject-matter—​Lesson-
books—​Slipshod habits; Inattention—​Careless enunciation 226

ix. the art of narrating

Children narrate by nature—​This power should be used in
their education—​Method of lesson 231

x. writing

Perfect accomplishment—​Printing—Steps in teaching—​Text-
hand—A New Handwriting—​How to use 233

xi. transcription

Value of transcription—​Children should transcribe favourite
passages—​Small text-hand—​Double-ruled lines—​Position
in writing—​Desks—​Children’s table 238

xii. spelling and dictation

A fertile cause of bad spelling—​The rationale of spelling—​
Steps of a dictation lesson 240

xiii. composition

George Osborne’s essay—​An educational futility—​Lessons in
composition—​Teaching that is a public danger—​
‘Composition’ comes by nature 243

xiv. bible lessons

Children enjoy the Bible—​Should know the Bible text—​
Essential and accidental truth—​Method of Bible lessons—​
Picture illustrations—​Bible recitations 247

xv. arithmetic

Educative value of—​Problems within the child’s grasp—​
Demonstrate—​Problems—​Notation—​Weighing and
measuring—​Arithmetic as a means of training—​The A B C
Arithmetic—​Preparation for mathematics 253

xvi. natural philosophy

A basis of facts—​Eyes and no eyes—​Principles—​To be
comprehended by children—​As taught in a village school 264

xvii. geography

Educational value of—​As commonly taught—​Geography
should be interesting—​How to begin—​What next—​Maps
—​What general knowledge a child of nine should have—​
Particular knowledge—​Definitions—​Fundamental ideas—​
Meaning of a map 271

xviii. history

A storehouse of ideas—​‘Outlines’ mischievous—​So are most
history books written for children—​Early history of a
nation best fitted for children—​Some old Chronicles—​Age
of myths—​Plutarch’s Lives—​History books—​Dates—​
Illustrations by the children—​‘Playing at’ history 279

xix. grammar

Grammar a difficult study—​Latin grammar—​English
grammar a logical study—​Two grammar lessons 295

xx. french.

M. Gouin’s method—​The ‘Series’—​How does the child
learn? 300

xxi. pictorial art, etc.

tudy of pictures—​Should be regular—​A picture talk—​
Drawing lessons—​Children have ‘Art’ in them—​Clay
modelling—​The piano and singing—​Handicrafts and drills 307

PART VI

the will—the conscience—the divine life in the child

i. the will

Government of Mansoul—​Executive power vested in the will
—​What is the will?—​Persons may go through life without a
deliberate act of will—​Character the result of conduct
regulated by will—Three functions of the will—​A
limitation of the will disregarded by some novelists—​
Parents fall into this metaphysical blunder—​Wilfulness
indicates want of will-power—​What is wilfulness?—​The
will has superior and inferior functions—​The will not a
moral faculty—​A disciplined will necessary to heroic
Christian character—​The sole practical faculty of man—​
How the will operates—​The way of the will; Incentives—​
Diversion—​Change of thought—​The way of the will
should be taught to children—​Power of will implies power
of attention—​Habit may frustrate the will—​Reasonable use
of so effective an instrument—​How to strengthen the will—​
Habit of self-management—​Education of the will more
important than of the intellect 317

ii. the conscience

Conscience is judge and law-giver—​I am, I ought, I can, I will 329
—​Inertness of parents not supplemented by Divine grace—​
Conscience not an infallible guide—​But a real power—​
That spiritual sense whereby we know good and evil—​A
child’s conscience an undeveloped capability rather than a
supreme authority—​The uninstructed conscience—​The
processes implied in a ‘conscientious’ decision—​The
instructed conscience nearly always right—​The good
conscience of a child—​Children play with moral questions
—​The Bible the chief source of moral ideas—​Tales fix
attention upon conduct—​Ignorance of a child’s conscience

—​Instructing the conscience—​Kindness—​The conscience
made effective by discipline

iii. the divine life in the child

The ‘very pulse of the machine’—​Parents have some power to
enthrone the King—​The functions and life of the soul—​
What is the life of the soul?—​The parent must present the
idea of God to the soul of the child—​Must not make
blundering efforts—​God presented to the children as an
exactor and punisher—​Parents must select inspiring ideas
—​We must teach only what we know—​Fitting and vital
ideas—​The knowledge of God distinct from morality—​The
times and the manner of religious instruction—​The reading
of the Bible—​Father and Giver—​The essence of
Christianity is loyalty to a Person 341

APPENDICES
A. List of Books 353
B. Questions for the Use of Students 357
C. The Examination of a Child of Seven upon a
Term’s Work on the Lines indicated in this
Volume 387
D. The Examination of a Child of Nine upon a Term’s
Work 398
INDEX 420

Home Education

PA RT I

SOME PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

Not the least sign of the higher status they have gained, is the growing
desire for work that obtains amongst educated women. The world wants the
work of such women; and presently, as education becomes more general,
we shall see all women with the capacity to work falling into the ranks of
working women, with definite tasks, fixed hours, and for wages, the
pleasure and honour of doing useful work if they are under no necessity to
earn money.
Children are a Public Trust.—​Now, that work which is of most
importance to society is the bringing-up and instruction of the children—in
the school, certainly, but far more in the home, because it is more than
anything else the home influences brought to bear upon the child that
determine the character and career of the future man or woman. It is a great
thing to be a parent: there is no promotion, no dignity, to compare with it.
The parents of but one child may be cherishing what shall prove a blessing
to the world. But then, entrusted with such a charge, they are not free to say,
“I may do as I will with mine own.” The children are, in truth, to be
regarded less as personal property than as public trusts, put into the hands
of parents that they may make the very most of them for the good of
society. And this responsibility is not equally divided between the parents: it
is upon the mothers of the present that the future of the world depends, in
even a greater degree than upon the fathers, because it is the mothers who
have the sole direction of the children’s early, most impressible years. This
is why we hear so frequently of great men who have had good mothers—

that is, mothers who brought up their children themselves, and did not make
over their gravest duty to indifferent persons.
Mothers owe ‘a thinking love’ to their Children.—“The mother is
qualified,” says Pestalozzi, “and qualified by the Creator Himself, to
become the principal agent in the development of her child; ... and what is
demanded of her is—a thinking love.... God has given to thy child all the
faculties of our nature, but the grand point remains undecided—how shall
this heart, this head, these hands, be employed? to whose service shall they
be dedicated? A question the answer to which involves a futurity of
happiness or misery to a life so dear to thee. Maternal love is the first agent
in education.”
We are waking up to our duties, and in proportion as mothers become
more highly educated and efficient, they will doubtless feel the more
strongly that the education of their children during the first six years of life
is an undertaking hardly to be entrusted to any hands but their own. And
they will take it up as their profession—that is, with the diligence,
regularity, and punctuality which men bestow on their professional labours.
That the mother may know what she is about, may come thoroughly
furnished to her work, she should have something more than a hearsay
acquaintance with the theory of education, and with those conditions of the
child’s nature upon which such theory rests.
The Training of Children ‘dreadfully defective.’—“The training of
children,” says Mr Herbert Spencer—“physical, moral, and intellectual—is
dreadfully defective. And in great measure it is so, because parents are
devoid of that knowledge by which this training can alone be rightly
guided. What is to be expected when one of the most intricate of problems
is undertaken by those who have given scarcely a thought to the principle
on which its solution depends? For shoemaking or house-building, for the
management of a ship or of a locomotive engine, a long apprenticeship is
needful. Is it, then, that the unfolding of a human being in body and mind is
so comparatively simple a process that any one may superintend and
regulate it with no preparation whatever? If not—if the process is, with one
exception, more complex than any in Nature, and the task of ministering to
it one of surpassing difficulty—is it not madness to make no provision for
such a task? Better sacrifice accomplishments than omit this all-essential

instruction.... Some acquaintance with the first principles of physiology and
the elementary truths of psychology is indispensable for the right bringing-
up of children.... Here are the indisputable facts: that the development of
children in mind and body follows certain laws; that unless these laws are in
some degree conformed to by parents, death is inevitable; that unless they
are in a great degree conformed to, there must result serious physical and
mental defects; and that only when they are completely conformed to, can a
perfect maturity be reached. Judge, then, whether all who may one day be
parents should not strive with some anxiety to learn what these laws are.”[2]
How Parents usually proceed.—​The parent begins instinctively by
regarding his child as an unwritten tablet, and is filled with great resolves as
to what he shall write thereon. By-and-by, traits of disposition appear, the
child has little ways of his own; and, at first, every new display of
personality is a delightful surprise. That the infant should show pleasure at
the sight of his father, that his face should cloud in sympathy with his
mother, must always be wonderful to us. But the wonder stales; his parents
are used to the fact by the time the child shows himself a complete human
being like themselves, with affections, desires, powers; taking to his book,
perhaps, as a duck to the water; or to the games which shall make a man of
him. The notion of doing all for the child with which the parents began
gradually recedes. So soon as he shows that he has a way of his own he is
encouraged to take it. Father and mother have no greater delight than to
watch the individuality of their child unfold as a flower unfolds. But
Othello loses his occupation. The more the child shapes his own course, the
less do the parents find to do, beyond feeding him with food convenient,
whether of love, or thought, or of bodily meat and drink. And here, we may
notice, the parents need only supply; the child knows well enough how to
appropriate. The parents’ chief care is, that that which they supply shall be
wholesome and nourishing, whether in the way of picture-books, lessons,
playmates, bread and milk, or mother’s love. This is education as most
parents understand it, with more of meat, more of love, more of culture,
according to their kind and degree. They let their children alone, allowing
human nature to develop on its own lines, modified by facts of environment
and descent.
Nothing could be better for the child than this ‘masterly inactivity,’ so far
as it goes. It is well he should be let grow and helped to grow according to

his nature; and so long as the parents do not step in to spoil him, much good
and no very evident harm comes of letting him alone. But this philosophy
of ‘let him be,’ while it covers a part, does not cover the serious part of the
parents’ calling; does not touch the strenuous incessant efforts upon lines of
law which go to the producing of a human being at his best.
Nothing is trivial that concerns a child; his foolish-seeming words and
ways are pregnant with meaning for the wise. It is in the infinitely little we
must study the infinitely great; and the vast possibilities, and the right
direction of education, are indicated in the open book of the little child’s
thoughts.
A generation ago, a great teacher amongst us never wearied of reiterating
that in the Divine plan “the family is the unit of the nation”: not the
individual, but the family. There is a great deal of teaching in the phrase,
but this lies on the surface; the whole is greater than the part, the whole
contains the part, owns the part, orders the part; and this being so, the
children are the property of the nation, to be brought up for the nation as is
best for the nation, and not according to the whim of individual parents. The
law is for the punishment of evil-doers, for the praise of them that do well;
so, practically, parents have very free play; but it is as well we should
remember that the children are a national trust whose bringing-up is the
concern of all—even of those unmarried and childless persons whose part
in the game is the rather dreary one of ‘looking on.’

i.—a method of education

Traditional Methods of Education.—​Never was it more necessary for
parents to face for themselves this question of education in all its bearings.
Hitherto, children have been brought up upon traditional methods mainly.
The experience of our ancestors, floating in a vast number of educational
maxims, is handed on from lip to lip; and few or many of these maxims
form the educational code of every household.
But we hardly take in how complete a revolution advancing science is
effecting in the theory of education. The traditions of the elders have been
tried and found wanting; it will be long before the axioms of the new school
pass into common currency; and, in the meantime, parents are thrown upon

their own resources, and absolutely must weigh principles, and adopt a
method, of education for themselves.
For instance, according to the former code, a mother might use her
slipper now and then, to good effect and without blame; but now, the person
of the child is, whether rightly or wrongly, held sacred, and the infliction of
pain for moral purposes is pretty generally disallowed.
Again, the old rule for the children’s table was, ‘the plainer the better,
and let hunger bring sauce’; now, the children’s diet must be at least as
nourishing and as varied as that of their elders; and appetite, the craving for
certain kinds of food, hitherto a vicious tendency to be repressed, is now
within certain limitations the parents’ most trustworthy guide in arranging a
dietary for their children.
That children should be trained to endure hardness, was a principle of
the old régime. “I shall never make a sailor if I can’t face the wind and
rain,” said a little fellow of five who was taken out on a bitter night to see a
torchlight procession; and, though shaking with cold, he declined the shelter
of a shed. Nowadays, the shed is everything; the children must not be
permitted to suffer from fatigue or exposure.
That children should do as they are bid, mind their books, and take
pleasure as it offers when nothing stands in the way, sums up the old theory;
now, the pleasures of children are apt to be made of more account than their
duties.
Formerly, they were brought up in subjection; now, the elders give place,
and the world is made for the children.
English people rarely go so far as the parents of that story in French
Home Life, who arrived an hour late at a dinner-party, because they had
been desired by their girl of three to undress and go to bed when she did,
and were able to steal away only when the child was asleep. We do not go
so far, but that is the direction in which we are moving; and how far the new
theories of education are wise and humane, the outcome of more widely
spread physiological and psychological knowledge, and how far they just
pander to the child-worship to which we are all succumbing, is not a
question to be decided off-hand.

At any rate, it is not too much to say that a parent who does not follow
reasonably a method of education, fully thought out, fails—now, more than
ever before—to fulfil the claims his children have upon him.
Method a Way to an End.—​Method implies two things—a way to an
end, and step-by-step progress in that way. Further, the following of a
method implies an idea, a mental image, of the end or object to be arrived
at. What do you propose that education shall effect in and for your child?
Again, method is natural; easy, yielding, unobtrusive, simple as the ways of
Nature herself; yet, watchful, careful, all-pervading, all-compelling.
Method, with the end of education in view, presses the most unlikely
matters into service to bring about that end; but with no more tiresome
mechanism than the sun employs when it makes the winds to blow and the
waters to flow only by shining. The parent who sees his way—that is, the
exact force of method—to educate his child, will make use of every
circumstance of the child’s life almost without intention on his own part, so
easy and spontaneous is a method of education based upon Natural Law.
Does the child eat or drink, does he come, or go, or play—all the time he is
being educated, though he is as little aware of it as he is of the act of
breathing. There is always the danger that a method, a bonâ fide method,
should degenerate into a mere system. The Kindergarten Method, for
instance, deserves the name, as having been conceived and perfected by
large-hearted educators to aid the many-sided evolution of the living,
growing, most complex human being; but what a miserable wooden system
does it become in the hands of ignorant practitioners!
A System easier than a Method.—​A ‘system of education’ is an
alluring fancy; more so, on some counts, than a method, because it is
pledged to more definite calculable results. By means of a system certain
developments may be brought about through the observance of given rules.
Shorthand, dancing, how to pass examinations, how to become a good
accountant, or a woman of society, may all be learned upon systems.
System—the observing of rules until the habit of doing certain things, of
behaving in certain ways, is confirmed, and, therefore, the art is acquired—
is so successful in achieving precise results, that it is no wonder there
should be endless attempts to straiten the whole field of education to the
limits of a system.

If a human being were a machine, education could do no more for him
than to set him in action in prescribed ways, and the work of the educator
would be simply to adopt a good working system or set of systems.
But the educator has to deal with a self-acting, self-developing being,
and his business is to guide, and assist in, the production of the latent good
in that being, the dissipation of the latent evil, the preparation of the child to
take his place in the world at his best, with every capacity for good that is in
him developed into a power.
Though system is highly useful as an instrument of education, a ‘system
of education’ is mischievous, as producing only mechanical action instead
of the vital growth and movement of a living being.
It is worth while to point out the differing characters of a system and a
method, because parents let themselves be run away with often enough by
some plausible ‘system,’ the object of which is to produce development in
one direction—of the muscles, of the memory, of the reasoning faculty—
and to rest content, as if that single development were a complete all-round
education. This easy satisfaction arises from the sluggishness of human
nature, to which any definite scheme is more agreeable than the constant
watchfulness, the unforeseen action, called for when the whole of a child’s
existence is to be used as the means of his education. But who is sufficient
for an education so comprehensive, so incessant? A parent may be willing
to undergo any definite labours for his child’s sake; but to be always
catering for his behoof, always contriving that circumstances shall play
upon him for his good, is the part of a god and not of a man! A reasonable
objection enough, if one looks upon education as an endless series of
independent efforts, each to be thought out and acted out on the spur of the
moment; but the fact is, that a few broad essential principles cover the
whole field, and these once fully laid hold of, it is as easy and natural to act
upon them as it is to act upon our knowledge of such facts as that fire burns
and water flows. My endeavour in this and the following chapters will be to
put these few fundamental principles before you in their practical bearing.
Meantime, let us consider one or two preliminary questions.

ii.—the child’s estate

The Child in the Midst.—​And first, let us consider where and what the
little being is who is entrusted to the care of human parents. A tablet to be
written upon? A twig to be bent? Wax to be moulded? Very likely; but he is
much more—a being belonging to an altogether higher estate than ours; as
it were, a prince committed to the fostering care of peasants. Hear
Wordsworth’s estimate of the child’s estate:—
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
* * * * *
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul’s immensity;
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find;
Thou, over whom thy immortality
Broods like the day, a master o’er a slave,
A presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom, on thy being’s height”—

and so on, through the whole of that great ode, which, next after the Bible,
shows the deepest insight into what is peculiar to the children in their nature
and estate. “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.” “Except ye become as little
children ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven.” “Who is the
greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” “And He called a little child, and set
him in the midst.” Here is the Divine estimate of the child’s estate. It is
worth while for parents to ponder every utterance in the Gospels about the
children, divesting themselves of the notion that these sayings belong, in the
first place, to the grown-up people who have become as little children.
What these profound sayings are, and how much they may mean, it is
beyond us to discuss here; only they appear to cover far more than
Wordsworth claims for the children in his sublimest reach—

“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”

Code of Education in the Gospels.—​It may surprise parents who have
not given much attention to the subject to discover also a code of education
in the Gospels, expressly laid down by Christ. It is summed up in three
commandments, and all three have a negative character, as if the chief thing
required of grown-up people is that they should do no sort of injury to the
children: Take heed that ye offend not—despise not—hinder not—one of
these little ones.
So run the three educational laws of the New Testament, which, when
separately examined, appear to me to cover all the help we can give the
children and all the harm we can save them from—that is, whatever is
included in training up a child in the way he should go. Let us look upon
these three great laws as prohibitive, in order to clear the ground for the
consideration of a method of education; for if we once settle with ourselves
what we may not do, we are greatly helped to see what we may do, and
must do. But, as a matter of fact, the positive is included in the negative,
what we are bound to do for the child in what we are forbidden to do to his
hurt.

iii.—offending the children

Offences.—​The first and second of the Divine edicts appear to include
our sins of commission and of omission against the children: we offend
them, when we do by them that which we ought not to have done; we
despise them, when we leave undone those things which, for their sakes, we
ought to have done. An offence, we know, is literally a stumbling-block,
that which trips up the walker and causes him to fall. Mothers know what it
is to clear the floor of every obstacle when a baby takes his unsteady little
runs from chair to chair, from one pair of loving arms to another. The table-
leg, the child’s toy on the floor, which has caused a fall and a pitiful cry, is a
thing to be deplored; why did not somebody put it out of the way, so that
the baby should not stumble? But the little child is going out into the world
with uncertain tottering steps in many directions. There are causes of
stumbling not so easy to remove as an offending footstool; and woe to him
who causes the child to fall!

Children are born Law-abiding.—​‘Naughty baby!’ says the mother;
and the child’s eyes droop, and a flush rises over neck and brow. It is very
wonderful; very ‘funny,’ some people think, and say, ‘Naughty baby!’ when
the baby is sweetly good, to amuse themselves with the sight of the infant
soul rising visibly before their eyes. But what does it mean, this display of
feeling, conscience, in the child, before any human teaching can have
reached him? No less than this, that he is born a law-abiding being, with a
sense of may, and must not, of right and wrong. That is how the children are
sent into the world with the warning, “Take heed that ye offend not one of
these little ones.” And—this being so—who has not met big girls and boys,
the children of right-minded parents, who yet do not know what must
means, who are not moved by ought, whose hearts feel no stir at the solemn
name of Duty, who know no higher rule of life than ‘I want,’ and ‘I don’t
want,’ ‘I like,’ and ‘I don’t like’? Heaven help parents and children when it
has come to that!
But how has it been brought about that the babe, with an acute sense of
right and wrong even when it can understand little of human speech, should
grow into the boy or girl already proving ‘the curse of lawless heart’? By
slow degrees, here a little and there a little, as all that is good or bad in
character comes to pass. ‘Naughty!’ says the mother, again, when a little
hand is thrust into the sugar-bowl; and a pair of roguish eyes seeks hers
furtively, to measure, as they do unerringly, how far the little pilferer may
go. It is very amusing; the mother ‘cannot help laughing’; and the little
trespass is allowed to pass: and, what the poor mother has not thought of, an
offence, a cause of stumbling, has been cast into the path of her two-year-
old child. He has learned already that that which is ‘naughty’ may yet be
done with impunity, and he goes on improving his knowledge. It is needless
to continue; everybody knows the steps by which the mother’s ‘no’ comes
to be disregarded, her refusal teased into consent. The child has learned to
believe that he has nothing to overcome but his mother’s disinclination; if
she choose to let him do this and that, there is no reason why she should
not; he can make her choose to let him do the thing forbidden, and then he
may do it. The next step in the argument is not too great for childish wits: if
his mother does what she chooses, of course he will do what he chooses, if
he can; and henceforward the child’s life becomes an endless struggle to get
his own way; a struggle in which a parent is pretty sure to be worsted,

having many things to think of, while the child sticks persistently to the
thing which has his fancy for the moment.
They must perceive that their Governors are Law-compelled.—​
Where is the beginning of this tangle, spoiling the lives of parent and child
alike? In this: that the mother began with no sufficient sense of duty; she
thought herself free to allow and disallow, to say and unsay, at pleasure, as
if the child were hers to do what she liked with. The child has never
discovered a background of must behind his mother’s decisions; he does not
know that she must not let him break his sister’s playthings, gorge himself
with cake, spoil the pleasure of other people, because these things are not
right. Let the child perceive that his parents are law-compelled as well as
he, that they simply cannot allow him to do the things which have been
forbidden, and he submits with the sweet meekness which belongs to his
age. To give reasons to a child is usually out of place, and is a sacrifice of
parental dignity; but he is quick enough to read the ‘must’ and ‘ought’
which rule her, in his mother’s face and manner, and in the fact that she is
not to be moved from a resolution on any question of right and wrong.
Parents may Offend their Children by Disregarding the Laws of
Health.—​This, of allowing him in what is wrong, is only one of many ways
in which the loving mother may offend her child. Through ignorance, or
wilfulness, which is worse, she may not only allow wrong in him, but do
wrong by him. She may cast a stumbling-block in the way of his physical
life by giving him unwholesome food, letting him sleep and live in ill-
ventilated rooms, by disregarding any or every of the simple laws of health,
ignorance of which is hardly to be excused in the face of the pains taken by
scientific men to bring this necessary knowledge within the reach of every
one.
And of the Intellectual Life.—​Almost as bad is the way the child’s
intellectual life may be wrecked at its outset by a round of dreary, dawdling
lessons in which definite progress is the last thing made or expected, and
which, so far from educating in any true sense, stultify his wits in a way he
never gets over. Many a little girl, especially, leaves the home schoolroom
with a distaste for all manner of learning, an aversion to mental effort,
which lasts her her lifetime, and that is why she grows up to read little but
trashy novels, and to talk all day about her clothes.

And of the Moral Life.—​And her affections—the movements of the
outgoing tender child-heart—how are they treated? There are few mothers
who do not take pains to cherish the family affections; but when the child
comes to have dealings with outsiders, do no worldly maxims and motives
ever nip the buds of childish love? Far worse than this happens when the
child’s love finds no natural outlets within her home: when she is the plain
or the dull child of the family, and is left out in the cold, while the parents’
affection is lavished on the rest. Of course she does not love her brothers
and sisters, who monopolise what should have been hers too. And how is
she to love her parents? Nobody knows the real anguish which many a child
in the nursery suffers from this cause, nor how many lives are embittered
and spoiled through the suppression of these childish affections. “My
childhood was made miserable,” a lady said to me a while ago, “by my
mother’s doting fondness for my little brother; there was not a day when
she did not make me wretched by coming into the nursery to fondle and
play with him, and all the time she had not a word nor a look nor a smile for
me, any more than if I had not been in the room. I have never got over it;
she is very kind to me now, but I never feel quite natural with her. And how
can we two, brother and sister, feel for each other as we should if we had
grown up together in love in the nursery?”

iv.—despising the children

Children should have the best of their Mothers.—​Suppose that a
mother may offend her child, how is it possible that she should despise him?
“Despise: to have a low opinion of, to undervalue”—thus the dictionary;
and, as a matter of fact, however much we may delight in them, we grown-
up people have far too low an opinion of children. If the mother did not
undervalue her child, would she leave him to the society of an ignorant
nursemaid during the early years when his whole nature is, like the
photographer’s sensitive plate, receiving momently indelible impressions?
Not but that his nurse is good for the child. Very likely it would not answer
for educated people to have their children always about them. The constant
society of his parents might be too stimulating for the child; and frequent
change of thought, and the society of other people, make the mother all the
fresher for her children. But they should have the best of their mother, her
freshest, brightest hours; while, at the same time, she is careful to choose

her nurses wisely, train them carefully, and keep a vigilant eye upon all that
goes on in the nursery.
‘Nurse.’—Mere coarseness and rudeness in his nurse does the tender
child lasting harm. Many a child leaves the nursery with his moral sense
blunted, and with an alienation from his heavenly Father set up which may
last his lifetime. For the child’s moral sense is exceedingly quick; he is all
eyes and ears for the slightest act or word of unfairness, deception,
shiftiness. His nurse says, “If you’ll be a good boy, I won’t tell”; and the
child learns that things may be concealed from his mother, who should be to
him as God, knowing all his good and evil. And it is not as if the child noted
the slips of his elders with aversion. He knows better, it is true, but then he
does not trust his own intuitions; he shapes his life on any pattern set before
him, and with the fatal taint of human nature upon him he is more ready to
imitate a bad pattern than a good. Give him a nurse who is coarse, violent,
and tricky, and before the child is able to speak plainly he will have caught
these dispositions.
Children’s Faults are Serious.—​One of many ways in which parents
are apt to have too low an opinion of their children is in the matter of their
faults. A little child shows some ugly trait—he is greedy, and gobbles up his
sister’s share of goodies as well as his own; he is vindictive, ready to bite or
fight the hand that offends him; he tells a lie;—no, he did not touch the
sugar-bowl or the jam-pot. The mother puts off the evil day: she knows she
must sometime reckon with the child for those offences, but in the
meantime she says, “Oh, it does not matter this time; he is very little, and
will know better by-and-by.” To put the thing on no higher grounds, what
happy days for herself and her children would the mother secure if she
would keep watch at the place of the letting out of waters! If the mother
settle it in her own mind that the child never does wrong without being
aware of his wrong-doing, she will see that he is not too young to have his
fault corrected or prevented. Deal with a child on his first offence, and a
grieved look is enough to convict the little transgressor; but let him go on
until a habit of wrong-doing is formed, and the cure is a slow one; then the
mother has no chance until she has formed in him a contrary habit of well-
doing. To laugh at ugly tempers and let them pass because the child is
small, is to sow the wind.

v.—hindering the children

A Child’s Relationship with Almighty God.—​The most fatal way of
despising the child falls under the third educational law of the Gospels; it is
to overlook and make light of his natural relationship with Almighty God.
“Suffer the little children to come unto Me,” says the Saviour, as if that
were the natural thing for the children to do, the thing they do when they
are not hindered by their elders. And perhaps it is not too beautiful a thing
to believe in this redeemed world, that, as the babe turns to his mother
though he has no power to say her name, as the flowers turn to the sun, so
the hearts of the children turn to their Saviour and God with unconscious
delight and trust.
Nursery Theology.—​Now listen to what goes on in many a nursery:
—‘God does not love you, you naughty, wicked boy!’ ‘He will send you to
the bad, wicked place,’ and so on; and this is all the practical teaching about
the ways of his ‘almighty Lover’ that the child gets!—never a word of how
God does love and cherish the little children all day long, and fill their
hours with delight. Add to this, listless perfunctory prayers, idle discussions
of Divine things in their presence, light use of holy words, few signs
whereby the child can read that the things of God are more to his parents
than any things of the world, and the child is hindered, tacitly forbidden to
“come unto Me,”—and this, often, by parents who in the depths of their
hearts desire nothing in comparison with God. The mischief lies in that
same foolish undervaluing of the children, in the notion that the child can
have no spiritual life until it please his elders to kindle the flame.

vi.—conditions of healthy brain-activity

Having just glanced at the wide region of forbidden ground, we are
prepared to consider what it is, definitely and positively, that the mother
owes to her child under the name of Education.
All Mind Labour means Wear of Brain.—​And first of all, the more
educable powers of the child—his intelligence, his will, his moral feelings
—have their seat in the brain; that is to say, as the eye is the organ of sight,
so is the brain, or some part of it, the organ of thought and will, of love and
worship. Authorities differ as to how far it is possible to localise the
functions of the brain; but this at least seems pretty clear—that none of the

functions of mind are performed without real activity in the mass of grey
and white nervous matter named ‘the brain.’ Now, this is not a matter for
the physiologist alone, but for every mother and father of a family; because
that wonderful brain, by means of which we do our thinking, if it is to act
healthily and in harmony with the healthful action of the members, should
act only under such conditions of exercise, rest, and nutrition as secure
health in every other part of the body.
Exercise.—​Most of us have met with a few eccentric and a good many
silly persons, concerning whom the question forces itself, Were these
people born with less brain power than others? Probably not; but if they
were allowed to grow up without the daily habit of appropriate moral and
mental work, if they were allowed to dawdle through youth without regular
and sustained efforts of thought or will, the result would be the same, and
the brain which should have been invigorated by daily exercise has become
flabby and feeble as a healthy arm would be after being carried for years in
a sling. The large active brain is not content with entire idleness; it strikes
out lines for itself and works fitfully, and the man or woman becomes
eccentric, because wholesome mental effort, like moral, must be carried on
under the discipline of rules. A shrewd writer suggests that mental
indolence may have been in some measure the cause of those pitiable
attacks of derangement and depression from which poor Cowper suffered;
the making of graceful verses when the ‘maggot bit’ did not afford him the
amount of mental labour necessary for his well-being.
The outcome of which is—Do not let the children pass a day without
distinct efforts, intellectual, moral, volitional; let them brace themselves to
understand; let them compel themselves to do and to bear; and let them do
right at the sacrifice of ease and pleasure: and this for many higher reasons,
but, in the first and lowest place, that the mere physical organ of mind and
will may grow vigorous with work.
Rest.—​Just as important is it that the brain should have due rest; that is,
should rest and work alternately. And here two considerations come into
play. In the first place, when the brain is actively at work it is treated as is
every other organ of the body in the same circumstances; that is to say, a
large additional supply of blood is attracted to the head for the nourishment
of the organ which is spending its substance in hard work. Now, there is not
an indefinite quantity of what we will for the moment call surplus blood in

the vessels. The supply is regulated on the principle that only one set of
organs shall be excessively active at one time—now the limbs, now the
digestive organs, now the brain; and all the blood in the body that can be
spared goes to the support of those organs which, for the time being, are in
a state of labour.
Rest after Meals.—​The child has just had his dinner, the meal of the
day which most severely taxes his digestive organs; for as much as two or
three hours after, much labour is going on in these organs, and the blood
that can be spared from elsewhere is present to assist. Now, send the child
out for a long walk immediately after dinner—the blood goes to the
labouring extremities, and the food is left half digested; give the child a
regular course of such dinners and walks, and he will grow up a dyspeptic.
Set him to his books after a heavy meal, and the case is as bad; the blood
which should have been assisting in the digestion of the meal goes to the
labouring brain.
It follows that the hours for lessons should be carefully chosen, after
periods of mental rest—sleep or play, for instance—and when there is no
excessive activity in any other part of the system. Thus, the morning, after
breakfast (the digestion of which lighter meal is not a severe tax), is much
the best time for lessons and every sort of mental work; if the whole
afternoon cannot be spared for out-of-door recreation, that is the time for
mechanical tasks such as needlework, drawing, practising; the children’s
wits are bright enough in the evening, but the drawback to evening work is,
that the brain, once excited, is inclined to carry on its labours beyond bed-
time, and dreams, wakefulness, and uneasy sleep attend the poor child who
has been at work until the last minute. If the elder children must work in the
evening, they should have at least one or two pleasant social hours before
they go to bed; but, indeed, we owe it to the children to abolish evening
‘preparation.’
Change of Occupation.—​“There is,” says Huxley, “no satisfactory
proof at present, that the manifestation of any particular kind of mental
faculty is especially allotted to, or connected with, the activity of any
particular region of the cerebral hemispheres,” a dictum against the
phrenologists, but coming to us on too high authority to be disputed. It is
not possible to localise the ‘faculties’—to say you are cautious with this
fraction of your brain, and music-loving with another; but this much is

certain, and is very important to the educator: the brain, or some portion of
the brain, becomes exhausted when any given function has been exercised
too long. The child has been doing sums for some time, and is getting
unaccountably stupid: take away his slate and let him read history, and you
find his wits fresh again. Imagination, which has had no part in the sums, is
called into play by the history lesson, and the child brings a lively
unexhausted power to his new work. School time-tables are usually drawn
up with a view to give the brain of the child variety of work; but the secret
of the weariness children often show in the home schoolroom is, that no
such judicious change of lessons is contrived.
Nourishment.—​Again, the brain cannot do its work well unless it be
abundantly and suitably nourished; somebody has made a calculation of
how many ounces of brain went to the production of such a work—say
Paradise Lost—how many to such another, and so on. Without going into
mental arithmetic of this nature, we may say with safety that every sort of
intellectual activity wastes the tissues of the brain; a network of vessels
supplies an enormous quantity of blood to the organ, to make up for this
waste of material; and the vigour and health of the brain depend upon the
quality and quantity of this blood-supply.
Certain Causes affect the Quality of the Blood.—​Now, the quality of
the blood is affected by three or four causes. In the first place, the blood is
elaborated from the food; the more nutritious and easy of digestion the
food, the more vital will be the properties of the blood. The food must be
varied, too, a mixed diet, because various ingredients are required to make
up for the various waste in the tissues. The children are shocking
spendthrifts; their endless goings and comings, their restlessness, their
energy, the very wagging of their tongues, all mean expenditure of
substance: the loss is not appreciable, but they lose something by every
sudden sally, out of doors or within. No doubt the gain of power which
results from exercise is more than compensation for the loss of substance;
but, all the same, this loss must be promptly made good. And not only is the
body of the child more active, proportionably, than that of the man: the
child’s brain as compared with the man’s is in a perpetual flutter of
endeavour. It is calculated that though the brain of a man weighs no more
than a fortieth part of his body, yet a fifth or a sixth of his whole
complement of blood goes to nourish this delicate and intensely active

organ; but, in the child’s case, a considerably larger proportion of the blood
that is in him is spent on the sustenance of his brain. And all the time, with
these excessive demands upon him, the child has to grow! not merely to
make up for waste, but to produce new substance in brain and body.
Concerning Meals.—​What is the obvious conclusion? That the child
must be well fed. Half the people of low vitality we come across are the
victims of low-feeding during their childhood; and that more often because
their parents were not alive to their duty in this respect, than because they
were not in a position to afford their children the diet necessary to their full
physical and mental development. Regular meals at, usually, unbroken
intervals—dinner, never more than five hours after breakfast; luncheon,
unnecessary; animal food, once certainly, in some lighter form, twice a day
—are the suggestions of common sense followed out in most well-regulated
households. But it is not the food which is eaten, but the food which is
digested, that nourishes body and brain. And here so many considerations
press, that we can only glance at two or three of the most obvious.
Everybody knows that children should not eat pastry, or pork, or fried
meats, or cheese, or rich, highly-flavoured food of any description; that
pepper, mustard, and vinegar, sauces and spices, should be forbidden, with
new bread, rich cakes, and jams, like plum or gooseberry, in which the
leathery coat of the fruit is preserved; that milk, or milk and water, and that
not too warm, or cocoa, is the best drink for children, and that they should
be trained not to drink until they have finished eating; that fresh fruit at
breakfast is invaluable; that, as serving the same end, oatmeal porridge and
treacle, and the fat of toasted bacon, are valuable breakfast foods; and that a
glass of water, also, taken the last thing at night and the first thing in the
morning, is useful in promoting those regular habits on which much of the
comfort of life depends.
Talk at Meals.—​All this and much of the same kind it is needless to
urge; but again let me say, it is digested food that nourishes the system, and
people are apt to forget how far mental and moral conditions affect the
processes of digestion. The fact is, that the gastric juices which act as
solvents to the viands are only secreted freely when the mind is in a
cheerful and contented frame. If the child dislike his dinner, he swallows it,
but the digestion of that distasteful meal is a laborious, much-impeded
process: if the meal be eaten in silence, unrelieved by pleasant chat, the

child loses much of the ‘good’ of his dinner. Hence it is not a matter of
pampering them at all, but a matter of health, of due nutrition, that the
children should enjoy their food, and that their meals should be eaten in
gladness; though, by the way, joyful excitement is as mischievous as its
opposite in destroying that even, cheerful tenor of mind favourable to the
processes of digestion. No pains should be spared to make the hours of
meeting round the family table the brightest hours of the day. This is
supposing that the children are allowed to sit at the same table with their
parents; and, if it is possible to let them do so at every meal excepting a late
dinner, the advantage to the little people is incalculable. Here is the parents’
opportunity to train them in manners and in morals, to cement family love,
and to accustom the children to habits, such as that of thorough mastication,
for instance, as important on the score of health as on that of propriety.
Variety in Meals.—​But, given pleasant surroundings and excellent
food, and even then the requirements of these exacting little people are not
fully met: plain as their food should be, they must have variety. A leg of
mutton every Tuesday, the same cold on Wednesday, and hashed on
Thursday, may be very good food; but the child who has this diet week after
week is inadequately nourished, simply because he is tired of it. The mother
should contrive a rotation for her children that will last at least a fortnight
without the same dinner recurring twice. Fish, especially if the children dine
off it without meat to follow, is excellent as a change, the more so as it is
rich in phosphorus—a valuable brain food. The children’s puddings deserve
a good deal of consideration, because they do not commonly care for fatty
foods, but prefer to derive the warmth of their bodies from the starch and
sugar of their puddings. But give them variety; do not let it be ‘everlasting
tapioca.’ Even for tea and breakfast the wise mother does not say, ‘I always
give my children’ so and so. They should not have anything ‘always’; every
meal should have some little surprise. But is this the way, to make them
think overmuch of what they shall eat and drink? On the contrary, it is the
underfed children who are greedy, and unfit to be trusted with any unusual
delicacy.
Air as important as Food.—​The quality of the blood depends almost as
much on the air we breathe as on the food we eat; in the course of every two
or three minutes, all the blood in the body passes through the endless
ramifications of the lungs, for no other purpose than that, during the instant

of its passage, it should be acted upon by the oxygen contained in the air
which is drawn into the lungs in the act of breathing. But what can happen
to the blood in the course of an exposure of so short duration? Just this—the
whole character, the very colour, of the blood is changed: it enters the lungs
spoiled, no longer capable of sustaining life; it leaves them, a pure and vital
fluid. Now, observe, the blood is only fully oxygenated when the air
contains its full proportion of oxygen, and every breathing and every
burning object withdraws some oxygen from the atmosphere. Hence the
importance of giving the children daily airings and abundant exercise of
limb and lung in unvitiated, unimpoverished air.
The Children Walk every Day.—‘The children walk every day; they
are never out less than an hour when the weather is suitable.’ That is better
than nothing; so is this:—An East London school-mistress notices the pale
looks of one of her best girls. “Have you had any dinner, Nellie?” “Ye-es”
(with hesitation). “What have you had?” “Mother gave Jessie and me a
halfpenny to buy our dinners, and we bought a haporth of aniseed drops—
they go further than bread”—with an appeal in her eyes against possible
censure for extravagance. Children do not develop at their best upon
aniseed drops for dinner, nor upon an hour’s ‘constitutional’ daily. Possibly
science will bring home to us more and more the fact that animal life, pent
under cover, is supported under artificial conditions, just as is plant life in a
glass house. Here is where most Continental nations have the advantage
over us; they keep up the habit of out-of-door life; and as a consequence,
the average Frenchman, German, Italian, Bulgarian, is more joyous, more
simple, and more hardy than the average Englishman. Climate? Did not
Charles II.—and he knew—declare for the climate of England because you
could be abroad “more hours in the day and more days in the year” in
England than “in any other country”? We lose sight of the fact that we are
not like that historical personage who “lived upon nothing but victuals and
drink.” “You can’t live upon air!” we say to the invalid who can’t eat. No;
we cannot live upon air; but, if we must choose among the three sustainers
of life, air will support us the longest. We know all about it; we are deadly
weary of the subject; let but the tail of your eye catch ‘oxygenation’ on a
page, and the well-trained organ skips that paragraph of its own accord. No
need to tell Macaulay’s schoolboy, or anybody else, how the blood of the
body is brought to the lungs and there spread about in a huge extent of
innumerable ‘pipes’ that it may be exposed momentarily to the oxygen in

the air; how the air is made to blow upon the blood, so spread out in
readiness, by the bellows-like action of breathing; how the air penetrates the
very thin walls of the pipes; and then, behold, a magical (or chemical)
transmutation; the worthless sewage of the system becomes on the instant
the rich vivifying fluid whose function it is to build up the tissues of muscle
and nerve. And the Prospero that wears the cloak? Oxygen, his name; and
the marvel that he effects within us some fifteen times in the course of a
minute is possibly without parallel in the whole array of marvels which we
‘tot up’ with easy familiarity, setting down ‘life,’ and carrying—a cypher!
Oxygen has its Limitations.—​We know all about it; what we forget,
perhaps, is, that even oxygen has its limitation: nothing can act but where it
is, and, waste attends work, hold true for this vital gas as for other matters.
Fire and lamp and breathing beings are all consumers of the oxygen which
sustains them. What follows? Why, that this element, which is present in the
ratio of twenty-three parts to the hundred in pure air, is subject to an
enormous drain within the four walls of a house, where the air is more or
less stationary. I am not speaking just now of the vitiation of the air—only
of the drain upon its life-sustaining element. Think, again, of the heavy
drain upon the oxygen which must support the multitudinous fires and
many breathing beings congregated in a large town! ‘What follows?’ is a
strictly vital question. Man can enjoy the full measure of vigorous joyous
existence possible to him only when his blood is fully aërated; and this
takes place when the air he inhales contains its full complement of oxygen.
Is it too much to say that vitality is reduced, other things being equal, in
proportion as persons are house-dwellers rather than open-air dwellers? The
impoverished air sustains life at a low and feeble level; wherefore, in the
great towns, stature dwindles, the chest contracts, men hardly live to see
their children’s children. True, we must needs have houses for shelter from
the weather by day and for rest at night; but in proportion as we cease to
make our houses ‘comfortable,’ as we regard them merely as necessary
shelters when we cannot be out of doors, shall we enjoy to the full the
vigorous vitality possible to us.
Unchanged Air.—​Parents of pale-faced town children, think of these
things! The gutter children who feed on the pickings of the streets are better
off (and healthier looking) in this one respect than your cherished darlings,
because they have more of the first essential of life—air. There is some

circulation of air even in the slums of the city, and the child who spends its
days in the streets is better supplied with oxygen than he who spends most
of his hours in the unchanged air of a spacious apartment. But it is not the
air of the streets the children want. It is the delicious life-giving air of the
country. The outlay of the children in living is enormously in excess of the
outlay of the adult. The endless activity of the child, while it develops
muscle, is kept up at the expense of very great waste of tissue. It is the
blood which carries material for the reparation of this loss. The child must
grow, every part of him, and it is the blood which brings material for the
building up of new tissues. Again, we know that the brain is, out of all
proportion to its size, the great consumer of the blood supply, but the brain
of the child, what with its eager activity, what with its twofold growth, is
insatiable in its demands!
‘I feed Alice on beef tea.’—​‘I feed Alice on beef tea, cod-liver oil, and
all sorts of nourishing things; but it’s very disheartening, the child doesn’t
gain flesh!’ It is probable that Alice breathes for twenty-two of the twenty-
four hours the impoverished and more or less vitiated air pent within the
four walls of a house. The child is practically starving; for the food she eats
is very imperfectly and inadequately converted into the aërated blood that
feeds the tissues of the body.
And if she is suffering from bodily inanition, what about the eager,
active, curious, hungering mind of the little girl? ‘Oh, she has her lessons
regularly every day.’ Probably: but lessons which deal with words, only the
signs of things, are not what the child wants. There is no knowledge so
appropriate to the early years of a child as that of the name and look and
behaviour in situ of every natural object he can get at. “He hath so done His
marvellous works that they ought to be had in remembrance.”
“Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown:
This child I to myself will take:
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
* * * * *
“‘She shall be sportive as the fawn,
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,

And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute, insensate things.
* * * * *
“‘The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.’”

