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Page 16
The teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is
fortunate. Almost all children collect something. A tactful teacher may
get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a neat and
orderly collection of notes; in starting, when they are mature enough, a
card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map which they may make.
Neatness, order, and method are thus instinctively gained, along with
the other benefits which the possession of the collection entails. Even
such a noisome thing as a collection of postage stamps may be used by
the teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographical and historical
information which she desires to impart. Sloyd successfully avails
itself of this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of
wooden implements fit for his own private use at home. Collecting is, of
course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody ever
became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector when
a boy.
_Constructiveness_ is another great instinctive tendency with which the
schoolroom has to contract an alliance. Up to the eighth or ninth year
of childhood one may say that the child does hardly anything else than
handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing,
setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart; for,
from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are
two names for the same manual activity. Both signify the production of
change, and the working of effects, in outward things. The result of all
this is that intimate familiarity with the physical environment, that
acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is really
the foundation of human _consciousness_. To the very last, in most of
us, the conceptions of objects and their properties are limited to the
notion of what we can _do with them_. A 'stick' means something we can
lean upon or strike with; 'fire,' something to cook, or warm ourselves,
or burn things up withal; 'string,' something with which to tie things
together. For most people these objects have no other meaning. In
geometry, the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by
going through certain processes of construction, revolving a
parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. The more different kinds of
things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more
confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives.
An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child
will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them. But the
wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten
upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction
and to object-teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I said awhile
back about the superiority of the objective and experimental methods.
They occupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the spontaneous
interests of his age. They absorb him, and leave impressions durable and
profound. Compared with the youth taught by these methods, one brought
up exclusively by books carries through life a certain remoteness from
reality: he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels that he
stands so; and often suffers a kind of melancholy from which he might
have been rescued by a more real education.
There are other impulses, such as love of approbation or vanity, shyness
and secretiveness, of which a word might be said; but they are too
familiar to need it. You can easily pursue the subject by your own
reflection. There is one general law, however, that relates to many of
our instinctive tendencies, and that has no little importance in
education; and I must refer to it briefly before I leave the subject. It
has been called the law of transitoriness in instincts. Many of our
impulsive tendencies ripen at a certain period; and, if the appropriate
objects be then and there provided, habits of conduct toward them are
acquired which last. But, if the objects be not forthcoming then, the
impulse may die out before a habit is formed; and later it may be hard
to teach the creature to react appropriately in those directions. The
sucking instincts in mammals, the following instinct in certain birds
and quadrupeds, are examples of this: they fade away shortly after
birth.
In children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a certain
determinate order. Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating vocal sounds,
constructing, drawing, calculating, possess the child in succession; and
in some children the possession, while it lasts, may be of a
semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the interest in any one of these
things may wholly fade away. Of course, the proper pedagogic moment to
work skill in, and to clench the useful habit, is when the native
impulse is most acutely present. Crowd on the athletic opportunities,
the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the botany, or
what not, the moment you have reason to think the hour is ripe. The hour
may not last long, and while it continues you may safely let all the
child's other occupations take a second place. In this way you economize
time and deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artistic or
mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but a few months.
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