CHILD STUDY WITH SPECIAL APPLICATION TO THE TEACHING OF RELIGION ffl UC-NRLF G.H. DIX '^ E R r S '. E Y u.c ;: .::ty o? LiF02^:!A J CA Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation Iittp://www.arcliive.org/details/cliildstudywitli6p00dixgricli LONGMANS' PICTURES OF THE PARISH CHURCH These pictures are in Colours, and have been reproduced from drawings in Water Colours by Cyril Ward and Patten Wilson. They are printed on stout cards suitable for framing. Each picture is 24 inches by 18 inches, printed on a card 36 inches by 25 inches. THE CHURCH AND CHURCH- THE FONT. YARD. THE CHOIR, ORGAN AND THE CHURCH PORCH. PULPIT. THE INTERIOR OF THE THE SANCTUARY. CHURCH. Price 2S. 6d. net each picture, or the set of 6 pictures in an envelope, X5S. net. Envelope separately, is. 3d. net. The following book is intended for use with the Series of Pictures as above, but it can be used independently. LESSONS ON THE PARISH CHURCH. Part I. Hymn Talks for the Infant School. By Sibyl Longman. Part XL Lessons for Older Classes. By the Rev. S. K. Knight, B.D. With 6 Illustra- tions. Together with Hints on the use of the Pictures, by the Rev. H. A. Lester, M.A. Crown 8vo. is 6d. net. SCENIC STUDIES OF THE BIBLE BACKGROUND By SOPHIE M. NICHOLLS, M.A., F.R.G.S. With Maps and Illustrations. 8vo, 3s. 6d. net. This book consists of 12 geographical studies, the centre of interest for each of which is a picture, accompanied by a map. The map is specially drawn in each case, to show the relief features of the country immediately surrounding the scene depicted in the view. The pictures are reduced facsimiles of the author's " PICTURES OF PALESTINE " (see below), to the use of which this book is in- tended as a guide. PICTURES OF PALESTINE From Photographs by S. M. Nicholls, M.A., F.R.G.S. Mounted on stifE brown cardboard for use in Colleges and Schools. 1. The Plain of Sharon : Auj6 River 3i^"xi3" 2/- net 2. Jerusalem: The Temple Area 3 2^" x 18^" 2/6 ,, 3. The Hills of Jerusalem from the South ... 3i|"xi3" 2/- „ 4. A Shepherd of Tekoa igf'xis^" 1/6 „ 5. The Desert Hills of Judaea I9i"xi5|" 1/6,, 6. Joseph's Well. Dothan I9i"xi5|" 1/6 „ 7. The Plain of Esdraelon 34"xi3" 2/- ,. 8. Nazareth and the Samarian Hill 3i|"x2iA" 2/6 „ g. The Sea of Galilee from Capernaum 3i|"xi3" 2/- ,, 10. The Orontes Highroad 3i|"xi3" 2/- „ 11. A Village in Samaria 19I" x 15J" 1/6 „ 12. The Plains of Jericho I9f"xi5|" 1/6,. LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. ilonion llwcfgan S)unira8 %t\)00l JKlanual0 Issued under the authority of The Lord Bishop of London Editor : Rev. S. K. KNIGHT, B.D. HON. SECRETARY, BISHOP OF LONDON'S SUNDAY SCHOOL COUNCIL Price IS. 6d. net per volume FOR SCHOLARS II-T3 FOR SCHOLARS 7-9 GOD'S LOVE AND CARE: Stories from the Old and New Testaments. Compiled by the Rev. S. K. KNIGHT, B.D. FOR SCHOLARS 8-IO SIMPLE LESSONS ON THE LIFE OF OUR LORD. By the Rev. H. A. Lester, M.A., and Eveline B. Jennings. FOR SCHOLARS Q-II CATECHISM : The Life of Faith and Action. By the Rev. H. A. Lester, M.A, and the Rev. E. G. Wain WRIGHT, M.A. ILLUSTRATIONS FOR TEACHING THE CATE- CHISM. Simple Diagrams to Illustrate the Lessons on "The Life of Faith and Action". By the Rev. G. H. Dix, M.A., and Rev. H. A. Lester, M.A. IS. net FOR SCHOLARS IO-I2 THE OLD TESTAMENT SUN- DAY LESSONS. By the Rev. Canon A. B. Bater, M.A. CATECHISM : Prayer and Sac- raments. By the Rev. Canon MoRLEY Stevenson, M.A FOR SCHOLARS OF 13 THE BEGINNING OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. By the Rev. Canon Wesley Dennis, M.A., and the Rev. G. H. Dix, M.A, FOR SCHOLARS OF I3 AND OVER OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST. By the Rev. Prebendary E. Hobson, M.A. THE PRAYER-BOOK IN THE CHURCH. By the Rev. W. Hume Campbell, M.A. LESSONS ON CELEBRITIES OF HEBREW STORY. By the Rev, H. F. B. Compston, M.A., and the Rev. H. A. Lester, M.A. With Map. INTRODUCTORY VOLUME. SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHING : Its Aims and its Methods. By the Rev. H. A. Lester, M.A With an Introduction by the Bishop of London. Crown 8vo, pap>er covers, is. net ; cloth, is. 6d. net. LESSONS ON THE PARISH CHURCH. Part I. Hymn Talks for the Infant School. By Sibyl Longman. Part II. Lessons for Older Classes. By the Rev. S. K. Knight, B.D. With 6 Illustrations. Together with Hints on the use of the Pictures, by the Rev. H. A. Lester, M.A., Director of Sunday School Work in the Diocese of London. Crown 8vo. is. 6d. net. THE CHRISTIAN'S' RESPONSIBILITIES AND MEANS OF GRACE. Fifty- Two Lessons on the Sacramental Teaching of the Church Catechism. By the Rev. W. Hume Campbell, M.A. is. 6d. net. For Scholars of 13-14 years of age. LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. CHILD STUDY WITH SPECIAL APPLICATION TO THE TEACHING OF RELIGION BY THE Rev. G. H. DIX, M.A. PRINCIPAL OF THE CLERGY HOUSE, WIMBLEDON WITH INTRODUCTION BY THE Rev. H. a. LESTER, M.A. DIRECTOR OF SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK IN THE DIOCESE OF LONDON NEW IMPRESSION LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 1915 /^ ^^is-j^ "D(^ INTRODUCTION What Maeterlinck says of bees is especially true of children, " It is with them as with all that is deeply real ; they must be studied, and one must learn how to study them ". This is the object of this book, to enable all who will, to study children, to observe them in all their words and ways and to find out their significance to the children themselves and the hidden motives which give rise to them. Such child-study is a difficult and absorbing piece of work, requiring much patience and insight and sympathy, but it is work which is abundantly profitable. To a teacher it is indispensable, for no one can hope to educate unknown qualities. Children are the raw material on which the teacher has to work and his function is not merely to teach books or subjects no matter how sacred, but to teach children. Sunday School Teachers are apt to forget that the first essential for success in religious teaching, after the possession of religion itself, is an understanding of and therefore abounding sympathy with children. ^45 vi Introduction It is not enough to have good seed to sow and a knowledge of the processes of sowing unless at the same time we understand the nature of soil into which the living seed is to be cast. This book is written by one who understands and loves children and who has had a wide ex- perience in the problems of child-study with which he deals. It is not the production of an arm-chair theorist, but of an eminently practical teacher whose practice is based on sound scientific principles. It is the work, moreover, not only of a teacher and lecturer on Psychology, but also of a hard- working parish priest. Thus the difficulties which confront not only our Sunday School Teachers, but also clergy and super- intendents, are appreciated by Mr. Dix, and as he shows most clearly their solution must be sought in a study of child-nature. The perennial questions of troublesome children, learning by heart, the retention of elder scholars, all are answered by reference to the nature of children themselves. The conclusions arrived at in this book are the result of much patient observation and investigation and are meant to suggest lines of inquiry on the part of teachers, leading them to investigate for themselves the possibilities, the depth and resources of child life. Teachers who will undertake this quest, whither the little child shall lead them, will find in it fresh inspiration for their work and sure Introduction vii guidance along the pathway they desired the baptized child to tread so that '' it may lead the rest of its life according to this beginning". H. A. LESTER, Director of Sunday School Work in the Diocese of London. Epiphany^ January^ iQ^S* CONTENTS I. The Science of Child Study II. Periods of Child Life . III. The Growing Infant . IV. Developing Instincts in the Child V. Wonder, Curiosity, Interest, Attention VI. The Principle of Self- Activity VII. The Emotional Development of the Child VIII. The Intellectual Development of the Child IX. The Development of Will . X. The Child of the Kindergarten XI. The Child of the Middle School XII. The Child of the Senior School XIII. Early Adolescence XIV. The Religion of Childhood . PAGE I II i8 25 38 48 59 70 82 92 99 107 116 126 THE SCIENCE OF CHILD STUDY. The science of child study began in the nineteenth cen- tury after that greatest of all educational dis- j^ coveries — the discovery of the child. Greek tanceof educational theory and practice had insisted Child upon the character of the teacher as most impor- " ^' tant for the proper training of the child, and subsequent ages have accepted this dictum. The Middle Ages had been careful to draw up a wise and well-ordered curriculum of studies by which to fashion the child's intellect, and to-day much of the meaning of that phrase "a liberal education" is an inheritance from those days. But it was reserved for later days to see that, given the right sort of teacher and the curriculum of real educa- tional value, there was yet another factor to be taken account of in teaching and training a child, viz. the nature of the child himself This factor, which earlier educational systems had regarded as third in order of importance, has come now to take the first place, partly because the science of psychology, while investigating mental facts, has made us aware of the complex nature of mind, and has shown that its most elementary forms of action are complicated processes. Thus while letting in new floods of light upon the working of intellect, emotion, and will, this science has also at the same time been forced to make a special study of the child mind to trace the origin of later and fuller developments. Partly, too, the need of the practical teacher to understand the nature of the I 2 Child Study children with whom his work lies has compelled him to abandon rule-of-thumb methods, and to seek for inspira- tion and guidance for his task in the different character- istics