Indoor Airings.—​About out-of-door airings we shall have occasion to
speak more fully; but indoor airings are truly as important, because, if the
tissues be nourished upon impure blood for all the hours the child spends in
the house, the mischief will not be mended in the shorter intervals spent out
of doors. Put two or three breathing bodies, as well as fire and gas, into a
room, and it is incredible how soon the air becomes vitiated unless it be
constantly renewed; that is, unless the room be well ventilated. We know
what it is to come in out of the fresh air and complain that a room feels
stuffy; but sit in the room a few minutes, and you get accustomed to its
stuffiness; the senses are no longer a safe guide.
Ventilation.—​Therefore, regular provision must be made for the
ventilation of rooms regardless of the feelings of their inmates: at least an
inch of window open at the top, day and night, renders a room tolerably
safe, because it allows of the escape of the vitiated air, which, being light,
ascends, leaving room for the influx of colder, fresher air by cracks and
crannies in doors and floors. An open chimney is a useful, though not a
sufficient, ventilator; it is needless to say that the stopping-up of chimneys
in sleeping-rooms is suicidal. It is particularly important to accustom
children to sleep with an inch or two, or more, of open window all through
the year—as much more as you like in the summer.
Night Air Wholesome.—​There is a popular notion that night air is
unwholesome; but if you reflect that wholesome air is that which contains
its full complement of oxygen, and no more than its very small complement
of carbonic acid gas, and that all burning objects—fire, furnace, gas-lamp—
give forth carbonic acid gas and consume oxygen, you will see that night air
is, in ordinary circumstances, more wholesome than day air, simply because
there is a less exhaustive drain upon its vital gas. When the children are out
of a room which they commonly occupy, day nursery or breakfast-room,

then is the opportunity to air it thoroughly by throwing windows and doors
wide open and producing a thorough draught.
Sunshine.—​But it is not only air, and pure air, the children must have if
their blood is to be of the ‘finest quality,’ as the advertisements have it.
Quite healthy blood is exceedingly rich in minute, red disc-like bodies,
known as red corpuscles, which in favourable circumstances are produced
freely in the blood itself. Now, it is observed that people who live much in
the sunshine are of a ruddy countenance—that is, a great many of these red
corpuscles are present in their blood; while the poor souls who live in
cellars and sunless alleys have skins the colour of whity-brown paper.
Therefore, it is concluded that light and sunshine are favourable to the
production of red corpuscles in the blood; and, therefore—to this next
‘therefore’ is but a step for the mother—the children’s rooms should be on
the sunny side of the house, with a south aspect if possible. Indeed, the
whole house should be kept light and bright for their sakes; trees and
outbuildings that obstruct the sunshine and make the children’s rooms dull
should be removed without hesitation.
Free Perspiration.—​Another point must be attended to, in order to
secure that the brain be nourished by healthy blood. The blood receives and
gets rid of the waste of the tissues, and one of the most important agents by
means of which it does this necessary scavenger’s work is the skin. Millions
of invisible pores perforate the skin, each the mouth of a minute many-
folded tube, and each such pore is employed without a moment’s cessation,
while the body is in health, in discharging perspiration—that is, the waste
of the tissues—upon the skin.
Insensible Perspiration.—​When the discharge is excessive, we are
aware of moisture upon the skin; but, aware of it or not, the discharge is
always going on; and, what is more, if it be checked, or if a considerable
portion of the skin be glazed, so that it becomes impervious, death will
result. This is why people die in consequence of scalds or burns which
injure a large surface of the skin, although they do not touch any vital
organ; multitudes of minute tubes which should carry off injurious matters
from the blood are closed, and, though the remaining surface of the skin and
the other excretory organs take extra work upon them, it is impossible to
make good the loss of what may be called efficient drainage over a
considerable area. Therefore, if the brain is to be duly nourished, it is

important to keep the whole surface of the skin in a condition to throw off
freely the excretions of the blood.
Daily Bath and Porous Garments.—​Two considerations follow: of the
first, the necessity for the daily bath, followed by vigorous rubbing of the
skin, it is needless to say a word here. But possibly it is not so well
understood that children should be clothed throughout in porous garments
which admit of the instant passing off of the exhalations of the skin. Why
did delicate women faint, or, at any rate, ‘feel faint,’ when it was the custom
to go to church in sealskin coats? Why do people who sleep under down, or
even under silk or cotton quilts, frequently rise unrefreshed? From the one
cause: their coverings have impeded the passage of the insensible
perspiration, and so have hindered the skin in its function of relieving the
blood of impurities. It is surprising what a constant loss of vitality many
people experience from no other cause than the unsuitable character of their
clothing. The children cannot be better dressed throughout than in loosely
woven woollen garments, flannels and serges, of varying thicknesses for
summer and winter wear. Woollens have other advantages over cotton and
linen materials besides that of being porous. Wool is a bad conductor, and
therefore does not allow of the too free escape of the animal heat; and it is
absorbent, and therefore relieves the skin of the clammy sensations which
follow sensible perspiration. We should be the better for it if we could make
up our minds to sleep in wool, discarding linen or cotton in favour of sheets
made of some lightly woven woollen material.
We might say much on this one question, the due nutrition of the brain,
upon which the very possibility of healthy education depends. But
something will have been effected if the reason why of only two or three
practical rules of health is made so plain that they cannot be evaded without
a sense of law-breaking.
I fear the reader may be inclined to think that I am inviting his attention
for the most part to a few physiological matters—the lowest round of the
educational ladder. The lowest round it may be, but yet it is the lowest
round, the necessary step to all the rest. For it is not too much to say that, in
our present state of being, intellectual, moral, even spiritual life and
progress depend greatly upon physical conditions. That is to say, not that he
who has a fine physique is necessarily a good and clever man; but that the
good and clever man requires much animal substance to make up for the

expenditure of tissue brought about in the exercise of his virtue and his
intellect. For example, is it easier to be amiable, kindly, candid, with or
without a headache or an attack of neuralgia?

vii.—‘the reign of law’ in education

Common Sense and Good Intentions.—​Besides, though this physical
culture of the brain may be only the groundwork of education, the method
of it indicates what should be the method of all education; that is, orderly,
regulated progress under the guidance of Law. The reason why education
effects so much less than it should effect is just this—that in nine cases out
of ten, sensible good parents trust too much to their common sense and their
good intentions, forgetting that common sense must be at the pains to
instruct itself in the nature of the case, and that well-intended efforts come
to little if they are not carried on in obedience to divine laws, to be read in
many cases, not in the Bible, but in the facts of life.
Law-abiding Lives often more blameless than Pious Lives.—​It is a
shame to believing people that many whose highest profession is that they
do not know, and therefore do not believe, should produce more blameless
lives, freer from flaws of temper, from the vice of selfishness, than do many
sincerely religious people. It is a fact that will confront the children by-and-
by, and one of which they will require an explanation; and what is more, it
is a fact that will have more weight, should it confront them in the person of
a character which they cannot but esteem and love, than all the doctrinal
teaching they have had in their lives. This appears to me the threatening
danger to that confessed dependence upon and allegiance to Almighty God
which we recognise as religion—not the wickedness, but the goodness of a
school which refuses to admit any such dependence and allegiance.
My sense of this danger is my reason for offering the little I have to say
upon the subject of education,—my sense of the danger, and the assurance I
feel that it is no such great danger after all, but one that parents of the
cultivated class are competent to deal with, and are precisely the only
persons who can deal with it.
‘Mind’ and ‘Matter’ equally governed by Law.—​As for this superior
morality of some non-believers, supposing we grant it, what does it amount
to? Just to this, that the universe of mind, as the universe of matter, is

governed by unwritten laws of God; that the child cannot blow soap-
bubbles or think his flitting thoughts otherwise than in obedience to divine
laws; that all safety, progress, and success in life come of obedience to law,
to the laws of mental, moral, or physical science, or of that spiritual science
which the Bible unfolds; that it is possible to ascertain laws and keep laws
without recognising the Lawgiver, and that those who do ascertain and keep
any divine law inherit the blessing due to obedience, whatever be their
attitude towards the Lawgiver; just as the man who goes out into blazing
sunshine is warmed, though he may shut his eyes and decline to see the sun.
Conversely, that they who take no pains to study the principles which
govern human action and human thought miss the blessings of obedience to
certain laws, though they may inherit the better blessings which come of
acknowledged relationship with the Lawgiver.
Antagonism to Law shown by some Religious Persons.—​These last
blessings are so unspeakably satisfying, that often enough the believer who
enjoys them wants no more. He opens his mouth and draws in his breath for
the delight he has in the law, it is true; but it is the law of the spiritual life
only. Towards the other laws of God which govern the universe he
sometimes takes up an attitude of antagonism, almost of resistance, worthy
of an infidel. It is nothing to him that he is fearfully and wonderfully made;
he does not care to know how the brain works, nor how the more subtle
essence we call mind evolves and develops in obedience to laws. There are
pious minds to which a desire to look into these things savours of unbelief,
as if it were to dishonour the Almighty to perceive that He carries on His
glorious works by means of glorious laws. They will have to do with no
laws excepting the laws of the kingdom of grace. In the meantime, the non-
believer, who looks for no supernatural aids, lays himself out to discover
and conform to all the laws which regulate natural life—physical, mental,
moral; all the laws of God, in fact, excepting those of the spiritual life
which the believer appropriates as his peculiar inheritance. But these laws
which are left to Esau are laws of God also, and the observance of them is
attended with such blessings, that the children of the believers say, “Look,
how is it that these who do not acknowledge the Law as of God are better
than we who do?”
Parents must acquaint themselves with the Principles of Physiology
and Moral Science.—​Now, believing parents have no right to lay up this

crucial difficulty for their children. They have no right, for instance, to pray
that their children may be made truthful, diligent, upright, and at the same
time neglect to acquaint themselves with those principles of moral science
the observance of which will guide into truthfulness, diligence, and
uprightness of character. For this, also, is the law of God. Observe, not into
the knowledge of God, the thing best worth living for: no mental science,
and no moral science, is pledged to reveal that. What I contend for is, that
these sciences have their part to play in the education of the human race,
and that the parent may not disregard them with impunity. My endeavour in
this and the following volumes of the series will be to sketch out roughly a
method of education which, as resting upon a basis of natural law, may
look, without presumption, to inherit the Divine blessing. Any sketch I can
offer in this short compass must be very imperfect and very incomplete; but
a hint here and there may be enough to put intelligent parents on profitable
lines of thinking with regard to the education of their children.

FOOTNOTES:
[2] Herbert Spencer, Education. Some particulars of the books referred to in this
volume will be found in Appendix A.

PA RT I I

OUT-OF-DOOR LIFE FOR THE CHILDREN

i.—a growing time

Meals out of Doors.—​People who live in the country know the value of
fresh air very well, and their children live out of doors, with intervals within
for sleeping and eating. As to the latter, even country people do not make
full use of their opportunities. On fine days when it is warm enough to sit
out with wraps, why should not tea and breakfast, everything but a hot
dinner, be served out of doors? For we are an overwrought generation,
running to nerves as a cabbage runs to seed; and every hour spent in the
open is a clear gain, tending to the increase of brain power and bodily
vigour, and to the lengthening of life itself. They who know what it is to
have fevered skin and throbbing brain deliciously soothed by the cool touch
of the air are inclined to make a new rule of life, “Never be within doors
when you can rightly be without.”
Besides the gain of an hour or two in the open air, there is this to be
considered: meals taken al fresco are usually joyous, and there is nothing
like gladness for converting meat and drink into healthy blood and tissue.
All the time, too, the children are storing up memories of a happy
childhood. Fifty years hence they will see the shadows of the boughs
making patterns on the white tablecloth; and sunshine, children’s laughter,
hum of bees, and scent of flowers are being bottled up for after refreshment.
For Dwellers in Towns and Suburbs.—​But it is only the people who
live, so to speak, in their own gardens who can make a practice of giving
their children tea out of doors. For the rest of us, and the most of us, who
live in towns or the suburbs of towns, that is included in the larger question
—How much time daily in the open air should the children have? and how
is it possible to secure this for them? In this time of extraordinary pressure,
educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to

secure for them a quiet growing time, a full six years of passive receptive
life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air. And
this, not for the gain in bodily health alone—body and soul, heart and mind,
are nourished with food convenient for them when the children are let
alone, let to live without friction and without stimulus amongst happy
influences which incline them to be good.
Possibilities of a Day in the Open.—‘I make a point,’ says a judicious
mother, ‘of sending my children out, weather permitting, for an hour in the
winter, and two hours a day in the summer months.’ That is well; but it is
not enough. In the first place, do not send them; if it is anyway possible,
take them; for, although the children should be left much to themselves,
there is a great deal to be done and a great deal to be prevented during these
long hours in the open air. And long hours they should be; not two, but four,
five, or six hours they should have on every tolerably fine day, from April
till October. ‘Impossible!’ says an over-wrought mother who sees her way
to no more for her children than a daily hour or so on the pavements of the
neighbouring London squares. Let me repeat, that I venture to suggest, not
what is practicable in any household, but what seems to me absolutely best
for the children; and that, in the faith that mothers work wonders once they
are convinced that wonders are demanded of them. A journey of twenty
minutes by rail or omnibus, and a luncheon basket, will make a day in the
country possible to most town-dwellers; and if one day, why not many, even
every suitable day?
Supposing we have got them, what is to be done with these golden
hours, so that every one shall be delightful? They must be spent with some
method, or the mother will be taxed and the children bored. There is a great
deal to be accomplished in this large fraction of the children’s day. They
must be kept in a joyous temper all the time, or they will miss some of the
strengthening and refreshing held in charge for them by the blessed air.
They must be let alone, left to themselves a great deal, to take in what they
can of the beauty of earth and heavens; for of the evils of modern education
few are worse than this—that the perpetual cackle of his elders leaves the
poor child not a moment of time, nor an inch of space, wherein to wonder—
and grow. At the same time, here is the mother’s opportunity to train the
seeing eye, the hearing ear, and to drop seeds of truth into the open soul of
the child, which shall germinate, blossom, and bear fruit, without further

help or knowledge of hers. Then, there is much to be got by perching in a
tree or nestling in heather, but muscular development comes of more active
ways, and an hour or two should be spent in vigorous play; and last, and
truly least, a lesson or two must be got in.
No Story-Books.—​Let us suppose mother and children arrived at some
breezy open “wherein it seemeth always afternoon.” In the first place, it is
not her business to entertain the little people: there should be no story-
books, no telling of tales, as little talk as possible, and that to some purpose.
Who thinks to amuse children with tale or talk at a circus or a pantomime?
And here, is there not infinitely more displayed for their delectation? Our
wise mother, arrived, first sends the children to let off their spirits in a wild
scamper, with cry, halloo, and hullaballoo, and any extravagance that comes
into their young heads. There is no distinction between big and little; the
latter love to follow in the wake of their elders, and, in lessons or play, to
pick up and do according to their little might. As for the baby, he is in bliss:
divested of his garments, he kicks and crawls, and clutches the grass, laughs
soft baby laughter, and takes in his little knowledge of shapes and
properties in his own wonderful fashion—clothed in a woollen gown, long
and loose, which is none the worse for the worst usage it may get.

ii.—‘sight-seeing’

By-and-by the others come back to their mother, and, while wits are
fresh and eyes keen, she sends them off on an exploring expedition—Who
can see the most, and tell the most, about yonder hillock or brook, hedge or
copse. This is an exercise that delights children, and may be endlessly
varied, carried on in the spirit of a game, and yet with the exactness and
carefulness of a lesson.
How to See.—‘Find out all you can about that cottage at the foot of the
hill; but do not pry about too much.’ Soon they are back, and there is a
crowd of excited faces, and a hubbub of tongues, and random observations
are shot breathlessly into the mother’s ear. ‘There are bee-hives.’ ‘We saw a
lot of bees going into one.’ ‘There is a long garden.’ ‘Yes, and there are
sunflowers in it.’ ‘And hen-and-chicken daisies and pansies.’ ‘And there’s a
great deal of a pretty blue flower with rough leaves, mother; what do you
suppose it is?’ ‘Borage for the bees, most likely; they are very fond of it.’

‘Oh, and there are apple and pear and plum trees on one side; there’s a little
path up the middle, you know.’ ‘On which hand side are the fruit trees?’
‘The right—no, the left; let me see, which is my thimble-hand? Yes, it is the
right-hand side.’ ‘And there are potatoes and cabbages, and mint and things
on the other side.’ ‘Where are the flowers, then?’ ‘Oh, they are just the
borders, running down each side of the path.’ ‘But we have not told mother
about the wonderful apple tree; I should think there are a million apples on
it, all ripe and rosy!’ ‘A million, Fanny?’ ‘Well, a great many, mother; I
don’t know how many.’ And so on, indefinitely; the mother getting by
degrees a complete description of the cottage and its garden.
Educational Uses of ‘Sight-seeing.’—​This is all play to the children,
but the mother is doing invaluable work; she is training their powers of
observation and expression, increasing their vocabulary and their range of
ideas by giving them the name and the uses of an object at the right
moment,—when they ask, ‘What is it?’ and ‘What is it for?’ And she is
training her children in truthful habits, by making them careful to see the
fact and to state it exactly, without omission or exaggeration. The child who
describes, ‘A tall tree, going up into a point, with rather roundish leaves; not
a pleasant tree for shade, because the branches all go up,’ deserves to learn
the name of the tree, and anything her mother has to tell her about it. But
the little bungler, who fails to make it clear whether he is describing an elm
or a beech, should get no encouragement; not a foot should his mother
move to see his tree, no coaxing should draw her into talk about it, until, in
despair, he goes off, and comes back with some more certain note—rough
or smooth bark, rough or smooth leaves,—then the mother considers,
pronounces, and, full of glee, he carries her off to see for herself.
Discriminating Observation.—​By degrees the children will learn
discriminatingly every feature of the landscapes with which they are
familiar; and think what a delightful possession for old age and middle life
is a series of pictures imaged, feature by feature, in the sunny glow of a
child’s mind! The miserable thing about the childish recollections of most
persons is that they are blurred, distorted, incomplete, no more pleasant to
look upon than a fractured cup or a torn garment; and the reason is, not that
the old scenes are forgotten, but that they were never fully seen. At the time,
there was no more than a hazy impression that such and such objects were
present, and naturally, after a lapse of years, those features can rarely be

recalled of which the child was not cognisant when he saw them before
him.

iii.—‘picture-painting’

Method of.—​So exceedingly delightful is this faculty of taking mental
photographs, exact images, of the ‘beauties of Nature’ we go about the
world for the refreshment of seeing, that it is worth while to exercise
children in another way towards this end, bearing in mind, however, that
they see the near and the minute, but can only be made with an effort to
look at the wide and the distant. Get the children to look well at some patch
of landscape, and then to shut their eyes and call up the picture before them;
if any bit of it is blurred, they had better look again. When they have a
perfect image before their eyes, let them say what they see. Thus: ‘I see a
pond; it is shallow on this side, but deep on the other; trees come to the
water’s edge on that side, and you can see their green leaves and branches
so plainly in the water that you would think there was a wood underneath.
Almost touching the trees in the water is a bit of blue sky with a soft white
cloud; and when you look up you see that same little cloud, but with a great
deal of sky instead of a patch, because there are no trees up there. There are
lovely yellow water-lilies round the far edge of the pond, and two or three
of the big round leaves are turned up like sails. Near where I am standing
three cows have come to drink, and one has got far into the water, nearly up
to her neck,’ etc.
Strain on the Attention.—​This, too, is an exercise children delight in,
but, as it involves some strain on the attention, it is fatiguing, and should
only be employed now and then. It is, however, well worth while to give
children the habit of getting a bit of landscape by heart in this way, because
it is the effort of recalling and reproducing that is fatiguing; while the
altogether pleasurable act of seeing, fully and in detail, is likely to be
repeated unconsciously until it becomes a habit by the child who is required
now and then to reproduce what he sees.
Seeing Fully and in Detail.—​At first the children will want a little help
in the art of seeing. The mother will say, ‘Look at the reflection of the trees!
There might be a wood under the water. What do those standing-up leaves
remind you of?’ and so on, until the children have noticed the salient points

of the scene. She will even herself learn off two or three scenes, and
describe them with closed eyes for the children’s amusement; and such little
mimics are they, and at the same time so sympathetic, that any graceful
fanciful touch which she throws into her descriptions will be reproduced
with variations in theirs.
The children will delight in this game of ‘picture-painting’ all the more if
the mother introduce it by describing some great picture-gallery she has
seen—pictures of mountains, of moors, of stormy seas, of ploughed fields,
of little children at play, of an old woman knitting,—and goes on to say, that
though she does not paint her pictures on canvas and have them put in
frames, she carries about with her just such a picture-gallery; for whenever
she sees anything lovely or interesting, she looks at it until she has the
picture in her ‘mind’s eye’; and then she carries it away with her, her own
for ever, a picture ‘on view’ just when she wants it.
A Means of After-Solace and Refreshment.—​It would be difficult to
overrate this habit of seeing and storing as a means of after-solace and
refreshment. The busiest of us have holidays when we slip our necks out of
the yoke and come face to face with Nature, to be healed and blessed by—
“The breathing balm,
The silence and the calm
Of mute, insensate things.”

This immediate refreshment is open to everybody according to his
measure; but it is a mistake to suppose that everybody is able to carry away
a refreshing image of that which gives him delight. Only a few can say with
Wordsworth, of scenes they have visited—
“Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration.”

And yet this is no high poetic gift which the rest of us must be content to
admire, but a common reward for taking pains in the act of seeing which
parents may do a great deal to confer upon their children.

The mother must beware how she spoils the simplicity, the objective
character of the child’s enjoyment, by treating his little descriptions as feats
of cleverness to be repeated to his father or to visitors; she had better make
a vow to suppress herself, ‘to say nothing to nobody,’ in his presence at any
rate, though the child should show himself a born poet.

iv.—flowers and trees

Children should know Field-crops.—​In the course of this ‘sight-
seeing’ and ‘picture-painting,’ opportunities will occur to make the children
familiar with rural objects and employments. If there are farm-lands within
reach, they should know meadow and pasture, clover, turnip, and corn field,
under every aspect, from the ploughing of the land to the getting in of the
crops.
Field Flowers and the Life-History of Plants.—​Milkwort, eyebright,
rest-harrow, lady’s-bedstraw, willow-herb, every wild flower that grows in
their neighbourhood, they should know quite well; should be able to
describe the leaf—its shape, size, growing from the root or from the stem;
the manner of flowering—a head of flowers, a single flower, a spike, etc.
And, having made the acquaintance of a wild flower, so that they can never
forget it or mistake it, they should examine the spot where they find it, so
that they will know for the future in what sort of ground to look for such
and such a flower. ‘We should find wild thyme here!’ ‘Oh, this is the very
spot for marsh marigolds; we must come here in the spring.’ If the mother is
no great botanist, she will find Miss Ann Pratt’s Wild Flowers[3] very
useful, with its coloured plates, like enough to identify the flowers by,
common English names, and pleasant facts and fancies that the children
delight in. To make collections of wild flowers for the several months, press
them, and mount them neatly on squares of cartridge paper, with the
English name, habitat, and date of finding of each, affords much happy
occupation and, at the same time, much useful training: better still is it to
accustom children to make careful brush drawings of the flowers that
interest them, of the whole plant where possible.
The Study of Trees.—​Children should be made early intimate with the
trees, too; should pick out half a dozen trees, oak, elm, ash, beech, in their
winter nakedness, and take these to be their yearlong friends. In the winter,

they will observe the light tresses of the birch, the knotted arms of the oak,
the sturdy growth of the sycamore. They may wait to learn the names of the
trees until the leaves come. By-and-by, as the spring advances, behold a
general stiffening and look of life in the still bare branches; life stirs in the
beautiful mystery of the leaf-buds, a nest of delicate baby-leaves lying in
downy warmth within many waterproof wrappings; oak and elm, beech and
birch, each has its own way of folding and packing its leaflets; observe the
‘ruby-budded lime’ and the ash, with its pretty stag’s foot of a bud, not
green but black—
“More black than ash-buds in the front of March.”

The Seasons should be followed.—​But it is hard to keep pace with the
wonders that unfold themselves in ‘the bountiful season, bland.’ There are
the dangling catkins and the little ruby-red pistillate flowers of the hazel—
clusters of flowers, both of them, two sorts on a single tree; and the downy
staminate catkins of the willow; and the festive breaking out of all the trees
into lovely leafage; the learning the patterns of the leaves as they come out,
and the naming of the trees from this and other signs. Then the flowers
come, each shut up tight in the dainty casket we call a bud, as cunningly
wrapped as the leaves in their buds, but less carefully guarded, for these
‘sweet nurslings’ delay their coming for the most part until earth has a
warm bed to offer, and the sun a kindly welcome.
Leigh Hunt on Flowers.—“Suppose,” says Leigh Hunt, “suppose
flowers themselves were new! Suppose they had just come into the world, a
sweet reward for some new goodness.... Imagine what we should feel when
we saw the first lateral stem bearing off from the main one, and putting
forth a leaf. How we should watch the leaf gradually unfolding its little
graceful hand; then another, then another; then the main stalk rising and
producing more; then one of them giving indications of the astonishing
novelty—a bud! then this mysterious bud gradually unfolding like the leaf,
amazing us, enchanting us, almost alarming us with delight, as if we knew
not what enchantment were to ensue, till at length, in all its fairy beauty,
and odorous voluptuousness, and mysterious elaboration of tender and
living sculpture, shines forth the blushing flower.” The flowers, it is true,
are not new; but the children are; and it is the fault of their elders if every
new flower they come upon is not to them a Picciola, a mystery of beauty
to be watched from day to day with unspeakable awe and delight.

Meanwhile, we have lost sight of those half-dozen forest-trees which the
children have taken into a sort of comradeship for the year. Presently they
have the delight of discovering that the great trees have flowers, too,
flowers very often of the same hue as their leaves, and that some trees put
off having their leaves until their flowers have come and gone. By-and-by
there is the fruit, and the discovery that every tree—with exceptions which
they need not learn yet—and every plant bears fruit, ‘fruit and seed after his
kind.’ All this is stale knowledge to older people, but one of the secrets of
the educator is to present nothing as stale knowledge, but to put himself in
the position of the child, and wonder and admire with him; for every
common miracle which the child sees with his own eyes makes of him for
the moment another Newton.
Calendars.—​It is a capital plan for children to keep a calendar—the first
oak-leaf, the first tadpole, the first cowslip, the first catkin, the first ripe
blackberries, where seen, and when. The next year they will know when
and where to look out for their favourites, and will, every year, be in a
condition to add new observations. Think of the zest and interest, the object,
which such a practice will give to daily walks and little excursions. There is
hardly a day when some friend may not be expected to hold a first ‘At
Home.’
Nature-Diaries.—​As soon as he is able to keep it himself, a nature-diary
is a source of delight to a child. Every day’s walk gives him something to
enter: three squirrels in a larch tree, a jay flying across such a field, a
caterpillar climbing up a nettle, a snail eating a cabbage leaf, a spider
dropping suddenly to the ground, where he found ground ivy, how it was
growing and what plants were growing with it, how bindweed or ivy
manages to climb. Innumerable matters to record occur to the intelligent
child. While he is quite young (five or six), he should begin to illustrate his
notes freely with brush-drawings; he should have a little help at first in
mixing colours, in the way of principles, not directions. He should not be
told to use now this and now that, but, ‘we get purple by mixing so and so,’
and then he should be left to himself to get the right tint. As for drawing,
instruction has no doubt its time and place; but his nature-diary should be
left to his own initiative. A child of six will produce a dandelion, poppy,
daisy, iris with its leaves, impelled by the desire to represent what he sees,
with surprising vigour and correctness.

An exercise book[4] with stiff covers serves for a nature-diary, but care is
necessary in choosing paper that answers both for writing and brush-
drawing.
‘I can’t stop thinking.’—‘But I can’t stop thinking; I can’t make my
mind sit down!’ Poor little girl! All children owe you thanks for giving
voice to their dumb woes. And we grown-up people have so little
imagination, that we send a little boy with an over-active brain to play by
himself in the garden in order to escape the fag of lessons. Little we know
how the brain-people swarm in and out and rush about!
“The human (brain) is like a millstone, turning ever round and round;
If it have nothing else to grind, it must itself be ground.”

Set the child to definite work by all means, and give him something to
grind. But, pray, let him work with things and not with signs—the things of
Nature in their own places, meadow and hedgerow, woods and shore.

v.—‘living creatures’

A Field of Interest and Delight.—​Then, as for the ‘living creatures,’
here is a field of unbounded interest and delight. The domesticated animals
are soon taken into kindly fellowship by the little people. Perhaps they live
too far from the ‘real country’ for squirrels and wild rabbits to be more to
them than a dream of possible delights. But surely there is a pond within
reach—by road or rail—where tadpoles may be caught, and carried home in
a bottle, fed, and watched through all their changes—fins disappearing, tails
getting shorter and shorter, until at last there is no tail at all, and a pretty
pert little frog looks you in the face. Turn up any chance stone, and you may
come upon a colony of ants. We have always known that it becomes us to
consider their ways and be wise; but now, think of all Lord Avebury has
told us to make that twelve-year-old ant of his acquaintance quite a
personage. Then, there are the bees. Some of us may have heard the late
Dean Farrar describe that lesson he was present at, on ‘How doth the little
busy bee’—the teacher bright, but the children not responsive; they took no
interest at all in little busy bees. He suspected the reason, and questioning
the class, found that not one of them had ever seen a bee. ‘Had never seen a
bee! Think for a moment,’ said he, ‘of how much that implies’; and then we
were moved by an eloquent picture of the sad child-life from which bees

and birds and flowers are all shut out. But how many children are there who
do not live in the slums of London, and yet are unable to distinguish a bee
from a wasp, or even a ‘humble’ from a honey-bee!
Children should be encouraged to Watch.—​Children should be
encouraged to watch, patiently and quietly, until they learn something of the
habits and history of bee, ant, wasp, spider, hairy caterpillar, dragon-fly, and
whatever of larger growth comes in their way. ‘The creatures never have
any habits while I am looking!’ a little girl in some story-book is made to
complain: but that was her fault; the bright keen eyes with which children
are blest were made to see, and see into, the doings of creatures too small
for the unaided observation of older people. Ants may be brought under
home observation in the following way:—Get two pieces of glass 1 foot
square, three strips of glass 11½ inches long, and one strip 11 inches long,
these all ¼ inch wide. The glass must be carefully cut so as to fit exactly.
Place the four strips of glass upon one of the sheets of glass and fix in an
exact square, leaving a ½ inch opening, with seccotine or any good fixer.
Get from an ant-hill about twelve ants (the yellow ants are best, as the red
are inclined to be quarrelsome), a few eggs, and one queen. The queen will
be quite twice as large as an ordinary ant, and so can be easily seen. Take
some of the earth of the ant-hill. Put the earth with your ants and eggs upon
the sheet of glass and fix the other sheet above, leaving only the small hole
in one corner, made by the shorter strip, which should be stopped with a bit
of cotton-wool. The ants will be restless for perhaps forty-eight hours, but
will then begin to settle and arrange the earth. Remove the wool plug once a
week, and replace it after putting two or three drops of honey on it. Once in
three weeks remove the plug to drop in with a syringe about ten drops of
water. This will not be necessary in the winter while the ants are asleep.
This ‘nest’ will last for years.
With regard to the horror which some children show of beetle, spider,
worm, that is usually a trick picked up from grown-up people. Kingsley’s
children would run after their ‘daddy’ with a ‘delicious worm,’ a ‘lovely
toad,’ a ‘sweet beetle’ carried tenderly in both hands. There are real
antipathies not to be overcome, such as Kingsley’s own horror of a spider;
but children who are accustomed to hold and admire caterpillars and beetles
from their babyhood will not give way to affected horrors. The child who
spends an hour in watching the ways of some new ‘grub’ he has come upon

will be a man of mark yet. Let all he finds out about it be entered in his
diary—by his mother, if writing be a labour to him,—where he finds it,
what it is doing, or seems to him to be doing; its colour, shape, legs: some
day he will come across the name of the creature, and will recognise the
description of an old friend.
The Force of Public Opinion in the Home.—​Some children are born
naturalists, with a bent inherited, perhaps, from an unknown ancestor; but
every child has a natural interest in the living things about him which it is
the business of his parents to encourage; for, but few children are equal to
holding their own in the face of public opinion; and if they see that the
things which interest them are indifferent or disgusting to you, their
pleasure in them vanishes, and that chapter in the book of Nature is closed
to them. It is likely that the Natural History of Selborne would never have
been written had it not been that the naturalist’s father used to take his boys
on daily foraging expeditions, when not a moving or growing thing, not a
pebble nor a boulder within miles of Selborne, escaped their eager
examination. Audubon, the American ornithologist, is another instance of
the effect of this kind of early training. “When I had hardly learned to
walk,” he says, “and to articulate those first words always so endearing to
parents, the productions of Nature that lay spread all around were
constantly pointed out to me.... My father generally accompanied my steps,
procured birds and flowers for me, and pointed out the elegant movements
of the former, the beauty and softness of their plumage, the manifestations
of their pleasure, or their sense of danger, and the always perfect forms and
splendid attire of the latter. He would speak of the departure and return of
the birds with the season, describe their haunts, and, more wonderful than
all, their change of livery, thus exciting me to study them, and to raise my
mind towards their great Creator.”
What Town Children can Do.—​Town children may get a great deal of
pleasure in watching the ways of sparrows—knowing little birds, and easily
tamed by a dole of crumbs,—and their days out will bring them in the way
of new acquaintances. But much may be done with sparrows. A friend
writes:—“Have you seen the man in the gardens of the Tuileries feeding
and talking to dozens of them? They sit on his hat, his hands, and feed from
his fingers. When he raises his arms they all flutter up and then settle again
on him and round him. I have watched him call a sparrow from a distance

by name and refuse food to all others till ‘petit chou,’ a pretty pied sparrow,
came for his destined bit. Others had their names and came at call, but I
could not see any distinguishing feature; and the crowd of sparrows on the
walk, benches and railing, formed a most attentive audience to the bright
French talk which kept them in constant motion as they were, here one and
there another, invited to come for a tempting morsel. Truly a St Francis and
the birds!”
The child who does not know the portly form and spotted breast of the
thrush, the graceful flight of the swallow, the yellow bill of the blackbird,
the gush of song which the skylark pours from above, is nearly as much to
be pitied as those London children who ‘had never seen a bee.’ A pleasant
acquaintance, easy to pick up, is the hairy caterpillar. The moment to seize
him is when he is seen shuffling along the ground in a great hurry; he is on
the look-out for quiet quarters in which to lie up: put him in a box, then, and
cover the box with net, through which you may watch his operations. Food
does not matter—he has other things to attend to. By-and-by he spins a sort
of white tent or hammock, into which he retires; you may see through it and
watch him, perhaps at the very moment when his skin splits asunder,
leaving him, for months to come, an egg-shaped mass without any sign of
life. At last the living thing within breaks out of this bundle, and there it is,
the handsome tiger-moth, fluttering feeble wings against the net. Most
children of six have had this taste of a naturalist’s experience, and it is
worth speaking of only because, instead of being merely a harmless
amusement, it is a valuable piece of education, of more use to the child than
the reading of a whole book of natural history, or much geography and
Latin. For the evil is, that children get their knowledge of natural history,
like all their knowledge, at second hand. They are so sated with wonders,
that nothing surprises them; and they are so little used to see for themselves,
that nothing interests them. The cure for this blasé condition is, to let them
alone for a bit, and then begin on new lines. Poor children, it is no fault of
theirs if they are not as they were meant to be—curious eager little souls, all
agog to explore so much of this wonderful world as they can get at, as quite
their first business in life.
“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”

Nature Knowledge the most important for Young Children.—​It
would be well if all we persons in authority, parents and all who act for
parents, could make up our minds that there is no sort of knowledge to be
got in these early years so valuable to children as that which they get for
themselves of the world they live in. Let them once get in touch with
Nature, and a habit is formed which will be a source of delight through life.
We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable
to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care
for none of these things.
Mental Training of a Child Naturalist.—​Consider, too, what an
unequalled mental training the child-naturalist is getting for any study or
calling under the sun—the powers of attention, of discrimination, of patient
pursuit, growing with his growth, what will they not fit him for? Besides,
life is so interesting to him, that he has no time for the faults of temper
which generally have their source in ennui; there is no reason why he
should be peevish or sulky or obstinate when he is always kept well
amused.
Nature Work especially valuable for Girls.—​I say ‘he’ from force of
habit, as speaking of the representative sex, but truly that she should be thus
conversant with Nature is a matter of infinitely more importance to the little
girl: she it is who is most tempted to indulge in ugly tempers (as child and
woman) because time hangs heavy on her hands; she, whose idler, more
desultory habits of mind want the spur and the bridle of an earnest
absorbing pursuit; whose feebler health demands to be braced by an out-of-
door life full of healthy excitement. Moreover, it is to the girls, little and
big, a most true kindness to lift them out of themselves and out of the round
of petty personal interests and emulations which too often hem in their
lives; and then, with whom but the girls must it rest to mould the
generations yet to be born?

vi.—field-lore and naturalists’ books

Reverence for Life.—​Is it advisable, then, to teach the children the
elements of natural science, of biology, botany, zoology? On the whole, no:
the dissection even of a flower is painful to a sensitive child, and, during the
first six or eight years of life, I would not teach them any botany which

should necessitate the pulling of flowers to bits; much less should they be
permitted to injure or destroy any (not noxious) form of animal life.
Reverence for life, as a wonderful and awful gift, which a ruthless child
may destroy but never can restore, is a lesson of first importance to the
child:—
“Let knowledge grow from more to more;
But more of reverence in us dwell.”

The child who sees his mother with reverent touch lift an early snowdrop
to her lips, learns a higher lesson than the ‘print-books’ can teach. Years
hence, when the children are old enough to understand that science itself is
in a sense sacred and demands some sacrifices, all the ‘common
information’ they have been gathering until then, and the habits of
observation they have acquired, will form a capital groundwork for a
scientific education. In the meantime, let them consider the lilies of the
field and the fowls of the air.
Rough Classification at First Hand.—​For convenience in describing
they should be able to name and distinguish petals, sepals, and so on; and
they should be encouraged to make such rough classifications as they can
with their slight knowledge of both animal and vegetable forms. Plants with
heart-shaped or spoon-shaped leaves, with whole or divided leaves; leaves
with criss-cross veins and leaves with straight veins; bell-shaped flowers
and cross-shaped flowers; flowers with three petals, with four, with five;
trees which keep their leaves all the year, and trees which lose them in the
autumn; creatures with a backbone and creatures without; creatures that eat
grass and creatures that eat flesh, and so on. To make collections of leaves
and flowers, pressed and mounted, and arranged according to their form,
affords much pleasure, and, what is better, valuable training in the noticing
of differences and resemblances. Patterns for this sort of classification of
leaves and flowers will be found in every little book of elementary botany.
The power to classify, discriminate, distinguish between things that
differ, is amongst the highest faculties of the human intellect, and no
opportunity to cultivate it should be let slip; but a classification got out of
books, that the child does not make for himself and is not able to verify for
himself, cultivates no power but that of verbal memory, and a phrase or two
of ‘Tamil’ or other unknown tongue, learnt off, would serve that purpose
just as well.

Uses of ‘Naturalists’ Books.—​The real use of naturalists’ books at this
stage is to give the child delightful glimpses into the world of wonders he
lives in, to reveal the sort of things to be seen by curious eyes, and fill him
with desire to make discoveries for himself. There are many[5] to be had, all
pleasant reading, many of them written by scientific men, and yet requiring
little or no scientific knowledge for their enjoyment.
Mothers and Teachers should know about Nature.—​The mother
cannot devote herself too much to this kind of reading, not only that she
may read tit-bits to her children about matters they have come across, but
that she may be able to answer their queries and direct their observation.
And not only the mother, but any woman, who is likely ever to spend an
hour or two in the society of children, should make herself mistress of this
sort of information; the children will adore her for knowing what they want
to know, and who knows but she may give its bent for life to some young
mind destined to do great things for the world.

vii.—the child gets knowledge by means of his senses

Nature’s Teaching.—​Watch a child standing at gaze at some sight new
to him—a plough at work, for instance—and you will see he is as naturally
occupied as is a babe at the breast; he is, in fact, taking in the intellectual
food which the working faculty of his brain at this period requires. In his
early years the child is all eyes; he observes, or, more truly, he perceives,
calling sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing to his aid, that he may learn all
that is discoverable by him about every new thing that comes under his
notice. Everybody knows how a baby fumbles over with soft little fingers,
and carries to his mouth, and bangs that it may produce what sound there is
in it, the spoon or doll which supercilious grown-up people give him to
‘keep him quiet.’ The child is at his lessons, and is learning all about it at a
rate utterly surprising to the physiologist, who considers how much is
implied in the act of ‘seeing,’ for instance: that to the infant, as to the blind
adult restored to sight, there is at first no difference between a flat picture
and a solid body,—that the ideas of form and solidity are not obtained by
sight at all, but are the judgments of experience. Then, think of the vague
passes in the air the little fist makes before it lays hold of the object of
desire, and you see how he learns the whereabouts of things, having as yet

no idea of direction. And why does he cry for the moon? Why does he crave
equally, a horse or a house-fly as an appropriate plaything? Because far and
near, large and small, are ideas he has yet to grasp. The child has truly a
great deal to do before he is in a condition to ‘believe his own eyes’; but
Nature teaches so gently, so gradually, so persistently, that he is never
overdone, but goes on gathering little stores of knowledge about whatever
comes before him.
And this is the process the child should continue for the first few years
of his life. Now is the storing time which should be spent in laying up
images of things familiar. By-and-by he will have to conceive of things he
has never seen: how can he do it except by comparison with things he has
seen and knows? By-and-by he will be called upon to reflect, understand,
reason; what material will he have, unless he has a magazine of facts to go
upon? The child who has been made to observe how high in the heavens the
sun is at noon on a summer’s day, how low at noon on a day in mid-winter,
is able to conceive of the great heat of the tropics under a vertical sun, and
to understand that the climate of a place depends greatly upon the mean
height the sun reaches above the horizon.
Overpressure.—​A great deal has been said lately about the danger of
overpressure, of requiring too much mental work from a child of tender
years. The danger exists; but lies, not in giving the child too much, but in
giving him the wrong thing to do, the sort of work for which the present
state of his mental development does not fit him. Who expects a boy in
petticoats to lift half a hundredweight? But give the child work that Nature
intended for him, and the quantity he can get through with ease is
practically unlimited. Whoever saw a child tired of seeing, of examining in
his own way, unfamiliar things? This is the sort of mental nourishment for
which he has an unbounded appetite, because it is that food of the mind on
which, for the present, he is meant to grow.
Object Lessons.—​Now, how far is this craving for natural sustenance
met? In infant and kindergarten schools, by the object lesson, which is good
so far as it goes, but is sometimes like that bean a day on which the
Frenchman fed his horse. The child at home has more new things brought
under his notice, if with less method. Neither at home nor at school is much
effort made to set before the child the abundant ‘feast of eyes’ which his
needs demand.

A Child learns from ‘Things.’—​We older people, partly because of our
maturer intellect, partly because of our defective education, get most of our
knowledge through the medium of words. We set the child to learn in the
same way, and find him dull and slow. Why? Because it is only with a few
words in common use that he associates a definite meaning; all the rest are
no more to him than the vocables of a foreign tongue. But set him face to
face with a thing, and he is twenty times as quick as you are in knowing all
about it; knowledge of things flies to the mind of a child as steel filings to a
magnet. And, pari passu with his knowledge of things, his vocabulary
grows; for it is a law of the mind that what we know, we struggle to
express. This fact accounts for many of the apparently aimless questions of
children; they are in quest, not of knowledge, but of words to express the
knowledge they have. Now, consider what a culpable waste of intellectual
energy it is to shut up a child, blessed with this inordinate capacity for
seeing and knowing, within the four walls of a house, or the dreary streets
of a town. Or suppose that he is let run loose in the country where there is
plenty to see, it is nearly as bad to let this great faculty of the child’s
dissipate itself in random observations for want of method and direction.
The Sense of Beauty comes from Early Contact with Nature.—​There
is no end to the store of common information, got in such a way that it will
never be forgotten, with which an intelligent child may furnish himself
before he begins his school career. The boy who can tell you off-hand
where to find each of the half-dozen most graceful birches, the three or four
finest ash trees in the neighbourhood of his home, has chances in life a
dozen to one compared with the lower, slower intelligence that does not
know an elm from an oak—not merely chances of success, but chances of a
larger, happier life, for it is curious how certain feelings are linked with the
mere observation of Nature and natural objects. “The æsthetic sense of the
beautiful,” says Dr Carpenter, “of the sublime, of the harmonious, seems in
its most elementary form to connect itself immediately with the Perceptions
which arise out of the contact of our minds with external Nature”; while he
quotes Dr Morell, who says still more forcibly that “All those who have
shown a remarkable appreciation of form and beauty date their first
impressions from a period lying far behind the existence of definite ideas or
verbal instruction.”

Most Grown Men lose the Habit of Observation.—​Thus, we owe
something to Mr Evans for taking his little daughter Mary Anne with him
on his long business drives among the pleasant Warwickshire lanes; the
little girl stood up between her father’s knees, seeing much and saying little;
and the outcome was the scenes of rural life in Adam Bede and The Mill on
the Floss. Wordsworth, reared amongst the mountains, becomes a very
prophet of Nature; while Tennyson draws endless imagery from the levels
of the eastern counties where he was brought up. Little David Copperfield
was “a very observant child, though,” says he, “I think the memory of most
of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I
believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be
quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most
grown men who are remarkable in this respect may with greater propriety
be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I
generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness,
and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have
preserved from their childhood”;—in which remark Dickens makes his hero
talk sound philosophy as well as kindly sense.

viii.—the child should be made familiar with natural objects

An Observant Child should be put in the way of Things worth
Observing.—​But what is the use of being ‘a very observant child,’ if you
are not put in the way of things worth observing? And here is the difference
between the streets of a town and the sights and sounds of the country.
There is plenty to be seen in a town, and children accustomed to the ways
of the streets become nimble-witted enough. But the scraps of information
to be picked up in a town are isolated fragments; they do not hang on to
anything else, nor come to anything more; the information may be
convenient, but no one is the wiser for knowing on which side of the street
is Smith’s, and which turning leads to Thompson’s shop.
Every Natural Object a Member of a Series.—​Now take up a natural
object, it does not matter what, and you are studying one of a group, a
member of a series; whatever knowledge you get about it is so much
towards the science which includes all of its kind. Break off an elder twig in
the spring; you notice a ring of wood round a centre of pith, and there you

have at a glance a distinguishing character of a great division of the
vegetable world. You pick up a pebble. Its edges are perfectly smooth and
rounded: why? you ask. It is water-worn, weather-worn. And that little
pebble brings you face to face with disintegration, the force to which, more
than to any other, we owe the aspects of the world which we call
picturesque—glen, ravine, valley, hill. It is not necessary that the child
should be told anything about disintegration or dicotyledon, only that he
should observe the wood and pith in the hazel twig, the pleasant roundness
of the pebble; by-and-by he will learn the bearing of the facts with which he
is already familiar—a very different thing from learning the reason why of
facts which have never come under his notice.
Power will pass, more and more, into the hands of Scientific Men.—​
It is infinitely well worth the mother’s while to take some pains every day
to secure, in the first place, that her children spend hours daily amongst
rural and natural objects; and, in the second place, to infuse into them, or
rather, to cherish in them, the love of investigation. “I say it deliberately,”
says Kingsley, “as a student of society and of history: power will pass more
and more into the hands of scientific men. They will rule, and they will act
—cautiously, we may hope, and modestly, and charitably—because in
learning true knowledge they will have learnt also their own ignorance, and
the vastness, the complexity, the mystery of Nature. But they will be able to
rule, they will be able to act, because they have taken the trouble to learn
the facts and the laws of Nature.”
Intimacy with Nature makes for Personal Well-being.—​But to enable
them to swim with the stream is the least of the benefits this early training
should confer on the children; a love of Nature, implanted so early that it
will seem to them hereafter to have been born in them, will enrich their
lives with pure interests, absorbing pursuits, health, and good humour. “I
have seen,” says the same writer, “the young man of fierce passions and
uncontrollable daring expend healthily that energy which threatened daily
to plunge him into recklessness, if not into sin, upon hunting out and
collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tempest, every bird and egg of
the neighbouring forest.... I have seen the young London beauty, amid all
the excitement and temptation of luxury and flattery, with her heart pure,
and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of shells and fossils, flowers and

seaweeds, keeping herself unspotted from the world, by considering the
lilies of the field, how they grow.”

ix.—out-of-door geography

Small Things may teach Great.—​After this long digression, intended
to impress upon mothers the supreme importance of stirring up in their
children a love of Nature and of natural objects—a deep-seated spring to
send up pure waters into the driest places of after-life—we must return to
the mother whom we have left out of doors all this time, waiting to know
what she is to do next. This pleasant earth of ours is not to be overlooked in
the out-of-door education of the children. ‘How do you get time for so
much?’ ‘Oh, I leave out subjects of no educational value; I do not teach
geography, for instance,’ said an advanced young theorist with all sorts of
certificates.
Pictorial Geography.—​But the mother, who knows better, will find a
hundred opportunities to teach geography by the way: a duck-pond is a lake
or an inland sea; any brooklet will serve to illustrate the great rivers of the
world; a hillock grows into a mountain—an Alpine system; a hazel-copse
suggests the mighty forests of the Amazon; a reedy swamp, the rice-fields
of China; a meadow, the boundless prairies of the West; the pretty purple
flowers of the common mallow is a text whereon to hang the cottonfields of
the Southern States: indeed, the whole field of pictorial geography—maps
may wait until by-and-by—may be covered in this way.
The Position of the Sun.—​And not only this: the children should be
taught to observe the position of the sun in the heavens from hour to hour,
and by his position, to tell the time of day. Of course they will want to know
why the sun is such an indefatigable traveller, and thereby hangs a
wonderful tale, which they may as well learn in the ‘age of faith,’ of the
relative sizes of sun and earth, and of the nature and movements of the
latter.
Clouds, Rain, Snow, and Hail.—“Clouds and rain, snow and hail,
winds and vapours, fulfilling His word”—are all everyday mysteries that
the mother will be called upon to explain faithfully, however simply. There
are certain ideas which children must get from within a walking radius of

their own home if ever they are to have a real understanding of maps and of
geographical terms.
Distance is one of these, and the first idea of distance is to be attained by
what children find a delightful operation. A child walks at his usual pace;
somebody measures and tells him the length of his pace, and he measures
the paces of his brothers and sisters. Then such a walk, such a distance, here
and there, is solemnly paced, and a little sum follows—so many inches or
feet covered by each pace equals so many yards in the whole distance.
Various short distances about the child’s home should be measured in this
way; and when the idea of covering distance is fully established, the idea of
time as a means of measurement should be introduced. The time taken to
pace a hundred yards should be noted down. Having found out that it takes
two minutes to pace a hundred yards, children will be able for the next step
—that if they have walked for thirty minutes, the walk should measure
fifteen hundred yards; in thirty-five minutes they would have walked a
mile, or rather seventeen hundred and fifty yards, and then they could add
the ten yards more which would make a mile. The longer the legs the longer
the pace, and most grown people can walk a mile in twenty minutes.
Direction.—​By the time they have got somewhat familiar with the idea
of distance, that of direction should be introduced. The first step is to make
children observant of the progress of the sun. The child who observes the
sun for a year and notes down for himself, or dictates, the times of his rising
and setting for the greater part of the year, and the points of his rising and
setting, will have secured a basis for a good deal of definite knowledge.
Such observation should take in the reflection of the sun’s light, the evening
light reflected by east windows, the morning light by west windows; the
varying length and intensity of shadows, the cause of shadows, to be
learned by the shadow cast by a figure between the blind and a candle. He
should associate, too, the hot hours of the day with the sun high overhead,
and the cool hours of the morning and evening with a low sun; and should
be reminded, that if he stands straight before the fire, he feels the heat more
than if he were in a corner of the room. When he is prepared by a little
observation of the course of the sun, he is ready to take in the idea of
direction, which depends entirely upon the sun.
East and West.—​Of course the two first ideas are that the sun rises in
the east and sets in the west; from this fact he will be able to tell the

direction in which the places near his own home, or the streets of his own
town, lie. Bid him stand so that his right hand is towards the east where the
sun rises, and his left towards the west where the sun sets. Then he is
looking towards the north and his back is towards the south. All the houses,
streets and towns on his right hand are to the east of him, those on the left
are to the west. The places he must walk straight forward to reach are north
of him, and the places behind him are to the south. If he is in a place new to
him where he has never seen the sun rise or set and wants to know in what
direction a certain road runs, he must notice in what direction his own
shadow falls at twelve o’clock, because at noon the shadows of all objects
fall towards the north. Then if he face the north, he has, as before, the south
behind him, the east on his right hand, the west on his left; or if he face the
sun at noon, he faces south.
Practice in finding Direction.—​This will throw an interesting light for
him on the names of our great railways. A child may become ready in
noticing the directions of places by a little practice. Let him notice how
each of the windows of his schoolroom faces, or the windows of each of the
rooms in his home; the rows of houses he passes in his walks, and which
are the north, south, east and west sides of the churches he knows. He will
soon be prepared to notice the direction of the wind by noticing the smoke
from the chimneys, the movement of branches, corn, grass, etc. If the wind
blow from the north—‘The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow.’
If it blow from the west, a west wind, we expect rain. Care must be taken at
this point to make it clear to the child that the wind is named after the
quarter it comes from, and not from the point it blows towards—just as he
is English because he was born in England, and not French because he goes
to France. The ideas of distance and direction may now be combined. Such
a building is two hundred yards to the east of the gate, such a village two
miles to the west. He will soon come across the difficulty, that a place is not
exactly east or west, north or south. It is well to let him give, in a
roundabout way, the direction of places as—‘more to the east than the
west,’ ‘very near the east but not quite,’ ‘half-way between east and west.’
He will value the exact means of expression all the more for having felt the
need of them.
Later, he should be introduced to the wonders of the mariner’s compass,
should have a little pocket compass of his own, and should observe the four

cardinal and all the other points. These will afford him the names for
directions that he has found it difficult to describe.
Compass Drill.—​Then he should do certain compass drill in this way:
Bid him hold the N of the compass towards the north. “Then, with the
compass in your hand, turn towards the east, and you will see a remarkable
thing. The little needle moves, too, but moves quite by itself in just the
other direction. Turn to the west, and again the needle moves in the opposite
direction to that in which you move. However little you turn, a little quiver
of the needle follows your movement. And you look at it, wondering how
the little thing could perceive you had moved, when you hardly knew it
yourself. Walk straight on in any direction, and the needle is fairly steady;
only fairly steady, because you are sure, without intending it, to move a
little to the right or left. Turn round very slowly, a little bit at a time,
beginning at the north and turning towards the east, and you may make the
needle also move round in a circle. It moves in the opposite direction to
yourself, for it is trying to get back to the north from which you are
turning.”
Boundaries.—​The children having got the idea of direction, it will be
quite easy to introduce that of boundaries—such and such a turnip field, for
instance, is bounded by the highroad on the south, by a wheat crop on the
south-east, a hedge on the north-east, and so on; the children getting by
degrees the idea that the boundaries of a given space are simply whatever
touches it on every side. Thus one crop may touch another without any
dividing line, and therefore one crop bounds the other. It is well that
children should get clear notions on this subject, or, later, they will be vague
when they learn that such a county is ‘bounded’ by so and so. In connection
with bounded spaces, whether they be villages, towns, ponds, fields, or
what not, children should be led to notice the various crops raised in the
district, why pasturelands and why cornfields, what manner of rocks appear,
and how many sorts of trees grow in the neighbourhood. For every field or
other space that is examined, they should draw a rude plan in the sand,
giving the shape roughly and lettering the directions as N, S, W, etc.
Plans.—​By-and-by, when they have learned to draw plans indoors, they
will occasionally pace the length of a field and draw their plan according to
scale, allowing an inch for five or for ten yards. The ground-plans of
garden, stables, house, etc., might follow.

Local Geography.—​It is probable that a child’s own neighbourhood
will give him opportunities to learn the meaning of hill and dale, pool and
brook, watershed, the current, bed, banks, tributaries of a brook, the relative
positions of villages and towns; and all this local geography he must be able
to figure roughly on a plan done with chalk on a rock, or with walking-stick
in the gravel, perceiving the relative distances and situations of the places
he marks.

x.—the child and mother-nature

The Mother must refrain from too much Talk.—​Does so wide a
programme alarm the mother? Does she with dismay see herself talking
through the whole of those five or six hours, and, even at that, not getting
through a tithe of the teaching laid out for her? On the contrary, the less she
says the better; and as for the quantity of educational work to be got
through, it is the fable of the anxious pendulum over again: it is true there
are countless ‘ticks’ to be ticked, but there will always be a second of time
to tick in, and no more than a single tick is to be delivered in any given
second.
Making a New Acquaintance.—​The rapid little people will have played
their play, whether of ‘sight-seeing’ or ‘picture-painting,’ in a quarter of an
hour or so; for the study of natural objects, an occasional ‘Look!’ an
attentive examination of the object on the mother’s own part, a name given,
a remark—a dozen words long—made at the right moment, and the
children have begun a new acquaintance which they will prosecute for
themselves; and not more than one or two such presentations should occur
in a single day.
Now, see how much leisure there is left! The mother’s real difficulty will
be to keep herself from much talk with the children, and to hinder them
from occupying themselves with her. There are few things sweeter and
more precious to the child than playful prattle with her mother; but one
thing is better—the communing with the larger Mother, in order to which
the child and she should be left to themselves. This is, truly, a delightful
thing to watch: the mother reads her book or knits her sock, checking all
attempts to make talk; the child stares up into a tree, or down into a flower
—doing nothing, thinking of nothing; or leads a bird’s life among the

branches, or capers about in aimless ecstasy;—quite foolish, irrational
doings, but, all the time, a fashioning is going on: Nature is doing her part,
with the vow—
“This child I to myself will take:
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.”[6]

Two Things permissible to the Mother.—​There is one thing the mother
will allow herself to do as interpreter between Nature and the child, but that
not oftener than once a week or once a month, and with look and gesture of
delight rather than with flow of improving words—she will point out to the
child some touch of especial loveliness in colouring or grouping in the
landscape or in the heavens. One other thing she will do, but very rarely,
and with tender filial reverence (most likely she will say her prayers, and
speak out of her prayer, for to touch on this ground with hard words is to
wound the soul of the child): she will point to some lovely flower or
gracious tree, not only as a beautiful work, but a beautiful thought of God,
in which we may believe He finds continual pleasure, and which He is
pleased to see his human children rejoice in. Such a seed of sympathy with
the Divine thought sown in the heart of the child is worth many of the
sermons the man may listen to hereafter, much of the ‘divinity’ he may
read.

xi.—out-of-door games, etc.

The bright hours fly by; and there is still at least one lesson on the
programme, to say nothing of an hour or two for games in the afternoon.
The thought of a lesson is uninviting after the discussion of much that is
more interesting, and, truly, more important; but it need only be a little
lesson, ten minutes long, and the slight break and the effort of attention will
give the greater zest to the pleasure and leisure to follow.
The French Lesson.—​The daily French lesson is that which should not
be omitted. That children should learn French orally, by listening to and
repeating French words and phrases; that they should begin so young that
the difference of accent does not strike them, but they repeat the new
French word all the same as if it were English and use it as freely; that they
should learn a few—two or three, five or six—new French words daily, and

that, at the same time, the old words should be kept in use—are points to be
considered more fully hereafter: in the meantime, it is so important to keep
tongue and ear familiar with French vocables, that not a lesson should be
omitted. The French lesson may, however, be made to fit in with the spirit
of the other out-of-door occupations; the half-dozen words may be the parts
—leaves, branches, bark, trunk of a tree, or the colours of the flowers, or
the movements of bird, cloud, lamb, child; in fact, the new French words
should be but another form of expression for the ideas that for the time fill
the child’s mind.
Noisy Games.—​The afternoon’s games, after luncheon, are an important
part of the day’s doings for the elder children, though the younger have
probably worn themselves out by this time with the ceaseless restlessness
by means of which Nature provides for the due development of muscular
tissue in them; let them sleep in the sweet air, and awake refreshed.
Meanwhile, the elders play; the more they run, and shout, and toss their
arms, the more healthful is the play. And this is one reason why mothers
should carry their children off to lonely places, where they may use their
lungs to their hearts’ content without risk of annoying anybody. The
muscular structure of the organs of voice is not enough considered; children
love to indulge in cries and shouts and view-halloos, and this ‘rude’ and
‘noisy’ play, with which their elders have not much patience, is no more
than Nature’s way of providing for the due exercise of organs, upon whose
working power the health and happiness of the child’s future largely
depend. People talk of ‘weak lungs,’ ‘weak chest,’ ‘weak throat,’ but
perhaps it does not occur to everybody that strong lungs and strong throat
are commonly to be had on the same terms as a strong arm or wrist—by
exercise, training, use, work. Still, if the children can ‘give voice’ musically,
and move rhythmically to the sound of their own voices, so much the better.
In this respect French children are better off than English; they dance and
sing through a hundred roundelays—just such games, no doubt, mimic
marryings and buryings, as the children played at long ago in the market-
place of Jerusalem.
‘Rondes.’—Before Puritan innovations made us a staid and circumspect
people, English lads and lasses of all ages danced out little dramas on the
village green, accompanying themselves with the words and airs of just
such rondes as the French children sing to-day. We have a few of them left

still—to be heard at Sunday-school treats and other gatherings of the
children,—and they are well worth preserving: ‘There came three dukes a-
riding, a-riding, a-riding’; ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St
Clement’s’; ‘Here we come gathering nuts in May’; ‘What has my poor
prisoner done?’ and many more, all set to delightful sing-song airs that little
feet trip to merrily, the more so for the pleasant titillation of the words—
dukes, nuts, oranges,—who could not go to the tune of such ideas?
The promoters of the kindergarten system have done much to introduce
games of this, or rather of a more educational kind; but is it not a fact that
the singing games of the kindergarten are apt to be somewhat inane? Also, it
is doubtful how far the prettiest plays, learnt at school and from a teacher,
will take hold of the children as do the games which have been passed on
from hand to hand through an endless chain of children, and are not to be
found in the print-books at all.
Skipping-rope and Shuttlecock.—​Cricket, tennis, and rounders are the
games par excellence if the children are old enough to play them, both as
giving free harmonious play to the muscles, and also as serving the highest
moral purpose of games in bringing the children under the discipline of
rules; but the little family we have in view, all of them under nine, will
hardly be up to scientific games. Races and chases, ‘tig,’ ‘follow my
leader,’ and any romping game they may invent, will be more to their
minds: still better are the hoop, the ball, the shuttlecock, and the invaluable
skipping-rope. For the rope, the very best use is for each child to skip with
her own, throwing it backwards rather than forwards, so that the tendency
of the movement is to expand the chest. Shuttlecock is a fine game,
affording scope for ambition and emulation. Her biographer thinks it worth
telling that Miss Austen could keep up in ‘cup and ball’ over a hundred
times, to the admiration of nephews and nieces; in like manner, any feat in
keeping up the shuttlecock might be noted down as a family event, so that
the children may be fired with ambition to excel in a game which affords
most graceful and vigorous play to almost every muscle of the upper part of
the body, and has this great recommendation, that it can be as well played
within doors as without. Quite the best play is to keep up the shuttlecock
with a battledore in each hand, so that the muscles on either side are
brought equally into play. But to ‘ordain’ about children’s games is an idle

waste of words, for here fashion is as supreme and as arbitrary as in
questions of bonnet or crinoline.
Climbing.—​Climbing is an amusement not much in favour with
mothers; torn garments, bleeding knees, and boot-toes rubbed into holes, to
say nothing of more serious risks, make a strong case against this form of
delight. But, truly, the exercise is so admirable—the body being thrown into
endless graceful postures which bring every muscle into play,—and the
training in pluck, daring, and resource so invaluable, that it is a pity trees
and cliffs and walls should be forbidden even to little girls. The mother may
do a good deal to avert serious mishaps by accustoming the younger
children to small feats of leaping and climbing, so that they learn, at the
same time, courage and caution from their own experiences, and are less
likely to follow the lead of too-daring playmates. Later, the mother had best
make up her mind to share the feelings of the hen that hatched a brood of
ducklings, remembering that a little scream, a sharp and sudden ‘Come
down instantly!’ ‘Tommy, you’ll break your neck!’ gives the child a nervous
shock, and is likely to cause the fall it was meant to hinder by startling
Tommy out of all presence of mind. Even boating and swimming are not
without the reach of town-bred children, in days when everybody goes for a
summer outing to the neighbourhood of the sea or of inland waters; and
then, there are swimming-baths in most towns. It would be well if most
children of seven were taught to swim, not only for the possible usefulness
of the art, but as giving them an added means of motion, and, therefore, of
delight.
Clothing.—​The havoc of clothes need not be great if the children are
dressed for their little excursions, as they should be, in plainly made
garments of some loosely woven woollen material, serge or flannel.
Woollen has many advantages over cotton, and more over linen, as a
clothing material; chiefly, that it is a bad conductor; that is to say, it does
not allow the heat of the body too free an exit, nor the heat of the sun too
free an entrance. Therefore the child in woollen, who has become heated in
play, does not suffer a chill from the sudden loss of this heat, as does the
child in linen garments; also, he is cooler in the sunshine, and warmer in the
shade.

xii.—walks in bad weather

Winter Walks as necessary as Summer Walks.—​All we have said
hitherto applies to the summer weather, which is, alas for us! a very limited
and uncertain quantity in our part of the world. The question of out-of-door
exercise in winter and in wet weather is really more important; for who that
could would not be abroad in the summer time? If the children are to have
what is quite the best thing for them, they should be two or three hours
every day in the open air all through the winter, say an hour and a half in
the morning and as long in the afternoon.
Pleasures connected with Frost and Snow.—​When frost and snow are
on the ground children have very festive times, what with sliding, snow-
balling, and snow-building. But even on the frequent days when it is dirty
under foot and dull over head they should be kept interested and alert, so
that the heart may do its work cheerfully, and a grateful glow be kept up
throughout the body in spite of clouds and cold weather.
Winter Observations.—​All that has been said about ‘sight-seeing’ and
‘picture-painting,’ the little French talk, and observations to be noted in the
family diary, belongs just as much to winter weather as to summer; and
there is no end to the things to be seen and noted. The party come across a
big tree which they judge, from its build, to be an oak—down it goes in the
diary; and when the leaves are out, the children come again to see if they
are right. Many birds come into view the more freely in the cold weather
that they are driven forth in search of food.
“The cattle mourn in corners where the fence screens them.”
“The sun, with ruddy orb
Ascending, fires the horizon.”

“Every herb and every spiry blade
Stretches a length of shadow o’er the field.”

“The sparrows peep, and quit the sheltering eaves.”

“The redbreast warbles still, but is content
With slender notes, and more than half suppress’d;
Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light
From spray to spray, where’er he rests he shakes
From many a twig the pendent drops of ice
That tinkle in the wither’d leaves below.”

There is no reason why the child’s winter walk should not be as fertile in
observations as the poet’s; indeed, in one way, it is possible to see the more
in winter, because the things to be seen do not crowd each other out.
Habit of Attention.—​Winter walks, too, whether in town or country,
give great opportunities for cultivating the habit of attention. The famous
conjurer, Robert Houdin, relates in his autobiography, that he and his son
would pass rapidly before a shop window, that of a toy-shop, for instance,
and each cast an attentive glance upon it. A few steps further on each drew
paper and pencil from his pocket, and tried which could enumerate the
greater number of the objects momentarily seen in passing. The boy
surpassed his father in quickness of apprehension, being often able to write
down forty objects, whilst his father could scarcely reach thirty; yet on their
returning to verify his statement, the son was rarely found to have made a
mistake. Here is a hint for a highly educational amusement for many a
winter’s walk.
Wet Weather Tramps.—​But what about the wet days? The fact is, that
rain, unless of the heaviest, does the children no harm at all if they are
suitably clothed. But every sort of waterproof garment should be tabooed,
because the texture which will not admit rain will not allow of the escape of
the insensible perspiration, and one secret of health for people who have no
organic disease is the prompt carrying off of the decayed and harmful
matters discharged by the skin.
Outer Garments for.—​Children should have woollen rain-garments—
made of coarse serge, for instance,—to be changed the moment they return
from a walk, and then there is no risk of catching cold. This is the common-
sense of the matter. Wet cloths are put upon the head of a fever patient; by-
and-by the cloths dry, and are dipped again: what has become of the water?
It has evaporated, and, in evaporating, has carried off much heat from the
fevered head. Now, that which eases the hot skin of fever is just the one
thing to be avoided in ordinary circumstances. To be wet to the skin may do
a child no more harm than a bath would do him, if the wet clothes do not
dry upon him—that is, if the water does not evaporate, carrying off much
heat from his body in the process. It is the loss of animal heat which is
followed by ‘colds,’ and not the ‘wetting,’ which mothers are ready to
deplore. Keep a child active and happy in the rain, and he gets nothing but

good from his walk. The case is altered if the child has a cold already; then
active exercise might increase any inflammation already set up.
I do not know whether it is more than a pretty fancy of Richter’s, that a
spring shower is a sort of electric bath, and a very potent means of health;
certainly rain clears the atmosphere—a fact of considerable importance in
and about large towns. But it is enough for our purpose to prove that the
rain need do no harm; for abundant daily exercise in the fresh air is of such
vital importance to the children, that really nothing but sickness should
keep them within doors. A mere time and distance tramp is sufficiently
joyous for a wet day, for, taken good-humouredly, the beating rain itself is
exhilarating. The ‘long run’ of the schoolboy, that is, a steady trot, breaking
now and then into a run, is capital exercise; but regard must be had to the
powers of the children, who must not be overdone.
Precautions.—​At the same time, children should never be allowed to sit
or stand about in damp clothes; and here is the use of waterproof rain-wraps
—to keep them dry on short journeys to church, or school, or neighbour’s
house, where they cannot very well change their garments.

xiii.—‘red indian’ life

Scouting.—​Baden Powell’s little book about Scouting set us upon a new
track. Hundreds of families make joyous expeditions, far more educative
than they dream, wherein scouting is the order of the day. For example, one
party of four or more lies in ambush,—the best ambush to be had, which is
pitched upon after much consideration. The enemy scouts; first he finds the
ambush, and then his skill is shown in getting within touch of the alert foe
without being discovered. But every family should possess Scouting in
default of the chance of going on the war-path with a Red Indian. The evil
of the ready-made life we lead is that we do not discern the signs of the
times. An alert intelligence towards what goes on in the open-air world is a
great possession, and, strongly as we sympathise with the effort made to put
down bird’s-nesting, we shall lose, if we are not careful, one of the few bits
of what we may call ‘Red Indian’ training still within our reach.
Bird-stalking.—​But bird ‘stalking,’ to adapt a name, is a great deal
more exciting and delightful than bird’s-nesting, and we get our joy at no
cost of pain to other living things. All the skill of a good scout comes into

play. Think, how exciting to creep noiselessly as shadows behind river-side
bushes on hands and knees without disturbing a twig or a pebble till you get
within a yard of a pair of sandpipers, and then, lying low, to watch their
dainty little runs, pretty tricks of head and tail, and to hear the music of their
call. And here comes in the real joy of bird-stalking. If in the winter months
the children have become fairly familiar with the notes of our resident birds,
they will be able in the early summer to ‘stalk’ to some purpose. The notes
and songs in June are bewildering, but the plan is to single out those you are
quite sure of, and then follow up the others. The key to a knowledge of
birds is knowledge of their notes, and the only way to get this is to follow
any note of which you are not sure. The joy of tracking a song or note to its
source is the joy of a ‘find,’ a possession for life.
But bird-stalking is only to be done upon certain conditions. You must
not only be ‘most mousy-quiet,’ but you must not even let a thought
whisper, for if you let yourself think about anything else, the entirely
delightful play of bird-life passes by you unobserved; nay, the very bird
notes are unheard.
Here are two bird walks communicated by a bird-lover:—
“We heard a note something like a chaffinch’s, only slower, and we
looked up in the boughs of the ash to try and track the bird by the sudden
quiver of one twig here, another, there. We found a steep, rocky path which
brought us almost level with the tree tops, and then we had a good view of
the shy little willow wren busily seeking food. A note from the next tree like
a bubbling of song drew us further on, and then we found the wood wren
and watched him as with upturned head and bubbling throat he uttered his
trill.
“A joyous burst of song came from a bush near by, and we crept on, to
find a blackcap warbler with upraised crest turning excitedly round and
round in the ecstasy of song. We waited, and traced him to his next station
by his light touch on the branches. A hoarse screech from another tree
announced a greenfinch, and we had a long chase to get a glimpse of him;
but he came to an outstanding twig, and then we heard his pretty song,
which I should never have guessed to be his had we not seen him at it. A
little squeaky note made us watch the tree trunks, and, sure enough, there

was a tree-creeper running up and round and round an ash, uttering his note
all the time.
“Another day we got behind a wall from which we could examine a field
that lay beside the lake. There was the green plover with his jaunty crest,
running and pecking, and, as he pecked, we caught sight of the rosy flash
under his tail. We waited, hoping for more, for the plovers stand so still that
they are lost in their surroundings. But someone coughed, and up went the
plovers, a dozen of them, with their weary taunt, ‘Why don’t you let us
alone?’ Their distress roused other birds, and we saw a snipe rise from the
water edge, a marshy place, with hasty zigzag flight; it made a long round
and settled not much further than where it rose. The sandpipers rose, two
flying close to the water’s edge, whistling all the time. By the side of a little
gully we watched a wagtail, and presently a turn in the sunshine showed us
the yellow breast of the yellow wagtail. A loud ‘tis-sic’ near us drew our
eyes to the wall, and there stood a pied wagtail with full beak, waiting to get
rid of us before visiting his nest in the wall. We crept away and sheltered
behind a tree, and after a few minutes’ waiting we saw him go into his hole.
An angry chatter near by (like a broom on Venetian blinds!) directed our
eyes to a little brown wren on the wall with cocked-up tail, but in a minute
he disappeared like a mouse over the side.”
This is from another bird-lover:—
“Now, they (the children) are beginning to care more for the birds than
the eggs, and their first question, instead of being, ‘What is the egg like?’ is
usually ‘What is the bird like?’ We have great searching through Morris’s
British Birds[7] to identify birds we have seen and to make quite sure of
doubtful points.
“But now for the birds. Stonechats abound on the heaths. I pricked
myself up to my knees standing in a gorse-patch watching and listening to
the first I saw, but I was quite rewarded, and saw at least four pairs at one
time. Do you know the birds? The cock birds are such handsome little
fellows, black head and mask, white collar, rufous breast and dark grey or
brown back. They have a pretty little song, rather longer than a chaffinch’s,
besides the chit-chat cry when they are disturbed. They do not make a long
flight, and will hover in the air like a flycatcher. The sandmartins have
numbers of holes in the cliffs. We tried to see how deep they burrowed to

build their nests, but though I put my arm in up to the elbows in several
deserted holes, I could not reach the end. I think my favourites are the reed-
warblers. I know of at least four pairs, and when I could induce the children
to both stop talking for a few minutes, we were able to watch them boldly
hopping up and down the reeds and singing in full view of us.”
This is the sort of thing bird-stalkers come upon—and what a loss have
those children who are not brought up to the gentle art wherein the eye is
satisfied with seeing, and there is no greed of collecting, no play of the
hunter’s instinct to kill, and yet a lifelong joy of possession.

xiv.—the children require country air

The Essential Proportion of Oxygen.—​Every one knows that the
breathing of air which has lost little of its due proportion of oxygen is the
essential condition of vigorous life and of a fine physique; also, that
whatever produces heat, whether it be animal heat, or the heat of fire,
candle, gas-lamp, produces that heat at the expense of the oxygen contained
in the atmosphere—a bank which is drawn upon by every breathing and
burning object; that in situations where much breathing and burning are
going on, there is a terrible drain upon this vital gas; that the drain may be
so excessive that there is no longer sufficient oxygen in the air to support
animal life, and death results; that where the drain is less excessive but still
great, animal life may be supported, and people live a flaccid, feeble life in
a state of low vitality.
Excess of Carbonic Acid Gas.—​Also we know that every breathing and
every burning object expels a hurtful gas—carbonic acid. A very small
proportion of this gas is present in the purest atmospheric air, and in that
small proportion is healthful; but increase that quantity by the action of
furnaces, fires, living beings, gas-lamps, and the air is rendered
unwholesome, just in proportion to the quantity of superfluous carbonic-
acid gas it contains. If the quantity be excessive—as when many people are
huddled together in a small unventilated room—speedy death by
suffocation is the result.
Unvitiated, Unimpoverished Air.—​For these reasons, it is not possible
to enjoy fulness of life in a town. For grown-up people, the stimulus of
town life does something to make up for the impurity of town air; as, on the

other hand, country people too often forfeit their advantages through the
habit of mental sluggishness they let themselves fall into: but, for the
children—who not only breathe, but grow; who require, proportionably,
more oxygen than adults need for their vital processes—it is absolutely
cruel not to give them very frequent, if not daily, copious draughts of
unvitiated, unimpoverished air, the sort of air that can be had only remote
from towns.
Solar Light.—​But this is only one of the reasons why, for health’s sake
alone, it is of the first importance to give children long days in the open
country. They want light, solar light, as well as air. Country people are
ruddier than town folk; miners are sallow, so are the dwellers in cellars and
in sunless valleys. The reason is, that, to secure the ruddy glow of perfect
health, certain changes must take place in the blood—the nature of which it
would take too long to explain here—and that these changes in the blood,
marked by the free production of red corpuscles, appear to take place most
favourably under the influence of abundant solar light. What is more, men
of science are beginning to suspect that not only the coloured light rays of
the solar spectrum, but the dark heat rays, and the chemical rays, minister to
vitality in ways not yet fully understood.
A Physical Ideal for a Child.—​There was a charming picture in Punch
some time ago, of two little boys airing their English-French on their
mother’s new maid; two noble little fellows, each straight as a dart, with no
superfluous flesh, eyes well opened, head erect, chest expanded, the whole
body full of spring even in repose. It was worth looking at, if only as
suggesting the sort of physique we delight to see in a child. No doubt the
child inherits the most that he is in this respect as in all others; but this is
what bringing-up may, with some limitations, effect:—The child is born
with certain natural tendencies, and, according to his bringing-up, each such
tendency may run into a blemish of person or character, or into a cognate
grace. Therefore, it is worth while to have even a physical ideal for one’s
child; not, for instance, to be run away with by the notion that a fat child is
necessarily a fine child. The fat child can easily be produced: but the bright
eye, the open regard, the springing step; the tones, clear as a bell; the agile,
graceful movements that characterise the well-brought-up child, are the
result, not of bodily well-being only, but of ‘mind and soul according well,’

of a quick, trained intelligence, and of a moral nature habituated to ‘the joy
of self-control.’

FOOTNOTES:
[3] See Appendix A.
[4] Nature note-books may be had at the P.N.E.U. Office, 26 Victoria Street. See
Appendix A.
[5] Kingsley’s Water Babies and Madam How and Lady Why. All Mrs
Brightwen’s books. Miss Buckley’s (Mrs Fisher) ‘Eyes and no Eyes’ Series. Life
and her Children, etc. All Seton-Thompson’s books. Long’s The School of the
Woods, The Little Brother of the Bear. Kearton’s Wild Nature’s Ways. Living
Animals of the World.
[6] Wordsworth.
[7] John’s British Birds, which costs as many shillings as Morris’s does guineas,
is better for beginners.

PA RT I I I

‘HABIT IS TEN NATURES’

i.—education based upon natural law

A Healthy Brain.—​What I desire to set before the reader is a method of
education based upon natural law. In the first place, we have considered
some of the conditions to be observed with a view to keep the brain in
healthy working order; for it is upon the possession of an active, duly
nourished brain that the possibility of a sound education depends.
Out-of-Door Life.—​The consideration of out-of-door life, in developing
a method of education, comes second in order; because my object is to
show that the chief function of the child—his business in the world during
the first six or seven years of his life—is to find out all he can, about
whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses; that he has an
insatiable appetite for knowledge got in this way; and that, therefore, the
endeavour of his parents should be to put him in the way of making
acquaintance freely with Nature and natural objects; that, in fact, the
intellectual education of the young child should lie in the free exercise of
perceptive power, because the first stages of mental effort are marked by the
extreme activity of this power; and the wisdom of the educator is to follow
the lead of Nature in the evolution of the complete human being.
The next subject for consideration—a rather dry psycho-physiological
one—seems to me, all the same, to be very well worthy of attention as
striking the keynote of a reasonable method of education.
Habit the Instrument by which Parents Work.—‘Habit is ten
natures!’ If I could but make others see with my eyes how much this saying
should mean to the educator! How habit, in the hands of the mother, is as
his wheel to the potter, his knife to the carver—the instrument by means of
which she turns out the design she has already conceived in her brain.
Observe, the material is there to begin with; his wheel will not enable the

potter to produce a porcelain cup cut of coarse clay; but the instrument is as
necessary as the material or the design. It is unpleasant to speak of one’s
self, but if the reader will allow me, I should like to run over the steps by
which I have been brought to look upon habit as the means whereby the
parent may make almost anything he chooses of his child. That which has
become the dominant idea of one person’s life, if it be launched suddenly at
another, conveys no very great depth or weight of meaning to the second
person—he wants to get at it by degrees, to see the steps by which the other
has travelled. Therefore, I shall venture to show how I arrived at my present
position, which is, from one of the three possible points of view—The
formation of habits is education, and Education is the formation of habits.

ii.—the children have no self-compelling power

An Educational Cul-de-sac.—​Some years ago I was accustomed to
hear, ‘Habit is ten natures’ delivered from the pulpit on at least one Sunday
out of four. I had at the time just begun to teach, and was young and
enthusiastic in my work. It was to my mind a great thing to be a teacher; it
was impossible but that the teacher should leave his stamp on the children.
His own was the fault if anything went wrong, if any child did badly in
school or out of it. There was no degree of responsibility to which youthful
ardour was not equal. But, all this zeal notwithstanding, the disappointing
thing was, that nothing extraordinary happened. The children were good on
the whole, because they were the children of parents who had themselves
been brought up with some care; but it was plain that they behaved very
much as ‘’twas their nature to.’ The faults they had, they kept; the virtues
they had were exercised just as fitfully as before. The good, meek little girl
still told fibs. The bright, generous child was incurably idle. In lessons it
was the same thing; the dawdling child went on dawdling, the dull child
became no brighter. It was very disappointing. The children, no doubt, ‘got
on’—a little; but each one of them had the makings in her of a noble
character, of a fine mind, and where was the lever to lift each of these little
worlds? Such a lever there must be. This horse-in-a-mill round of
geography and French, history and sums, was no more than playing at
education; for who remembers the scraps of knowledge he laboured over as
a child? and would not the application of a few hours in later life effect
more than a year’s drudgery at any one subject in childhood? If education is

to secure the step-by-step progress of the individual and the race, it must
mean something over and above the daily plodding at small tasks which
goes by the name.
Love, Law, and Religion as Educational Forces.—​Looking for
guidance to the literature of education, I learned much from various
sources, though I failed to find what seemed to me an authoritative guide,
that is, one whose thought embraced the possibilities contained in the
human nature of a child, and, at the same time, measured the scope of
education. I saw how religious teaching helped the children, gave them
power and motives for continuous effort, and raised their desires towards
the best things. I saw in how far law restrained from evil, and love impelled
towards good. But with these great aids from without and from above, there
was still the depressing sense of labouring at education in the dark; the
advance made by the young people in moral, and even in intellectual, power
was like that of a door on its hinges—a swing forward to-day and back
again to-morrow, with little sensible progress from year to year beyond that
of being able to do harder sums and read harder books.
Why Children are incapable of Steady Effort.—​Consideration made
the reason of the failure plain: there was a warm glow of goodness at the
heart of every one of the children, but they were all incapable of steady
effort, because they had no strength of will, no power to make themselves
do that which they knew they ought to do. Here, no doubt, come in the
functions of parents and teachers; they should be able to make the child do
that which he lacks the power to compel himself to. But it were poor
training that should keep the child dependent upon personal influence. It is
the business of education to find some way of supplementing that weakness
of will which is the bane of most of us as well as of the children.
Children should be saved the Effort of Decision.—​That the effort of
decision is the most exhausting effort of life, has been well said from the
pulpit; and if that remain true about ourselves, even when the decision is
about trifling matters of going or coming, buying or not buying, it surely is
not just to leave the children all the labour of an effort of will whenever
they have to choose between the right and the wrong.

iii.—what is ‘nature’?

‘Habit is ten natures,’ went on being proclaimed in my ears; and at last it
came home to me as a weighty saying, which might contain the educational
‘Open, sesame!’ I was in quest of. In the first place, what is Nature, and
what, precisely, is Habit?
It is an astonishing thing, when we consider, what the child is,
irrespective of race, country, or kindred, simply in right of his birth as a
human being.
All Persons born with the same Primary Desires.—​That we all have
the same instincts and appetites, we are prepared to allow, but that the
principles of action which govern all men everywhere are primarily the
same, is a little startling; that, for instance, the same desires stir in the
breasts of savage and of sage alike; that the desire of knowledge, which
shows itself in the child’s curiosity about things and his eager use of his
eyes, is equally active everywhere; that the desire of society, which you
may see in two babies presented to one another and all agog with glee and
friendliness, is the cause, alike, of village communities amongst savage
tribes and of the philosophical meetings of the learned; that everywhere is
felt the desire of esteem—a wonderful power in the hands of the educator,
making a word of praise or blame more powerful as a motive than any fear
or hope of punishment or reward.
And Affections.—​And it is not only the same desires; all people,
everywhere, have the same affections and passions which act in the same
way under similar provocation: joy and grief, love and resentment,
benevolence, sympathy, fear, and much else, are common to all of us. So,
too, of conscience, the sense of duty.
Content of the most Elemental Notion of Human Nature.—​Dr
Livingstone mentions that the only addition he felt called upon to make to
the moral code of certain of the Zambesi tribes (however little they
observed their own law) was, that a man should not have more than one
wife. “Evil speaking, lying, hatred, disobedience to parents, neglect of
them,” were all known to be sin by these dark peoples whom civilised or
Christian teaching had never before reached. Not only is a sense of duty
common to mankind, but the deeper consciousness of God, however vague
such consciousness may be. And all this and much more goes to make up
the most elemental notion of human nature.