which various natures possess, and which they reveal to sympathetic observers. Let it then be said at this point that the only sound Method "^^^h<^d of child study — the only method likely of to give results of practical value to teachers — is Child the sympathetic observation of children and their " ^* ways. This is a delightful though not an easy- task. It demands from the student much patience and care in the collection of facts, in putting those facts into sets, and then in formulating general truths from the facts so arranged. The mind of a child is a complex thing ; no two children are exactly alike in any respect ; and the very variety of the phenomena observed is both bewildering at first and liable to a too hasty interpreta- tion. Hence there is need of checking our results time after time to make sure that they are accurate and in accordance with all the facts. It is always difficult to approach child-nature without prejudice, merely as an observer intent on finding the true nature of the pheno- mena it reveals ; for in general, we are apt to read our own partial remembrances of childhood's days into our observations, and to conclude that we have gained a new truth when as a matter of fact we are simply reading our own preformed opinions into the new facts which have come to light. Moreover, children are particularly shy of being observed ; their natures do not readily open out except under the sunshine of sympathy ; and when the attempt is made to dissect and analyse their minds they will not respond if they are at all conscious that they are being watched. The first essential in the child under observation is that it should be "natural"; hence no show of observing it must be made by the student — the notebook must be used after the facts have been obtained. Every opportunity must be taken advantage of by the observer, whether those opportunities occur when the The Science of Child Study 3 child is at play or engaged in more serious things. Actions, postures, expressions, the language used in de- scription, the child's use of fact and fancy, imagination and reason, the emotions which pass across its mind, its behaviour in society and its powers of imitation — every- thing that children say and feel and do, is material for our science. To gather this material and then to interpret it aright is the task of the student of child-nature. No one will come to that task with any assurance of knowledge, nor will it be undertaken without a living sympathy with children and the world of childhood. It will be our aim to indicate the broad lines of such observation, the points to be taken account of in estimating the characteristics of childhood, rather than to present cut-and-dried results, however exact they may be or whatever the weight of authority with which they come to us. For this purpose it will be advisable to take the normal development of a child from earliest infancy to the period of maturity, to observe the history of this development, and to take note of deviations shown by abnormal children from this standard. First we notice the long period of helplessness and de- pendence which characterises the infancy of the Nature human being. This period is so devised by Pro- and vidence in view of the many and complex activities Nurture. which will be necessary in later life. As the life which the developing human being has to live must be infin- itely more adaptable than that of the lower animals, so the period of preparation, while the infant is dependent upon the nurture and training given by parents, is long, and tends to grow longer with successive generations, in order that the child may be more ready to face the diffi- culties of the later struggle for existence. Already the child is confronted with two factors which will play an important part through life, " adaptability " and "environment". The young of an animal quickly adapts itself to its environment, walking, feeding, using its instincts almost at once. In other words, the adap- 4 Child Study tation of an animal to its environment begins almost at birth. Protection is afforded by the parent for as long as this adaptation is needed. Watch a young chicken, for example, during the first hours of its escape from the egg-shell ; the rapidity with which it settles down into new conditions of life is remarkable. In a few weeks it knows how to take care of itself without the aid of the mother. But this is far from being the case with a child. True, there are certain instinctive movements which it begins to make almost at once, such as sucking and cry- ing ; but these are few in number and simple in their nature. It is only after some months that the child takes an interest in the world around, balancing its body in attempts to walk, stretching out its hands towards a mov- ing object, crawling, crying at failures to attain its pur- poses, and so forth. In these attempts the child learns to do slowly what the animal acquires almost at birth. But in doing so, it passes from the stage