Nature plus Heredity.—​Then, heredity comes in, and here, if you
please, is ten natures: who is to deal with the child who is resentful, or
stubborn, or reckless, because it is born in him, his mother’s nature or his
grandfather’s? Think of the trick of the eye, the action of the hand, repeated
from father to son; the peculiar character of the handwriting, traceable, as
Miss Power Cobbe tells us is the case in her family, for instance, through
five generations; the artistic temperament, the taste for music or drawing,
running in families: here you get Nature with a twist, confirmed, sealed,
riveted, utterly proof, you would say, against any attempt to alter or modify
it.
Plus Physical Conditions.—​And, once more, physical conditions come
into force. The puny, feeble child and the sturdy urchin who never ails must
necessarily differ from one another in the strength of their desires and
emotions.
Human Nature the Sum of certain Attributes.—​What, then, with the
natural desires, affections, and emotions common to the whole race, what
with the tendencies which each family derives by descent, and those
peculiarities which the individual owes to his own constitution of body and
brain,—human nature, the sum of all these, makes out for itself a strong
case; so much so, that we are inclined to think the best that can be done is to
let it alone, to let every child develop unhindered according to the elements
of character and disposition that are in him.
The Child must not be left to his Human Nature.—​This is precisely
what half the parents in the world, and three-fourths of the teachers, are
content to do; and what is the consequence? That the world is making
advances, but the progress is, for the most part, amongst the few whose
parents have taken their education seriously in hand; while the rest, who
have been allowed to stay where they were, be no more, or no better than
Nature made them, act as a heavy drag: for, indeed, the fact is, that they do
not stay where they were; it is unchangeably true that the child who is not
being constantly raised to a higher and a higher platform will sink to a
lower and a lower. Wherefore, it is as much the parent’s duty to educate his
child into moral strength and purpose and intellectual activity as it is to feed
him and clothe him; and that in spite of his nature, if it must be so. It is true
that here and there circumstances step in and ‘make a man’ of the boy

whose parents have failed to bring him under discipline; but this is a
fortuitous aid which the educator is no way warranted to count upon.
I was beginning to see my way—not yet out of the psychological
difficulty, which, so far as I was concerned, blocked the way to any real
education; but now I could put my finger on the place, and that was
something. Thus:—
The will of the child is pitifully feeble, weaker in the children of the
weak, stronger in the children of the strong, but hardly ever to be counted
upon as a power in education.
The nature of the child—his human nature—being the sum of what he is
as a human being, and what he is in right of the stock he comes of, and what
he is as the result of his own physical and mental constitution—this nature
is incalculably strong.
Problem before the Educator.—​The problem before the educator is to
give the child control over his own nature, to enable him to hold himself in
hand as much in regard to the traits we call good, as to those we call evil:—
many a man makes shipwreck on the rock of what he grew up to think his
characteristic virtue—his open-handedness, for instance.
Divine Grace works on the Lines of Human Effort.—​In looking for a
solution of this problem, I do not undervalue the Divine grace—far
otherwise; but we do not always make enough of the fact that Divine grace
is exerted on the lines of enlightened human effort; that the parent, for
instance, who takes the trouble to understand what he is about in educating
his child, deserves, and assuredly gets, support from above; and that
Rebecca, let us say, had no right to bring up her son to be “thou worm,
Jacob,” in the trust that Divine grace would, speaking reverently, pull him
through. Being a pious man, the son of pious parents, he was pulled
through, but his days, he complains at the end, were “few and evil.”
The Trust of Parents must not be Supine.—​And indeed this is what
too many Christian parents expect: they let a child grow free as the wild
bramble, putting forth unchecked whatever is in him—thorn, coarse flower,
insipid fruit,—trusting, they will tell you, that the grace of God will prune
and dig and prop the wayward branches lying prone. And their trust is not
always misplaced; but the poor man endures anguish, is torn asunder in the

process of recovery which his parents might have spared him had they
trained the early shoots which should develop by-and-by into the character
of their child.
Nature then, strong as she is, is not invincible; and, at her best, Nature is
not to be permitted to ride rampant. Bit and bridle, hand and voice, will get
the utmost of endeavour out of her if her training be taken in hand in time;
but let Nature run wild, like the forest ponies, and not spur nor whip will
break her in.

iv.—habit may supplant ‘nature’

‘Habit is ten natures.’ If that be true, strong as nature is, habit is not only
as strong, but tenfold as strong. Here, then, have we a stronger than he, able
to overcome this strong man armed.
Habit runs on the Lines of Nature.—​But habit runs on the lines of
nature: the cowardly child habitually lies that he may escape blame; the
loving child has a hundred endearing habits; the good-natured child has a
habit of giving; the selfish child, a habit of keeping. Habit, working thus
according to nature, is simply nature in action, growing strong by exercise.
But Habit may be a Lever.—​But habit, to be the lever to lift the child,
must work contrary to nature, or at any rate, independently of her.
Directly we begin to look out for the working of habit on these lines,
examples crowd upon us: there are the children trained in careful habits,
who never soil their clothes; those trained in reticent habits, who never
speak of what is done at home, and answer indiscreet questions with ‘I
don’t know’; there are the children brought up in courteous habits, who
make way for their elders with gentle grace, and more readily for the poor
woman with the basket than for the well-dressed lady; and there are
children trained in grudging habits, who never offer to yield, or go, or do.
A Mother forms her Children’s Habits involuntarily.—​Such habits as
these, good, bad, or indifferent, are they natural to the children? No, but
they are what their mothers have brought them up to; and as a matter of
fact, there is nothing which a mother cannot bring her child up to, and there
is hardly a mother anywhere who has not some two or three—crotchets
sometimes, principles sometimes—which her children never violate. So that

it comes to this—given, a mother with liberal views on the subject of
education, and she simply cannot help working her own views into her
children’s habits; given, on the other hand, a mother whose final question is,
‘What will people say? what will people think? how will it look?’ and the
children grow up with habits of seeming, and not of being; they are content
to appear well-dressed, well-mannered, and well-intentioned to outsiders,
with very little effort after beauty, order, and goodness at home, and in each
other’s eyes.
Habit forces Nature into New Channels.—​The extraordinary power of
habit in forcing nature into new channels hardly requires illustration; we
have only to see a small boy at a circus riding two barebacked ponies with a
foot on the back of each, or a pantomime fairy dancing on air, or a clown
behaving like an indiarubber ball, or any of the thousand feats of skill and
dexterity which we pay our shillings to see—mental feats as well as bodily,
though, happily, these are the rarer—to be convinced that exactly anything
may be accomplished by training, that is, the cultivation of persistent habits.
And the power of habit is not seen in human beings alone. The cat goes in
search of her dinner always at the same time and to the same place—that is,
if it is usual to feed her in one spot. Indeed, the habit of place is so much to
the cat, that she will often rather die of famine than forsake the house to
which she is accustomed. As for the dog, he is still more a ‘bundle of
habits’ than his master. Scatter the crumbs for the sparrows at nine o’clock
every morning, and at nine o’clock they will come for their breakfast,
crumbs or no crumbs. Darwin inclines to think that the terror and avoidance
shown towards man by the wild birds and lesser animals is simply a matter
of transmitted habit; he tells us how he landed upon certain of the Pacific
islands where the birds had never seen man before, and they lighted upon
him and flew about him with utter fearlessness. To come nearer home, what
evidence of the mastery of habit is more sad and more overwhelming than
the habits of the drunkard, for instance, persisted in, in spite of reason,
conscience, purpose, religion, every motive which should influence a
thinking being?
Parents and Teachers must lay down Lines of Habit.—​All this is
nothing new; we have always known that ‘use is second nature,’ and that
‘man is a bundle of habits.’ It was not the fact, but the application of the
fact, and the physiology of habit, that were new and exceedingly valuable

ideas to me, and I hope they may be of some use to the reader. It was new to
me, for instance, to perceive that it rests with parents and teachers to lay
down lines of habit on which the life of the child may run henceforth with
little jolting or miscarriage, and may advance in the right direction with the
minimum of effort.

v.—the laying down of lines of habit

‘Begin it, and the thing will be completed!’ is infallibly true of every
mental and moral habitude: completed, not on the lines you foresee and
intend, but on the lines appropriate and necessary to that particular
habitude. In the phrase ‘unconscious cerebration’ we are brought face to
face with the fact that, whatever seed of thought or feeling you implant in a
child—whether through inheritance or by early training—grows, completes
itself, and begets after its kind, even as does a corporeal organism. It is a
marvellous and beautiful thing to perceive an idea—when the idea itself is a
fine one—developing within you of its own accord, to find your pen writing
down sentences whose logical sequence delights you, and yet in the
conception of which you have had no conscious part. When the experienced
writer ‘reels off’ in this fashion, he knows that so far as the run of the
words, the ordering of the ideas, go, his work will need no revision. So fine
a thing is this, that the lingering fallacy of the infallible reason established
itself thereupon. The philosopher, who takes pleasure in observing the ways
of his own mind, is a thinker of high thoughts, and he is apt to forget that
the thought which defiles a man behaves in precisely the same way as that
which purifies: the one, as the other, develops, matures, and increases after
its kind.
We Think, as we are accustomed to Think.—​How does this bear on
the practical work of bringing up children? In this way: We think, as we are
accustomed to think; ideas come and go and carry on a ceaseless traffic in
the rut—let us call it—you have made for them in the very nerve substance
of the brain. You do not deliberately intend to think these thoughts; you
may, indeed, object strongly to the line they are taking (two ‘trains’ of
thought going on at one and the same time!), and objecting, you may be
able to barricade the way, to put up ‘No Road’ in big letters, and to compel
the busy populace of the brain-world to take another route. But who is able

for these things? Not the child, immature of will, feeble in moral power,
unused to the weapons of the spiritual warfare. He depends upon his
parents; it rests with them to initiate the thoughts he shall think, the desires
he shall cherish, the feelings he shall allow. Only to initiate; no more is
permitted to them; but from this initiation will result the habits of thought
and feeling which govern the man—his character, that is to say. But is not
this assuming too much, seeing that, to sum up roughly all we understand
by heredity, a child is born with his future in his hands? The child is born,
doubtless, with the tendencies which should shape his future; but every
tendency has its branch roads, its good or evil outcome; and to put the child
on the right track for the fulfilment of the possibilities inherent in him, is the
vocation of the parent.
Direction of Lines of Habit.—​This relation of habit to human life—as
the rails on which it runs to a locomotive—is perhaps the most suggestive
and helpful to the educator; for just as it is on the whole easier for the
locomotive to pursue its way on the rails than to take a disastrous run off
them, so it is easier for the child to follow lines of habit carefully laid down
than to run off these lines at his peril. It follows that this business of laying
down lines towards the unexplored country of the child’s future is a very
serious and responsible one for the parent. It rests with him to consider well
the tracks over which the child should travel with profit and pleasure; and,
along these tracks, to lay down lines so invitingly smooth and easy that the
little traveller is going upon them at full speed without stopping to consider
whether or no he chooses to go that way.
Habit and Free-will.—​But,—supposing that the doing of a certain
action a score or two of times in unbroken sequence forms a habit which it
is as easy to follow as not; that, persist still further in the habit without
lapses, and it becomes second nature, quite difficult to shake off; continue it
further, through a course of years, and the habit has the strength of ten
natures, you cannot break through it without doing real violence to yourself;
—grant all this, and also that it is possible to form in the child the habit of
doing and saying, even of thinking and feeling, all that it is desirable he
should do or say, think or feel,—and do you not take away the child’s free-
will, make a mere automaton of him by this excessive culture?
Habit rules ninety-nine in a hundred of our Thoughts and Acts.—​In
the first place, whether you choose or no to take any trouble about the

formation of his habits, it is habit, all the same, which will govern ninety-
nine one-hundredths of the child’s life: he is the mere automaton you
describe. As for the child’s becoming the creature of habit, that is not left
with the parent to determine. We are all mere creatures of habit. We think
our accustomed thoughts, make our usual small talk, go through the trivial
round, the common task, without any self-determining effort of will at all. If
it were not so—if we had to think, to deliberate, about each operation of the
bath or the table—life would not be worth having; the perpetually repeated
effort of decision would wear us out. But, let us be thankful, life is not thus
laborious. For a hundred times we act or think, it is not necessary to choose,
to will, say, more than once. And the little emergencies, which compel an
act of will, will fall in the children’s lives just about as frequently as in our
own. These we cannot save them from, nor is it desirable that we should.
What we can do for them is to secure that they have habits which shall lead
them in ways of order, propriety, and virtue, instead of leaving their wheel
of life to make ugly ruts in miry places.
Habit powerful even where the Will decides.—​And then, even in
emergencies, in every sudden difficulty and temptation that requires an act
of will, why, conduct is still apt to run on the lines of the familiar habit. The
boy who has been accustomed to find both profit and pleasure in his books
does not fall easily into idle ways because he is attracted by an idle
schoolfellow. The girl who has been carefully trained to speak the exact
truth simply does not think of a lie as a ready means of getting out of a
scrape, coward as she may be.
But this doctrine of habit, is it, after all, any more than an empirical
treatment of the child’s symptoms? Why should the doing of an act or the
thinking of a thought, say, a score of times in unbroken succession, have
any tendency to make the doing of that act or the thinking of that thought a
part of the child’s nature? We may accept the doctrine as an act of faith
resting on experience; but if we could discover the raison d’être of this
enormous force of habit it would be possible to go to work on the laying
down of habits with real purpose and method.

vi.—the physiology of habit

A work of Dr Carpenter’s was perhaps the first which gave me the clue I
was in search of. In his Mental Physiology—a most interesting book, by the
way—he works out the analogy between mental and physical activity, and
shows that the correspondence in effect is due to a correspondence in cause.
Growing Tissues form themselves to Modes of Action.—​To state
roughly the doctrine of the school Dr Carpenter represents—the tissues, as
muscular tissue, for instance, undergo constant waste and as constant
reparation. Even those modes of muscular action which we regard as
natural to us, as walking and standing erect, are in reality the results of a
laborious education; quite as much so as many modes of action which we
consciously acquire, as writing or dancing; but the acquired modes become
perfectly easy and natural. Why? Because it is the law of the constantly
growing tissues that they should form themselves according to the modes of
action required of them. In a case where the brain is repeatedly sending
down to the muscles, under nervous control as they are, the message to have
a certain action done, that action becomes automatic in the lower centre,
and the faintest suggestion from outside comes to produce it without the
intervention of the brain. Thus, the joints and muscles of the child’s hand
very soon accommodate themselves to the mode of action required of them
in holding and guiding the pen. Observe, it is not that the child learns with
his mind how to use his pen, in spite of his muscles; but that the newly
growing muscles themselves take form according to the action required of
them. And here is the explanation of all the mountebank feats which appear
simply impossible to the untrained looker-on. They are impossible to him,
because his joints and muscles have not the same powers which have been
produced in the mountebank by a process of early training.
Therefore Children should learn Dancing, Swimming, etc., at an
Early Age.—​So much for mere bodily activities. And here we have the
reason why children should learn dancing, riding, swimming, calisthenics,
every form of activity which requires a training of the muscles, at an early
age: the fact being, that muscles and joints have not merely to conform
themselves to new uses, but to grow to a modified pattern; and this growth
and adaptation take place with the greatest facility in early youth. Of
course, the man whose muscles have kept the habit of adaptation picks up
new games, new muscular exercises, without very great labour. But teach a
ploughman to write, and you see the enormous physical difficulty which

unaccustomed muscles have in growing to any new sort of effort. Here we
see how important it is to keep watch over the habits of enunciation,
carriage of the head, and so on, which the child is forming hour by hour.
The poke, the stoop, the indistinct utterance, is not a mere trick to be left off
at pleasure ‘when he is older and knows better,’ but is all the time growing
into him becoming a part of himself, because it is registered in the very
substance of his spinal cord. The part of his nervous system where
consciousness resides (the brain) has long ago given a standing order, and
such are the complications of the administration, that to recall the order
would mean the absolute re-making of the parts concerned. And to correct
bad habits of speaking, for instance, it will not be enough for the child to
intend to speak plainly and to try to speak plainly; he will not be able to do
so habitually until some degree of new growth has taken place in the organs
of voice whilst he is making efforts to form the new habit.
Moral and Mental Habits make their Mark upon Physical Tissues.—​
But, practically, everybody knows that the body, and every part of the body,
accommodates itself very readily to the uses it is put to: we know that if a
child accustom herself to stand on one foot, thus pushing up one shoulder,
the habit will probably end in curvature of the spine; that to permit drooping
shoulders, and, consequently, contracted chest, is to prepare the way for
lung disease. The physical consequences of bad habits of this sort are so
evident, that we cannot blind ourselves to the relation of cause and effect.
What we are less prepared to admit is, that habits which do not appear to be
in any sense physical—a flippant habit, a truthful habit, an orderly habit—
should also make their mark upon a physical tissue, and that it is to this
physical effect the enormous strength of habit is probably due. Yet when we
consider that the brain, the physical brain, is the exceedingly delicate organ
by means of which we think and feel and desire, love and hate and worship,
it is not surprising that that organ should be modified by the work it has to
do; to put the matter picturesquely, it is as if every familiar train of thought
made a rut in the nervous substance of the brain into which the thoughts run
lightly of their own accord, and out of which they can only be got by an
effort of will.
Persistent Trains of Thought.—​Thus, the mistress of the house knows
that when her thoughts are free to take their own course, they run to cares of
the house or the larder, to to-morrow’s dinner or the winter’s clothing; that

is, thought runs into the rut which has been, so to speak, worn for it by
constant repetition. The mother’s thoughts run on her children, the painter’s
on pictures, the poet’s on poems; those of the anxious head of the house on
money cares, it may be, until in times of unusual pressure the thoughts beat,
beat, beat in that well-worn rut of ways and means, and decline to run in
any other channel, till the poor man loses his reason, simply because he
cannot get his thoughts out of that one channel made in the substance of his
brain. And, indeed, “that way madness lies” for every one of us, in the
persistent preying of any one train of thought upon the brain tissue. Pride,
resentment, jealousy, an invention that a man has laboured over, an opinion
he has conceived, any line of thought which he has no longer the power to
divert, will endanger a man’s sanity.
Incessant Regeneration of Brain Tissue.—​If we love, hate, think, feel,
worship, at the expense of actual physical effort on the part of the brain, and
consequent waste of tissue, how enormous must be the labour of that organ
with which we, in fact, do everything, even many of those acts whose final
execution falls to the hands or feet! It is true: and to repair this excessive
waste, the brain consumes the lion’s share of the nourishment provided for
the body. As we have already seen, fully a sixth or a fifth of all the blood in
the body goes to repair the waste in the king’s house; in other words, new
brain tissue is being constantly formed at a startlingly rapid rate: one
wonders at what age the child has no longer any part left of that brain with
which he was born.
The new tissue repeats the old, but not quite exactly. Just as a new
muscular growth adapts itself to any new exercise required of it, so the new
brain tissue is supposed to ‘grow to’ any habit of thought in force during the
time of growth—‘thought’ here including, of course, every exercise of mind
and soul. “The cerebrum of man grows to the modes of thought in which it
is habitually exercised,” says an able physiologist; or, in the words of Dr
Carpenter, “Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently
repeated, tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically
prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to
think, feel, or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formed
purpose or anticipation of results. For there is no reason to regard the
cerebrum as an exception to the general principle, that whilst each part of
the organism tends to form itself in accordance with the mode in which it is

habitually exercised, this tendency will be specially strong in the nervous
apparatus, in virtue of that incessant regeneration which is the very
condition of its functional activity. It scarcely, indeed, admits of a doubt,
that every state of ideational consciousness which is either very strong or is
habitually repeated, leaves an organic impression on the cerebrum, in virtue
of which the same state may be reproduced at any future time in
correspondence to a suggestion fitted to excite it.”
Artificial Reflex Actions may be Acquired.—​Or, to take Huxley’s way
of putting the case:—
“By the help of the brain we may acquire an infinity of artificial
reflex actions; that is to say, an action may require all our attention
and all our volition for its first, second, or third performance, but by
frequent repetition it becomes, in a manner, part of our organisation,
and is performed without volition or even consciousness.
“As every one knows, it takes a soldier a long time to learn his
drill—for instance, to put himself into the attitude of ‘attention’ at
the instant the word of command is heard. But after a time the sound
of the word gives rise to the act, whether the soldier be thinking of it
or not. There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not
be true, of a practical joker who, seeing a discharged veteran
carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out ‘Attention!’
whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his
mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and
its effects had become embodied in the man’s nervous structure.
“The possibility of all education (of which military drill is only
one particular form) is based upon the existence of this power which
the nervous system possesses, of organising conscious actions into
more or less unconscious, or reflex, operations. It may be down laid
as a rule, that if any two mental states be called up together, or in
succession, with due frequency and vividness, the subsequent
production of the one of them will suffice to call up the other, and
that whether we desire it or not.”
Intellectual and Moral Education.—“The object of intellectual
education is to create such indissoluble associations of our ideas of things,
in the order and relation in which they occur in nature; that of a moral

education is to unite as fixedly, the ideas of evil deeds with those of pain
and degradation, and of good actions with those of pleasure and nobleness.”
But it is the intimate interlocking of mind and matter which is more
directly important to the educator—the idea which we have put broadly
under the (by no means scientifically accurate) figure of a rut. Given, that
the constant direction of the thoughts produces a certain set in the tissues of
the brain, this set is the first trace of the rut or path, a line of least
resistance, along which the same impression, made another time, will find it
easier to travel than to take another path. So arises a right-of-way for any
given habit of action or thought.
Character affected by Acquired Modification of Brain Tissue.—​
What follows? Why, that the actual conformation of the child’s brain
depends upon the habits which the parents permit or encourage; and that the
habits of the child produce the character of the man, because certain mental
habitudes once set up, their nature is to go on for ever unless they should be
displaced by other habits. Here is an end to the easy philosophy of, ‘It
doesn’t matter,’ ‘Oh, he’ll grow out of it,’ ‘He’ll know better by-and-by,’
‘He’s so young, what can we expect?’ and so on. Every day, every hour, the
parents are either passively or actively forming those habits in their children
upon which, more than upon anything else, future character and conduct
depend.
Outside Influence.—​And here comes in the consideration of outside
influence. Nine times out of ten we begin to do a thing because we see
some one else do it; we go on doing it, and—there is the habit! If it is so
easy for ourselves to take up a new habit, it is tenfold as easy for the
children; and this is the real difficulty in the matter of the education of
habit. It is necessary that the mother be always on the alert to nip in the bud
the bad habit her children may be in the act of picking up from servants or
from other children.

vii.—the forming of a habit—‘shut the door after you’

“Do ye next thinge.”
“Lose this day loitering, and ’twill be the same story
To-morrow; and the next, more dilatory:
The indecision brings its own delays,

And days are lost, lamenting o’er lost days,”

says Marlowe, who, like many of us, knew the misery of the intellectual
indolence which cannot brace itself to “Do ye next thinge.” No question
concerning the bringing up of children can, conceivably, be trivial, but this,
of dilatoriness, is very important. The effort of decision, we have seen, is
the greatest effort of life; not the doing of the thing, but the making up of
one’s mind as to which thing to do first. It is commonly this sort of mental
indolence, born of indecision, which leads to dawdling habits. How is the
dilatory child to be cured? Time? She will know better as she grows older?
Not a bit of it: “And the next, more dilatory” will be the story of her days,
except for occasional spurts. Punishments? No; your dilatory person is a
fatalist. ‘What can’t be cured must be endured,’ he says, but he will endure
without any effort to cure. Rewards? No; to him a reward is a punishment
presented under another aspect: the possible reward he realises as actual;
there it is, within his grasp, so to say; in foregoing the reward he is
punished; and he bears the punishment. What remains to be tried when
neither time, reward, nor punishment is effectual? That panacea of the
educationist: ‘One custom overcometh another.’ This inveterate dawdling is
a habit to be supplanted only by the contrary habit, and the mother must
devote herself for a few weeks to this cure as steadily and untiringly as she
would to the nursing of her child through measles. Having in a few—the
fewer the better—earnest words pointed out the miseries that must arise
from this fault, and the duty of overcoming it, and having so got the (sadly
feeble) will of the child on the side of right-doing, she simply sees that for
weeks together the fault does not recur. The child goes to dress for a walk;
she dreams over the lacing of her boots—the tag in her fingers poised in
mid air—but her conscience is awake; she is constrained to look up, and her
mother’s eye is upon her, hopeful and expectant. She answers to the rein
and goes on; midway, in the lacing of the second boot, there is another
pause, shorter this time; again she looks up, and again she goes on. The
pauses become fewer day by day, the efforts steadier, the immature young
will is being strengthened, the habit of prompt action acquired. After that
first talk, the mother would do well to refrain from one more word on the
subject; the eye (expectant, not reproachful), and, where the child is far
gone in a dream, the lightest possible touch, are the only effectual
instruments. By-and-by, ‘Do you think you can get ready in five minutes to-
day without me?’ ‘Oh yes, mother.’ ‘Do not say “yes” unless you are quite

sure.’ ‘I will try.’ And she tries, and succeeds. Now, the mother will be
tempted to relax her efforts—to overlook a little dawdling because the dear
child has been trying so hard. This is absolutely fatal. The fact is, that the
dawdling habit has made an appreciable record in the very substance of the
child’s brain. During the weeks of cure new growth has been obliterating
the old track, and the track of a new habit is being formed. To permit any
reversion to the old bad habit is to let go all this gain. To form a good habit
is the work of a few weeks; to guard it is a work of incessant, but by no
means anxious care. One word more,—prompt action on the child’s part
should have the reward of absolute leisure, time in which to do exactly as
she pleases, not granted as a favour, but accruing (without any words) as a
right.
Habit a Delight in itself.—​Except for this one drawback, the forming of
habits in the children is no laborious task, for the reward goes hand in hand
with the labour; so much so, that it is like the laying out of a penny with the
certainty of the immediate return of a pound. For a habit is a delight in
itself; poor human nature is conscious of the ease that it is to repeat the
doing of anything without effort; and, therefore, the formation of a habit,
the gradually lessening sense of effort in a given act, is pleasurable. This is
one of the rocks that mothers sometimes split upon: they lose sight of the
fact that a habit, even a good habit, becomes a real pleasure; and when the
child has really formed the habit of doing a certain thing, his mother
imagines that the effort is as great to him as at first, that it is virtue in him to
go on making this effort, and that he deserves, by way of reward, a little
relaxation—she will let him break through the new habit a few times, and
then go on again. But it is not going on; it is beginning again, and beginning
in the face of obstacles. The ‘little relaxation’ she allowed her child meant
the forming of another contrary habit, which must be overcome before the
child gets back to where he was before.
As a matter of fact, this misguided sympathy on the part of mothers is
the one thing that makes it a laborious undertaking to train a child in good
habits; for it is the nature of the child to take to habits as kindly as the infant
takes to his mother’s milk.
Tact, Watchfulness, and Persistence.—​For example, and to choose a
habit of no great consequence except as a matter of consideration for others:
the mother wishes her child to acquire the habit of shutting the door after

him when he enters or leaves a room. Tact, watchfulness, and persistence
are the qualities she must cultivate in herself; and, with these, she will be
astonished at the readiness with which the child picks up the new habit.
Stages in the Formation of a Habit.—‘Johnny,’ she says, in a bright,
friendly voice, ‘I want you to remember something with all your might:
never go into or out of a room in which anybody is sitting without shutting
the door.’
‘But if I forget, mother?’
‘I will try to remind you.’
‘But perhaps I shall be in a great hurry.’
‘You must always make time to do that.’
‘But why, mother?’
‘Because it is not polite to the people in the room to make them
uncomfortable.’
‘But if I am going out again that very minute?’
‘Still, shut the door, when you come in; you can open it again to go out.
Do you think you can remember?’
‘I’ll try, mother.’
‘Very well; I shall watch to see how few “forgets” you make.’
For two or three times Johnny remembers; and then, he is off like a shot
and half-way downstairs before his mother has time to call him back. She
does not cry out, ‘Johnny, come back and shut the door!’ because she knows
that a summons of that kind is exasperating to big or little. She goes to the
door, and calls pleasantly, ‘Johnny!’ Johnny has forgotten all about the
door; he wonders what his mother wants, and, stirred by curiosity, comes
back, to find her seated and employed as before. She looks up, glances at
the door, and says, ‘I said I should try to remind you.’ ‘Oh, I forgot’ says
Johnny, put upon his honour; and he shuts the door that time, and the next,
and the next.
But the little fellow has really not much power to recollect, and the
mother will have to adopt various little devices to remind him; but of two

things she will be careful—that he never slips off without shutting the door,
and that she never lets the matter be a cause of friction between herself and
the child, taking the line of his friendly ally to help him against that bad
memory of his. By and by, after, say, twenty shuttings of the door with
never an omission, the habit begins to be formed; Johnny shuts the door as a
matter of course, and his mother watches him with delight come into a
room, shut the door, take something off the table, and go out, again shutting
the door.
The Dangerous Stage.—​Now that Johnny always shuts the door, his
mother’s joy and triumph begin to be mixed with unreasonable pity. ‘Poor
child,’ she says to herself, ‘it is very good of him to take so much pains
about a little thing, just because he is bid!’ She thinks that, all the time, the
child is making an effort for her sake; losing sight of the fact that the habit
has become easy and natural, that, in fact, Johnny shuts the door without
knowing that he does so. Now comes the critical moment. Some day
Johnny is so taken up with a new delight that the habit, not yet fully formed,
loses its hold, and he is half-way downstairs before he thinks of the door.
Then he does think of it, with a little prick of conscience, strong enough,
not to send him back, but to make him pause a moment to see if his mother
will call him back. She has noticed the omission, and is saying to herself,
‘Poor little fellow, he has been very good about it this long time; I’ll let him
off this once.’ He, outside, fails to hear his mother’s call, says, to himself—
fatal sentence!—‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ and trots off.
Next time he leaves the door open, but it is not a ‘forget.’ His mother
calls him back in a rather feeble way. His quick ear catches the weakness of
her tone, and, without coming back, he cries, ‘Oh, mother, I’m in such a
hurry,’ and she says no more, but lets him off. Again he rushes in, leaving
the door wide open. ‘Johnny!’—in a warning voice. ‘I’m going out again
just in a minute, mother,’ and after ten minutes’ rummaging he does go out,
and forgets to shut the door. The mother’s mis-timed easiness has lost for
her every foot of the ground she had gained.

viii.—infant ‘habits’

The whole group of habitudes, half physical and half moral, on which
the propriety and comfort of everyday life depend, are received passively

by the child; that is, he does very little to form these habits himself, but his
brain receives impressions from what he sees about him; and these
impressions take form as his own very strongest and most lasting habits.
Some Branches of Infant Education.—​Cleanliness, order, neatness,
regularity, punctuality, are all ‘branches’ of infant education. They should
be about the child like the air he breathes, and he will take them in as
unconsciously. It is hardly necessary to say a word about the necessity for
delicate cleanliness in the nursery. The babies get their share of tubbing, and
unlimited washing is done on their behalf; but, indeed, scrupulous as
mothers of the cultured class are, a great deal rests with the nurses, and it
needs much watchfulness to secure that there shall not be the faintest odour
about the infant or anything belonging to him, and that the nurseries be kept
sweet and thoroughly aired. One great difficulty is, that there are still some
nurses who belong to a class to which an open window is an abomination;
and another is, they do not all know the meaning of odours: they cannot see
‘a smell,’ and, therefore, it is not easy to persuade them that a smell is
matter, microscopic particles which the child takes into him with every
breath he draws.
A Sensitive Nose.—​By the way, a very important bit of physical
education for a child is to train in him a sensitive nose—nostrils which sniff
out the least ‘stuffiness’ in a room, or the faintest odour attached to clothes
or furniture. The sense of smell appears to have been given us not only as
an avenue of pleasure, but as a sort of danger-signal to warn us of the
presence of noxious matters: yet many people appear to go through the
world without a nose at all; and the fact tends to show that a quick sense of
smell is a matter of education and habit. The habit is easily formed.
Encourage the children to notice whether the room they enter ‘smells’ quite
fresh when they come in out of the open air, to observe the difference
between the air of the town and the fresher air beyond; and train them to
perceive the faintest trace of pleasant or harmless odours.
The Baby is Ubiquitous.—​To return to the nursery. It would be a great
thing if the nurse could be impressed with the notion that the baby is
ubiquitous, and that he not only sees and knows everything, but will keep,
for all his life, the mark of all he sees:—
“If there’s a hole in a’ your coats,
I pray ye, tent it;

A chiel’s amang ye takin’ notes,
And, faith, he’ll prent it”:—

‘prent it’ on his own active brain, as a type for his future habits. Such a
notion on the nurse’s part might do something to secure cleanliness that
goes beyond that of clean aprons. One or two little bits of tidiness that
nurses affect are not to be commended on the score of cleanliness:—the
making up of the nursery beds early in the morning, and the folding up of
the children’s garments when they take them off at night. It is well to stretch
a line across the day nursery at night, and hang the little garments out for an
airing, to get rid of the insensible perspiration with which they have been
laden during the day. For the same reason, the beds and bedclothes should
be turned down to air for a couple of hours before they are made up.
Personal Cleanliness as an Early Habit.—​The nursery table, if there
be one, should be kept as scrupulously nice as that of the dining-room. The
child who sits down to a crumpled or spotted tablecloth, or uses a
discoloured metal spoon, is degraded—by so much. The children, too,
should be encouraged to nice cleanliness in their own persons. We have all
seen the dainty baby-hand stretched out to be washed; it has got a smudge,
and the child does not like it. May they be as particular when they are big
enough to wash their own hands! Not that they should be always clean and
presentable; children love to ‘mess about,’ and should have big pinafores
for the purpose. They are all like that little French prince who scorned his
birthday gifts, and entreated to be allowed to make dear little mud-pies with
the boy in the gutter. Let them make their mud-pies freely; but that over,
they should be impatient to remove every trace of soil, and should do it
themselves. Young children may be taught to take care of their finger-nails,
and to cleanse the corners of eyes and ears. As for sitting down to table with
unwashed hands and unbrushed hair, that, of course, no decent child is
allowed to do. Children should be early provided with their own washing
materials, and accustomed to find real pleasure in the bath, and in attending
to themselves. There is no reason why a child of five or six should not make
himself thoroughly clean without all that torture of soap in the eyes and
general pulling about and poking which children hate, and no wonder.
Besides, the child is not getting the habit of the daily bath until he can take
it for himself, and it is important that this habit should be formed before the
reckless era of school-life begins.

Modesty and Purity.—​The operations of the bath afford the mother
opportunities to give necessary teaching and training in habits of decency,
and a sense of modesty. To let her young child live and grow in Eden-like
simplicity is, perhaps, the most tempting and natural course to the mother.
But alas! we do not live in the Garden, and it may be well that the child
should be trained from the first to the conditions under which he is to live.
To the youngest child, as to our first parents, there is that which is
forbidden. In the age of unquestioning obedience, let him know that not all
of his body does Almighty God allow him to speak of, think of, display,
handle, except for purposes of cleanliness. This will be the easier to the
mother if she speak of heart, lungs, etc., which, also, we are not allowed to
look at or handle, but which have been so enclosed in walls of flesh and
bone that we cannot get at them. That which is left open to us is so left, like
that tree in the Garden of Eden, as a test of obedience; and in the one case,
as in the other, disobedience is attended with certain loss and ruin.
The Habit of Obedience and the Sense of Honour.—​The sense of
prohibition, of sin in disobedience, will be a wonderful safeguard against
knowledge of evil to the child brought up in habits of obedience; and still
more effective will be the sense of honour, of a charge to keep—the motive
of the apostolic injunctions on this subject. Let the mother renew this
charge with earnestness on the eve, say, of each birthday, giving the child to
feel that by obedience in this matter he may glorify God with his body; let
her keep watch against every approach of evil; and let her pray daily that
each one of her children may be kept in purity for that day. To ignore the
possibilities of evil in this kind is to expose the child to frightful risks. At
the same time, be it remembered that words which were meant to hinder
may themselves be the cause of evil, and that a life full of healthy interests
and activities is amongst the surest preventives of secret vice.
Order Essential.—​What has been said about cleanliness applies as
much to order—order in the nursery, and orderly habits in the nurse. One
thing under this head: the nursery should not be made the hospital for the
disabled or worn-out furniture of the house; cracked cups, chipped plates,
jugs and teapots with fractured spouts, should be banished. The children
should be brought up to think that when once an article is made unsightly
by soil or fracture it is spoiled, and must be replaced; and this rule will
prove really economical, for when children and servants find that things no

longer ‘do,’ after some careless injury, they learn to be careful. But, in any
case, it is a real detriment to the children to grow up using imperfect and
unsightly makeshifts.
The pleasure grown-up people take in waiting on children is really a
fruitful source of mischief;—for instance, in this matter of orderly habits.
Who does not know the litter the children leave to be cleared up after them
a dozen times a day, in the nursery, garden, drawing-room, wherever their
restless little feet carry them? We are a bit sentimental about scattered toys
and faded nosegays, and all the tokens of the children’s presence; but the
fact is, that the lawless habit of scattering should not be allowed to grow
upon children. Everybody condemns the mother of a family whose drawers
are chaotic, whose possessions are flung about heedlessly; but at least some
of the blame should be carried back to her mother. It is not as a woman that
she has picked up a miserable habit which destroys the comfort, if not the
happiness, of her home; the habit of disorder was allowed to grow upon her
as a child, and her share of the blame is, that she has failed to cure herself.
The Child of Two should put away his Playthings.—​The child of two
should be taught to get and to replace his playthings. Begin early. Let it be a
pleasure to him, part of his play, to open his cupboard, and put back the doll
or the horse each in its own place. Let him always put away his things as a
matter of course, and it is surprising how soon a habit of order is formed,
which will make it pleasant to the child to put away his toys, and irritating
to him to see things in the wrong place. If parents would only see the
morality of order, that order in the nursery becomes scrupulousness in after
life, and that the training necessary to form the habit is no more,
comparatively, than the occasional winding of a clock, which ticks away
then of its own accord and without trouble to itself, more pains would be
taken to cultivate this important habit.
Neatness Akin to Order.—​Neatness is akin to order, but is not quite the
same thing: it implies not only ‘a place for everything, and everything in its
place,’ but everything in a suitable place, so as to produce a good effect; in
fact, taste comes into play. The little girl must not only put her flowers in
water, but arrange them prettily, and must not be put off with some rude
kitchen mug or jug for them, or some hideous pink vase, but must have jar
or vase graceful in form and harmonious in hue, though it be but a cheap
trifle. In the same way, everything in the nursery should be ‘neat’—that is,

pleasing and suitable; and children should be encouraged to make neat and
effective arrangements of their own little properties. Nothing vulgar in the
way of print, picture-book, or toy should be admitted—nothing to vitiate a
child’s taste or introduce a strain of commonness into his nature. On the
other hand, it would be hard to estimate the refining, elevating influence of
one or two well-chosen works of art, in however cheap a reproduction.
Regularity.—​The importance of Regularity in infant education is
beginning to be pretty generally acknowledged. The young mother knows
that she must put her baby to bed at a proper time, regardless of his cries,
even if she leave him to cry two or three times, in order that, for the rest of
his baby life, he may put himself sweetly to sleep in the dark without
protest. But a good deal of nonsense is talked about the reason of the child’s
cries: he is supposed to want his mother, or his nurse, or his bottle, or the
light, and to be ‘a knowing little fellow,’ according to his nurse, quite up to
the fact that if he cries for these things he will get them.
Habits of Time and Place.—​The fact is, the child has already formed a
habit of wakefulness or of feeding at improper times, and he is as uneasy at
his habits being broken in upon as the cat is at a change of habitation; when
he submits happily to the new regulation, it is because the new habit is
formed, and is, in its turn, the source of satisfaction. According to Dr
Carpenter, “Regularity should begin even with infant life, as to times of
feeding, repose, etc. The bodily habit thus formed greatly helps to shape the
mental habit at a later period. On the other hand, nothing tends more to
generate a habit of self-indulgence than to feed a child, or to allow it to
remain out of bed, at unseasonable times, merely because it cries. It is
wonderful how soon the actions of a young infant (like those of a young
dog or horse) come into harmony with systematic ‘training’ judiciously
exercised.” The habit of regularity is as attractive to older children as to the
infant. The days when the usual programme falls through are, we know, the
days when the children are apt to be naughty.

ix.—physical exercises

Importance of Daily.—​The subject of the natural training of eye and
muscles was taken up pretty fully in treating of ‘Out-of-door Life.’ I will
only add, that to give the child pleasure in light and easy motion—the sort

of delight in the management of his own body that a good rider finds in
managing his horse—dancing, drill, calisthenics, some sort of judicious
physical exercise, should make part of every day’s routine. Swedish drill is
especially valuable, and many of the exercises are quite suitable for the
nursery. Certain moral qualities come into play in alert movements, eye-to-
eye attention, prompt and intelligent replies; but it often happens that good
children fail in these points for want of physical training.
Drill of Good Manners.—​Just let them go through the drill of good
manners: let them rehearse little scenes in play,—Mary, the lady asking the
way to the market; Harry, the boy who directs her, and so on. Let them go
through a position drill—eyes right, hands still, heads up. They will invent a
hundred situations, and the behaviour proper to each, and will treasure hints
thrown in for their guidance; but this sort of drill should be attempted while
children are young, before the tyranny of mauvaise honte sets in. Encourage
them to admire and take pride in light springing movements, and to eschew
a heavy gait and clownish action of the limbs.
Training of the Ear and Voice.—​The training of the ear and voice is an
exceedingly important part of physical culture. Drill the children in pure
vowel sounds, in the enunciation of final consonants; do not let them speak
of ‘walkin’’ and ‘talkin’,’ of a ‘fi-ine da-ay,’ ‘ni-ice boy-oys.’ Drill them in
pronouncing difficult words—‘imperturbability,’ ‘ipecacuanha,’
‘Antananarivo,’—with sharp precision after a single hearing; in producing
the several sounds of each vowel; and the sounds of the consonants without
attendant vowels. French, taught orally, is exceedingly valuable as affording
training for both ear and voice.
The Habit of Music.—​As for a musical training, it would be hard to say
how much that passes for inherited musical taste and ability is the result of
the constant hearing and producing of musical sounds, the habit of music,
that the child of musical people grows up with. Mr Hullah maintained that
the art of singing is entirely a trained habit—that every child may be, and
should be, trained to sing. Of course, transmitted habit must be taken into
account. It is a pity that the musical training most children get is of a
random character; that they are not trained, for instance, by carefully
graduated ear and voice exercises, to produce and distinguish musical tones
and intervals.

Let Children Alone.—​In conclusion, let me say that the education of
habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children
alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions—a
running fire of Do and Don’t; but letting them go their own way and grow,
having first secured that they will go the right way, and grow to fruitful
purpose. The gardener, it is true, ‘digs about and dungs,’ prunes and trains,
his peach tree; but that occupies a small fraction of the tree’s life: all the rest
of the time the sweet airs and sunshine, the rains and dews, play about it
and breathe upon it, get into its substance, and the result is—peaches. But
let the gardener neglect his part, and the peaches will be no better than
sloes.

PA RT I V

SOME HABITS OF MIND—SOME MORAL HABITS

A Science of Education.—​Allow me to say once more, that I venture to
write upon subjects bearing on home education with the greatest deference
to mothers; believing, that in virtue of their peculiar insight into the
dispositions of their own children, they are blest with both knowledge and
power in the management of them which lookers-on can only admire from
afar. At the same time, there is such a thing as a science of education, that
does not come by intuition, in the knowledge of which it is possible to bring
up a child entirely according to natural law, which is also Divine law, in the
keeping of which there is great reward.
Education in Habit favours an Easy Life.—​We have seen why Habit,
for instance, is such a marvellous force in human life. I find this view of
habit very encouraging, as giving a scientific reasonableness to the
conclusions already reached by common experience. It is pleasant to know
that, even in mature life, it is possible by a little persistent effort to acquire a
desirable habit. It is good, if not pleasant, to know, also, with what fatal
ease we can slip into bad habits. But the most comfortable thing in this view
of habit is, that it falls in with our natural love of an easy life. We are not
unwilling to make efforts in the beginning with the assurance that by-and-
by things will go smoothly; and this is just what habit is, in an extraordinary
degree, pledged to effect. The mother who takes pains to endow her
children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days; while
she who lets their habits take care of themselves has a weary life of endless
friction with the children. All day she is crying out, ‘Do this!’ and they do it
not; ‘Do that!’ and they do the other. ‘But,’ you say, ‘if habit is so powerful,
whether to hinder or to help the child, it is fatiguing to think of all the habits
the poor mother must attend to. Is she never to be at ease with her
children?’

Training in Habits becomes a Habit.—​Here, again, is an illustration of
that fable of the anxious pendulum, overwhelmed with the thought of the
number of ticks it must tick. But the ticks are to be delivered tick by tick,
and there will always be a second of time to tick in. The mother devotes
herself to the formation of one habit at a time, doing no more than keep
watch over those already formed. If she be appalled by the thought of
overmuch labour, let her limit the number of good habits she will lay herself
out to form. The child who starts in life with, say, twenty good habits,
begins with a certain capital which he will lay out to endless profit as the
years go on. The mother who is distrustful of her own power of steady
effort may well take comfort in two facts. In the first place, she herself
acquires the habit of training her children in a given habit, so that by-and-
by it becomes, not only no trouble, but a pleasure to her. In the second
place, the child’s most fixed and dominant habits are those which the
mother takes no pains about, but which the child picks up for himself
through his close observation of all that is said and done, felt and thought,
in his home.
Habits inspired in the Home Atmosphere.—​We have already
considered a group of half-physical habits—order, regularity, neatness—
which the child imbibes, so to speak, in this way. But this is not all: habits
of gentleness, courtesy, kindness, candour, respect for other people, or—
habits quite other than these, are inspired by the child as the very
atmosphere of his home, the air he lives in and must grow by.

i.—the habit of attention

Let us pass on, now, to the consideration of a group of mental habits
which are affected by direct training rather than by example.
First, we put the habit of Attention, because the highest intellectual gifts
depend for their value upon the measure in which their owner has cultivated
the habit of attention. To explain why this habit is of such supreme
importance, we must consider the operation of one or two of the laws of
thought. But just recall, in the meantime, the fixity of attention with which
the trained professional man—the lawyer, the doctor, the man of letters—
listens to a roundabout story, throws out the padding, seizes the facts, sees
the bearing of every circumstance, and puts the case with new clearness and

method; and contrast this with the wandering eye and random replies of the
uneducated;—and you see that to differentiate people according to their
power of attention is to employ a legitimate test.
A Mind at the Mercy of Associations.—​We will consider, then, the
nature and the functions of attention. The mind—with the possible
exception of the state of coma—is never idle; ideas are for ever passing
through the brain, by day and by night, sleeping or waking, mad or sane.
We take a great deal too much upon ourselves when we suppose that we are
the authors and intenders of the thoughts we think. The most we can do is to
give direction to these trains of thought in the comparatively few moments
when we are regulating the thoughts of our hearts. We see in dreams—the
rapid dance of ideas through the brain during lighter sleep—how ideas
follow one another in a general way. In the wanderings of delirium, in the
fancies of the mad, the inconsequent prattle of the child, and the babble of
the old man, we see the same thing, i.e. the law according to which ideas
course through the mind when they are left to themselves. You talk to a
child about glass—you wish to provoke a proper curiosity as to how glass is
made, and what are its uses. Not a bit of it; he wanders off to Cinderella’s
glass slipper; then he tells you about his godmother who gave him a boat;
then about the ship in which Uncle Harry went to America; then he wonders
why you do not wear spectacles, leaving you to guess that Uncle Harry does
so. But the child’s ramblings are not whimsical; they follow a law, the law
of association of ideas, by which any idea presented to the mind recalls
some other idea which has been at any time associated with it—as glass,
and Cinderella’s slipper; and that, again some idea associated with it. Now
this law of association of ideas is a good servant and a bad master. To have
this aid in recalling the events of the past, the engagements of the present, is
an infinite boon; but to be at the mercy of associations, to have no power to
think of what we choose when we choose, but only as something ‘puts it in
our head,’ is to be no better than an imbecile.
Wandering Attention.—​A vigorous effort of will should enable us at
any time to fix our thoughts. Yes; but a vigorous self-compelling will is the
flower of a developed character; and while the child has no character to
speak of, but only natural disposition, who is to keep humming-tops out of a
geography lesson, or a doll’s sofa out of a French verb? Here is the secret of
the weariness of the home schoolroom—the children are thinking all the

time about something else than their lessons; or, rather, they are at the
mercy of the thousand fancies that flit through their brains, each in the train
of the last. “Oh, Miss Smith,” said a little girl to her governess, “there are so
many things more interesting than lessons to think about!”
Where is the harm? In this: not merely that the children are wasting time,
though that is a pity; but that they are forming a desultory habit of mind,
and reducing their own capacity for mental effort.
The Habit of Attention to be Cultivated in the Infant.—​The help,
then, is not in the will of the child but in the habit of attention, a habit to be
cultivated even in the infant. A baby, notwithstanding his wonderful powers
of observation, has no power of attention; in a minute, the coveted
plaything drops from listless little fingers, and the wandering glance lights
upon some new joy. But even at this stage the habit of attention may be
trained: the discarded plaything is picked up, and, with ‘Pretty!’ and dumb
show, the mother keeps the infant’s eyes fixed for fully a couple of minutes
—and this is his first lesson in attention. Later, as we have seen, the child is
eager to see and handle every object that comes in his way. But watch him
at his investigations: he flits from thing to thing with less purpose than a
butterfly amongst the flowers, staying at nothing long enough to get the
good out of it. It is the mother’s part to supplement the child’s quick
observing faculty with the habit of attention. She must see to it that he does
not flit from this to that, but looks long enough at one thing to get a real
acquaintance with it.
Is little Margaret fixing round eyes on a daisy she has plucked? In a
second, the daisy will be thrown away, and a pebble or a buttercup will
charm the little maid. But the mother seizes the happy moment. She makes
Margaret see that the daisy is a bright yellow eye with white eyelashes
round it; that all the day long it lies there in the grass and looks up at the
great sun, never blinking as Margaret would do, but keeping its eye wide
open. And that is why it is called daisy, ‘day’s eye,’ because its eye is
always looking at the sun which makes the day. And what does Margaret
think it does at night, when there is no sun? It does what little boys and girls
do; it just shuts up its eye with its white lashes tipped with pink, and goes to
sleep till the sun comes again in the morning. By this time the daisy has
become interesting to Margaret; she looks at it with big eyes after her
mother has finished speaking, and then, very likely, cuddles it up to her

breast or gives it a soft little kiss. Thus the mother will contrive ways to
invest every object in the child’s world with interest and delight.
Attention to ‘Things’; Words a Weariness.—​But the tug-of-war
begins with the lessons of the schoolroom. Even the child who has gained
the habit of attention to things, finds words a weariness. This is a turning-
point in the child’s life, and the moment for the mother’s tact and vigilance.
In the first place, never let the child dawdle over copybook or sum, sit
dreaming with his book before him. When a child grows stupid over a
lesson, it is time to put it away. Let him do another lesson as unlike the last
as possible, and then go back with freshened wits to his unfinished task. If
mother or governess have been unwary enough to let the child ‘moon’ over
a lesson, she must just exert her wits to pull him through; the lesson must be
done, of course, but must be made bright and pleasant to the child.
Lessons Attractive.—​The teacher should have some knowledge of the
principles of education; should know what subjects are best fitted for the
child considering his age, and how to make these subjects attractive; should
know, too, how to vary the lessons, so that each power of the child’s mind
should rest after effort, and some other power be called into play. She
should know how to incite the child to effort through his desire of
approbation, of excelling, of advancing, his desire of knowledge, his love of
his parents, his sense of duty, in such a way that no one set of motives be
called unduly into play to the injury of the child’s character. But the danger
she must be especially alive to, is the substitution of any other natural desire
for that of knowledge, which is equally natural, and is adequate for all the
purposes of education.
Time-table; Definite Work in a Given Time.—​I shall have
opportunities to enter into some of these points later; meantime, let us look
in at a home schoolroom managed upon sound principles. In the first place,
there is a time-table, written out fairly, so that the child knows what he has
to do and how long each lesson is to last. This idea of definite work to be
finished in a given time is valuable to the child, not only as training him in
habits of order, but in diligence; he learns that one time is not ‘as good as
another’; that there is no right time left for what is not done in its own time;
and this knowledge alone does a great deal to secure the child’s attention to
his work. Again, the lessons are short, seldom more than twenty minutes in
length for children under eight; and this, for two or three reasons. The sense

that there is not much time for his sums or his reading, keeps the child’s
wits on the alert and helps to fix his attention; he has time to learn just so
much of any one subject as it is good for him to take in at once: and if the
lessons be judiciously alternated—sums first, say, while the brain is quite
fresh; then writing, or reading—some more or less mechanical exercise, by
way of a rest; and so on, the programme varying a little from day to day, but
the same principle throughout—a ‘thinking’ lesson first, and a ‘painstaking’
lesson to follow,—the child gets through his morning lessons without any
sign of weariness.
Even with regular lessons and short lessons, a further stimulus may be
occasionally necessary to secure the attention of the child. His desire of
approbation may ask the stimulus, not only of a word of praise, but of
something in the shape of a reward to secure his utmost efforts. Now,
rewards should be dealt out to the child upon principle: they should be the
natural consequences of his good conduct.
A Natural Reward.—​What is the natural consequence of work well and
quickly done? Is it not the enjoyment of ampler leisure? The boy is
expected to do two right sums in twenty minutes: he does them in ten
minutes; the remaining ten minutes are his own, fairly earned, in which he
should be free for a scamper in the garden, or any delight he chooses. His
writing task is to produce six perfect m’s: he writes six lines with only one
good m in each line; the time for the writing lesson is over and he has none
for himself; or, he is able to point out six good m’s in his first line, and he
has the rest of the time to draw steamboats and railway trains. This
possibility of letting the children occupy themselves variously in the few
minutes they may gain at the end of each lesson, is compensation which the
home schoolroom offers for the zest which the sympathy of numbers, and
emulation, are supposed to give to school work.
Emulation.—​As for emulation, a very potent means of exciting and
holding the attention of children, it is often objected that a desire to excel,
to do better than others, implies an unloving temper, which the educator
should rather repress than cultivate. Good marks of some kind are usually
the rewards of those who do best, and it is urged that these good marks are
often the cause of ungenerous rivalry. Now, the fact is, the children are
being trained to live in the world, and in the world we all do get good marks
of one kind or another, prize, or praise, or both, according as we excel

others, whether in football or tennis, or in picture-painting or poem-making.
There are envyings and heart-burnings amongst those who come in second
best; so it has been from the beginning, and doubtless will be to the end. If
the child is to go out into an emulous world, why, it may possibly be well
that he should be brought up in an emulous school. But here is where the
mother’s work comes in. She can teach her child to be first without vanity,
and to be last without bitterness; that is, she can bring him up in such a
hearty outgoing of love and sympathy that joy in his brother’s success takes
the sting out of his own failure, and regret for his brother’s failure leaves no
room for self-glorification. Again, if a system of marks be used as a
stimulus to attention and effort, the good marks should be given for conduct
rather than for cleverness—that is, they should be within everybody’s reach:
every child may get his mark for punctuality, order, attention, diligence,
obedience, gentleness; and therefore, marks of this kind may be given
without danger of leaving a rankling sense of injustice in the breast of the
child who fails. Emulation becomes suicidal when it is used as the incentive
to intellectual effort, because the desire for knowledge subsides in
proportion as the desire to excel becomes active. As a matter of fact, marks
of any sort, even for conduct, distract the attention of children from their
proper work, which is in itself interesting enough to secure good behaviour
as well as attention.
Affection as a Motive.—​That he ought to work hard to please his
parents who do so much for him, is a proper motive to bring before the
child from time to time, but not too often: if the mother trade on her child’s
feelings, if, ‘Do this or that to please mother,’ ‘Do not grieve poor mother,’
etc., be brought too frequently before the child as the reason for right doing,
a sentimental relation is set up which both parent and child will find
embarrassing, the true motives of action will be obscured, and the child,
unwilling to appear unloving, will end in being untrue.
Attractiveness of Knowledge.—​Of course, the most obvious means of
quickening and holding the attention of children lies in the attractiveness of
knowledge itself, and in the real appetite for knowledge with which they are
endowed. But how successful faulty teachers are in curing children of any
desire to know, is to be seen in many a schoolroom. I shall later, however,
have an opportunity for a few words on this subject.

What is Attention?—​It is evident that attention is no ‘faculty’ of the
mind; indeed, it is very doubtful how far the various operations of the mind
should be described as ‘faculties’ at all. Attention is hardly even an
operation of the mind, but is simply the act by which the whole mental
force is applied to the subject in hand. This act, of bringing the whole mind
to bear, may be trained into a habit at the will of the parent or teacher, who
attracts and holds the child’s attention by means of a sufficient motive.
Self-Compelled.—​As the child gets older, he is taught to bring his own
will to bear; to make himself attend in spite of the most inviting suggestions
from without. He should be taught to feel a certain triumph in compelling
himself to fix his thoughts. Let him know what the real difficulty is, how it
is the nature of his mind to be incessantly thinking, but how the thoughts, if
left to themselves, will always run off from one thing to another, and that
the struggle and the victory required of him is to fix his thoughts upon the
task in hand. ‘You have done your duty,’ with a look of sympathy from his
mother, is a reward for the child who has made this effort in the strength of
his growing will. But it cannot be too much borne in mind that attention is,
to a great extent, the product of the educated mind; that is, one can only
attend in proportion as one has the intellectual power of developing the
topic.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of this habit of attention. It
is, to quote words of weight, “within the reach of every one, and should be
made the primary object of all mental discipline”; for whatever the natural
gifts of the child, it is only in so far as the habit of attention is cultivated in
him that he is able to make use of them.
The Secret of Overpressure.—​If it were only as it saves wear and tear,
a perpetual tussle between duty and inclination, it is worth while for the
mother to lay herself out to secure that her child never does a lesson into
which he does not put his heart. And that is no difficult undertaking; the
thing is, to be on the watch from the beginning against the formation of the
contrary habit of inattention. A great deal has been said lately about
overpressure, and we have glanced at one or two of the causes whose
effects go by this name. But truly, one of the most fertile causes of an
overdone brain is a failure in the habit of attention. I suppose we are all
ready to admit that it is not the things we do, but the things we fail to do,
which fatigue us, with the sense of omission, with the worry of hurry in

overtaking our tasks. And this is almost the only cause of failure in work in
the case of the healthy schoolboy or schoolgirl: wandering wits hinder a
lesson from being fully taken in at the right moment; that lesson becomes a
bugbear, continually wanted henceforth and never there; and the sense of
loss tries the young scholar more than would the attentive reception of a
dozen such lessons.
The Schoolboy’s Home Work.—​In the matter of home work, the
parents may still be of great use to their boys and girls after they begin to go
to day-school; not in helping them, that should not be necessary; but let us
suppose a case:—‘Poor Annie does not finish her lessons till half-past nine,
she really has so much to do’; ‘Poor Tom is at his books till ten o’clock; we
never see anything of the children in the evening,’ say the distressed
parents; and they let their children go on in a course which is absolutely
ruinous both to bodily health and brain power.
Wholesome Home Treatment for Mooning.—​Now, the fault is very
seldom in the lessons, but in the children; they moon over their books, and a
little wholesome home treatment should cure them of that ailment. Allow
them, at the utmost, an hour and a half for their home-work; treat them
tacitly as defaulters if they do not appear at the end of that time; do not be
betrayed into word or look of sympathy; and the moment the time for
lessons is over, let some delightful game or story-book be begun in the
drawing-room. By-and-by they will find that it is possible to finish lessons
in time to secure a pleasant evening afterwards, and the lessons will be
much the better done for the fact that concentrated attention has been
bestowed on them. At the same time the custom of giving home-work, at
any rate to children under fourteen, is greatly to be deprecated. The gain of
a combination of home and school life is lost to the children; and a very full
scheme of school work may be carried through in the morning hours.
Rewards and Punishments should be relative Consequences of
Conduct.—​In considering the means of securing attention, it has been
necessary to refer to discipline—the dealing out of rewards and
punishments,—a subject which every tyro of a nursemaid or nursery
governess feels herself very competent to handle. But this, too, has its
scientific aspect: there is a law by which all rewards and punishments
should be regulated: they should be the natural, or, at any rate, the relative
consequences of conduct; should imitate, as nearly as may be without injury

to the child, the treatment which such and such conduct deserves and
receives in after life. Miss Edgeworth, in her story of Rosamond and the
Purple Jar, hits the right principle, though the incident is rather
extravagant. Little girls do not often pine for purple jars in chemists’
windows; but that we should suffer for our wilfulness in getting what is
unnecessary by doing without what is necessary, is precisely one of the
lessons of life we all have to learn, and therefore is the right sort of lesson
to teach a child.
Natural and Educative Consequences.—​It is evident that to administer
rewards and punishments on this principle requires patient consideration
and steady determination on the mother’s part. She must consider with
herself what fault of disposition the child’s misbehaviour springs from; she
must aim her punishment at that fault, and must brace herself to see her
child suffer present loss for his lasting gain. Indeed, exceedingly little actual
punishment is necessary where children are brought up with care. But this
happens continually—the child who has done well gains some natural
reward (like that ten minutes in the garden), which the child forfeits who
has done less well; and the mother must brace herself and her child to bear
this loss; if she equalise the two children she commits a serious wrong, not
against the child who has done well, but against the defaulter, whom she
deliberately encourages to repeat his shortcoming. In placing her child
under the discipline of consequences, the mother must use much tact and
discretion. In many cases, the natural consequence of the child’s fault is
precisely that which it is her business to avert, while, at the same time, she
looks about for some consequence related to the fault which shall have an
educative bearing on the child: for instance, if a boy neglect his studies, the
natural consequence is that he remains ignorant; but to allow him to do so
would be criminal neglect on the part of the parent.

ii.—the habits of application, etc.

Rapid Mental Effort.—​The habits of mental activity and of application
are trained by the very means employed to cultivate that of attention. The
child may plod diligently through his work who might be trained to rapid
mental effort. The teacher herself must be alert, must expect instant
answers, quick thought, rapid work. The tortoise will lag behind the hare,

but the tortoise must be trained to move, every day, a trifle quicker. Aim
steadily at securing quickness of apprehension and execution, and that goes
far towards getting it.
Zeal must be stimulated.—​So of application. The child must not be
allowed to get into the mood in which he says, ‘Oh, I am so tired of sums,’
or ‘of history.’ His zeal must be stimulated; there must always be a pleasing
vista before him; and steady, untiring application to work should be held up
as honourable, while fitful, flagging attention and effort are scouted.

iii.—the habit of thinking

‘A Lion’ Operations included in Thinking.—​The actual labour of the
brain is known to psychologists under various names, and divided into
various operations: let us call it thinking, which, for educational purposes, is
sufficiently exact; but, by ‘thinking,’ let us mean a real conscious effort of
mind, and not the fancies that flit without effort through the brain. This sort
of thing, for instance, an example quoted by Archbishop Thompson in his
Laws of Thought[8]:—“When Captain Head was travelling across the
pampas of South America, his guide one day suddenly stopped him, and
pointing high into the air, cried out ‘A lion!’ Surprised at such an
exclamation, accompanied with such an act, he turned up his eyes, and with
difficulty perceived, at an immeasurable height, a flight of condors, soaring
in circles in a particular spot. Beneath this spot, far out of sight of himself
or guide, lay the carcass of a horse, and over that carcass stood, as the guide
well knew, a lion, whom the condors were eyeing with envy from their airy
height. The signal of the birds was to him what the sight of the lion alone
would have been to the traveller—a full assurance of its existence. Here
was an act of thought which cost the thinker no trouble, which was as easy
to him as to cast his eyes upward, yet which from us, unaccustomed to the
subject, would require many steps and some labour. The sight of the
condors convinced him that there was some carcass or other; but as they
kept wheeling far above it, instead of swooping down to their feast, he
guessed that some beast had anticipated them. Was it a dog, or a jackal? No;
the condors would not fear to drive away, or share with, either: it must be
some large beast, and as there were lions in the neighbourhood, he

concluded that one was here.” And all these steps of thought are summed up
in the words ‘A lion.’
This is the sort of thing that the children should go through, more or less,
in every lesson—a tracing of effect from cause, or of cause from effect; a
comparing of things to find out wherein they are alike, and wherein they
differ; a conclusion as to causes or consequences from certain premises.

iv.—the habit of imagining

The Sense of the Incongruous.—​All their lessons will afford scope for
some slight exercise of the children’s thinking power, some more and some
less, and the lessons must be judiciously alternated, so that the more
mechanical efforts succeed the more strictly intellectual, and that the
pleasing exercise of the imagination, again, succeed efforts of reason. By
the way, it is a pity when the sense of the ludicrous is cultivated in
children’s books at the expense of better things. Alice in Wonderland is a
delicious feast of absurdities, which none of us, old or young, could afford
to spare; but it is doubtful whether the child who reads it has the delightful
imaginings, the realising of the unknown, with which he reads The Swiss
Family Robinson.
This point is worth considering in connection with Christmas books for
the little people. Books of ‘comicalities’ cultivate no power but the sense of
the incongruous; and though life is the more amusing for the possession of
such a sense, when cultivated to excess it is apt to show itself in a flippant
habit. Diogenes and the Naughty Boys of Troy is irresistible, but it is not the
sort of thing the children will live over and over, and ‘play at’ by the hour,
as we have all played at Robinson Crusoe finding the footprints. They must
have ‘funny books,’ but do not give the children too much nonsense-
reading.
Commonplace Tales; Tales of Imagination.—​Stories, again, of the
Christmas holidays, of George and Lucy, of the amusements, foibles, and
virtues of children in their own condition of life, leave nothing to the
imagination. The children know all about everything so well that it never
occurs to them to play at the situations in any one of these tales, or even to
read it twice over. But let them have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in
other lands and other times, heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes,

delicious fairy tales in which they are never roughly pulled up by the
impossible—even where all is impossible, and they know it, and yet
believe.
Imagination and Great Conceptions.—​And this, not for the children’s
amusement merely: it is not impossible that posterity may write us down a
generation blest with little imagination, and, by so far, the less capable of
great conceptions and heroic efforts, for it is only as we have it in us to let a
person or a cause fill the whole stage of the mind, to the exclusion of self-
occupation, that we are capable of large-hearted action on behalf of that
person or cause. Our novelists say there is nothing left to imagine; and that,
therefore, a realistic description of things as they are is all that is open to
them. But imagination is nothing if not creative, unless it see, not only what
is apparent, but what is conceivable, and what is poetically fit in given
circumstances.
Imagination Grows.—​Now imagination does not descend, full-grown,
to take possession of an empty house; like every other power of the mind, it
is the merest germ of a power to begin with, and grows by what it gets; and
childhood, the age of faith, is the time for its nourishing. The children
should have the joy of living in far lands, in other persons, in other times—
a delightful double existence; and this joy they will find, for the most part,
in their story-books. Their lessons, too, history and geography, should
cultivate their conceptive powers. If the child do not live in the times of his
history lesson, be not at home in the climes his geography book describes,
why, these lessons will fail of their purpose. But let lessons do their best,
and the picture-gallery of the imagination is poorly hung if the child have
not found his way into the realms of fancy.
Thinking comes by Practice.—​How the children’s various lessons
should be handled so as to induce habits of thinking, we shall consider later;
but this for the present: thinking, like writing or skating, comes by practice.
The child who never has thought, never does think, and probably never will
think; for are there not people enough who go through the world without
any deliberate exercise of their own wits? The child must think, get at the
reason-why of things for himself, every day of his life, and more each day
than the day before. Children and parents both are given to invert this
educational process. The child asks ‘Why?’ and the parent answers, rather
proud of this evidence of thought in his child. There is some slight show of

speculation even in wondering ‘Why?’ but it is the slightest and most
superficial effort the thinking brain produces. Let the parent ask ‘Why?’ and
the child produce the answer, if he can. After he has turned the matter over
and over in his mind, there is no harm in telling him—and he will
remember it—the reason why. Every walk should offer some knotty
problem for the children to think out—“Why does that leaf float on the
water, and this pebble sink?” and so on.

v.—the habit of remembering

Remembering and Recollecting.—​Memory is the storehouse of
whatever knowledge we possess; and it is upon the fact of the stores lodged
in the memory that we take rank as intelligent beings. The children learn in
order that they may remember. Much of what we have learned and
experienced in childhood, and later, we cannot reproduce, and yet it has
formed the groundwork of after-knowledge; later notions and opinions have
grown out of what we once learned and knew. That is our sunk capital, of
which we enjoy the interest though we are unable to realise. Again, much
that we have learned and experienced is not only retained in the storehouse
of memory, but is our available capital, we can reproduce, recollect upon
demand. This memory which may be drawn upon by the act of recollection
is our most valuable endowment.
A ‘Spurious’ Memory.—​There is a third kind of (spurious) memory—
facts and ideas floating in the brain which yet make no part of it, and are
exuded at a single effort; as when a barrister produces all his knowledge of
a case in his brief, and then forgets all about it; or when the schoolboy
‘crams’ for an examination, writes down what he has thus learned, and
behold, it is gone from his gaze for ever: as Ruskin puts it, “They cram to
pass, and not to know; they do pass, and they don’t know.” That the
barrister, the physician, should be able thus to dismiss the case on which he
has ceased to be occupied, the publisher the book he has rejected, is well for
him, and this art of forgetting is not without its uses: but what of the
schoolboy who has little left after a year’s work but his place in a class-list?
Memory a Record in the Brain Substance.—​To say anything adequate
on the subject of memory is impossible here; but let us try to answer two or
three queries which present themselves on the surface. How do we come to

‘remember’ at all? How do we gain the power to utilise remembered facts—
that is, to recollect? And under what conditions is knowledge acquired that
neither goes to the growth of brain and mind, nor is available on demand,
but is lightly lodged in the brain for some short period, and is then
evacuated at a single throw? We are interested in a wonderful invention—an
instrument which records spoken words, and will deliver, say a century
hence, speech or lecture in the very words and in the very tones of the
speaker. Such an instrument is that function of the brain called memory,
whereby the impressions received by the brain are recorded mechanically—
at least, such is the theory pretty generally received now by physiologists.
That is, the mind takes cognisance of certain facts, and the nerve substance
of the brain records that cognisance.
Made under what Conditions.—​Now, the questions arise, Under what
conditions is such an imprint of fact or event made upon the substance of
the brain? Is the record permanent? And is the brain capable of receiving an
indefinite number of such impressions? It appears, both from common
experience and from an infinite number of examples quoted by
psychologists, that any object or idea which is regarded with attention
makes the sort of impression on the brain which is said to fix it in the
memory. In other words, give an instant’s undivided attention to anything
whatsoever, and that thing will be remembered. In describing this effect, the
common expression is accurate beyond its intention. We say, “Such and
such a sight or sound, or sensation, made a strong impression on me.” And
that is precisely what has happened: arrest the attention upon any fact or
incident, and that fact or incident is remembered; it is impressed, imprinted
upon the brain substance. The inference is plain. You want the child to
remember? Then secure his whole attention, the fixed gaze of his mind, as
it were, upon the fact to be remembered; then he will have it: by a sort of
photographic (!) process, that fact or idea is ‘taken’ by his brain, and when
he is an old man, perhaps, the memory of it will flash across him.
Recollection and the Law of Association.—​But it is not enough to have
a recollection flash across one incidentally; we want to have the power of
recalling at will: and for this, something more is necessary than an
occasional act of attention producing a solitary impression. Supposing, for
instance, that by good teaching you secure the child’s attention to the verb
avoir, he will remember it; that is to say, some infinitely slight growth of

brain tissue will record and retain that one French verb. But one verb is
nothing; you want the child to learn French, and for this you must not only
fix his attention upon each new lesson, but each must be so linked into the
last that it is impossible for him to recall one without the other following in
its train. The physical effect of such a method appears to be that each new
growth of brain tissue is, so to speak, laid upon the last; that is, to put it
figuratively, a certain tract of the brain may be conceived of as being
overlaid with French. This is to make a practical use of that law of
association of ideas of which one would not willingly become the sport; and
it is the neglect of this law which invalidates much good teaching. The
teacher is content to produce a solitary impression which is only recalled as
it is acted upon by a chance suggestion; whereas he should forge the links
of a chain to draw his bucket out of the well. Probably the reader may have
heard, or heard of, a Dr Pick, who grounded a really philosophical system
of mnemonics on these two principles of attention and association.
Whatever we may think of his application of it, the principle he asserted is
the right one.
Every Lesson must recall the Last.—​Let every lesson gain the child’s
entire attention, and let each new lesson be so interlaced with the last that
the one must recall the other; that, again, recalls the one before it, and so on
to the beginning.
No Limit to the Recording Power of the Brain.—​But the ‘lightly
come, lightly go’ of a mere verbal memory follows no such rules. The child
gets his exercise ‘by heart,’ says it off like a parrot, and behold, it is gone;
there is no record of it upon the brain at all. To secure such a record, there
must be time; time for that full gaze of the mind we call attention, and for
the growth of the brain tissue to the new idea. Given these conditions, there
appears to be no limit of quantity to the recording power of the brain.
Except in this way: a girl learns French, and speaks it fairly well; by the
time she is a grandmother she has forgotten it entirely, has not a word left.
When this is the case, her French has been disused; she has not been in the
habit of reading, hearing, or speaking French from youth to age. Whereby it
is evident that, to secure right-of-way to that record of French imprinted on
her brain, the path should have been kept open by frequent goings and
comings.

But Links of Association a Condition of Recollection.—​To acquire
any knowledge or power whatsoever, and then to leave it to grow rusty in a
neglected corner of the brain, is practically useless. Where there is no chain
of association to draw the bucket out of the well, it is all the same as if there
were no water there. As to how to form these links, every subject will
suggest a suitable method. The child has a lesson about Switzerland to-day,
and one about Holland to-morrow, and the one is linked to the other by the
very fact that the two countries have hardly anything in common; what the
one has, the other has not. Again, the association will be of similarity, and
not of contrast. In our own experience we find that colours, places, sounds,
odours recall persons or events; but links of this sensuous order can hardly
be employed in education. The link between any two things must be found
in the nature of the things associated.

vi.—the habit of perfect execution

The Habit of turning out Imperfect Work.—‘Throw perfection into
all you do’ is a counsel upon which a family may be brought up with great
advantage. We English, as a nation, think too much of persons, and too little
of things, work, execution. Our children are allowed to make their figures,
or their letters, their stitches, their dolls’ clothes, their small carpentry,
anyhow, with the notion that they will do better by-and-by. Other nations—
the Germans and the French, for instance—look at the question
philosophically, and know that if the children get the habit of turning out
imperfect work, the men and women will undoubtedly keep that habit up. I
remember being delighted with the work of a class of about forty children,
of six and seven, in an elementary school at Heidelberg. They were doing a
writing lesson, accompanied by a good deal of oral teaching from a master,
who wrote each word on the blackboard. By-and-by the slates were shown,
and I did not observe one faulty or irregular letter on the whole forty slates.
The same principle of ‘perfection’ was to be discerned in a recent exhibition
of school-work held throughout France. No faulty work was shown, to be
excused on the plea that it was the work of children.
A Child should Execute Perfectly.—​No work should be given to a
child that he cannot execute perfectly, and then perfection should be
required of him as a matter of course. For instance, he is set to do a copy of

strokes, and is allowed to show a slateful at all sorts of slopes and all sorts
of intervals; his moral sense is vitiated, his eye is injured. Set him six
strokes to copy; let him, not bring a slateful, but six perfect strokes, at
regular distances and at regular slopes. If he produces a faulty pair, get him
to point out the fault, and persevere until he has produced his task; if he
does not do it to-day, let him go on to-morrow and the next day, and when
the six perfect strokes appear, let it be an occasion of triumph. So with the
little tasks of painting, drawing, or construction he sets himself—let
everything he does be well done. An unsteady house of cards is a thing to be
ashamed of. Closely connected with this habit of ‘perfect work’ is that of
finishing whatever is taken in hand. The child should rarely be allowed to
set his hand to a new undertaking until the last is finished.

vii.—some moral habits—obedience

It is disappointing that, in order to cover the ground at all, we must treat
those moral habits, which the mother owes it to her children to cultivate in
them, in a slight and inadequate way; but the point to be borne in mind is,
that all that has been already said about the cultivation of habit applies with
the greatest possible force to each of these habits.
The Whole Duty of a Child.—​First, and infinitely the most important,
is the habit of obedience. Indeed, obedience is the whole duty of the child,
and for this reason—every other duty of the child is fulfilled as a matter of
obedience to his parents. Not only so: obedience is the whole duty of man;
obedience to conscience, to law, to Divine direction.
It has been well observed that each of the three recorded temptations of
our Lord in the wilderness is a suggestion, not of an act of overt sin, but of
an act of wilfulness, that state directly opposed to obedience, and out of
which springs all that foolishness which is bound up in the heart of a child.
Obedience no Accidental Duty.—​Now, if the parent realise that
obedience is no mere accidental duty, the fulfilling of which is a matter that
lies between himself and the child, but that he is the appointed agent to train
the child up to the intelligent obedience of the self-compelling, law-abiding
human being, he will see that he has no right to forego the obedience of his
child, and that every act of disobedience in the child is a direct
condemnation of the parent. Also, he will see that the motive to the child’s

obedience is not the arbitrary one of, ‘Do this, or that, because I have said
so,’ but the motive of the apostolic injunction, “Children, obey your parents
in the Lord, for this is right.”
Children must have the Desire to Obey.—​It is only in proportion as
the will of the child is in the act of obedience, and he obeys because his
sense of right makes him desire to obey in spite of temptations to
disobedience—not of constraint, but willingly—that the habit has been
formed which will, hereafter, enable the child to use the strength of his will
against his inclinations when these prompt him to lawless courses. It is said
that the children of parents who are most strict in exacting obedience often
turn out ill; and that orphans and other poor waifs brought up under strict
discipline only wait their opportunity to break out into license. Exactly so;
because, in these cases, there is no gradual training of the child in the habit
of obedience; no gradual enlisting of his will on the side of sweet service
and a free-will offering of submission to the highest law: the poor children
are simply bullied into submission to the will, that is, the wilfulness, of
another; not at all, ‘for it is right’; only because it is convenient.
Expect Obedience.—​The mother has no more sacred duty than that of
training her infant to instant obedience. To do so is no difficult task; the
child is still “trailing clouds of glory ... from God, who is his home”; the
principle of obedience is within him, waiting to be called into exercise.
There is no need to rate the child, or threaten him, or use any manner of
violence, because the parent is invested with authority which the child
intuitively recognises. It is enough to say, ‘Do this,’ in a quiet, authoritative
tone, and expect it to be done. The mother often enough loses her hold over
her children because they detect in the tone of her voice that she does not
expect them to obey her behests; she does not think enough of her position;
has not sufficient confidence in her own authority. The mother’s great
stronghold is in the habit of obedience. If she begin by requiring that her
children always obey her, why, they will always do so as a matter of course;
but let them once get the thin end of the wedge in, let them discover that
they can do otherwise than obey, and a woful struggle begins, which
commonly ends in the children doing that which is right in their own eyes.
This is the sort of thing which is fatal: The children are in the drawing-
room, and a caller is announced. ‘You must go upstairs now.’ ‘Oh, mother
dear, do let us stay in the window-corner; we will be as quiet as mice!’ The

mother is rather proud of her children’s pretty manners, and they stay. They
are not quiet, of course; but that is the least of the evils; they have
succeeded in doing as they chose and not as they were bid, and they will not
put their necks under the yoke again without a struggle. It is in little matters
that the mother is worsted. ‘Bedtime, Willie!’ ‘Oh, mamma, just let me
finish this’; and the mother yields, forgetting that the case in point is of no
consequence; the thing that matters is that the child should be daily
confirming a habit of obedience by the unbroken repetition of acts of
obedience. It is astonishing how clever the child is in finding ways of
evading the spirit while he observes the letter. ‘Mary, come in.’ ‘Yes,
mother’; but her mother calls four times before Mary comes. ‘Put away
your bricks’; and the bricks are put away with slow, reluctant fingers. ‘You
must always wash your hands when you hear the first bell.’ The child obeys
for that once, and no more.
To avoid these displays of wilfulness, the mother will insist from the
first on an obedience which is prompt, cheerful, and lasting—save for
lapses of memory on the child’s part. Tardy, unwilling, occasional
obedience is hardly worth the having; and it is greatly easier to give the
child the habit of perfect obedience by never allowing him in anything else,
than it is to obtain this mere formal obedience by a constant exercise of
authority. By-and-by, when he is old enough, take the child into confidence;
let him know what a noble thing it is to be able to make himself do, in a
minute, and brightly, the very thing he would rather not do. To secure this
habit of obedience, the mother must exercise great self-restraint; she must
never give a command which she does not intend to see carried out to the
full. And she must not lay upon her children burdens, grievous to be borne,
of command heaped upon command.
Law ensures Liberty.—​The children who are trained to perfect
obedience may be trusted with a good deal of liberty: they receive a few
directions which they know they must not disobey; and for the rest, they are
left to learn how to direct their own actions, even at the cost of some small
mishaps; and are not pestered with a perpetual fire of ‘Do this,’ and ‘Don’t
do that!’

viii.—truthfulness

It is unnecessary to say a word of the duty of Truthfulness; but the
training of the child in the habit of strict veracity is another matter, and one
which requires delicate care and scrupulosity on the part of the mother.
Three Causes of Lying—all Vicious.—​The vice of lying arises from
three causes: carelessness in ascertaining the truth, carelessness in stating
the truth, and a deliberate intention to deceive. That all three are vicious, is
evident from the fact that a man’s character may be ruined by what is no
more than a careless mis-statement on the part of another: the speaker
repeats a damaging remark without taking the trouble to sift it; or he repeats
what he has heard or seen with so little care to deliver the truth that his
statement becomes no better than a lie.
Only One Kind visited on Children.—​Now, of the three kinds of lying,
it is only, as a matter of fact, the third which is severely visited upon the
child; the first and the second he is allowed in. He tells you he has seen
‘lots’ of spotted dogs in the town—he has really seen two; that ‘all the boys’
are collecting crests—he knows of three who are doing so; that ‘everybody’
says Jones is a ‘sneak’—the fact is he has heard Brown say so. These
departures from strict veracity are on matters of such slight importance that
the mother is apt to let them pass as the ‘children’s chatter’; but, indeed,
every such lapse is damaging to the child’s sense of truth—a blade which
easily loses its keenness of edge.
Accuracy of Statement.—​The mother who trains her child to strict
accuracy of statement about things small and great fortifies him against
temptations to the grosser forms of lying; he will not readily colour a tale to
his own advantage, suppress facts, equivocate, when the statement of the
simple fact has become a binding habit, and when he has not been allowed
to form the contrary vicious habit of playing fast and loose with words.
Exaggeration and Ludicrous Embellishments.—​Two forms of
prevarication, very tempting to the child, will require great vigilance on the
mother’s part—that of exaggeration and that of clothing a story with
ludicrous embellishments. However funny a circumstance may be as
described by the child, the ruthless mother must strip the tale of everything
over and above the naked truth: for, indeed, a reputation for facetiousness is
dearly purchased by the loss of that dignity of character, in child or man,

which accompanies the habit of strict veracity; it is possible, happily, to be
humorous without any sacrifice of truth.
Reverence, etc.—​As for reverence, consideration for others, respect for
persons and property, I can only urge the importance of a sedulous
cultivation of these moral qualities—the distinguishing marks of a refined
nature—until they become the daily habits of the child’s life; and the more,
because a self-assertive, aggressive, self-seeking temper is but too
characteristic of the times we live in.
Temper—Born in a Child.—​I am anxious, however, to say a few words
on the habit of sweet temper. It is very customary to regard temper as
constitutional, that which is born in you and is neither to be helped nor
hindered. ‘Oh, she is a good-tempered little soul; nothing puts her out!’ ‘Oh,
he has his father’s temper; the least thing that goes contrary makes him fly
into a passion,’ are the sorts of remarks we hear constantly.
Not Temper, but Tendency.—​It is no doubt true that the children inherit
a certain tendency to irascibility or to amiability, to fretfulness,
discontentment, peevishness, sullenness, murmuring, and impatience; or to
cheerfulness, trustfulness, good-humour, patience, and humility. It is also
true that upon the preponderance of any of these qualities—upon temper,
that is—the happiness or wretchedness of child and man depends, as well as
the comfort or misery of the people who live with him. We all know people
possessed of integrity and of many excellent virtues who make themselves
intolerable to their belongings. The root of the evil is, not that these people
were born sullen, or peevish, or envious—that might have been mended;
but that they were permitted to grow up in these dispositions. Here, if
anywhere, the power of habit is invaluable: it rests with the parents to
correct the original twist, all the more so if it is from them the child gets it,
and to send their child into the world blest with an even, happy temper,
inclined to make the best of things, to look on the bright side, to impute the
best and kindest motives to others, and to make no extravagant claims on
his own account—fertile source of ugly tempers. And this, because the child
is born with no more than certain tendencies.
Parents must correct Tendency by New Habit of Temper.—​It is by
force of habit that a tendency becomes a temper; and it rests with the
mother to hinder the formation of ill tempers, to force that of good tempers.

Nor is it difficult to do this while the child’s countenance is as an open book
to his mother, and she reads the thoughts of his heart before he is aware of
them himself. Remembering that every envious, murmuring, discontented
thought leaves a track in the very substance of the child’s brain for such
thoughts to run in again and again—that this track, this rut, so to speak, is
ever widening and deepening with the traffic in ugly thoughts—the
mother’s care is to hinder at the outset the formation of any such track. She
sees into her child’s soul—sees the evil temper in the act of rising: now is
her opportunity.
Change the Child’s Thoughts.—​Let her change the child’s thoughts
before ever the bad temper has had time to develop into conscious feeling,
much less act: take him out of doors, send him to fetch or carry, tell him or
show him something of interest,—in a word, give him something else to
think about; but all in a natural way, and without letting the child perceive
that he is being treated. As every fit of sullenness leaves place in the child’s
mind for another fit of sullenness to succeed it, so every such fit averted by
the mother’s tact tends to obliterate the evil traces of former sullen tempers.
At the same time, the mother is careful to lay down a highway for the free
course of all sweet and genial thoughts and feelings.
I have been offering suggestions, not for a course of intellectual and
moral training, but only for the formation of certain habits which should be,
as it were, the outworks of character. Even with this limited programme, I
have left unnoticed many matters fully as important as those touched upon.
In the presence of an embarrassment of riches, it has been necessary to
adopt some principle of selection; and I have thought it well to dwell upon
considerations which do not appear to me to have their full weight with
educated parents, rather than upon those of which every thoughtful person
recognises the force.

FOOTNOTES:
[8] This example, offered by so able a psychologist, is so admirable that I
venture to quote it more than once.

PA RT V

LESSONS AS INSTRUMENTS OF EDUCATION

i.—the matter and method of lessons

It seems to me that we live in an age of pedagogy; that we of the
teaching profession are inclined to take too much upon ourselves, and that
parents are ready to yield the responsibility of direction, as well as of actual
instruction, more than is wholesome for the children.
Parents must reflect on the Subject-matter of Instruction.—​I am
about to invite your attention to a subject that parents are accustomed to
leave very much in the hands of schoolmaster or governess when they do
not instruct their children themselves—I mean the choice of subjects of
instruction, and the ways of handling those subjects. Teachers are the
people who have, more than others, given themselves to the consideration
of what a child should learn and how he should learn it; but the parent, also,
should have thought out this subject, and even when he does not profess to
teach his children, should have his own carefully formed opinions as to the
subject-matter and the method of their intellectual education: and this for
the sake of the teacher as well as for that of the children. Nothing does more
to give vitality and purpose to the work of the teacher than the certainty that
the parents of his pupils go with him.
Even when children go to schools taught by qualified persons, some
insight on the part of fathers and mothers is useful as hindering the teacher
from dropping into professional grooves, valuing proficiency in this or that
subject for its own sake, and not as it affects the children. But in the early
days of the home schoolroom, it is iniquitous to leave the young governess,
with little qualification beyond her native French or German, or scanty
English, to chalk out a course for herself and her charges. That the children
waste their time is the least of the evils that accrue: they are forming habits
dead against intellectual effort; and by-and-by, when they go to school, the

lessons go over their heads, the work slips through their fingers, and their
powers of passive resistance baffle the most strenuous teachers.
Home the best Growing-ground for Young Children.—​All the same,
whatever be the advantages of Kindergarten or other schools for little
children, the home schoolroom ought to be the best growing-ground for
them. And doubtless it would be so, were the mother at liberty to devote
herself to the instruction of her children; but this she is seldom free to do. If
she live in a town, she can send them to school when they are six; if in the
country, she must have a governess; and the difficulty is to get a woman
who is not only acquainted with the subjects she undertakes to teach, but
who understands in some measure the nature of the child and the art and
objects of education; a woman capable of making the very most of the
children without waste of power or of time. Such a rara avis does not
present herself in answer to every advertisement; and in default of a trained
teacher, the mother must undertake to train her governess—that is, she may
supplement with her own insight the scanty knowledge and experience of
the young teacher. ‘I wish the children to be taught to read, thus and thus,
because——’: or, ‘to learn history in such a way that the lessons may have
such and such effects.’ Half an hour’s talk of this kind with a sensible
governess will secure a whole month’s work for the children, so well
directed that much is done in little time, and the widest possible margin
secured for play and open-air exercise.
Three Questions for the Mother.—​But if the mother is to inoculate the
governess with her views as to the teaching of writing, French, geography,
she must, herself, have definite views. She must ask herself seriously, Why
must the children learn at all? What should they learn? And, How should
they learn it? If she take the trouble to find a definite and thoughtful answer
to each of these three queries, she will be in a position to direct her
children’s studies; and will, at the same time, be surprised to find that three-
fourths of the time and labour ordinarily spent by the child at his lessons is
lost time and wasted energy.
Children learn, to Grow.—​Why must the child learn? Why do we eat?
Is it not in order that the body may live and grow and be able to fulfil its
functions? Precisely so must the mind be sustained and developed by means
of the food convenient for it, the mental pabulum of assimilated knowledge.
Again, the body is developed not only by means of proper sustenance, but

by the appropriate exercise of each of its members. A young mother
remarked to me the other day, that before her marriage she had such slender
arms she never liked to exhibit them; but a strong five-months-old baby had
cured her of that; she could toss and lift him with ease, and could now show
well-rounded arms with anybody: and just as the limbs grow strong with
exercise, so does intellectual effort with a given power of the mind make
that power effective. People are apt to overlook the fact that mind must have
its aliment—we learn that we may know, not that we may grow; hence the
parrot-like saying of lessons, the cramming of ill-digested facts for
examinations, all the ways of taking in knowledge which the mind does not
assimilate.
Doctoring of the Material of Knowledge.—​Specialists, on the other
hand, are apt to attach too much importance to the several exercises of the
mental ‘faculties.’ We come across books on teaching, with lessons
elaborately drawn up, in which certain work is assigned to the perceptive
faculties, certain work to the imagination, to the judgment, and so on. Now
this doctrine of the faculties, which rests on a false analogy between the
mind and the body, is on its way to the limbo where the phrenologist’s
‘bumps’ now rest in peace. The mind would appear to be one and
indivisible, and endowed with manifold powers; and this sort of doctoring
of the material of knowledge is unnecessary for the healthy child, whose
mind is capable of self-direction, and of applying itself to its proper work
upon the parcel of knowledge delivered to it. Almost any subject which
common sense points out as suitable for the instruction of children will
afford exercise for all their powers, if properly presented.
Children learn, to get Ideas.—​The child must learn, in the second
place, in order that ideas may be freely sown in the fruitful soil of his mind.
‘Idea, the image or picture formed by the mind of anything external,
whether sensible or spiritual,’—so, the dictionary; therefore, if the business
of teaching be to furnish the child with ideas, any teaching which does not
leave him possessed of a new mental image has, by so far, missed its mark.
Now, just think of the listless way in which the children too often drag
through reading and tables, geography and sums, and you will see that it is
a rare thing for any part of any lesson to flash upon them with the vividness
which leaves a mental picture behind. It is not too much to say that a

morning in which a child receives no new idea is a morning wasted,
however closely the little student has been kept at his books.
Ideas Grow and Produce after their Kind.—​For the dictionary
appears to me to fall short of the truth in its definition of the term ‘idea.’ An
idea is more than an image or a picture; it is, so to speak, a spiritual germ
endowed with vital force—with power, that is, to grow, and to produce after
its kind. It is the very nature of an idea to grow: as the vegetable germ
secretes that it lives by, so, fairly implant an idea in the child’s mind, and it
will secrete its own food, grow, and bear fruit in the form of a succession of
kindred ideas. We know from our own experience that, let our attention be
forcibly drawn to some public character, some startling theory, and for days
after we are continually hearing or reading matter which bears on this one
subject, just as if all the world were thinking about what occupies our
thoughts: the fact being, that the new idea we have received is in the act of
growth, and is reaching out after its appropriate food. This process of
feeding goes on with peculiar avidity in childhood, and the growth of an
idea in the child is proportionately rapid.
Scott and Stephenson worked with Ideas.—​Scott got an idea, a whole
group of ideas, out of the Border tales and ballads, the folklore of the
countryside, on which his boyhood was nourished: his ideas grew and
brought forth, and the Waverley Novels are the fruit they bore. George
Stephenson made little clay engines with his playmate, Thomas Tholoway;
by-and-by, when he was an engineman, he was always watching his engine,
cleaning it, studying it; an engine was his dominant idea, and it developed
into no less a thing than the locomotive.
Value of Dominant Ideas.—​But how does this theory of the vital and
fruitful character of ideas bear upon the education of the child? In this way:
give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his
education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of
information; for the child who grows up with a few dominant ideas has his
self-education provided for, his career marked out.
Lessons must furnish Ideas.—​In order for the reception of an idea, the
mind must be in an attitude of eager attention, and how to secure that state
we have considered elsewhere. One thing more: a single idea may be a
possession so precious in itself, so fruitful, that the parent cannot fitly allow

the child’s selection of ideas to be a matter of chance: his lessons should
furnish him with such ideas as shall make for his further education.
Children learn to get Knowledge.—​But it is not only to secure due
intellectual growth and the furnishing of his mind with ideas, that the child
must learn: the common notion, that he learns for the sake of getting
knowledge, is also a true one so much so, that no knowledge should be so
precious as that gained in childhood, no later knowledge should be so
clearly chronicled on the brain, nor so useful as the foundation of that to
follow. At the same time, the child’s capacity for knowledge is very limited;
his mind is, in this respect at least, but a little phial with a narrow neck; and,
therefore, it behoves parent or teacher to pour in only of the best.
Diluted Knowledge.—​But, poor children, they are too often badly used
by their best friends in the matter of the sort of knowledge offered them.
Grown-up people who are not mothers talk and think far more childishly
than the child does in their efforts to approach his mind. If a child talk
twaddle, it is because his elders are in the habit of talking twaddle to him;
leave him to himself, and his remarks are wise and sensible so far as his
small experience guides him. Mothers seldom talk down to their children;
they are too intimate with the little people, and have, therefore, too much
respect for them: but professional teachers, whether the writers of books or
the givers of lessons, are too apt to present a single grain of pure knowledge
in a whole gallon of talk, imposing upon the child the labour of discerning
the grain and of extracting it from the worthless flood.
Dr Arnold’s Knowledge as a Child.—​On the whole, the children who
grow up amongst their elders and are not provided with what are called
children’s books at all, fare the better on what they are able to glean for
themselves from the literature of grown-up people. Thus it is told of Dr
Arnold that when he was three years old he received a present from his
father of Smollett’s History of England as a reward for the accuracy with
which he went through the stories connected with the portraits and pictures
of the successive reigns—an amusement which probably laid the foundation
of the great love for history which distinguished him in after life. When
occupying the professorial chair at Oxford, he made quotations, we are told,
from Dr Priestley’s Lectures on History,—verbally accurate quotations, we
may believe, for such was the habit of his mind; besides, a child has little
skill in recasting his matter—and that, though he had not had the book in

his hands since he was a child of eight. No doubt he was an exceptional
child; and all I maintain is, that had his reading been the sort of diluted
twaddle which is commonly thrust upon children, it would have been
impossible for him to cite passages a week, much less some two score
years, after the reading.
Literature Proper for Children.—​This sort of weak literature for the
children, both in story and lesson books, is the result of a reactionary
process. Not so long ago the current impression was that the children had
little understanding, but prodigious memory for facts; dates, numbers, rules,
catechisms of knowledge, much information in small parcels, was supposed
to be the fitting material for a child’s education. We have changed all that,
and put into the children’s hands lesson-books with pretty pictures and easy
talk, almost as good as story-books; but we do not see that, after all, we are
but giving the same little pills of knowledge in the form of a weak and
copious diluent. Teachers, and even parents, who are careful enough about
their children’s diet, are so reckless as to the sort of mental aliment offered
to them, that I am exceedingly anxious to secure consideration for this
question, of the lessons and literature proper for the little people.
Four Tests which should be applied to Children’s Lessons.—​We see,
then, that the children’s lessons should provide material for their mental
growth, should exercise the several powers of their minds, should furnish
them with fruitful ideas, and should afford them knowledge, really valuable
for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may
recall as a man with profit and pleasure. Before applying these tests to the
various subjects in which children are commonly instructed, may I remind
you of two or three points which I have endeavoured to establish in the
preceding pages:—
Résumé of Six Points already considered.—
(a) That the knowledge most valuable to the child is that which he gets
with his own eyes and ears and fingers (under direction) in the open air.
(b) That the claims of the schoolroom should not be allowed to encroach
on the child’s right to long hours daily for exercise and investigation.
(c) That the child should be taken daily, if possible, to scenes—moor or
meadow, park, common, or shore—where he may find new things to

examine, and so add to his store of real knowledge. That the child’s
observation should be directed to flower or boulder, bird or tree; that, in
fact, he should be employed in gathering the common information which is
the basis of scientific knowledge.
(d) That play, vigorous healthful play, is, in its turn, fully as important as
lessons, as regards both bodily health and brain-power.
(e) That the child, though under supervision, should be left much to
himself—both that he may go to work in his own way on the ideas he
receives, and also that he may be the more open to natural influences.
(f) That the happiness of the child is the condition of his progress; that
his lessons should be joyous, and that occasions of friction in the
schoolroom are greatly to be deprecated.
Premising so much, let us now consider—What the children should
learn, and how they should be taught.