of instinctive movements to the stage of voluntary activities, whereby it brings into play groups of muscles in order to achieve some definite purpose, to adapt itself to its environment. But more than this, the child who has thus learnt to exercise will-power in effort is beginning to do what an animal never does, viz. to adapt his environment to hi'tnself. It is by this double use of personal effort, in self-adap- tation to environment, and in the adaptation of environ- ment to self, that the child surpasses the animal, which is guided by instinct only to self-adaptation : and the double process is the basis of all that makes personality. For only so can the child ever become self-conscious, only so can it manifest this self-consciousness in action upon the world, and by so doing make the world in which it lives something which it can understand and work upon. To train the child coming into the world thus helpless, but with latent powers of personality stored up within its being, is therefore the problem which confronts parents and at a later stage, teachers of the young. The magni tude of the task is apparent when we remember that the The Science of Child Study 5 baby makes its appearance in the world with "no language but a cry " to express its needs. For weeks it seems to do little but feed, sleep, and grow ; while multitudes of sensations from two worlds are crowding in upon its brain. There are first its own feelings of comfort and discomfort, the pain of unsatisfied appetite and the ease of satisfied want, which compose the whole of its world within. The universe without is striving to send impulses through all the gateways to the brain — eyes and ears and skin and tongue and nose — impulses at first unnoticed, undiscriminated — but which will after- wards provide material for knowledge. Not yet are the two worlds, the world of objects, and the world of mind, distinguishable or distinct. They blend into a single whole of "thatness," producing at one time the distress of un- appeased hunger, at another the comfortable satisfaction of repletion. Both worlds minister alike to the wants of life which seems almost vegetative in character, having little else to do than to await the moment of its unfolding. What is the baby thinking of, is an interesting ques- tion to parents ; but as yet the baby has not reached the stage of thinking at all. Instinctive movements are indicative not of thought, but of capacities for thinking eventually ; not of a mind already at work, but of one whose complex powers are latent though they will develop later, when opportunities for the play of intel- lect, emotion, and will, present themselves as the child develops. To watch this development, to find in it the reign of law, to observe the working therein of powers essentially human, is the province of child study. That light will be thrown thereby upon educational method is certain, since to enter into the realm of childhood is to find the things that go to make up the child's own world. No person can share that world but he who becomes as a little child, entering into it by the lowliest doors of childhood's interests and activities ; for only in this way can we realize the nature of the child. Yet the study is worthy of effort ; for in that nature lies an infinite 6 Child Stu^y possibility of good or evil — a possibility which becomes actualized through teaching and training. So delicate and wonderful a mechanism as a child's soul needs knowledge if it is to be directed aright. It used to be thought that child-nature was so simple, so uniform in all children, that no special know- turg' ledge of individual children was necessary to a and teacher. Rough and ready generalizations had Train- convinced the world that all children were much alike in that they are all born into the world with a large share of depravity in their natures, and that minds were merely receptacles for holding knowledge. There were thus two essential factors to be brought into play in educating all children. The first was Discipline, to get rid of the taint of natural depravity ; the second was Storage, to fill up the empty spaces of a vacant mind. While it was considered a sound principle to flog the evil out of the growing boy, it was also a maxim to fill his mind with facts which should perhaps be of use some day when decent adult life was reached. That the flogging was often ineffectual to tame turbulent spirits or that it sometimes broke and cowed the will into dread submis- sion, and that the facts imparted were often distasteful to the child or forgotten at the earliest convenient moment, mattered nothing to the teacher. The same dreary round of painful and dull routine was gone through with generation after generation of children in the fervent belief that the " discipline " would make them good, and the " knowledge " would make them wise ! It was ac- cepted without further question that the age of childhood was an age of evil and ignorance, and that both evil and ignorance were obstinate