ii.—the kindergarten as a place of education

The Mother the best Kindergärtnerin.—​It is hardly necessary, here, to
discuss the merits of the Kindergarten School. The success of such a school
demands rare qualities in the teacher—high culture, some knowledge of
psychology and of the art of education; intense sympathy with the children,
much tact, much common sense, much common information, much
‘joyousness of nature’ and much governing power;—in a word, the
Kindergarten method is nicely contrived to bring the child en rapport with a
superior intelligence. Given, such a superior being to conduct it, and the
Kindergarten is beautiful—‘’tis like a little heaven below’; but put a
commonplace woman in charge of such a school, and the charmingly
devised gifts and games and occupations become so many instruments of
wooden teaching. If the very essence of the Kindergarten method is
personal influence, a sort of spiritual mesmerism, it follows that the mother
is naturally the best Kindergärtnerin; for who so likely as she to have the
needful tact, sympathy, common sense, culture?
The Nursery need not therefore be a Kindergarten.—​Though every
mother should be a Kindergärtnerin, in the sense in which Froebel would
employ the term, it does not follow that every nursery should be a regularly

organised Kindergarten. Indeed, the machinery of the Kindergarten is no
more than a device to ensure the carrying out of certain educational
principles, and some of these it is the mother’s business to get at, and work
out according to Froebel’s method—or her own. For instance, in the
Kindergarten the child’s senses are carefully and progressively trained: he
looks, listens, learns by touch; gets ideas of size, colour, form, number; is
taught to copy faithfully, express exactly. And in this training of the senses,
the child is made to pursue the method the infant shapes for himself in his
early studies of ring or ball.
Field of Knowledge too circumscribed.—​But it is possible that the
child’s marvellous power of obtaining knowledge by means of his senses
may be undervalued; that the field may be too circumscribed; and that,
during the first six or seven years in which he might have become
intimately acquainted with the properties and history of every natural object
within his reach, he has obtained, exact ideas, it is true—can distinguish a
rhomboid from a pentagon, a primary from a secondary colour, has learned
to see so truly that he can copy what he sees in folded paper or woven
straw,—but this at the expense of much of that real knowledge of the
external world which at no time of his life will he be so fitted to acquire.
Therefore, while the exact nicely graduated training of the Kindergarten
may be of value, the mother will endeavour to give it by the way, and will
by no means let it stand for that wider training of the senses, to secure
which for her children is a primary duty.
Again, the child in the Kindergarten is set to such tasks only as he is
competent to perform, and then, whatever he has to do, he is expected to do
perfectly. I have seen a four-years-old child blush and look as self-
condemned, because he had folded a slip of paper irregularly, as if found
out in a falsehood. But mother or nurse is quite able to secure that the
child’s small offices are perfectly executed; and, here is an important point,
without that slight strain of distressful anxiety which may be observed in
children labouring to please that smiling goddess, their ‘Kindergärtnerin.’
Training of a Just Eye and Faithful Hand.—​The Kindergarten
‘Occupations’ afford opportunities for training in this kind of faithfulness;
but in the home a thousand such opportunities occur; if only in such trifles
as the straightening of a tablecloth or of a picture, the hanging of a towel,
the packing of a parcel—every thoughtful mother invents a thousand ways

of training in her child a just eye and a faithful hand. Nevertheless, as a
means of methodical training, as well as of happy employment, the
introduction of some of the games and occupations of the Kindergarten into
the nursery may be allowed; provided that the mother does not depend upon
these, but makes all the child’s occupations subserve the purposes of his
education.
‘Sweetness and Light’ in the Kindergarten.—​The child breathes an
atmosphere of ‘sweetness and light’ in the Kindergarten. You see the sturdy
urchin of five stiffen his back and decline to be a jumping frog, and the
Kindergärtnerin comes with unruffled gentleness, takes him by the hand,
and leads him out of the circle,—he is not treated as an offender, only he
does not choose to do as others do, therefore he is not wanted there: the
next time, he is quite content to be a frog. Here we have the principle for
the discipline of the nursery. Do not treat the child’s small contumacy too
seriously; do not assume that he is being naughty: just leave him out when
he is not prepared to act in harmony with the rest. Avoid friction; and above
all, do not let him disturb the moral atmosphere; in all gentleness and
serenity, remove him from the company of the others, when he is being
what nurses call ‘tiresome.’
Once more, the Kindergarten professes to take account of the joyousness
of the child’s nature: to allow him full and free expression for the glee that
is in him, without the ‘rampaging’ which follows if he is left to himself to
find an outlet for his exuberant life. This union of joy and gentleness is the
very temper to be cultivated in the nursery. The boisterous behaviour
sometimes allowed in children is unnecessary—within doors, at any rate;
but even a momentary absence of sunshine on the faces of her children will
be a graver cause of uneasiness to the mother. On the whole, we may say
that some of the principles which should govern Kindergarten training are
precisely those in which every thoughtful mother endeavours to bring up
her family; while the practices of the Kindergarten, being only ways,
amongst others, of carrying out these principles, and being apt to become
stereotyped and wooden, are unnecessary, but may be adopted so far as they
fit in conveniently with the mother’s general scheme for the education of
her family.

iii.—further consideration of the kindergarten
The Childhood of Tolstoi.—​There is possibly no known field of
research in which so little available work has been done as in that covered
by the word ‘children.’ The ‘fair lande’ lies under our very eyes, but whoso
would map it out must write ‘Unexplored’ across vast tracts. Thoughtful
persons begin to suspect that the mistakes we make through this ignorance
are grievous and injurious. For example, are not all our schemes of
education founded on the presumption that a child’s mind—his ‘thinking,
feeling man’—begins ‘very small’ and grows great with the growth of his
body? We cannot tell if this is indeed the case. The children keep
themselves to themselves in a general way, their winning ways and frank
confidences notwithstanding; but if one of us do, by chance, get a child
revealed to him, he is startled to find that the child has by far the keener
intelligence, the wiser thoughts, the larger soul of the two. When genius is
able to lift the veil and show us a child, it does a service which, in our
present state of thought, we are hardly able to appraise; and when genius or
simplicity, or both, shall have given us enough such studies to generalise
upon, we shall doubtless reconsider the whole subject, and shall be
dismayed at the slights we have been putting upon children in the name of
education. Count Tolstoi gives us, in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,[9]
unmistakable child-portraiture, a miniature in which a mother may see her
child and recognise what and how much there is in him:—
“Like our own dear mother,”

the little fellow writes, in the verses he makes for his grandmothers
birthday; and then, when the verses come to be read, ah! the humiliation of
soul he goes through, and how surely he expects father and grandmother to
find him out for a hypocrite. “Why did I write it? She’s not here, and it was
not necessary to mention her; I love grandma, it’s true; I reverence her, but
still she is not the same. Why did I write it? Why have I lied?” This is the
sort of thing there is in children. We recognise it as we read, and remember
the dim, childish days when we, too, had an ‘organ of truth’ just so
exquisitely delicate; and the recollection should quicken our reverence for
the tender consciences of children.
“The Story of a Child.”—I should like while speaking of this subject to
mention another book which contains the self-revelation of a child,—a child

that once was summoned, to give evidence, out of the dark abysm of time.
This is the sort of study of a child that is really precious, because it is to be
had on no other terms than by harking back to our own childhood, vivifying
it, reproducing it, by mere force of imaginative power. This is absolutely the
only way to get into sympathy with a child, for children, with all their frank
confidences and ready chatter, are quite inscrutable little persons, who
never tell anyone the sort of things that we read in this ‘Story.’ There is no
need to tell each other, for other children know, and, as for telling the
grown-ups, children are fully persuaded that no grown-up, not even mother,
could understand; Ponto might, perhaps, and confidences will be poured
into the ear of a dog which the loving mother lays herself out for in vain.
“Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe
Our hermit spirits dwell, and range apart,
Our eyes see all around in gloom or glow—
Hues of their own, fresh borrow’d from the heart.”

And this is even more notably the case with children than with
ourselves. It is a law of our nature with which it is absolutely useless to
contend, and our only means of true intimacy with a child is the power of
recovering our own childhood—a power which we are apt to let slip as of
no vital importance. This, Miss Margaret Deland helps us to do: we
recognise our old selves, with a difference, in Ellen. Just so irrational,
inconsequent, loving and heroic, and generally tiresome to the grown-up
world were our own impulses in that long ago, on which we look back with
tenderness, but seldom with complacency. If we rise, after reading The
Story of a Child,[10] a little more humble, a little more diffident, ready to
believe more than we see, why, it will do us no harm, and should bless and
help the children. From one word of the author’s we should like to differ.
Miss Deland thinks that it may be wholesome for the elders to understand
children better, but for the children, why, she thinks that most of us grow up
wonderfully well in spite of this and all other difficulties. In a sense this is
true, but, in another sense, one of the saddest things in life is the issue of
splendid child-material into commonplace, uninteresting maturity, of a kind
that the world seems to be neither the better nor the worse for.
Tolstoi’s childhood and that of Miss Deland’s little heroine would appear
to be a far cry from ‘the Kindergarten’; but as a matter of fact these two
revelations of what children are bring our contention to a point.

We are told that, “but yesterday, in the University of Edinburgh, the
greatest figure in the Faculty was Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of
chloroform. The other day his successor and nephew, Professor Simpson,
was asked by the librarian of the University to go to the library and pick out
the books on his subject that were no longer needed. And his reply to the
librarian was this: ‘Take every text-book that is more than ten years old, and
put it down in the cellar.’” So far as education is a science, the truth of even
ten—much more, a hundred—years ago is not the whole truth of to-day.
“Thoughts beyond their thought to those high seers were given”;

and, in proportion as the urgency of educational effort presses upon us, will
be the ardour of our appreciation, the diligence of our employment, of those
truths which the great pioneers, Froebel and the rest, have won for us by no
less than prophetic insight. But, alas, and alas, for the cravings of lazy
human nature—we may not have an educational pope; we must think out
for ourselves, as well as work out, those things that belong to the perfect
bringing-up of our children.
What we Owe to Froebel.—​We reverence Froebel. Many of his great
thoughts we share; we cannot say borrow, because some, like the child’s
relations to the universe, are at least as old as Plato; others belong to
universal practice and experience, and this shows their psychological
rightness. Froebel gathered diffused thought and practice into a system, but
he did a greater thing than this. He raised an altar to the enthusiasm of
childhood upon which the flame has never since gone out. The true
Kindergärtnerin is the artist amongst teachers; she is filled with the
inspiration of her work, and probably most sincere teachers have caught
something from her fervour, some sense of the beauty of childhood, and of
the enthralling delight of truly educational work.
Requirements of a Person.—​And yet I enter a caveat. Our first care
should be to preserve the individuality, give play to the personality, of
children. Now persons do not grow in a garden, much less in a greenhouse.
It is a doubtful boon to a person to have conditions too carefully adapted to
his needs. The exactly due sunshine and shade, pruning and training, are
good for a plant whose uses are subordinate, so to say, to the needs and
pleasures of its owner. But a person has other uses in the world, and mother
or teacher who regards him as a plant and herself as the gardener, will only

be saved from grave mistakes by the force of human nature in herself and in
her child.
Nature as an Educator.—​The notion of supplementing Nature from the
cradle is a dangerous one. A little guiding, a little restraining, much reverent
watching, Nature asks of us; but beyond that, it is the wisdom of parents to
leave children as much as may be to Nature, and “to a higher Power than
Nature itself.”
Danger of undervaluing Children’s Intelligence.—​Those of us who
have watched an urchin of seven making Catherine-wheels down the length
of a street, or a group of little girls dancing to a barrel organ, or small boys
and girls on a door-step giving what Dickens calls ‘dry nourishment’ to
their babies, or a small girl sent by her mother to make four careful
purchases out of sixpence and bring home the change—are not ready to
believe that physical, mental, and moral development waits, so to speak,
upon Kindergarten teaching. Indeed, I am inclined to question whether, in
the interest of carrying out a system, the charming Kindergärtnerin is not in
danger sometimes of greatly undervaluing the intelligence of her children. I
know a person of three who happened to be found by a caller alone in the
drawing-room. It was spring, and the caller thought to make himself
entertaining with talk about the pretty ‘baa-lambs.’ But a pair of big blue
eyes were fixed upon him and a solemn person made this solemn remark,
“Isn’t it a dwefful howid thing to see a pig killed!” We hope she had never
seen or even heard of the killing of a pig, but she made as effective a protest
against twaddle as would any woman of Society. Boers and kopjes,
Russians and Japs, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday,
the fight of Thermopylæ, Ulysses and the Suitors—these are the sorts of
things that children play at by the month together; even the toddlers of three
and four will hold their own manfully with their brothers and sisters. And, if
the little people were in the habit of telling how they feel, we should learn
perhaps that they are a good deal bored by the nice little games in which
they frisk like lambs, flap their fins, and twiddle their fingers like
butterflies.
We all like to be Humoured.—‘But,’ says the reader, ‘children do all
these things so pleasantly and happily in the Kindergarten!’ It is a curious
thing about human nature that we all like to be managed by persons who
take the pains to play on our amiabilities. Even a dog can be made foolishly

sentimental; and, if we who are older have our foibles in this kind, it is little
wonder that children can be wooed to do anything by persons whose
approaches to them are always charming. It is true that ‘W. V.,’ the child
whom the world has been taught to love, sang her Kindergarten songs with
little hands waving in the ‘air so blue!’ but that was for the delectation and
delusion of the elders when bedtime came. ‘W. V.’ had greater thoughts at
other times.
Teachers mediate too much.—​There are still, probably, Kindergartens
where a great deal of twaddle is talked in song and story, where the teacher
conceives that to make poems for the children herself and to compose tunes
for their singing and to draw pictures for their admiration, is to fulfil her
function to the uttermost. The children might echo Wordsworth’s complaint
of ‘the world’ and say, the teacher is too much with us, late and soon.
Everything is directed, expected, suggested. No other personality out of
book, picture, or song, no, not even that of Nature herself, can get at the
children without the mediation of the teacher. No room is left for
spontaneity or personal initiation on their part.
Danger of Personal Magnetism.—​Most of us are misled by our virtues,
and the entire zeal and enthusiasm of the Kindergärtnerin is perhaps her
stone of stumbling. ‘But the children are so happy and good!’ Precisely; the
home-nursery is by no means such a scene of peace, but I venture to think it
a better growing-place. I am delighted to see that an eminent Fröbelian
protests against the element of personal magnetism in the teacher; but there
is, or has been, a good deal of this element in the successful Kindergärtner,
and we all know how we lose vigour and individuality under this sort of
influence. Even apart from this element of charm, I doubt if the self-
adjusting property of life in the Kindergarten is good for children.
‘Kindergarten’ a False Analogy.—​The world suffered that morning
when the happy name of ‘Kindergarten’ suggested itself to the greatest
among educational ‘Fathers.’ No doubt it was simple and fit in its first
intention as meaning an out-of-door garden life for the children; but, a false
analogy has hampered, or killed, more than one philosophic system—the
child became a plant in a well-ordered garden. The analogy appealed to the
orderly, scientific German mind, which does not much approve of irregular,
spontaneous movement in any sort. Culture, due stimulus, sweetness and
light, became the chief features of a great educational code. From the

potting-shed to the frame and thence to the flower-bed, the little plant gets
in due proportion what is good for him. He grows in a seemly way, in
ordered ranks; and in fit season puts forth his flower.
Now, to figure a person by any analogy whatsoever is dangerous and
misleading; there is nothing in nature commensurable with a person.
Because the analogy of the garden plant is very attractive, it is the more
misleading; manifestations of purpose in a plant are wonderful and
delightful, but in a person such manifestations are simply normal. The
outcome of any thought is necessarily moulded by that thought, and to have
a cultivated garden as the ground-plan of our educational thought, either
means nothing at all, which it would be wronging the Master to suppose, or
it means undue interference with the spontaneous development of a human
being.
Mother-games too strenuous for a Child.—​To begin with the ‘Mother-
games,’ a sweet conception, most lovingly worked out. But let us consider;
the infant is exquisitely aware of every mood of his mother, the little face
clouds with grief or beams with joy in response to the expression of hers.
The two left to themselves have rare games. He jumps and pulls, crows and
chuckles, crawls and kicks and gurgles with joy; and, amid all the play, is
taught what he may not do. Hands and feet, legs and arms, fingers and toes,
are continually going while he is awake; mouth, eyes and ears are agog. All
is play without intention, and mother plays with baby as glad as he. Nature
sits quietly by and sees to it that all the play is really work; and
development of every sort is going on at a greater rate during the first two
years of life than at any like period of after life—enough development and
not too much, for baby is an inordinate sleeper. Then comes in the educator
and offers a little more. The new games are so pretty and taking that baby
might as well be doing these as his own meaningless and clumsy jumpings
and pattings. But a real labour is being put upon the child in addition to the
heaviest two years’ work that his life will know. His sympathy with his
mother is so acute that he perceives something strenuous in the new play,
notwithstanding all the smiles and pretty talk; he answers by endeavour,
great in proportion as he is small. His nerve centres and brain power have
been unduly taxed, some of the joy of living has been taken from him, and
though his baby response to direct education is very charming, he has less
latent power left for the future calls of life.

The Society of his Equals too stimulating for a Child.—​Let us follow
the little person to the Kindergarten, where he has the stimulus of
classmates of his own age. It certainly is stimulating. For ourselves, no
society is so much so as that of a number of persons of our own age and
standing; this is the great joy of college life; a wholesome joy for all young
people for a limited time. But persons of twenty have, or should have, some
command over their inhibitory centres. They should not permit the
dissipation of nerve power caused by too much social stimulus; yet even
persons of twenty are not always equal to the task of self-management in
exciting circumstances. What then, is to be expected of persons of two,
three, four, five? That the little person looks rather stolid than otherwise is
no guarantee against excitement within. The clash and sparkle of our equals
now and then stirs us up to health; but for everyday life, the mixed society
of elders, juniors and equals, which we get in a family, gives at the same
time the most repose and the most room for individual development. We
have all wondered at the good sense, reasonableness, fun and
resourcefulness shown by a child in his own home as compared with the
same child in school life.
Danger of supplanting Nature.—​Danger lurks in the Kindergarten, just
in proportion to the completeness and beauty of its organisation. It is
possible to supplement Nature so skilfully that we run some risk of
supplanting her, depriving her of space and time to do her own work in her
own way. ‘Go and see what Tommy is doing and tell him he mustn’t,’ is not
sound doctrine. Tommy should be free to do what he likes with his limbs
and his mind through all the hours of the day when he is not sitting up
nicely at meals. He should run and jump, leap and tumble, lie on his face
watching a worm, or on his back watching the bees in a lime tree. Nature
will look after him and give him promptings of desire to know many things,
and somebody must tell as he wants to know; and to do many things, and
somebody should be handy just to put him in the way; and to be many
things, naughty and good, and somebody should give direction.
Importance of Personal Initiative.—​Here we come to the real crux of
the Kindergarten question. The busy mother says she has no leisure to be
that somebody, and the child will run wild and get into bad habits; but we
must not make a fetish of habit; education is a life as well as a discipline.
Health, strength, and agility, bright eyes and alert movements, come of a

free life, out-of-doors, if it may be; and as for habits, there is no habit or
power so useful to man or woman as that of personal initiative. The
resourcefulness which will enable a family of children to invent their own
games and occupations through the length of a summer’s day is worth more
in after life than a good deal of knowledge about cubes and hexagons, and
this comes, not of continual intervention on the mother’s part, but of much
masterly inactivity.
Parents and Teachers must sow Opportunities.—​The educational
error of our day is that we believe too much in mediators. Now, Nature is
her own mediator, undertakes, herself, to find work for eyes and ears, taste
and touch; she will prick the brain with problems and the heart with
feelings; and the part of mother or teacher in the early years (indeed, all
through life) is to sow opportunities, and then to keep in the background,
ready with a guiding or restraining hand only when these are badly wanted.
Mothers shirk their work and put it, as they would say, into better hands
than their own, because they do not recognise that wise letting alone is the
chief thing asked of them, seeing that every mother has in Nature an all-
sufficient handmaid, who arranges for due work and due rest of mind,
muscles, and senses.
In one way the children of the poor have better chances than those of the
rich. Poor children get education out of household ways; but there is a great
deal of good teaching to be got out of a wisely ordered nursery, and their
own small persons and possessions should, as I have said, afford much
‘Kindergarten’ training to the little family at home. At six or seven, definite
lessons should begin, and these need not be watered down or served with
jam for the acute intelligences that will in this way be brought to bear on
them.
‘Only’ Children.—​But what of only children, or the child too old to
play with her baby brother? Surely the Kindergarten is a great boon for
these! Perhaps so; but a cottage-child as a companion, or a lively young
nursemaid, might be better. A child will have taught himself to paint, paste,
cut paper, knit, weave, hammer and saw, make lovely things in clay and
sand, build castles with his bricks; possibly, too, will have taught himself to
read, write, and do sums, besides acquiring no end of knowledge and
notions about the world he lives in, by the time he is six or seven. What I

contend for is that he shall do these things because he chooses (provided
that the standard of perfection in his small works be kept before him).
The Child should be allowed some Ordering of his Life.—​The details
of family living will give him the repose of an ordered life; but, for the rest,
he should have more free-growing time than is possible in the most
charming school. The fact that lessons look like play is no recommendation:
they just want the freedom of play and the sense of his own ordering that
belongs to play. Most of us have little enough opportunity for the ordering
of our own lives, so it is well to make much of the years that can be given to
children to gain this joyous experience.
Helen Keller.—​I think what I have said of natural development as
opposed to any too carefully organised system is supported by a recent
contribution, of unique value, to the science of education—I mean the
autobiography of Helen Keller.[11]
When she was nineteen months old, Helen had a severe illness, in which
she lost sight and hearing, and consequently speech. She never recovered
the lost senses; and here, we should say, was a soul almost inviolably
sealed, to which there was no approach but through the single sense of
touch; yet, this lady’s book, written with her own unaided hands (she used a
typewriter), with hardly any revision, should rank as a classic for the purity
and pregnancy of the style, independently of the vital interest of the matter.
How was the miracle accomplished? Of her childhood Helen says herself
that, save for a few impressions, “the shadows of the prison-house”
enveloped it. But there were always roses, and she had the sense of smell;
and there was love—but she was not loving then. When she was seven Miss
Sullivan came to her. This lady had herself been blind for some years, and
had been at the Perkins Institute, founded by that Dr Howe who liberated
the intelligence of Laura Bridgman. But Miss Sullivan is no mere output of
any institution. She is a person of fine sanity and wholesomeness, trusting
to her personal initiative, and aware from the first that her work was to
liberate the personality of her little pupil and by no means to superimpose
her own. “Thus I came up out of Egypt,” says Miss Keller of the arrival of
her teacher, and the voice which she heard from Sinai said, “Knowledge is
love and light and vision”; and then follows that amazing and enthralling
epic which tells how it was all done, how the one word water was the key
which opened the doors of the child’s mind, while the word love opened

those of the closed heart. Thenceforth, many new words came every day
with crowds of ideas; and it is not too much to say that this imprisoned and
desolate child entered upon such a large inheritance of thought and
knowledge, of gladness and vision, as few of us of the seeing and hearing
world attain to. The instrument in this great liberation was nothing more
than the familiar manual alphabet, followed in course of time by raised
books and ‘Braille.’
Miss Sullivan on Systems of Education.—​Like all great discoveries,
this, of a soul, was, in all its steps, marked by simplicity. Miss Sullivan had
little love for psychologists and all their ways; would have no experiments;
would not have her pupil treated as a phenomenon, but as a person. “No,”
she says, “I don’t want any more Kindergarten materials.... I am beginning
to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me
to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must
be taught to think, whereas if the child is left to himself he will think more
and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real
things, and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors
at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a
stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of
coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills
the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child
can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.” It is a great thing
to have a study of education as it were de novo, in which we see the triumph
of mind, not only over apparently insuperable natural obstacles, but over the
dead wall of systematised education—a more complete hindrance to many a
poor child than her grievous defects proved to Helen Keller.
The Kindergarten in the United States.—​This question of the
Kindergarten, as the proper place for the education of young children, is so
important that I should like to recommend to parents and teachers the
examination of the subject contained in the Special Reports published by
the Board of Education.[12]
We must go to the United States to witness the apotheosis of educational
theory; I say theory rather than practice, because the American mind, like
the French, seems to me severely logical as well as generously impulsive. A
theory arrives, is liberally entertained, and is set to work with due
appliances on a magnificent scale to do that which in it lies for the

education of a great people. That is to say, educational science in America
appears to be deductive rather than inductive; theories are translated into
experiments with truly imposing zeal and generosity. An inductive theory of
education is, on the other hand, arrived at by means of long, slow, various,
and laborious experiments which disclose, here a little, and there a little, of
universal truth. The Americans have chosen, perhaps, the easier way, and in
the end, they too experiment upon their theory. The Kindergarten system
illustrates what I mean; notwithstanding its German name, the Kindergarten
is not a common product in the Fatherland; it is in America that the ideas of
Froebel have received their greatest development, that the Kindergarten has
become a cult, and the great teacher a prophet. But the impulse has worn
itself out; any way, it is waxing weak.
Mr Thistleton Mark on the Kindergarten.—​According to Mr
Thistleton Mark—whose able paper on ‘Moral Education in American
Schools’ offers matter for much profitable reflection—“Even a stationary
Froebelian is driven to have some better holdfast than the ipse dixit of the
great reformer. The word Kindergarten is no longer a proper noun
signifying always and everywhere the one, sole, original, and identical
thing. It is a common noun, and as such is assured of a more permanent
place in American speech.” That is to say, educational thought in America is
tending towards the broad and natural conception expressed in the phrase
‘education is a life.’ But I wish that educationalists would give up the name
Kindergarten. I cannot help thinking that it is somewhat of a strain to
conscientious minds to draw the cover of Froebelian doctrine and practice
over the broader and more living conceptions that are abroad to-day. Even
revolutionised Kindergarten practice must suffer from the memory and
habit of weaknesses such as are pointed out by Dr Stanley Hall in the
following words:—
Dr Stanley Hall on the Kindergarten.—“The most decadent
intellectual new departure of the American Froebelists is the emphasis now
laid upon the mother-plays as the acme of Kindergarten wisdom. These are
represented by very crude poems, indifferent music and pictures, illustrating
certain incidents of child life believed to be of fundamental and typical
significance. I have read these in German and in English, have strummed
the music, and have given a brief course of lectures from the sympathetic
standpoint, trying to put all the new wine of meaning I could think of into

them. But I am driven to the conclusion that, if they are not positively
unwholesome and harmful for the child, and productive of anti-scientific
and unphilosophical intellectual habits in the teacher, they should
nevertheless be superseded by the far better things now available.”[13]
“Another cardinal error of the Kindergarten is the intensity of its
devotion to gifts and occupations. In devising these Froebel showed great
sagacity; but the scheme as it left his own hands was a very inadequate
expression of his educational ideas, even for his time. He thought it a
perfect grammar of play and an alphabet of industries; and in this opinion
he was utterly mistaken. Play and industry were then relatively
undeveloped; and while his devices were beneficent for the peasant children
in the country, they lead in the interests of the modern city child a very
pallid and unreal life.” With these important utterances I must conclude a
superficial examination of the very important question,—Is the
Kindergarten the best training-ground for a child?

iv.—reading

Time of Teaching to Read, an Open Question.—Reading presents
itself first amongst the lessons to be used as instruments of education,
although it is open to discussion whether the child should acquire the art
unconsciously, from his infancy upwards, or whether the effort should be
deferred until he is, say, six or seven, and then made with vigour. In a
valuable letter, addressed to her son John, we have the way of teaching to
read adopted by that pattern mother, the mother of the Wesleys:—
Mrs Wesley’s Plan.—“None of them was taught to read till five years
old, except Kezzy, in whose case I was overruled; and she was more years
in learning than any of the rest had been months. The way of teaching was
this: the day before a child began to learn, the house was set in order, every
one’s work appointed them, and a charge given that no one should come
into the room from nine to twelve, or from two to five, which were our
school hours. One day was allowed the child wherein to learn its letters, and
each of them did in that time know all its letters, great and small, except
Molly and Nancy, who were a day and a half before they knew them
perfectly, for which I thought them then very dull; but the reason why I
thought them so was because the rest learned them so readily; and your

brother Samuel, who was the first child I ever taught, learned the alphabet
in a few hours. He was five years old the tenth of February; the next day he
began to learn, and as soon as he knew the letters, began at the first chapter
of Genesis. He was taught to spell the first verse, then to read it over and
over until he could read it off-hand without hesitation; so on, to the second
verse, etc., till he took ten verses for a lesson, which he quickly did. Easter
fell low that year, and by Whitsuntide he could read a chapter very well; for
he read continually, and had such a prodigious memory, that I cannot
remember to have told him the same word twice. What was yet stranger,
any word he had learnt in his lesson he knew wherever he saw it, either in
his Bible or any other book, by which means he learned very soon to read
an English author well.”[14]
It is much to be wished that thoughtful mothers would more often keep
account of the methods they employ with their children, with some definite
note of the success of this or that plan.
Many persons consider that to learn to read a language so full of
anomalies and difficulties as our own is a task which should not be imposed
too soon on the childish mind. But, as a matter of fact, few of us can
recollect how or when we learned to read: for all we know, it came by
nature, like the art of running; and not only so, but often mothers of the
educated classes do not know how their children learned to read. ‘Oh, he
taught himself,’ is all the account his mother can give of little Dick’s
proficiency. Whereby it is plain, that this notion of the extreme difficulty of
learning to read is begotten by the elders rather than by the children. There
would be no little books entitled Reading without Tears, if tears were not
sometimes shed over the reading lesson; but, really, when that is the case,
the fault rests with the teacher.
The Alphabet.—​As for his letters, the child usually teaches himself. He
has his box of ivory letters, and picks out p for pudding, b for blackbird, h
for horse, big and little, and knows them both. But the learning of the
alphabet should be made a means of cultivating the child’s observation: he
should be made to see what he looks at. Make big B in the air, and let him
name it; then let him make round O, and crooked S, and T for Tommy, and
you name the letters as the little finger forms them with unsteady strokes in
the air. To make the small letters thus from memory is a work of more art,
and requires more careful observation on the child’s part. A tray of sand is

useful at this stage. The child draws his finger boldly through the sand, and
then puts a back to his D; and behold, his first essay in making a straight
line and a curve. But the devices for making the learning of the ‘A B C’
interesting are endless. There is no occasion to hurry the child: let him learn
one form at a time, and know it so well that he can pick out the d’s, say, big
and little, in a page of large print. Let him say d for duck, dog, doll, thus: d
—uck, d—og, prolonging the sound of the initial consonant, and at last
sounding d alone, not dee, but d’, the mere sound of the consonant
separated as far as possible from the following vowel.
Let the child alone, and he will learn the alphabet for himself: but few
mothers can resist the pleasure of teaching it; and there is no reason why
they should, for this kind of learning is no more than play to the child, and
if the alphabet be taught to the little student, his appreciation of both form
and sound will be cultivated. When should he begin? Whenever his box of
letters begins to interest him. The baby of two will often be able to name
half a dozen letters; and there is nothing against it so long as the finding and
naming of letters is a game to him. But he must not be urged, required to
show off, teased to find letters when his heart is set on other play.
Word-making.—​The first exercises in the making of words will be just
as pleasant to the child. Exercises treated as a game, which yet teach the
powers of the letters, will be better to begin with than actual sentences.
Take up two of his letters and make the syllable ‘at’: tell him it is the word
we use when we say ‘at home,’ ‘at school.’ Then put b to ‘at’—bat; c to
‘at’—cat; fat, hat, mat, sat, rat, and so on. First, let the child say what the
word becomes with each initial consonant; then let him add the right
consonant to ‘at,’ in order to make hat, pat, cat. Let the syllables all be
actual words which he knows. Set the words in a row, and let him read them
off. Do this with the short vowel sounds in combination with each of the
consonants, and the child will learn to read off dozens of words of three
letters, and will master the short-vowel sounds with initial and final
consonants without effort. Before long he will do the lesson for himself.
‘How many words can you make with “en” and another letter, with “od”
and another letter?’ etc. Do not hurry him.
Word-making with Long Vowels, etc.—​When this sort of exercise
becomes so easy that it is no longer interesting, let the long sounds of the
vowels be learnt in the same way: use the same syllables as before with a

final e; thus, ‘at’ becomes ‘ate,’ and we get late, pate, rate, etc. The child
may be told that a in ‘rate’ is long a; a in ‘rat’ is short a. He will make the
new sets of words with much facility, helped by the experience he gained in
the former lessons.
Then the same sort of thing with final ‘ng’—‘ing,’ ‘ang,’ ‘ong,’ ‘ung’; as
ring, fang, long, sung: initial ‘th,’ as then, that: final ‘th,’ as with, pith, hath,
lath, and so on, through endless combinations which will suggest
themselves. This is not reading, but it is preparing the ground for reading;
words will be no longer unfamiliar, perplexing objects, when the child
meets with them in a line of print. Require him to pronounce the words he
makes with such finish and distinctness that he can himself hear and count
the sounds in a given word.
Early Spelling.—​Accustom him from the first to shut his eyes and spell
the word he has made. This is important. Reading is not spelling, nor is it
necessary to spell in order to read well; but the good speller is the child
whose eye is quick enough to take in the letters which compose it, in the act
of reading off a word; and this is a habit to be acquired from the first:
accustom him to see the letters in the word, and he will do so without effort.
If words were always made on a given pattern in English, if the same
letters always represented the same sounds, learning to read would be an
easy matter; for the child would soon acquire the few elements of which all
words would, in that case, be composed. But many of our English words
are, each, a law unto itself: there is nothing for it, but the child must learn to
know them at sight; he must recognise ‘which,’ precisely as he recognises
‘B,’ because he has seen it before, been made to look at it with interest, so
that the pattern of the word is stamped on his retentive brain. This process
should go on side by side with the other—the learning of the powers of the
letters; for the more variety you can throw into his reading lessons, the
more will the child enjoy them. Lessons in word-making help him to take
intelligent interest in words; but his progress in the art of reading depends
chiefly on the ‘reading at sight’ lessons.
Reading at Sight.—​The teacher must be content to proceed very slowly,
securing the ground under her feet as she goes. Say—
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are,”

is the first lesson; just those two lines. Read the passage for the child, very
slowly, sweetly, with just expression, so that it is pleasant to him to listen.
Point to each word as you read. Then point to ‘twinkle,’ ‘wonder,’ ‘star,’
‘what,’—and expect the child to pronounce each word in the verse taken
promiscuously; then, when he shows that he knows each word by itself, and
not before, let him read the two lines with clear enunciation and expression:
insist from the first on clear, beautiful reading, and do not let the child fall
into a dreary monotone, no more pleasant to himself than to his listener. Of
course, by this time he is able to say the two lines; and let him say them
clearly and beautifully. In his after lessons he will learn the rest of the little
poem.
The Reading of Prose.—​At this stage, his reading lessons must advance
so slowly that he may just as well learn his reading exercises, both prose
and poetry, as recitation lessons. Little poems suitable to be learned in this
way will suggest themselves at once; but perhaps prose is better, on the
whole, as offering more of the words in everyday use, of Saxon origin, and
of anomalous spelling. Short fables, and such graceful, simple prose as we
have in Mrs Gatty’s Parables from Nature, and, still better, in Mrs
Barbauld’s prose poems, are very suitable. Even for their earliest reading
lessons, it is unnecessary to put twaddle into the hands of children.
But we have not yet finished the reading lesson on ‘Twinkle, twinkle,
little star.’ The child should hunt through two or three pages of good clear
type for ‘little,’ ‘star,’ ‘you,’ ‘are,’ each of the words he has learned, until
the word he knows looks out upon him like the face of a friend in a crowd
of strangers, and he is able to pounce upon it anywhere. Lest he grow weary
of the search, the teacher should guide him, unawares, to the line or
paragraph where the word he wants occurs. Already the child has
accumulated a little capital; he knows eight or ten words so well that he will
recognise them anywhere, and the lesson has occupied probably ten
minutes.
The next ‘reading at sight’ lesson will begin with a hunt for the familiar
words, and then—
“Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky,”

should be gone through in the same way. As spelling is simply the art of
seeing, seeing the letters in a word as we see the features of a face—say to
the child, ‘Can you spell sky?’—or any of the shorter words. He is put on
his mettle, and if he fail this time, be sure he will be able to spell the word
when you ask him next; but do not let him learn to spell or even say the
letters aloud with the word before him.
As for understanding what they read, the children will be full of bright,
intelligent remarks and questions, and will take this part of the lesson into
their own hands; indeed, the teacher will have to be on her guard not to let
them carry her away from the subject.
Careful Pronunciation.—​The little people will probably have to be
pulled up on the score of pronunciation. They must render ‘high,’ ‘sky,’
‘like,’ ‘world,’ with delicate precision; ‘diamond,’ they will no doubt wish
to hurry over, and say as ‘di’mond,’ just as they will reduce ‘history’ to
‘hist’ry.’ But here is another advantage of slow and steady progress—the
saying of each word receives due attention, and the child is trained in the
habit of careful enunciation. Every day increases the number of words he is
able to read at sight, and the more words he knows already, the longer his
reading lesson becomes in order to afford the ten or a dozen new words
which he should master every day.
A Year’s Work.—‘But what a snail’s progress!’ you are inclined to say.
Not so slow, after all: a child will thus learn, without appreciable labour,
from two to three thousand words in the course of a year; in other words, he
will learn to read, for the mastery of this number of words will carry him
with comfort through most of the books that fall in his way.
Ordinary Method.—​Now, compare the steady progress and constant
interest and liveliness of such lessons with the deadly weariness of the
ordinary reading lesson. The child blunders through a page or two in a
dreary monotone without expression, with imperfect enunciation. He comes
to a word he does not know, and he spells it; that throws no light on the
subject, and he is told the word: he repeats it, but as he has made no mental
effort to secure the word, the next time he meets with it the same process is
gone through. The reading lesson for that day comes to an end. The pupil
has been miserably bored, and has not acquired one new word. Eventually,
he learns to read, somehow, by mere dint of repetition; but consider what an

abuse of his intelligence is a system of teaching which makes him undergo
daily labour with little or no result, and gives him a distaste for books
before he has learned to use them.

[15]
v.—the first reading lesson

(Two Mothers Confer)
“You don’t mean to say you would go plump into words of three or four
syllables before a child knows his letters?”
“It is possible to read words without knowing the alphabet, as you may
know a face without singling out its features; but we learn not only the
names but the sounds of the letters before we begin to read words.”
“Our children learn their letters without any teaching. We always keep
by us a shallow table drawer, the bottom covered half an inch deep with
sand. Before they are two, the babies make round O and crooked S, and T
for Tommy, and so on, with dumpy, uncertain little fingers. The elder
children teach the little ones by way of a game.”
“The sand is capital! We have various devices, but none so good as that.
Children love to be doing. The funny, shaky lines the little finger makes in
the sand will be ten times as interesting as the shapes the eye sees.”
“But the reading! I can’t get over three syllables for the first lesson.
Why, it’s like teaching a twelve-months old child to waltz!”
“You say that because we forget that a group of letters is no more than
the sign of a word, while a word is only the vocal sign of a thing or an act.
This is how the child learns. First, he gets the notion of table; he sees
several tables; he finds they have legs, by which you can scramble up; very
often covers which you may pull off; and on them many things lie, good
and pleasant for a baby to enjoy; sometimes, too, you can pull these things
off the table, and they go down with a bang, which is nice. The grown-up
people call this pleasant thing, full of many interests, ‘table,’ and, by-and-
by, baby says ‘table’ too; and the word ‘table’ comes to mean, in a vague
way, all this to him. ‘A round table,’ ‘on the table,’ and so on, form part of
the idea of ‘table’ to him. In the same way baby chimes in when his mother

sings. She says, ‘Baby, sing,’ and, by-and-by, notions of ‘sing,’ ‘kiss,’
‘love,’ dawn on his brain.”
“Yes, the darlings! and it’s surprising how many words a child knows
even before he can speak them; ‘pussy,’ ‘dolly,’ ‘carriage,’ soon convey
interesting ideas to him.”
“That’s just it. Interest the child in the thing, and he soon learns the
sound-sign for it—that is, its name. Now, I maintain that, when he is a little
older, he should learn the form-sign—that is, the printed word—on the
same principle. It is far easier for a child to read p l u m - p u d d i n g than
to read ‘t o, to,’ because ‘plum-pudding’ conveys a far more interesting
idea.”
“That may be, when he gets into words of three or four syllables; but
what would you do while he’s in words of one syllable—indeed, of two or
three letters?”
“I should never put him into words of one syllable at all. The bigger the
word, the more striking the look of it, and, therefore, the easier it is to read,
provided always that the idea it conveys is interesting to a child. It is sad to
see an intelligent child toiling over a reading-lesson infinitely below his
capacity—ath, eth, ith, oth, uth—or, at the very best, ‘The cat sat on the
mat.’ How should we like to begin to read German, for example, by toiling
over all conceivable combinations of letters, arranged on no principle but
similarity of sound; or, worse still, that our readings should be graduated
according to the number of letters each word contains? We should be lost in
a hopeless fog before a page of words of three letters, all drearily like one
another, with no distinctive features for the eye to seize upon; but the child?
‘Oh, well—children are different; no doubt it is good for the child to grind
in this mill!’ But this is only one of many ways in which children are
needlessly and cruelly oppressed!”
“You are taking high moral ground! All the same, I don’t think I am
convinced. It is far easier for a child to spell c a t, cat, than to spell p l u m -
p u d d i n g, plum-pudding.”
“But spelling and reading are two things. You must learn to spell in order
to write words, not to read them. A child is droning over a reading-lesson,
spells c o u g h; you say ‘cough,’ and she repeats. By dint of repetition, she

learns at last to associate the look of the word with the sound, and says
‘cough’ without spelling it; and you think she has arrived at ‘cough’ through
c o u g h. Not a bit of it; c o f spells cough!”
“Yes; but ‘cough’ has a silent u, and a gh with the sound of f. There, I
grant, is a great difficulty. If only there were no silent letters, and if all
letters had always the same sound, we should, indeed, have reading made
easy. The phonetic people have something to say for themselves.”
“You would agree with the writer of an article in a number of a leading
review: ‘Plough ought to be written and printed plow; through, thru;
enough, enuf; ought, aut or ort’; and so on. All this goes on the mistaken
idea that in reading we look at the letters which compose a word, think of
their sounds, combine these, and form the word. We do nothing of the kind;
we accept a word, written or printed, simply as the symbol of a word we are
accustomed to say. If the word is new to us we may try to make something
of the letters, but we know so well that this is a shot in the dark, that we are
careful not to say the new word until we have heard some one else say it.”
“Yes, but children are different.”
“Children are the same, ‘only more so.’ We could, if we liked, break up a
word into its sounds, or put certain sounds together to make a word. But
these are efforts of mind beyond the range of children. First, as last, they
learn to know a word by the look of it, and the more striking it looks the
easier it is to recognise; provided always that the printed word is one which
they already know very well by sound and by sense.”
“It is not clear yet; suppose you tell me, step by step, how you would
give your first reading lesson. An illustration helps one so much.”
“Very well: Bobbie had his first lesson yesterday—on his sixth birthday.
The lesson was part of the celebration. By the way, I think it’s rather a good
plan to begin a new study with a child on his birthday, or some great day; he
begins by thinking the new study a privilege.”
“That is a hint. But go on; did Bobbie know his letters?”
“Yes, he had picked them up, as you say; but I had been careful not to
allow any small readings. You know how Susanna Wesley used to retire to
her room with the child who was to have his first reading-lesson, and not to
appear again for some hours, when the boy came out able to read a good

part of the first chapter of Genesis? Well, Bobbie’s first reading-lesson was
a solemn occasion too, for which we had been preparing for a week or two.
First, I bought a dozen penny copies of the ‘History of Cock Robin’—good
bold type, bad pictures, that we cut out.
“Then we had a nursery pasting day—pasting the sheets on common
drawing-paper—six one side down, and six the other; so that now we had
six complete copies, and not twelve.
“Then we cut up the first page only, of all six copies, line by line, and
word by word. We gathered up the words and put them in a box, and our
preparations were complete.
“Now for the lesson. Bobbie and I are shut in by ourselves in the
morning-room. I always use a blackboard in teaching the children. I write
up, in good clear ‘print’ hand,
Cock Robin.
Bobbie watches with the more interest because he knows his letters. I
say, pointing to the word, ‘cock robin,’ which he repeats.
“Then the words in the box are scattered on the table, and he finds half a
dozen ‘cock robins’ with great ease.
“We do the same thing with ‘sparrow,’ ‘arrow,’ ‘said,’ ‘killed,’ ‘who,’
and so on, till all the words in the verse have been learned. The words on
the blackboard grow into a column, which Bob reads backwards and
forwards, and every way, except as the words run in the verse.
“Then Bobbie arranges the loose words into columns like that on the
board.
“Then into columns of his own devising, which he reads off.
“Lastly, culminating joy (the whole lesson has been a delight!), he finds
among the loose words, at my dictation,
‘Who killed Cock Robin
I said the sparrow
With my bow and arrow
I killed Cock Robin,’

arranging the words in verse form.

“Then I had still one unmutilated copy, out of which Bob had the
pleasure of reading the verse, and he read it forwards and backwards. So
long as he lives he will know those twelve words.”
“No doubt it was a pleasant lesson; but, think of all the pasting and
cutting!”
“Yes, that is troublesome. I wish some publisher would provide us with
what we want—nursery rhymes, in good bold type, with boxes of loose
words to match—a separate box, or division, for each page, so that the child
may not be confused by having too many words to hunt amongst. The point
is that he should see, and look at, the new word many times, so that its
shape becomes impressed on his brain.”
“I see; but he is only able to read ‘Cock Robin’; he has no general power
of reading.”
“On the contrary, he will read those twelve words wherever he meets
with them. Suppose he learns ten words a day, in half a year he will have at
least six hundred words; he will know how to read a little.”
“Excellent, supposing your children remember all they learn. At the end
of a week, mine would remember ‘Cock Robin,’ perhaps, but the rest would
be gone!”
“Oh, but we keep what we get! When we have mastered the words of the
second verse, Bob runs through the first in the book, naming words here
and there as I point to them. It takes less than a minute, and the ground is
secured.”
“The first lesson must have been long?”
“I’m sorry to say it lasted half an hour. The child’s interest tempted me
to do more than I should.”
“It all sounds very attractive—a sort of game—but I cannot be satisfied
that a child should learn to read without knowing the powers of the letters.
You constantly see a child spell a word over to himself, and then pronounce
it; the more so, if he has been carefully taught the sounds of the letters—not
merely their names.”
“Naturally; for though many of our English words are each a law unto
itself, others offer a key to a whole group, as arrow gives us sp arrow, m

arrow, h arrow; but we have alternate days—one for reading, the other for
word-building—and that is one way to secure variety, and, so, the joyous
interest which is the real secret of success.”

vi.—reading by sight and by sound

Learning to read is Hard Work.—​Probably that vague whole which
we call ‘Education’ offers no more difficult and repellent task than that to
which every little child is (or ought to be) set down—the task of learning to
read. We realise the labour of it when some grown man makes a heroic
effort to remedy shameful ignorance, but we forget how contrary to Nature
it is for a little child to occupy himself with dreary hieroglyphics—all so
dreadfully alike!—when the world is teeming with interesting objects which
he is agog to know. But we cannot excuse our volatile Tommy, nor is it
good for him that we should. It is quite necessary he should know how to
read; and not only so—the discipline of the task is altogether wholesome
for the little man. At the same time, let us recognise that learning to read is
to many children hard work, and let us do what we can to make the task
easy and inviting.
Knowledge of Arbitrary Symbols.—​In the first place, let us bear in
mind that reading is not a science nor an art. Even if it were, the children
must still be the first consideration with the educator; but it is not. Learning
to read is no more than picking up, how we can, a knowledge of certain
arbitrary symbols for objects and ideas. There are absolutely no right and
necessary ‘steps’ to reading, each of which leads to the next; there is no true
beginning, middle, or end. For the arbitrary symbols we must know in order
to read are not letters, but words. By way of illustration, consider the
delicate differences of sound represented by the letter ‘o’ in the last
sentence; to analyse and classify the sounds of ‘o’ in ‘for,’ ‘symbols,’
‘know,’ ‘order,’ ‘to,’ ‘not,’ and ‘words,’ is a curious, not especially useful,
study for a philologist, but a laborious and inappropriate one for a child. It
is time we faced the fact that the letters which compose an English word are
full of philological interest, and that their study will be a valuable part of
education by-and-by; but meantime, sound and letter-sign are so loosely
wedded in English, that to base the teaching of reading on the sounds of the
letters only, is to lay up for the child much analytic labour, much mental

confusion, due to the irregularities of the language; and some little moral
strain in making the sound of a letter in a given word fall under any of the
‘sounds’ he has been taught.
Definitely, what is it we propose in teaching a child to read? (a) that he
shall know at sight, say, some thousand words; (b) that he shall be able to
build up new words with the elements of these. Let him learn ten new
words a day, and in twenty weeks he will be to some extent able to read,
without any question as to the number of letters in a word. For the second,
and less important, part of our task, the child must know the sounds of the
letters, and acquire power to throw given sounds into new combinations.
What we want is a bridge between the child’s natural interests and those
arbitrary symbols with which he must become acquainted, and which, as we
have seen, are words, and not letters.
These Symbols should be Interesting.—​The child cares for things, not
words; his analytic power is very small, his observing faculty is
exceedingly quick and keen; nothing is too small for him; he will spy out
the eye of a fly; nothing is too intricate, he delights in puzzles. But the thing
he learns to know by looking at it, is a thing which interests him. Here we
have the key to reading. No meaningless combinations of letters, no cla,
cle, cli, clo, clu, no ath, eth, ith, oth, uth, should be presented to him. The
child should be taught from the first to regard the printed word as he
already regards the spoken word, as the symbol of fact or idea full of
interest. How easy to read ‘robin redbreast,’ ‘buttercups and daisies’; the
number of letters in the words is no matter; the words themselves convey
such interesting ideas that the general form and look of them fixes itself on
the child’s brain by the same law of association of ideas which makes it
easy to couple the objects with their spoken names. Having got a word
fixed on the sure peg of the idea it conveys, the child will use his
knowledge of the sounds of the letters to make up other words containing
the same elements with great interest. When he knows ‘butter’ he is quite
ready to make ‘mutter’ by changing the b for an m.
Tommy’s First Lesson.—​But example is better than precept, and more
convincing than the soundest reasoning. This is the sort of reading lesson
we have in view. Tommy knows his letters by name and sound, but he
knows no more. To-day he is to be launched into the very middle of

reading, without any ‘steps’ at all, because reading is neither an art nor a
science, and has, probably, no beginning. Tommy is to learn to read
to-day—
“I like little pussy,
Her coat is so warm”—

and he is to know those nine words so well that he will be able to read them
wherever they may occur henceforth and for evermore.
“Oh, yes,” says a reader, “as in the ‘Cock Robin’ lesson; grant that the
principle is sound—and there is much to be said on both sides of that
question—but grant it, who in the world could get through all the pasting
and cutting and general messing preparatory to the great lesson? No; the
method of the books may be only second-best, but ready-made books must
do for me. I have no time to make my own apparatus.”
I must own that the cutting and pasting was very clumsy, but the lesson
served its purpose because it induced a good friend to education[16] to have
a delightful ‘Little Pussy’ box prepared for us, loose words, nice big type,
two lines in a bag. Whoso learns ‘Little Pussy’ as it should be learned will
know at least one hundred words—not a bad stock-in-trade for a beginner—
all of them good useful words that we want every day. There is one
objection; such contractions as ‘I’ll’ are ugly at the best, and I hope that in
the word-lessons based upon ‘Little Pussy,’ pieces will be chosen in which
this fault is avoided.
Steps.—​And now, we begin. Matériel: Tommy’s box of loose letters, the
new ‘Little Pussy’ box, pencil and paper, or much better, blackboard and
chalk. We write up in good big print hand ‘Pussy.’ Tommy watches with
interest: he knows the letters, and probably says them as we write. Besides,
he is prepared for the great event of his life; he knows he is going to begin
to learn to read to-day. But we do not ask anything yet of his previous
knowledge. We simply tell him that the word is ‘pussy.’ Interest at once; he
knows the thing, pussy, and the written symbol is pleasant in his eyes
because it is associated with an existing idea in his mind. He is told to look
at the word ‘pussy’ until he is sure he would know it again. Then he makes
‘pussy’ from memory with his own loose letters. Then the little bag
containing our two lines in loose words is turned out, and he finds the word
‘pussy’; and, lastly, the little sheet with the poem printed on it is shown to

him, and he finds ‘pussy,’ but is not allowed yet to find out the run of the
rhyme. ‘Coat, little, like, is, her, warm, I, so,’ are taught in the same way, in
less time than it takes to describe the lesson. When each new word is
learned, Tommy makes a column of the old ones, and reads up and down
and cris-cras, the column on the blackboard.
Reading Sentences.—​He knows words now, but he cannot yet read
sentences. Now for the delight of reading. He finds at our dictation,
amongst his loose words, ‘pussy—is—warm,’ places them in ‘reading’
order, one after the other, and then reads off the sentence. Joy, as of one
who has found a new planet! And Tommy has indeed found a new power.
Then, ‘her—little—coat—is—warm,’ ‘Pussy—is—so—little,’ ‘I—like—
pussy,’ ‘Pussy—is—little—like—her—coat,’ and so on through a dozen
more little arrangements. If the rhyme can be kept a secret till the whole is
worked out, so much the better. To make the verses up with his own loose
words will give Tommy such a delicious sense that knowledge is power, as
few occasions in after life will afford. Anyway, reading is to him a delight
henceforth, and it will require very bad management indeed to make him
hate it.
Tommy’s Second Lesson.—​Tommy promises himself another reading
lesson next day, but he has instead a spelling lesson, conducted somewhat
in this way:—
He makes the word ‘coat’ with his letters, from memory if he can; if not,
with the pattern word. Say ‘coat’ slowly; give the sound of the c. ‘Take
away c, and what have we left?’ A little help will get ‘oat’ from him. How
would you make ‘boat’ (say the word very slowly, bringing out the sound of
b). He knows the sounds of the letters, and says b-oat readily; fl-oat, two
added sounds, which you lead him to find out; g-oat, he will give you the g,
and find goat a charming new word to know; m-oat, he easily decides on
the sound of m; a little talk about moat; the other words are too familiar to
need explanation. Tommy will, no doubt, offer ‘note,’ and we must make a
clean breast of it and say, ‘No, note is spelt with other letters’; but what
other letters we do not tell him now. Thus he comes to learn incidentally
and very gradually that different groups of letters may stand for the same
sounds. But we do not ask him to generalise; we only let him have the fact
that n-oat does not spell the symbol we express by ‘note.’ ‘Stoat’—he will
be able to give the sounds of the initial letters, and stoat again calls for a

little talk—another interesting word. He has made a group of words with his
letters, and there they are on the blackboard in a column, thus—

c-oat
m-oat
g-oat
fl-oat
st-oat
b-oat

He reads the column up and down and cris-cras; every word has a
meaning and carries an idea. Then the loose words he knows are turned out,
and we dictate new sentences, which he arranges: ‘I—like—her—goat’;
‘her—little—stoat—is—warm,’ and so on, making the new words with
loose letters.
Unknown Words.—​Now for a new experience. We dictate ‘pussy is in
the boat.’ Consternation! Tommy does not know ‘in’ nor ‘the.’ ‘Put counters
for the words you don’t know; they may soon come in our lessons,’ and
Tommy has a desire and a need—that is, an appetite for learning.
Like Combinations have Different Sounds.—​We deal with the
remaining words in the same way: ‘little’ gives brittle, tittle, skittle: pussy,
is, I, and her, give no new words. ‘Like’ gives mike and pike. ‘So’ gives no,
do (the musical ‘do’), and lo! From ‘warm’ we get arm, harm, charm, barm,
alarm; we pronounce warm as arm. Tommy perceives that such a
pronunciation is wrong and vulgar, and sees that all these words are
sounded like ‘arm,’ but not one of them like ‘warm’—that is, he sees that
the same group of letters need not always have the same sound. But we do
not ask him to ‘make a note of’ this new piece of knowledge; we let it grow
into him gradually, after many experiences.
By this time he has eighteen new words on the blackboard of which to
make sentences with the nine loose words of ‘pussy.’ Her skittle is little, her
charm is brittle, her arm is warm, and so on. But we take care that the
sentences make sense. Her goat is brittle, is ‘silly,’ and not to be thought of
at all. Tommy’s new words are written in his ‘note-book’ in print hand, so
that he can take stock of his possessions in the way of words.

Moral Training in Reading Lessons.—​The next day we do the last two
lines of the stanza, as at first. These lines afford hardly any material for a
spelling lesson, so in our next lesson we go on with the second verse. But
our stock of words is growing; we are able, as we go on, to make an almost
unlimited number of little sentences. If we have to use counters now and
then, why, that only whets our appetite for knowledge. By the time Tommy
has worked ‘Little Pussy’ through he has quite a large stock of words; has
considerable power to attack new words with familiar combinations; what
is more, he has achieved; he has courage to attack all ‘learning,’ and has a
sense that delightful results are quite within reach. Moreover, he learns to
read in a way that affords him some moral training. There is no stumbling,
no hesitation from the first, but bright attention and perfect achievement.
His reading lesson is a delight, of which he is deprived when he comes to
his lesson in a lazy, drawling mood. Perfect enunciation and precision are
insisted on, and when he comes to arrange the whole of the little rhyme in
his loose words and read it off (most delightful of all the lessons) his
reading must be a perfect and finished recitation.[17] I believe that this is a
practical common-sense way to teach reading in English. It may be
profitable for the little German child to work through all possible dreary
combinations of letters before he is permitted to have any joy in ‘reading,’
because wherever these combinations occur they will have the sounds the
child has learned laboriously. The fact that English is anomalous as regards
the connection between sign and sound, happily exonerates us from
enforcing this dreary grind.[18]

vii.—recitation

‘The Children’s Art’
On this subject I cannot do better than refer the reader to Mr Arthur
Burrell’s Recitation.[19] This book purports to be a handbook for teachers in
elementary schools. I wish that it may be very largely used by such
teachers, and may also become a family handbook; though many of the
lessons will not be called for in educated homes. There is hardly any
‘subject’ so educative and so elevating as that which Mr Burrell has happily
described as ‘The Children’s Art.’ All children have it in them to recite; it is
an imprisoned gift waiting to be delivered, like Ariel from the pine. In this

most thoughtful and methodical volume we are possessed of the fit
incantations. Use them duly, and out of the woodenness of even the most
commonplace child steps forth the child-artist, a delicate sprite, who shall
make you laugh and make you weep. Did not the great Sir Walter “sway to
and fro, sobbing his fill,” to his little ‘Pet’s’ speaking of—
“For I am sick, and capable of fears,
Oppressed with wrong, and therefore full of fears;
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears;
A woman, naturally born to fears”?

Marjorie Fleming was, to be sure, a child-genius; but in this book we
learn by what carefully graduated steps a child who is not a genius, is not
even born of cultivated parents, may be taught the fine art of beautiful and
perfect speaking; but that is only the first step in the acquisition of ‘The
Children’s Art.’ The child should speak beautiful thoughts so beautifully,
with such delicate rendering of each nuance of meaning, that he becomes to
the listener the interpreter of the author’s thought. Now, consider what
appreciation, sympathy, power of expression this implies, and you will
grant that ‘The Children’s Art’ is, as Steele said of the society of his wife, “a
liberal education in itself.” It is objected—‘Children are such parrots! They
say a thing as they hear it said; as for troubling themselves to “appreciate”
and “interpret,” not a bit of it!’ Most true of the ‘My name is Norval’ style
of recitation; but throughout this volume the child is led to find the just
expression of the thought for himself; never is the poor teacher allowed to
set a pattern—‘say this as I say it.’ The ideas are kept well within the child’s
range, and the expression is his own. He is caught with guile, his very
naughtiness is pressed into service, he finds a dozen ways of saying ‘I
shan’t,’ is led cunningly up to the point of expressing himself, and—he does
it, to his own surprise and delight. The pieces given here for recitation are a
treasure-trove of new joys. ‘Winken, Blinken, and Nod,’ ‘Miss Lilywhite’s
Party,’ and ‘The Two Kittens,’ would compel any child to recite. Try a
single piece over with the author’s markings and suggestions, and you will
find there is as much difference between the result and ordinary reading
aloud as there is in a musical composition played with and without the
composer’s expression marks. I hope that my readers will train their
children in the art of recitation; in the coming days, more even than in our
own, will it behove every educated man and woman to be able to speak
effectively in public; and, in learning to recite you learn to speak.

Memorising.—​Recitation and committing to memory are not
necessarily the same thing, and it is well to store a child’s memory with a
good deal of poetry, learnt without labour. Some years ago I chanced to visit
a house, the mistress of which had educational notions of her own, upon
which she was bringing up a niece. She presented me with a large foolscap
sheet written all over with the titles of poems, some of them long and
difficult: Tintern Abbey, for example. She told me that her niece could
repeat to me any of those poems that I liked to ask for, and that she had
never learnt a single verse by heart in her life. The girl did repeat several of
the poems on the list, quite beautifully and without hesitation; and then the
lady unfolded her secret. She thought she had made a discovery, and I
thought so too. She read a poem through to E.; then the next day, while the
little girl was making a doll’s frock, perhaps, she read it again; once again
the next day, while E.’s hair was being brushed. She got in about six or
more readings, according to the length of the poem, at odd and unexpected
times, and in the end E. could say the poem which she had not learned.
I have tried the plan often since, and found it effectual. The child must
not try to recollect or to say the verse over to himself, but, as far as may be,
present an open mind to receive an impression of interest. Half a dozen
repetitions should give children possession of such poems as—‘Dolly and
Dick,’ ‘Do you ask what the birds say?’ ‘Little lamb, who made thee?’ and
the like. The gains of such a method of learning are, that the edge of the
child’s enjoyment is not taken off by weariful verse by verse repetitions,
and, also, that the habit of making mental images is unconsciously formed.
I remember once discussing this subject with the late Miss Anna
Swanwick in some connection with Browning which I do not recall, but in
the course of talk an extremely curious incident transpired. A lady, a niece
of Miss Swanwick’s, said that after a long illness, during which she had not
been allowed to do anything, she read ‘Lycidas’ through, by way of a first
treat to herself as a convalescent. She was surprised to find herself the next
day repeating to herself long passages. Then she tried the whole poem and
found she could say it off, the result of this single reading, for she had not
learned the poem before her illness, nor read it with particular attention. She
was much elated by the treasure-trove she had chanced upon, and to test her
powers, she read the whole of ‘Paradise Lost,’ book by book, and with the
same result,—she could repeat it book by book after a single reading! She

enriched herself by acquiring other treasures during her convalescence; but
as health returned, and her mind became preoccupied with many interests,
she found she no longer had this astonishing power. It is possible that the
disengaged mind of a child is as free to take and as strong to hold beautiful
images clothed in beautiful words as was that of this lady during her
convalescence. But, let me again say, every effort of the kind, however
unconscious, means wear and tear of brain substance. Let the child lie
fallow till he is six, and then, in this matter of memorising, as in others,
attempt only a little, and let the poems the child learns be simple and within
the range of his own thought and imagination. At the same time, when there
is so much noble poetry within a child’s compass, the pity of it, that he
should be allowed to learn twaddle!

viii.—reading for older children

In teaching to read, as in other matters, c’est le premier pas qui coûte.
The child who has been taught to read with care and deliberation until he
has mastered the words of a limited vocabulary, usually does the rest for
himself. The attention of his teachers should be fixed on two points—that
he acquires the habit of reading, and that he does not fall into slipshod
habits of reading.
The Habit of Reading.—​The most common and the monstrous defect
in the education of the day is that children fail to acquire the habit of
reading. Knowledge is conveyed to them by lessons and talk, but the
studious habit of using books as a means of interest and delight is not
acquired. This habit should be begun early; so soon as the child can read at
all, he should read for himself, and to himself, history, legends, fairy tales,
and other suitable matter. He should be trained from the first to think that
one reading of any lesson is enough to enable him to narrate what he has
read, and will thus get the habit of slow, careful reading, intelligent even
when it is silent, because he reads with an eye to the full meaning of every
clause.
Reading Aloud.—​He should have practice, too, in reading aloud, for the
most part, in the books he is using for his term’s work. These should include
a good deal of poetry, to accustom him to the delicate rendering of shades
of meaning, and especially to make him aware that words are beautiful in

themselves, that they are a source of pleasure, and are worthy of our
honour; and that a beautiful word deserves to be beautifully said, with a
certain roundness of tone and precision of utterance. Quite young children
are open to this sort of teaching, conveyed, not in a lesson, but by a word
now and then.
Limitation.—​In this connection the teacher should not trust to setting,
as it were, a copy in reading for the children’s imitation. They do imitate
readily enough, catching tricks of emphasis and action in an amusing way;
but these are mere tricks, an aping of intelligence. The child must express
what he feels to be the author’s meaning; and this sort of intelligent reading
comes only of the habit of reading with understanding.
Reading to Children.—​It is a delight to older people to read aloud to
children, but this should be only an occasional treat and indulgence,
allowed before bedtime, for example. We must remember the natural
inertness of a child’s mind; give him the habit of being read to, and he will
steadily shirk the labour of reading for himself; indeed, we all like to be
spoon-fed with our intellectual meat, or we should read and think more for
ourselves and be less eager to run after lectures.
Questions on the Subject-matter.—​When a child is reading, he should
not be teased with questions as to the meaning of what he has read, the
signification of this word or that; what is annoying to older people is
equally annoying to children. Besides, it is not of the least consequence that
they should be able to give the meaning of every word they read. A
knowledge of meanings, that is, an ample and correct vocabulary, is only
arrived at in one way—by the habit of reading. A child unconsciously gets
the meaning of a new word from the context, if not the first time he meets
with it, then the second or the third: but he is on the look-out, and will find
out for himself the sense of any expression he does not understand. Direct
questions on the subject-matter of what a child has read are always a
mistake. Let him narrate what he has read, or some part of it. He enjoys
this sort of consecutive reproduction, but abominates every question in the
nature of a riddle. If there must be riddles, let it be his to ask and the
teacher’s to direct him to the answer. Questions that lead to a side issue or
to a personal view are allowable because these interest children—‘What
would you have done in his place?’

Lesson-Books.—​A child has not begun his education until he has
acquired the habit of reading to himself, with interest and pleasure, books
fully on a level with his intelligence. I am speaking now of his lesson-
books, which are all too apt to be written in a style of insufferable twaddle,
probably because they are written by persons who have never chanced to
meet a child. All who know children know that they do not talk twaddle and
do not like it, and prefer that which appeals to their understanding. Their
lesson-books should offer matter for their reading, whether aloud or to
themselves; therefore they should be written with literary power. As for the
matter of these books, let us remember that children can take in ideas and
principles, whether the latter be moral or mechanical, as quickly and clearly
as we do ourselves (perhaps more so); but detailed processes, lists and
summaries, blunt the edge of a child’s delicate mind. Therefore, the
selection of their first lesson-books is a matter of grave importance, because
it rests with these to give children the idea that knowledge is supremely
attractive and that reading is delightful. Once the habit of reading his
lesson-books with delight is set up in a child, his education is—not
completed, but—ensured; he will go on for himself in spite of the
obstructions which school too commonly throws in his way.
Slipshod Habits; Inattention.—​I have already spoken of the
importance of a single reading. If a child is not able to narrate what he has
read once, let him not get the notion that he may, or that he must, read it
again. A look of slight regret because there is a gap in his knowledge will
convict him. The power of reading with perfect attention will not be gained
by the child who is allowed to moon over his lessons. For this reason,
reading lessons must be short; ten minutes or a quarter of an hour of fixed
attention is enough for children of the ages we have in view, and a lesson of
this length will enable a child to cover two or three pages of his book. The
same rule as to the length of a lesson applies to children whose lessons are
read to them because they are not yet able to read for themselves.
Careless Enunciation.—​It is important that, when reading aloud,
children should make due use of the vocal organs, and, for this reason, a
reading lesson should be introduced by two or three simple breathing
exercises, as, for example, a long inspiration with closed lips and a slow
expiration with open mouth. If a child read through his nose, it is well to
consult a doctor; an operation for adenoids may be necessary, which is

rarely distressing, and should be performed while children are young.
Provincial pronunciation and slipshod enunciation must be guarded against.
Practice in pure vowel sounds, and the respect for words which will not
allow of their being hastily slurred over, should cure these defects. By the
way, quite little children commonly enunciate beautifully, because a big
word is a new acquirement which they delight in and make the most of; our
efforts should be directed to make older children hold words in like esteem.
The habit of ‘minding your stops’ comes of intelligent reading. A child’s
understanding of the passage will lead him to correct pointing.

ix.—the art of narrating

Children Narrate by Nature.—​Narrating is an art, like poetry-making
or painting, because it is there, in every child’s mind, waiting to be
discovered, and is not the result of any process of disciplinary education. A
creative fiat calls it forth. ‘Let him narrate’; and the child narrates, fluently,
copiously, in ordered sequence, with fit and graphic details, with a just
choice of words, without verbosity or tautology, so soon as he can speak
with ease. This amazing gift with which normal children are born is allowed
to lie fallow in their education. Bobbie will come home with a heroic
narrative of a fight he has seen between ‘Duke’ and a dog in the street. It is
wonderful! He has seen everything, and he tells everything with splendid
vigour in the true epic vein; but so ingrained is our contempt for children
that we see nothing in this but Bobbie’s foolish childish way! Whereas here,
if we have eyes to see and grace to build, is the ground-plan of his
education.
Until he is six, let Bobbie narrate only when and what he has a mind to.
He must not be called upon to tell anything. Is this the secret of the strange
long talks we watch with amusement between creatures of two, and four,
and five? Is it possible that they narrate while they are still inarticulate, and
that the other inarticulate person takes it all in? They try us, poor dear
elders, and we reply ‘Yes,’ ‘Really!’ ‘Do you think so?’ to the babble of
whose meaning we have no comprehension. Be this as it may; of what goes
on in the dim region of ‘under two’ we have no assurance. But wait till the
little fellow has words and he will ‘tell’ without end to whomsoever will
listen to the tale, but, for choice, to his own compeers.

This Power should be used in their Education.—​Let us take the goods
the gods provide. When the child is six, not earlier, let him narrate the fairy-
tale which has been read to him, episode by episode, upon one hearing of
each; the Bible tale read to him in the words of the Bible; the well-written
animal story; or all about other lands from some such volume as The World
at Home.[20] The seven-years-old boy will have begun to read for himself,
but must get most of his intellectual nutriment, by ear, certainly, but read to
him out of books. Geography, sketches from ancient history, Robinson
Crusoe,[20a] The Pilgrim’s Progress,[20a] Tanglewood Tales,[20a] Heroes of
Asgard,[20a] and much of the same calibre, will occupy him until he is eight.
The points to be borne in mind are, that he should have no book which is
not a child’s classic; and that, given the right book, it must not be diluted
with talk or broken up with questions, but given to the boy in fit portions as
wholesome meat for his mind, in the full trust that a child’s mind is able to
deal with its proper food.
The child of eight or nine is able to tackle the more serious material of
knowledge; but our business for the moment is with what children under
nine can narrate.
Method of Lesson.—​In every case the reading should be consecutive
from a well-chosen book. Before the reading for the day begins, the teacher
should talk a little (and get the children to talk) about the last lesson, with a
few words about what is to be read, in order that the children may be
animated by expectation; but she should beware of explanation, and,
especially, of forestalling the narrative. Then, she may read two or three
pages, enough to include an episode; after that, let her call upon the children
to narrate,—in turns, if there be several of them. They not only narrate with
spirit and accuracy, but succeed in catching the style of their author. It is not
wise to tease them with corrections; they may begin with an endless chain
of ‘ands,’ but they soon leave this off, and their narrations become good
enough in style and composition to be put in a ‘print book’!
This sort of narration lesson should not occupy more than a quarter of an
hour.
The book should always be deeply interesting, and when the narration is
over, there should be a little talk in which moral points are brought out,
pictures shown to illustrate the lesson, or diagrams drawn on the

blackboard. As soon as children are able to read with ease and fluency, they
read their own lesson, either aloud or silently, with a view to narration; but
where it is necessary to make omissions, as in the Old Testament narratives
and Plutarch’s Lives for example, it is better that the teacher should always
read the lesson which is to be narrated.

x.—writing

Perfect Accomplishment.—​I can only offer a few hints on the teaching
of writing, though much might be said. First, let the child accomplish
something perfectly in every lesson—a stroke, a pothook, a letter. Let the
writing lesson be short; it should not last more than five or ten minutes.
Ease in writing comes by practice; but that must be secured later. In the
meantime, the thing to be avoided is the habit of careless work—humpy
m’s, angular o’s.
Printing.—​But the child should have practice in printing before he
begins to write. First, let him print the simplest of the capital letters with
single curves and straight lines. When he can make the capitals and large
letters, with some firmness and decision, he might go on to the small letters
—‘printed’ as in the type we call ‘italics,’ only upright,—as simple as
possible, and large.
Steps in Teaching.—​Let the stroke be learned first; then the pothook;
then the letters of which the pothook is an element—n, m, v, w, r, h, p, y;
then o, and letters of which the curve is an element—a, c, g, e, x, s, q; then
looped and irregular letters--b, l, f, t, etc. One letter should be perfectly
formed in a day and the next day the same elemental forms repeated in
another letter, until they become familiar. By-and-by copies, three or four of
the letters they have learned grouped into a word—‘man,’ ‘aunt’; the lesson
to be the production of the written word once without a single fault in any
letter. At this stage the chalk and blackboard are better than pen and paper,
as it is well that the child should rub out and rub out until his own eye is
satisfied with the word or letter he has written.
Of the further stages, little need be said. Secure that the child begins by
making perfect letters and is never allowed to make faulty ones, and the rest
he will do for himself; as for ‘a good hand,’ do not hurry him; his
‘handwriting’ will come by-and-by, out of the character that is in him; but,

as a child, he cannot be said, strictly speaking, to have character. Set good
copies before him, and see that he imitates his model dutifully: the writing
lesson being, not so many lines, or ‘a copy’—that is, a page of writing—but
a single line which is as exactly as possible a copy of the characters set. The
child may have to write several lines before he succeeds in producing this.
Text-hand.—​If he write in books with copperplate headlines (which are,
on the whole, to be eschewed), discrimination should be exercised in the
choice of these; in many of them the writing is atrocious, and the letters are
adorned with flourishes which increase the pupil’s labour but by no means
improve his style. One word more; do not hurry the child into ‘small hand’;
it is unnecessary that he should labour much over what is called ‘large
hand,’ but ‘text-hand,’ the medium size, should be continued until he makes
the letters with ease. It is much easier for the child to get into an irregular
scribble by way of ‘small-hand,’ than to get out of it again. In this, as in
everything else, the care of the educator must be given, not only to the
formation of good, but to the prevention of bad habits.
A ‘New Handwriting.’—​Some years ago I heard of a lady who was
elaborating, by means of the study of old Italian and other manuscripts, a
‘system of beautiful handwriting’ which could be taught to children. I
waited patiently, though not without some urgency, for the production of
this new kind of ‘copy-book.’ The need for such an effort was very great,
for the distinctly commonplace writing taught from existing copy-books,
however painstaking and legible, cannot but have a rather vulgarising effect
both on the writer and the reader of such manuscript. At last the lady, Mrs
Robert Bridges, has succeeded in her tedious and difficult undertaking, and
this book for teachers will enable them to teach their pupils a style of
writing which is pleasant to acquire because it is beautiful to behold. It is
surprising how quickly young children, even those already confirmed in
‘ugly’ writing, take to this ‘new handwriting.’
But Mrs Bridges’ purpose in A New Handwriting will be better
understood by some passages quoted, with her permission, from her
preface:—“The accompanying ten plates are intended chiefly for those who
teach writing: a few words, both of apology and explanation, are needed to
introduce them. I was always interested in handwriting, and after making
acquaintance with the Italianised Gothic of the sixteenth century, I
consciously altered my hand towards some likeness with its forms and

general character. The script happening to please, I was often asked to make
alphabets and copies, and begged by professional teachers to have such a
book as this printed, that they might use it in their schools. One can never
quite satisfy oneself in the making of models for others to copy, but these
plates are very much what I intended, though, owing to my inexperience,
some of them have suffered in the reproduction.... A child must first learn to
control his hand and constrain it to obey his eye; at this earliest stage, any
simple forms will serve the purpose; and hence it might be further argued
that the forms are always indifferent, and that full mastery of the hand can
be as well attained by copying bad models as good; but this can hardly be:
the ordinary copybook, the aim of which seems to be to economise the
component parts of the letters, cannot train the hand as more varied shapes
will; nor does this uniformity, exclusive of beauty, offer as good training to
the eye. Moreover, I should say that variety and beauty of form are
attractive, even to little children, and that the attempt to create something
which interests them, cheers and crowns their stupendous efforts with a
pleasure that cannot be looked for in the task of copying monotonous
shapes. But whether such a hand as that here shown lends itself as easily as
the more uniform model to the development of a quick, useful cursive, I
cannot say; and it is possible that the degradations, inevitable in the habit of
quick writing, might produce a mere untidiness, almost the worst reproach
of penmanship. Some of the best English hands of to-day are as good a
quick cursive as one can desire, and show points of real beauty; but such
hands are rare, and are only those which have, as we say, character; which
probably means that the writer would have done well for himself under any
system: whereas the average hands, which are the natural outcome of the
old copybook writing, degraded by haste, seem to owe their common
ugliness to the mean type from which they sprang; and the writers, when
they have occasion to write well, find they can do but little better, and only
prove that haste was not the real cause of their bad writing.”
How to Use.—​The method of using Mrs Bridges’ Handwriting,[21]
which we find most effectual, is to practise each form on the blackboard
from the plate, and later to use pencil, and still later pen and ink. By-and-by
the children will be promoted to transcribe little poems, and so on, in this
very pleasing script. Set headlines are to be avoided, as children fail to use
the forms of the headline in their ordinary writing. It is sometimes objected
that this rather elaborate and beautiful handwriting will interfere with a

characteristic ‘hand,’ but it seems to me that to have a beautiful, instead of a
commonplace, basis for handwriting is a great gain.

xi.—transcription

Value of Transcription.—​The earliest practice in writing proper for
children of seven or eight should be, not letter-writing or dictation, but
transcription, slow and beautiful work, for which the New Handwriting is to
be preferred, though perhaps some of the more ornate characters may be
omitted with advantage.
Transcription should be an introduction to spelling. Children should be
encouraged to look at the word, see a picture of it with their eyes shut, and
then write from memory.
Children should Transcribe favourite Passages.—​A certain sense of
possession and delight may be added to this exercise if children are allowed
to choose for transcription their favourite verse in one poem and another.
This is better than to write a favourite poem, an exercise which stales on the
little people before it is finished. But a book of their own, made up of their
own chosen verses, should give them pleasure.
Small Text-hand—Double-ruled Lines.—​Double-ruled lines, small
text-hand, should be used at first, as children are eager to write very minute
‘small hand,’ and once they have fallen into this habit it is not easy to get
good writing. A sense of beauty in their writing and in the lines they copy
should carry them over this stage of their work with pleasure. Not more
than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour should be given to the early
writing-lessons. If they are longer the children get tired and slovenly.
Position in Writing.—​For the writing position children should sit so
that light reaches them from the left, and desk or table should be at a
comfortable height.
It would be a great gain if children were taught from the first to hold the
pen between the first and second fingers, steadying it with the thumb. This
position avoids the uncomfortable strain on the muscles produced by the
usual way of holding a pen—a strain which causes writer’s cramp in later
days when there is much writing to be done. The pen should be held in a
comfortable position, rather near the point, fingers and thumb somewhat

bent, and the hand resting on the paper. The writer should also be allowed to
support himself with the left hand on the paper, and should write in an easy
position, with bent head but not with stooping figure. It would be
unnecessary to say that the flat of the nib should be used if children had not
a happy gift for making spider marks with the nib held sideways. In all
writing lessons, free use should be made of the blackboard by both teacher
and children by way of model and practice.
Desks.—​The best desks I know are those recommended by Dr Roth,[22]
single desks which may be raised or lowered, moved backwards or
forwards, with seat, back, and a back pad, and rests for the feet. There may
be others as good, even better, in the market, but these seem to answer
every purpose.
Children’s Table.—​For little children it is a good plan to have a table of
the right height made by the house carpenter, the top of the table consisting
of two leaves with hinges. These leaves open in the middle, and disclose a
sort of box in the space which is often used for a drawer, the table-top itself
making the lids of the box. Such a receptacle for the children’s books,
writing materials, etc., is more easily kept neat by themselves than is an
ordinary drawer or box.

xii.—spelling and dictation

Of all the mischievous exercises in which children spend their school
hours, dictation, as commonly practised, is perhaps the most mischievous;
and this, because people are slow to understand that there is no part of a
child’s work at school which some philosophic principle does not underlie.
A Fertile Cause of Bad Spelling.—​The common practice is for the
teacher to dictate a passage, clause by clause, repeating each clause,
perhaps, three or four times under a fire of questions from the writers.
Every line has errors in spelling, one, two, three, perhaps. The conscientious
teacher draws her pencil under these errors, or solemnly underlines them
with red ink. The children correct in various fashions; sometimes they
change books, and each corrects the errors of another, copying the word
from the book or from the blackboard. A few benighted teachers still cause
children to copy their own error along with the correction, which last is

written three or four times, learned, and spelt to the teacher. The latter is
astonished at the pure perversity which causes the same errors to be
repeated again and again, notwithstanding all these painstaking efforts.
The Rationale of Spelling.—​But the fact is, the gift of spelling depends
upon the power the eye possesses to ‘take’ (in a photographic sense) a
detailed picture of a word; and this is a power and habit which must be
cultivated in children from the first. When they have read ‘cat,’ they must
be encouraged to see the word with their eyes shut, and the same habit will
enable them to image ‘Thermopylæ.’ This picturing of words upon the
retina appears to me to be the only royal road to spelling; an error once
made and corrected leads to fearful doubt for the rest of one’s life, as to
which was the wrong way and which the right. Most of us are haunted by
some such doubt as to whether ‘balance,’ for instance, should have one ‘l’
or two; and the doubt is born of a correction. Once the eye sees a misspelt
word, that image remains; and if there is also the image of the word rightly
spelt, we are perplexed as to which is which. Now we see why there could
not be a more ingenious way of making bad spellers than ‘dictation’ as it is
commonly taught. Every misspelt word is an image in the child’s brain not
to be obliterated by the right spelling. It becomes, therefore, the teacher’s
business to prevent false spelling, and, if an error has been made, to hide it
away, as it were, so that the impression may not become fixed.
Steps of a Dictation Lesson.—​Dictation lessons, conducted in some
such way as the following, usually result in good spelling. A child of eight
or nine prepares a paragraph, older children a page, or two or three pages.
The child prepares by himself, by looking at the word he is not sure of, and
then seeing it with his eyes shut. Before he begins, the teacher asks what
words he thinks will need his attention. He generally knows, but the teacher
may point out any word likely to be a cause of stumbling. He lets his
teacher know when he is ready. The teacher asks if there are any words he is
not sure of. These she puts, one by one, on the blackboard, letting the child
look till he has a picture, and then rubbing the word out. If anyone is still
doubtful he should be called to put the word he is not sure of on the board,
the teacher watching to rub out the word when a wrong letter begins to
appear, and again helping the child to get a mental picture. Then the teacher
gives out the dictation, clause by clause, each clause repeated once. She
dictates with a view to the pointing, which the children are expected to put

in as they write; but they must not be told ‘comma,’ ‘semicolon,’ etc. After
the sort of preparation I have described, which takes ten minutes or less,
there is rarely an error in spelling. If there be, it is well worth while for the
teacher to be on the watch with slips of stamp-paper to put over the wrong
word, that its image may be erased as far as possible. At the end of the
lesson, the child should again study the wrong word in his book until he
says he is sure of it, and should write it correctly on the stamp-paper.
A lesson of this kind secures the hearty co-operation of children, who
feel they take their due part in it; and it also prepares them for the second
condition of good spelling, which is—much reading combined with the
habit of imaging the words as they are read.
Illiterate spelling is usually a sign of sparse reading; but, sometimes, of
hasty reading without the habit of seeing the words that are skimmed over.
Spelling must not be lost sight of in the children’s other studies, though
they should not be teased to spell. It is well to write a difficult proper name,
for example, on the blackboard in the course of history or geography
readings, rubbing the word out when the children say they can see it. The
whole secret of spelling lies in the habit of visualising words from memory,
and children must be trained to visualise in the course of their reading. They
enjoy this way of learning to spell.

xiii.—composition

George Osborne’s Essay.—“What a prodigiously well-read and
delightful person the Reverend Lawrence Veal was, George’s master! ‘He
knows everything,’ Amelia said. ‘He says there is no place in the bar or the
senate that Georgy may not aspire to. Look here,’ and she went to the piano-
drawer and drew out a theme of George’s composition. This great effort of
genius, which is still in the possession of Georgy’s mother, is as follows:—
“‘On Selfishness.—Of all the vices which degrade the human
character, Selfishness is the most odious and contemptible. An
undue love of Self leads to the most monstrous crimes, and
occasions the greatest misfortunes both in States and Families. As a
selfish man will impoverish his family and often bring them to ruin;
so a selfish king brings ruin on his people and often plunges them

into war. Example: The selfishness of Achilles, as remarked by the
poet Homer, occasioned a thousand woes to the Greeks—μυρί’
Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε—(Hom., Il., A. 2). The selfishness of the late
Napoleon Bonaparte occasioned innumerable wars in Europe, and
caused him to perish, himself, in a miserable island—that of St
Helena in the Atlantic Ocean.
“‘We see by these examples that we are not to consult our own
interest and ambition, but that we are to consider the interests of
others as well as our own.
George S. Osborne.
“‘Athenè House, 24 April 1827.’
“‘Think of him’ (George was 10) ‘writing such a hand, and
quoting Greek too, at his age,’ the delighted mother said.”
And well might Mrs George Sedley be delighted. Would not many a
mother to-day triumph in such a literary effort? What can Thackeray be
laughing at? Or does he, in truth, give us this little ‘theme’ as a tour de
force?
An Educational Futility.—​I think this great moral teacher here throws
down the gauntlet in challenge of an educational futility which is practised,
and an educational fallacy which is accepted, even in the twentieth century.
That futility is the exaction of original composition from schoolboys and
schoolgirls. The proper function of the mind of the young scholar is to
collect material for the generalisations of after-life. If a child is asked to
generalise, that is, to write an essay upon some abstract theme, a double
wrong is done him. He is brought up before a stone wall by being asked to
do what is impossible to him, and that is discouraging. But a worse moral
injury happens to him in that, having no thought of his own to offer on the
subject, he puts together such tags of commonplace thought as have come
in his way and offers the whole as his ‘composition,’ an effort which puts a
strain upon his conscience while it piques his vanity. In these days masters
do not consciously put their hand to the work of their pupils as did that
‘prodigiously well-read and delightful’ master who had the educating of
George Osborne. But, perhaps without knowing it, they give the ideas
which the cunning schoolboy seizes to ‘stick’ into the ‘essay’ he hates.

Sometimes they do more. They deliberately teach children how to ‘build a
sentence’ and how to ‘bind sentences’ together.
Lessons in Composition.—​Here is a series of preliminary exercises (or
rather a part of the series, which numbers 40) intended to help a child to
write an essay on ‘An Umbrella,’ from a book of the hour proceeding from
one of our best publishing houses:—
“Step I.
“1. What are you?
“2. How did you get your name?
“3. Who uses you?
“4. What were you once?
“5. What were you like then?
“6. Where were you obtained or found?
“7. Of what stuff or materials are you made?
“8. From what sources do you come?
“9. What are your parts?
“10. Are you made, grown, or fitted together?
* * * * *
“Step II.
“I am an umbrella, and am used by many people, young and old.
“I get my name from a word which means a shade.
“The stick came perhaps from America, and is quite smooth, even, and
polished, so that the metal ring may slide easily up and down the stick.
“My parts are a frame and a cover. My frame consists of a stick about a
yard long, wires, and a sliding metal band. At the lower end of the stick is a
steel ferrule or ring. This keeps the end from wearing away when I am used
in walking.
“Step III.
“Now use it, is, are, and was, instead of I, have, my, and am.
* * * * *
“Exercise.
“Now write out your own description of it.”

Such Teaching a Public Danger.—​And this is work intended for
Standards VI. and VII.! That is to say, this kind of thing is the final literary
effort to be exacted from children in our elementary schools!
The two volumes (I quote from near the end of the second and more
advanced volume) are not to be gibbeted as exceptionally bad. A few years
ago the appalling discovery was made that, both in secondary and
elementary schools, ‘composition’ was dreadfully defective, and, therefore,
badly taught. Since then many volumes have been produced, more or less
on the lines indicated in the above citation, and distinguished publishers
have not perceived that to offer to the public, with the sanction of their
name, works of this sterilising and injurious character, is an offence against
society. The body of a child is sacred in the eye of the law, but his
intellectual powers may be annihilated on such starvation diet as this, and
nothing said! The worst of it is, both authors and publishers in every case
act upon the fallacy that well-intentioned effort is always excusable, if not
praiseworthy. They do not perceive that no effort is permissible towards the
education of children without an intelligent conception, both of children,
and of what is meant by education.
‘Composition’ comes by Nature.—​In fact, lessons on ‘composition’
should follow the model of that famous essay on “Snakes in
Ireland”—“There are none.” For children under nine, the question of
composition resolves itself into that of narration, varied by some such
simple exercise as to write a part and narrate a part, or write the whole
account of a walk they have taken, a lesson they have studied, or of some
simple matter that they know. Before they are ten, children who have been
in the habit of using books will write good, vigorous English with ease and
freedom; that is, if they have not been hampered by instructions. It is well
for them not even to learn rules for the placing of full stops and capitals
until they notice how these things occur in their books. Our business is to
provide children with material in their lessons, and, leave the handling of
such material to themselves. If we would believe it, composition is as
natural as jumping and running to children who have been allowed due use
of books. They should narrate in the first place, and they will compose,
later, readily enough; but they should not be taught ‘composition.’

xiv.—bible lessons

Children enjoy the Bible.—​We are apt to believe that children cannot
be interested in the Bible unless its pages be watered down—turned into the
slipshod English we prefer to offer them. Here is a suggestive anecdote of
the childhood of Mrs Harrison, one of the pair of little Quaker maidens
introduced to us in the Autobiography of Mary Howitt, the better known of
the sisters. “One day she found her way into a lumber room. There she
caught sight of an old Bible, and turning over its yellow leaves she came
upon words that she had not heard at the usual morning readings, the
opening chapters of St Luke—which her father objected to read aloud—and
the closing chapter of Revelation. The exquisite picture of the Great Child’s
birth in the one chapter, and the beauty of the description of the New
Jerusalem in the other, were seized upon by the eager little girl of six years
old with a rapture which, she used to say, no novel in after years ever
produced.”
And here is a mention of a child of five. “The little ones read every day
the events of Holy Week with me. Z. is inexpressibly interesting in his deep,
reverent interest, almost excitement.”
We are probably quite incapable of measuring the religious receptivity of
children. Nevertheless, their fitness to apprehend the deep things of God is
a fact with which we are called to ‘deal prudently,’ and to deal reverently.
And that, because, as none can appreciate more fully than the ‘Darwinian,’
the attitude of thought and feeling in which you place a child is the vital
factor in his education.
Should know the Bible Text.—​Children between the ages of six and
nine should get a considerable knowledge of the Bible text. By nine they
should have read the simple (and suitable) narrative portions of the Old
Testament, and, say, two of the gospels. The Old Testament should, for
various reasons, be read to children. The gospel stories, they might read for
themselves as soon as they can read them beautifully. It is a mistake to use
paraphrases of the text; the fine roll of Bible English appeals to children
with a compelling music, and they will probably retain through life their
first conception of the Bible scenes, and, also, the very words in which
these scenes are portrayed. This is a great possession. Half the clever talk
we hear to-day, and half the uneasiness which underlies this talk, are due to

a thorough and perfect ignorance of the Bible text. The points of assault are
presented to men’s minds naked and jagged, without atmosphere,
perspective, proportion; until the Bible comes to mean for many, the
speaking of Balaam’s ass or the standing still of the sun at Joshua’s bidding.
But let the imaginations of children be stored with the pictures, their
minds nourished upon the words, of the gradually unfolding story of the
Scriptures, and they will come to look out upon a wide horizon within
which persons and events take shape in their due place and in due
proportion. By degrees, they will see that the world is a stage whereon the
goodness of God is continually striving with the wilfulness of man; that
some heroic men take sides with God; and that others, foolish and
headstrong, oppose themselves to Him. The fire of enthusiasm will kindle
in their breast, and the children, too, will take their side, without much
exhortation, or any thought or talk of spiritual experience.
Essential and Accidental Truth.—​As for whether such and such a
narrative be a myth, or a parable, or a circumstance that has actually
occurred, such questions do not affect the sincere mind of a child, because
they have nothing to do with the main issues. It is quite well to bring before
children, in the course of their Bible readings, whatever new light modern
research puts in our way; the more we can help them in this way, the more
vivid and real will Bible teaching become to them. But this grace, at any
rate, the children may claim at our hands, that they shall not be disturbed by
questions of authenticity in their Bible reading any more than in their
reading of English history. Let them hear the story of the Garden of Eden,
for example, as it stands; just so, we might even let them have the story of
the man who went fishing and found a goodly pearl; and this, because the
thing that matters in both stories is the essential truths they embody, and not
the mere accidents of time and place. It is conceivable that the ‘pearl of
great price’ was matter of current talk at the time; a so-called ‘fact’ seized
upon by our Lord to make of it the vehicle for essential truth. If we will
believe it, the minds of children are, perhaps, more fit than our own to
appropriate and deal with truth. By-and-by they will perceive, and discard,
if necessary, the accidental circumstances with which the truth is clothed
upon; but let us be very chary of our own action. Let us remember that
neither we nor the children can bear the white light of naked truth; that if,
for example, we succeed in destroying the clothing that covers the story of

the first fall—the tree and its fruit, the tempting serpent, the yielding
woman—we have no other clothing at hand for the fundamental truths of
responsibility, temptation, sin; and, once uncovered, with no vesture which
we can lay hold upon, the truths themselves will assuredly slip from our
grasp.
We need not be at the pains to discriminate, in teaching children Bible
narratives, between essential and accidental truth—the truth which
interprets our own lives, and that which concerns only the time, place, and
circumstances proper to the narrative. The children themselves will discern
and keep fast hold of the essential, while the merely accidental slips from
their memory as from ours. Therefore, let the minds of young children be
well stored with the beautiful narratives of the earlier portions of the Old
Testament and of the gospels; but, in order that these stories may be always
fresh and delightful to them, care must be taken lest Bible teaching stale
upon their minds. Children are more capable of being bored than even we
ourselves, and many a revolt has been brought about by the undue rubbing-
in of the Bible, in season and out of season, even in nursery days. But we
are considering, not the religious life of children, but their education by
lessons; and their Bible lessons should help them to realise in early days
that the knowledge of God is the principal knowledge, and, therefore, that
their Bible lessons are their chief lessons.
Method of Bible Lessons.—​The method of such lessons is very simple.
Read aloud to the children a few verses covering, if possible, an episode.
Read reverently, carefully, and with just expression. Then require the
children to narrate what they have listened to as nearly as possible in the
words of the Bible. It is curious how readily they catch the rhythm of the
majestic and simple Bible English. Then, talk the narrative over with them
in the light of research and criticism. Let the teaching, moral and spiritual,
reach them without much personal application. I know of no better help in
the teaching of young children than we get in Canon Paterson Smyth’s
Bible for the Young. Mr Smyth brings both modern criticism and research to
bear, so that children taught from his little manuals will not be startled to be
told later that the world was not made in six days; and, at the same time,
they will be very sure that the world was made by God. The moral and
spiritual teaching in these manuals is on broad and convincing lines. It is
rather a good plan occasionally to read aloud Mr Smyth’s lesson on the

subject after the Bible passage has been narrated. Children are more ready
to appropriate lessons that are not directly levelled at themselves; while the
teacher makes the teaching her own by the interest with which she reads,
the pictures and other illustrations she shows, and her conversational
remarks.
Picture Illustrations.—​The pictures in the Illustrated New Testament
are, at the same time, reverent and actual, an unusual combination, and
children enjoy them greatly. It would be well for them to have only the
penny gospel they are reading, but it should perhaps be protected (and
honoured) by an embroidered cover. A tattered Bible is not a wholesome
sight for children. The Holy Gospels with Illustrations from the Old
Masters,[23] published by the S.P.C.K., is admirable. The study of such
pictures as are here reproduced should be a valuable part of a child’s
education; it is no slight thing to realise how the Nativity and the visit of the
Wise Men filled the imagination of the early Masters, and with what
exceeding reverence and delight they dwelt upon every detail of the sacred
story. This sort of impression is not to be had from any up-to-date
treatment, or up-to-date illustrations; and the child who gets it in early days,
will have a substratum of reverent feeling upon which should rest his faith.
But it is well to let the pictures tell their own tale. The children should study
a subject quietly for a few minutes; and then, the picture being removed,
say what they have seen in it. It will be found that they miss no little
reverent or suggestive detail which the artist has thought well to include.
The various R.T.S. publications issued in the series of Bypaths of Bible
Knowledge will be found very helpful by the teacher, as illustrating modern
research; notably, Professor Sayce’s Fresh Light from Ancient Monuments,
and Budge’s Dwellers on the Nile.[24]
Bible Recitations.—​The learning by heart of Bible passages should
begin while the children are quite young, six or seven. It is a delightful
thing to have the memory stored with beautiful, comforting, and inspiring
passages, and we cannot tell when and how this manner of seed may spring
up, grow, and bear fruit; but the learning of the parable of the Prodigal Son,
for example, should not be laid on the children as a burden. The whole
parable should be read to them in a way to bring out its beauty and
tenderness; and then, day by day, the teacher should recite a short passage,
perhaps two or three verses, saying it over some three or four times until the

children think they know it. Then, but not before, let them recite the
passage. Next day the children will recite what they have already learned,
and so on, until they are able to say the whole parable.

xv.—arithmetic

Educative Value of Arithmetic.—​Of all his early studies, perhaps none
is more important to the child as a means of education than that of
arithmetic. That he should do sums is of comparatively small importance;
but the use of those functions which ‘summing’ calls into play is a great part
of education; so much so, that the advocates of mathematics and of
language as instruments of education have, until recently, divided the field
pretty equally between them.
The practical value of arithmetic to persons in every class of life goes
without remark. But the use of the study in practical life is the least of its
uses. The chief value of arithmetic, like that of the higher mathematics, lies
in the training it affords to the reasoning powers, and in the habits of
insight, readiness, accuracy, intellectual truthfulness it engenders. There is
no one subject in which good teaching effects more, as there is none in
which slovenly teaching has more mischievous results. Multiplication does
not produce the ‘right answer,’ so the boy tries division; that again fails, but
subtraction may get him out of the bog. There is no must be to him; he does
not see that one process, and one process only, can give the required result.
Now, a child who does not know what rule to apply to a simple problem
within his grasp, has been ill taught from the first, although he may produce
slatefuls of quite right sums in multiplication or long division.
Problems within the Child’s Grasp.—​How is this insight, this exercise
of the reasoning powers, to be secured? Engage the child upon little
problems within his comprehension from the first, rather than upon set
sums. The young governess delights to set a noble ‘long division sum,’—
953,783,465 ÷ 873—which shall fill the child’s slate, and keep him
occupied for a good half-hour; and when it is finished, and the child is
finished too, done up with the unprofitable labour, the sum is not right after
all: the two last figures in the quotient are wrong, and the remainder is false.
But he cannot do it again—he must not be discouraged by being told it is
wrong; so, ‘nearly right’ is the verdict, a judgment inadmissible in

arithmetic. Instead of this laborious task, which gives no scope for mental
effort, and in which he goes to sea at last from sheer want of attention, say
to him—
“Mr Jones sent six hundred and seven, and Mr Stevens eight hundred
and nineteen, apples to be divided amongst the twenty-seven boys at school
on Monday. How many apples apiece did they get?”
Here he must ask himself certain questions. ‘How many apples
altogether? How shall I find out? Then I must divide the apples into twenty-
seven heaps to find out each boy’s share.’ That is to say, the child perceives
what rules he must apply to get the required information. He is interested;
the work goes on briskly: the sum is done in no time, and is probably right,
because the attention of the child is concentrated on his work. Care must be
taken to give the child such problems as he can work, but yet which are
difficult enough to cause him some little mental effort.
Demonstrate.—​The next point is to demonstrate everything
demonstrable. The child may learn the multiplication-table and do a
subtraction sum without any insight into the rationale of either. He may
even become a good arithmetician, applying rules aptly, without seeing the
reason of them; but arithmetic becomes an elementary mathematical
training only in so far as the reason why of every process is clear to the
child. 2 + 2 = 4, is a self-evident fact, admitting of little demonstration; but
4 × 7 = 28 may be proved.
He has a bag of beans; places four rows with seven beans in a row; adds
the rows, thus: 7 and 7 are 14, and 7 are 21, and 7 are 28; how many sevens
in 28? 4. Therefore it is right to say 4 × 7 = 28; and the child sees that
multiplication is only a short way of doing addition.
A bag of beans, counters, or buttons should be used in all the early
arithmetic lessons, and the child should be able to work with these freely,
and even to add, subtract, multiply, and divide mentally, without the aid of
buttons or beans, before he is set to ‘do sums’ on his slate.
He may arrange an addition table with his beans, thus—
⬭⬭ ⬭ = 3 beans
⬭⬭ ⬭⬭ =4 ”

⬭⬭ ⬭⬭⬭ =5 ”
and be exercised upon it until he can tell, first without counting, and then
without looking at the beans, that 2 + 7 = 9, etc.
Thus with 3, 4, 5,—each of the digits: as he learns each line of his
addition table, he is exercised upon imaginary objects, ‘4 apples and 9
apples,’ ‘4 nuts and 6 nuts,’ etc.; and lastly, with abstract numbers—6 + 5, 6
+ 8.
A subtraction table is worked out simultaneously with the addition table.
As he works out each line of additions, he goes over the same ground, only
taking away one bean, or two beans, instead of adding, until he is able to
answer quite readily, 2 from 7? 2 from 5? After working out each line of
addition or subtraction, he may put it on his slate with the proper signs, that
is, if he have learned to make figures. It will be found that it requires a
much greater mental effort on the child’s part to grasp the idea of
subtraction than that of addition, and the teacher must be content to go
slowly—one finger from four fingers, one nut from three nuts, and so forth,
until he knows what he is about.
When the child can add and subtract numbers pretty freely up to twenty,
the multiplication and division tables may be worked out with beans, as far
as 6 × 12; that is, ‘twice 6 are 12’ will be ascertained by means of two rows
of beans, six beans in a row.
When the child can say readily, without even a glance at his beans, 2 × 8
= 16, 2 × 7 = 14, etc., he will take 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 beans, and divide them
into groups of two: then, how many twos in 10, in 12, in 20? And so on,
with each line of the multiplication table that he works out.
Problems.—​Now he is ready for more ambitious problems: thus, ‘A boy
had twice ten apples; how many heaps of 4 could he make?’ He will be able
to work with promiscuous numbers, as 7 + 5 - 3. If he must use beans to get
his answer, let him; but encourage him to work with imaginary beans, as a
step towards working with abstract numbers. Carefully graduated teaching
and daily mental effort on the child’s part at this early stage may be the
means of developing real mathematical power, and will certainly promote
the habits of concentration and effort of mind.

Notation.—​When the child is able to work pretty freely with small
numbers, a serious difficulty must be faced, upon his thorough mastery of
which will depend his apprehension of arithmetic as a science; in other
words, will depend the educational value of all the sums he may henceforth
do. He must be made to understand our system of notation. Here, as before,
it is best to begin with the concrete: let the child get the idea of ten units in
one ten after he has mastered the more easily demonstrable idea of twelve
pence in one shilling.
Let him have a heap of pennies, say fifty: point out the inconvenience of
carrying such weighty money to shops. Lighter money is used—shillings.
How many pennies is a shilling worth? How many shillings, then, might he
have for his fifty pennies? He divides them into heaps of twelve, and finds
that he has four such heaps, and two pennies over; that is to say, fifty pence
are (or are worth) four shillings and twopence. I buy ten pounds of biscuits
at fivepence a pound; they cost fifty pence, but the shopman gives me a bill
for 4s. 2d.; show the child how put down: the pennies, which are worth
least, to the right; the shillings, which are worth more, to the left.
When the child is able to work freely with shillings and pence, and to
understand that 2 in the right-hand column of figures is pence, 2 in the left-
hand column, shillings, introduce him to the notion of tens and units, being
content to work very gradually. Tell him of uncivilised peoples who can
only count so far as five—who say ‘five-five beasts in the forest,’ ‘five-five
fish in the river,’ when they wish to express an immense number. We can
count so far that we might count all day long for years without coming to
the end of the numbers we might name; but after all, we have very few
numbers to count with, and very few figures to express them by. We have
but nine figures and a nought: we take the first figure and the nought to
express another number, ten; but after that we must begin again until we get
two tens, then, again, till we reach three tens, and so on. We call two tens,
twenty, three tens, thirty, because ‘ty’ (tig) means ten.
But if I see figure 4, how am I to know whether it means four tens or
four ones? By a very simple plan. The tens have a place of their own; if you
see figure 6 in the ten-place, you know it means sixty. The tens are always
put behind the units: when you see two figures standing side by side, thus,
‘55,’ the left-hand figure stands for so many tens; that is, the second 5
stands for ten times as many as the first.

Let the child work with tens and units only until he has mastered the idea
of the tenfold value of the second figure to the left, and would laugh at the
folly of writing 7 in the second column of figures, knowing that thereby it
becomes seventy. Then he is ready for the same sort of drill in hundreds,
and picks up the new idea readily if the principle have been made clear to
him, that each remove to the left means a tenfold increase in the value of a
number. Meantime, ‘set’ him no sums. Let him never work with figures the
notation of which is beyond him, and when he comes to ‘carry’ in an
addition or multiplication sum, let him not say he carries ‘two,’ or ‘three,’
but ‘two tens,’ or ‘three hundreds,’ as the case may be.
Weighing and Measuring.—​If the child do not get the ground under his
feet at this stage, he works arithmetic ever after by rule of thumb. On the
same principle, let him learn ‘weights and measures’ by measuring and
weighing; let him have scales and weights, sand or rice, paper and twine,
and weigh, and do up, in perfectly made parcels, ounces, pounds, etc. The
parcels, though they are not arithmetic, are educative, and afford
considerable exercise of judgment as well as of neatness, deftness, and
quickness. In like manner, let him work with foot-rule and yard measure,
and draw up his tables for himself. Let him not only measure and weigh
everything about him that admits of such treatment, but let him use his
judgment on questions of measure and weight. How many yards long is the
tablecloth? how many feet long and broad a map, or picture? What does he
suppose a book weighs that is to go by parcel post? The sort of readiness to
be gained thus is valuable in the affairs of life, and, if only for that reason,
should be cultivated in the child. While engaged in measuring and weighing
concrete quantities, the scholar is prepared to take in his first idea of a
‘fraction,’ half a pound, a quarter of a yard, etc.
Arithmetic a Means of Training.—​Arithmetic is valuable as a means
of training children in habits of strict accuracy, but the ingenuity which
makes this exact science tend to foster slipshod habits of mind, a disregard
of truth and common honesty, is worthy of admiration! The copying,
prompting, telling, helping over difficulties, working with an eye to the
answer which he knows, that are allowed in the arithmetic lesson, under an
inferior teacher, are enough to vitiate any child; and quite as bad as these is
the habit of allowing that a sum is nearly right, two figures wrong, and so
on, and letting the child work it over again. Pronounce a sum wrong, or

right—it cannot be something between the two. That which is wrong must
remain wrong: the child must not be let run away with the notion that wrong
can be mended into right. The future is before him: he may get the next sum
right, and the wise teacher will make it her business to see that he does, and
that he starts with new hope. But the wrong sum must just be let alone.
Therefore his progress must be carefully graduated; but there is no subject
in which the teacher has a more delightful consciousness of drawing out
from day to day new power in the child. Do not offer him a crutch: it is in
his own power he must go. Give him short sums, in words rather than in
figures, and excite in him the enthusiasm which produces concentrated
attention and rapid work. Let his arithmetic lesson be to the child a daily
exercise in clear thinking and rapid, careful execution, and his mental
growth will be as obvious as the sprouting of seedlings in the spring.
The A B C Arithmetic.—​Instead of entering further into the subject of
the teaching of elementary arithmetic, I should like to refer the reader to the
A B C Arithmetic by Messrs Sonnenschein & Nesbit.
The authors found their method upon the following passage from Mill’s
Logic:—“The fundamental truths of the science of Number all rest on the
evidence of sense; they are proved by showing to our eyes and our fingers
that any given number of objects, ten balls for example, may by separation
and re-arrangement exhibit to our senses all the different sets of numbers
the sum of which is equal to ten. All the improved methods of teaching
arithmetic to children proceed on a knowledge of this fact. All who wish to
carry the child’s mind along with them in learning arithmetic, all who wish
to teach numbers and not mere ciphers, now teach it through the evidence
of the senses in the manner we have described.”
Here we may, I think, trace the solitary source of weakness in a
surpassingly excellent manual. It is quite true that the fundamental truths of
the science of number all rest on the evidence of sense; but, having used
eyes and fingers upon ten balls or twenty balls, upon ten nuts, or leaves, or
sheep, or what not, the child has formed the association of a given number
with objects, and is able to conceive of the association of various other
numbers with objects. In fact, he begins to think in numbers and not in
objects, that is, he begins mathematics. Therefore I incline to think that an
elaborate system of staves, cubes, etc., instead of tens, hundreds, thousands,
errs by embarrassing the child’s mind with too much teaching, and by

making the illustration occupy a more prominent place than the thing
illustrated.
Dominoes, beans, graphic figures drawn on the blackboard, and the like,
are, on the other hand, aids to the child when it is necessary for him to
conceive of a great number with the material of a small one; but to see a
symbol of the great numbers and to work with such a symbol are quite
different matters.
With the above trifling exception, which does not interfere at all with the
use of the books, nothing can be more delightful than the careful analysis of
numbers and the beautiful graduation of the work, “only one difficulty at a
time being presented to the mind.” The examples and the little problems
could only have been invented by writers in sympathy with children. I
advise the reader who is interested in the teaching of arithmetic to turn to
Mr Sonnenschein’s paper on ‘The Teaching of Arithmetic in Elementary
Schools,’ in one of the volumes published by the Board of Education.[25]
Preparation for Mathematics.—​In the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties’ it was
currently held that the continual sight of the outward and visible signs
(geometrical forms and figures) should beget the inward and spiritual grace
of mathematical genius, or, at any rate, of an inclination to mathematics.
But the educationalists of those days forgot, when they gave children boxes
of ‘form’ and stuck up cubes, hexagons, pentagons, and what not, in every
available schoolroom space, the immense capacity for being bored which is
common to us all, and is far more strongly developed in children than in
grown-up people. The objects which bore us, or the persons who bore us,
appear to wear a bald place in the mind, and thought turns from them with
sick aversion. Dickens showed us the pathos of it in the schoolroom of the
little Gradgrinds, which was bountifully supplied with objects of
uncompromising outline. Ruskin, more genially, exposes the fallacy. No
doubt geometric forms abound,—the skeletons of which living beauty, in
contour and gesture, in hill and plant, is the covering; and the skeleton is
beautiful and wonderful to the mind which has already entered within the
portals of geometry. But children should not be presented with the skeleton,
but with the living forms which clothe it. Besides, is it not an inverse
method to familiarise the child’s eye with patterns made by his compasses,
or stitched upon his card, in the hope that the form will beget the idea? For
the novice, it is probably the rule that the idea must beget the form, and any

suggestion of an idea from a form comes only to the initiated. I do not think
that any direct preparation for mathematics is desirable. The child, who has
been allowed to think and not compelled to cram, hails the new study with
delight when the due time for it arrives. The reason why mathematics are a
great study is because there exists in the normal mind an affinity and
capacity for this study; and too great an elaboration, whether of teaching or
of preparation, has, I think, a tendency to take the edge off this manner of
intellectual interest.

xvi.—natural philosophy

A Basis of Facts.—​Of the teaching of Natural Philosophy, I will only
remind the reader of what was said in an earlier chapter—that there is no
part of a child’s education more important than that he should lay, by his
own observation, a wide basis of facts towards scientific knowledge in the
future. He must live hours daily in the open air, and, as far as possible, in
the country; must look and touch and listen; must be quick to note,
consciously, every peculiarity of habit or structure, in beast, bird, or insect;
the manner of growth and fructification of every plant. He must be
accustomed to ask why—Why does the wind blow? Why does the river
flow? Why is a leaf-bud sticky? And do not hurry to answer his questions
for him; let him think his difficulties out so far as his small experience will
carry him. Above all, when you come to the rescue, let it not be in the ‘cut
and dried’ formula of some miserable little text-book; let him have all the
insight available, and you will find that on many scientific questions the
child may be brought at once to the level of modern thought. Do not
embarrass him with too much scientific nomenclature. If he discover for
himself (helped, perhaps, by a leading question or two), by comparing an
oyster and his cat, that some animals have backbones and some have not, it
is less important that he should learn the terms vertebrate and invertebrate
than that he should class the animals he meets with according to this
difference.
Eyes and No-eyes.—​The method of this sort of instruction is shown in
Evenings at Home, where ‘Eyes and No-eyes’ go for a walk. No-eyes comes
home bored; he has seen nothing, been interested in nothing: while Eyes is
all agog to discuss a hundred things that have interested him. As I have

already tried to point out, to get this sort of instruction for himself is simply
the nature of a child: the business of the parent is to afford him abundant
and varied opportunities, and to direct his observations, so that, knowing
little of the principles of scientific classification, he is, unconsciously,
furnishing himself with the materials for such classification. It is needless to
repeat what has already been said on this subject; but, indeed, the future of
the man or woman depends very largely on the store of real knowledge
gathered, and the habits of intelligent observation acquired, by the child.
“Think you,” says Mr Herbert Spencer, “that the rounded rock marked with
parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the
mind of the geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million
of years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered on scientific
pursuits are blind to most of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the
halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can assume.”
Principles.—​In this connection I should like to recommend The
Sciences, by Mr Holden. America comes to the fore with a schoolbook after
my own heart. The Sciences is a forbidding title, but since the era of Joyce’s
Scientific Dialogues I have met with nothing on the same lines which
makes so fit an approach to the sensible and intelligent mind of a child. This
is what we may call a ‘first-hand’ book. The knowledge has of course all
been acquired; but then it has been assimilated, and Mr Holden writes freely
out of his own knowledge both of his subject-matter and of his readers. The
book has been thrown into the form of conversations between children—
simple conversations without padding. About three hundred topics are
treated of: Sand-dunes, Back-ice, Herculaneum, Dredging, Hurricanes,
Echoes, the Prism, the Diving-bell, the Milky Way, and, shall I say,
everything else? But the amazing skill of the author is shown in the fact that
there is nothing scrappy and nothing hurried in the treatment of any topic,
but each falls naturally and easily under the head of some principle which it
elucidates. Many simple experiments are included, which the author insists
shall be performed by the children themselves. I venture to quote from the
singularly wise preface, a vade mecum for teachers:—
“The object of the present volume is to present chapters to be read in
school or at home that shall materially widen the outlook of American
schoolchildren in the domain of science, and of the applications of science

to the arts and to daily life. It is in no sense a text-book, although the
fundamental principles underlying the sciences treated are here laid down.
Its main object is to help the child to understand the material world about
him.”
To be Comprehended by Children.—“All natural phenomena are
orderly; they are governed by law; they are not magical. They are
comprehended by someone; why not by the child himself? It is not possible
to explain every detail of a locomotive to a young pupil, but it is perfectly
practicable to explain its principles so that this machine, like others,
becomes a mere special case of certain well-understood general laws. The
general plan of the book is to awaken the imagination; to convey useful
knowledge; to open the doors towards wisdom. Its special aim is to
stimulate observation and to excite a living and lasting interest in the world
that lies about us.
“The sciences of astronomy, physics, chemistry, meteorology, and
physiography are treated as fully and as deeply as the conditions permit;
and the lessons that they teach are enforced by examples taken from
familiar and important things. In astronomy, for example, emphasis is laid
upon phenomena that the child himself can observe, and he is instructed
how to go about it. The rising and setting of the stars, the phases of the
moon, the uses of the telescope, are explained in simple words. The mystery
of these and other matters is not magical, as the child at first supposes. It is
to deeper mysteries that his attention is here directed. Mere phenomena are
treated as special cases of very general laws. The same process is followed
in the exposition of the other sciences.
“Familiar phenomena, like those of steam, of shadows, of reflected light,
of musical instruments, of echoes, etc., are referred to their fundamental
causes. Whenever it is desirable, simple experiments are described and fully
illustrated, and all such experiments can very well be repeated in the
schoolroom.... The volume is the result of a sincere belief that much can be
done to aid young children to comprehend the material world in which they
live, and of a desire to have a part in a work so very well worth doing.”
I cannot help quoting also in this connection from an article[26] by the
Rev. H. H. Moore dealing with a forgotten pioneer of a rational education
and his experiment. This pioneer was the Rev. Richard Dawes, at one time

Rector of Kings Somborne parish, Hampshire, who, in 1841, worked out
the problem of rational education in an agricultural village, in which he
found the population unusually ignorant and debased. The whole story is of
great interest, but our concern is with the question of Natural Philosophy,
the staple of the teaching given in this school.
As taught in a Village School.—​Mr Dawes thus explained his object:
—“I aimed at teaching what would be profitable and interesting to persons
in the position in life which the children were likely to occupy. I aimed at
their being taught what may be called the philosophy of common things—
of everyday life. They were shown how much there is that is interesting,
and which it is advantageous for them to know, in connection with the
natural objects with which they are familiar; they had explained to them,
and were made acquainted with, the principles of a variety of natural
phenomena, as well as the principles and construction of various
instruments of a useful kind. A practical turn was given to everything; the
uses and fruits of the knowledge they were acquiring were never lost sight
of.” A list of some of the subjects included in this kind of teaching will be
the best commentary on Mr Dawes’ scheme:—
“Some of the properties of air, explaining how its pressure enables them
to pump up water, to amuse themselves with squirts and popguns, to suck
up water through a straw; explaining also the principles and construction of
a barometer, the common pump, the diving-bell, a pair of bellows. That air
expands by heat, shown by placing a half-blown bladder near the fire, when
the wrinkles disappear. Why the chimney-smoke sometimes rises easily in
the air, sometimes not. Why there is a draught up the chimney, and under
the door, and towards the fire. Air as a vehicle of sound, and why the flash
of a distant gun fired is seen before the report is heard; how to calculate the
distance of a thunderstorm; the difference in the speeds at which different
materials conduct sound. Water and its properties, its solid, fluid, and
vaporous state; why water-pipes are burst by frost; why ice forms and floats
on the surface of ponds, and not at the bottom; why the kettle-lid jumps up
when the water is boiling on the fire; the uses to which the power of steam
is applied; the gradual evolution of the steam-engine, shown by models and
diagrams; how their clothes are dried, and why they feel cold sitting in
damp clothes; why a damp bed is so dangerous; why one body floats in
water, and another sinks; the different densities of sea and fresh water; why,

on going into the school on a cold morning, they sometimes see a quantity
of water on the glass, and why on the inside and not on the outside; why, on
a frosty day, their breath is visible as vapour; the substances water holds in
solution, and how their drinking water is affected by the kind of soil
through which it has passed. Dew, its value, and the conditions necessary
for its formation; placing equal portions of dry wool on gravel, glass, and
the grass, and weighing them the next morning. Heat and its properties;
how it is that the blacksmith can fit iron hoops so firmly on the wheels of
carts and barrows; what precautions have to be taken in laying the iron rails
of railways and in building iron bridges, etc.; what materials are good, and
what bad, conductors of heat; why at the same temperature some feel colder
to our touch than others; why a glass sometimes breaks when hot water is
poured into it, and whether thick or thin glass would be more liable to
crack; why water can be made to boil in a paper kettle or an eggshell
without its being burned. The metals, their sources, properties, and uses;
mode of separating from the ores. Light and its properties, illustrated by
prisms, etc.; adaptation of the eye; causes of long- and short-sightedness.
The mechanical principles of the tools more commonly used, the spade, the
plough, the axe, the lever, etc.”
“It may surprise some who read carefully the above list that such
subjects should have been taught to the children of a rural elementary
school. But it is an undeniable fact that they were taught in Kings
Somborne school, and so successfully that the children were both interested
and benefited by the teaching. Mr Dawes, in answer to the objection that
such subjects are above the comprehension of the young, said:—‘The
distinguishing mark of Nature’s laws is their extreme simplicity. It may
doubtless require intellect of a high order to make the discovery of these
laws; yet, once evolved, they are within the capacity of a child,—in short,
the principles of natural philosophy are the principles of common sense,
and if taught in a simple and common-sense way, they will be speedily
understood and eagerly attended to by children; and it will be found that
with pupils of even from ten to twelve years of age much may be done
towards forming habits of observation and inquiry.’ Such a fact, I think,
suggests some valuable practical lessons for those who have the
responsibility of deciding what subjects to include in an educational system
for children.”

In reading of this remarkable experiment, we feel that we must at once
secure a man, all-informed like the late Dean Dawes, to teach our own Jack
and Elsie; but it is something to realise what these young persons should
know, and Mr Holden has done a great deal for us. Some of the chapters in
The Sciences may be beyond children under nine, but they will be able to
master a good deal. One thing is to be borne in mind: nothing should be
done without its due experiment. By the way, our old friend, Joyce’s
Scientific Dialogues, if it is still to be had, describes a vast number of easy
and interesting experiments which children can work for themselves.

xvii.—geography

Geography is, to my mind, a subject of high educational value; though
not because it affords the means of scientific training. Geography does
present its problems, and these of the most interesting, and does afford
materials for classification; but it is physical geography only which falls
within the definition of a science, and even that is rather a compendium of
the results of several sciences than a science itself. But the peculiar value of
geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas, and to furnish
the imagination with pictures. Herein lies the educational value of
geography.
As commonly Taught.—​Now, how is the subject commonly taught?
The child learns the names of the capital cities of Europe, or of the rivers of
England, or of the mountain-summits of Scotland, from some miserable
text-book, with length in miles, and height in feet, and population, finding
the names on his map or not, according as his teacher is more or less up to
her work. Poor little fellow! the lesson is hard work to him; but as far as
education goes—that is, the developing of power, the furnishing of the
mind—he would be better employed in watching the progress of a fly
across the windowpane. But, you will say, geography has a further use than
this strictly educative one; everybody wants the sort of information which
the geography lesson should afford. That is true, and is to be borne in mind
in the schoolroom; the child’s geography lesson should furnish just the sort
of information which grown-up people care to possess. Now, do think how
unreasonable we are in this matter; nothing will persuade us to read a book
of travel unless it be interesting, graphic, with a spice of personal adventure.

Even when we are going about with Murray in hand, we skip the dry facts
and figures, and read the suggestive pictorial scraps; these are the sorts of
things we like to know, and remember with ease. But none of this pleasant
padding for the poor child, if you please; do not let him have little pictorial
sentences that he may dream over; facts and names and figures—these are
the pabulum for him!
Geography should be Interesting.—​But, you say, this sort of
knowledge, though it may be a labour to the child to acquire it, is useful in
after life. Not a bit of it; and for this reason—it has never been really
received by the brain at all; has never got further than the floating nebulæ of
mere verbal memory of which I have already had occasion to speak. Most
of us have gone through a good deal of drudgery in the way of ‘geography’
lessons, but how much do we remember? Just the pleasant bits we heard
from travelled friends, about the Rhine, or Paris, or Venice, or bits from The
Voyages of Captain Cook, or other pleasant tales of travel and adventure.
We begin to see the lines we must go upon in teaching geography: for
educative purposes, the child must learn such geography, and in such a way,
that his mind shall thereby be stored with ideas, his imagination with
images; for practical purposes he must learn such geography only as, the
nature of his mind considered, he will able to remember; in other words, he
must learn what interests him. The educative and the practical run in one
groove, and the geography lesson becomes the most charming occupation
of the child’s day.
How to begin.—​But, how to begin? In the first place, the child gets his
rudimentary notions of geography as he gets his first notions of natural
science, in those long hours out of doors of which we have already seen the
importance. A pool fed by a mere cutting in the fields will explain the
nature of a lake, will carry the child to the lovely lakes of the Alps, to
Livingstone’s great African lake, in which he delighted to see his children
‘paidling’—“his own children ‘paidling’ in his own lake.” In this
connection will come in a great deal of pleasant talk about places, ‘pictorial
geography,’ until the child knows by name and nature the great rivers and
mountains, deserts and plains, the cities and countries of the world. At the
same time, he gets his first notions of a map from a rude sketch, a mere few
lines and dots, done with pencil and paper, or, better still, with a stick in the
sand or gravel. ‘This crooked line is the Rhine; but you must imagine the

rafts, and the island with the Mouse Tower, and the Nuns’ Island, and the
rest. Here are the hills, with their ruined castles—now on this side, now on
that. This dot is Cologne,’ etc. Especially, let these talks cover all the home
scenery and interests you are acquainted with, so that, by-and-by, when he
looks at the map of England, he finds a score of familiar names which
suggest landscapes to him—places where ‘mother has been,’—the woody,
flowery islets of the Thames; the smooth Sussex downs, delightful to run
and roll upon, with soft carpet of turf and nodding harebells; the York or
Devon moors, with bilberries and heather:—and always give him a rough
sketch-map of the route you took in a given journey.
What next?—​Give him next intimate knowledge, with the fullest
details, of any country or region of the world, any county or district of his
own country. It is not necessary that he should learn at this stage what is
called the ‘geography’ of the countries of Europe, the continents of the
world—mere strings of names for the most part; he may learn these, but it is
tolerably certain that he will not remember them. But let him be at home in
any single region; let him see, with the mind’s eye, the people at their work
and at their play, the flowers and fruits in their seasons, the beasts, each in
its habitat; and let him see all sympathetically, that is, let him follow the
adventures of a traveller; and he knows more, is better furnished with ideas,
than if he had learnt all the names on all the maps. The ‘way’ of this kind of
teaching is very simple and obvious; read to him, or read for him, that is,
read bit by bit, and tell as you read, Hartwig’s Tropical World,[27] the same
author’s Polar World,[27a] Livingstone’s missionary travels, Mrs Bishop’s
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan[27a]—in fact, any interesting, well-written book
of travel. It may be necessary to leave out a good deal, but every illustrative
anecdote, every bit of description, is so much towards the child’s education.
Here, as elsewhere, the question is, not how many things does he know, but
how much does he know about each thing.
Maps.—Maps must be carefully used in this kind of work,—a sketch-
map following the traveller’s progress, to be compared finally with a
complete map of the region; and the teacher will exact a description of such
and such a town, and such and such a district, marked on the map, by way
of testing and confirming the child’s exact knowledge. In this way, too, he
gets intelligent notions of physical geography; in the course of his readings
he falls in with a description of a volcano, a glacier, a cañon, a hurricane; he

hears all about, and asks and learns the how and the why, of such
phenomena at the moment when his interest is excited. In other words, he
learns as his elders elect to learn for themselves, though they rarely allow
the children to tread in paths so pleasant.
What General Knowledge a Child of Nine should have.—​Supposing
that between the child’s sixth and his ninth year half a dozen well-chosen
standard books of travel have been read with him in this way, he has gained
distinct ideas of the contours, the productions, and the manners of the
people, of every great region of the world; has laid up a store of reliable,
valuable knowledge, that will last his lifetime; and besides, has done
something to acquire a taste for books and the habit of reading. Such books
as Lady Brassey’s Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’ should be avoided, as covering
too much ground, and likely to breed some confusion of ideas.
Particular Knowledge.—​But we are considering lessons as
‘Instruments of Education’; and the sort of knowledge of the world I have
indicated will be conveyed rather by readings in the ‘Children’s Hour’ and
at other times than by way of lessons. I know of nothing so good as the old-
fashioned World at Home (for lessons) for children between six and seven.
As they hear, they wonder, admire, imagine, and can even ‘play at’ a
hundred situations. The first ideas of geography, the lessons on place, which
should make a child observant of local geography, of the features of his
own neighbourhood, its heights and hollows, and level lands, its streams
and ponds, should be gained, as we have seen, out of doors, and should
prepare him for a certain amount of generalisation—that is, he should be
able to discover definitions of river, island, lake, and so on, and should
make these for himself in a tray of sand, or draw them on the blackboard.
Definitions.—​But definitions should come in the way of recording his
experiences. Before he is taught what a river is, he must have watched a
stream and observed that it flows; and so on with the rest.
Children easily simulate knowledge, and at this point the teacher will
have to be careful that nothing which the child receives is mere verbiage,
but that every generalisation is worked out somewhat in this way:—The
child observes a fact, as, for example, a wide stretch of flat ground; the
teacher amplifies. He reads in his book about Pampas, the flat countries of
the north-west of Europe, the Holland of our own eastern coast, and, by

degrees, he is prepared to receive the idea of a plain, and to show it on his
tray of sand.
Fundamental Ideas.—​By the time he is seven, or before, he finds
himself in need of further knowledge. He has read of hot countries and cold
countries, has observed the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun, has
said to himself—
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!”—

knows something of ocean and sea, has watched the tide come in and go
out, has seen many rough sketch-maps made and has made some for
himself, and has, no doubt, noticed the criss-cross lines on a ‘proper’ map;
that is to say, his mind is prepared for knowledge in various directions;
there are a number of things concerned with geography which he really
wants to know.
The shape and motions of the earth are fundamental ideas,[28] however
difficult to grasp, but the difficulty is of a kind which increases with years.
The principle in each case is simple enough, and a child does not concern
himself, as do his elders, with the enormous magnitude of the scale upon
which operations in space are carried on. It is probable that a child’s vivid
imagination puts him on a level with the mathematician in dealing with the
planetary system, with the behaviour and character of Earth, with the causes
of the seasons, and much besides.
Meaning of a Map.—​Then, again, geography should be learned chiefly
from maps. Pictorial readings and talks introduce him to the subject, but so
soon as his geography lessons become definite they are to be learned, in the
first place, from the map. This is an important principle to bear in mind.
The child who gets no ideas from considering the map, say of Italy or of
Russia, has no knowledge of geography, however many facts about places
he may be able to produce. Therefore he should begin this study by learning
the meaning of a map and how to use it. He must learn to draw a plan of his
schoolroom, etc., according to scale, go on to the plan of a field, consider
how to make the plan of his town, and be carried gradually from the idea of
a plan to that of a map; always beginning with the notion of an explorer
who finds the land and measures it, and by means of sun and stars, is able to
record just where it is on the earth’s surface, east or west, north or south.

Now he will arrive at the meaning of the lines of latitude and longitude.
He will learn how sea and land are shown on a map, how rivers and
mountains are represented; and having learned his points of direction and
the use of his compass, and knowing that maps are always made as if the
beholder were looking to the north, he will be able to tell a good deal about
situation, direction, and the like, in very early days. The fundamental ideas
of geography and the meaning of a map are subjects well fitted to form an
attractive introduction to the study. Some of them should awaken the
delightful interest which attaches in a child’s mind to that which is
wonderful, incomprehensible, while the map lessons should lead to
mechanical efforts equally delightful. It is only when presented to the child
for the first time in the form of stale knowledge and foregone conclusions
that the facts taught in such lessons appear dry and repulsive to him. An
effort should be made to treat the subject with the sort of sympathetic
interest and freshness which attracts children to a new study.

xviii.—history

A Storehouse of Ideas.—​Much that has been said about the teaching of
geography applies equally to that of history. Here, too, is a subject which
should be to the child an inexhaustible storehouse of ideas, should enrich
the chambers of his House Beautiful with a thousand tableaux, pathetic and
heroic, and should form in him, insensibly, principles whereby he will
hereafter judge of the behaviour of nations, and will rule his own conduct as
one of a nation. This is what the study of history should do for the child; but
what is he to get out of the miserable little chronicle of feuds, battles, and
death which is presented to him by way of ‘a reign’—all the more repellent
because it bristles with dates? As for the dates, they never come right; the
tens and units he can get, but the centuries will go astray; and how is he to
put the right events in the right reign, when, to him, one king differs from
another only in number, one period from another only in date? But he
blunders through with it; reads in his pleasant, chatty little history book all
the reigns of all the kings, from William the Conqueror to William IV., and
back to the dim days of British rule. And with what result? This: that,
possibly, no way of warping the judgment of the child, of filling him with
crude notions, narrow prejudices, is more successful than that of carrying
him through some such course of English history; and all the more so if his