and required drastic measures to be taken to uproot them. The human child was lost sight of behind this wall of prejudice which served as educational theory. The Book of Proverbs formed a convenient reference-point for this theory, with such maxims as " Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell ". All that was necessary to The Science of Child Study 7 the educator was to be stern enough to " make no differ- ence " between one child and another, to chastise for failings as well as faults, and at the same time to pour knowledge into the mind, as water is poured into a bucket, until it was full of the facts that ought to be known. With the work of men such as Pestalozzi and Herbart there came a great change over this conception . of education. The former recognized that all ijne"^ children are not alike. He was willing to believe and that their dispositions were not evil. He further ^^^^^' saw that education need not be distasteful in order to be effective, and sympathizing with children's desires for joyous activities, he set himself to make the response to those desires by giving opportunity for pleasure to play a part in their studies. To his work we owe the present kindergarten system. Herbart made a special point of his " doctrine of interest," that the mind must be interested if it is to learn, that when it is interested i t is won to learning, and that the effort it then puts forth in learning is a real moral training of the will. Self- activity and interest, when they came to be recognized as fundamental principles of educational work, completely changed the point of view of the teacher. No longer must the child be repressed in his natural instincts ; rather must he be allowed to express himself in all natural ways. No longer must he be driven to learn under threats of dire punishment if he failed ; rather must he be won-to regard learning as 'a pleasant task calling him to its performance. Such a point of view necessarily commended itself to many who were ready to adopt it, since it promised de- liverance from a slavery like that of Israel in Egypt, irksome to the educational taskmasters and painful to their charges. Such a deliverance was likewise bound to be used, not only for liberty, but for licence, at least in some cases. The teachers saw tb6 reasonableness of the new theories, and heard of the wonderful results that 8 Child Study followed upon emancipation from the shackles of custom. What might not be accomplished under the new condi- tions of freedom ? Now the cliild could be treated as a human being ; before he had been r^[arded as a machine. Pleasure is a necessary condition of human life, though not for a machine. At all costs education must be made pleasurable in order that it may not become mechanical. Consequently, the educational pendulum begins to swing forward, gathering momentum as it goes, until the point is reached where it marks ** pleasure and amusometit/* and has passed the equally important point of " the dis- cipline of studies '*. It is easy to understand that theories which achieve results under the hands of skilled educa- tionalists should be misinterpreted, misunderstood, and misapplied, when they are taken up by teachers who have less knowledge and less skill to apply them. With such it has been found that they have in many cases mistaken the shadow for the substance, and hnv( '\ substituted one set of rules for another, depciuiii, upon T! I lire instead of Discipline, upon Ainu-ciuc ut instead oi Storage, for doing the work of cducituii; children. Perhaps the slavery is less irksome, but it remains ^axcw none the less: and who is content with the result 1 hey are singularly poor considered from tlu point oi \u v ( ither of the gain to childhood or of the icaultiii^ chai.ictcr and intellectual equipment of the adult. But we think we see another and more gradual change coming over educational practice. The theories of Pestalozti and Herbart will abide because they fit in with facts of child-nature. It is in the working out of those theories by the unskilled that tl\e practice has gone wrong — in thrii fnluu to appreciate what the theories really moan .uul ih n ! aHng upon education : and now there conu ; i pu ccovery in which pleasure co-openU( w th h . nd interest — not amusement — fosters K I h w 1 ! ; r p 1 . h r r words, the true meaning and purpo.sr o[ '• -.It .1. ti\ i!\ " .uul '* interest** are being The Science of Child Study 9 rediscovered by examining the facts of child-nature ; and in the new light thus thrown upon them we shall find the way to better application of the dieories they cover — theories idiich do not dispense with all " discipline " and all ** storage," but make that discipline suitable to the child's training, and diat storage such as stimulates its intellectual powers to their best and highest ca p a bilit ieR This necessarily demands to make it efiectnal all that the teacher can ^c in the way of knoiHe(%e and under- standing of child-nature and its pogsfliiKties. For the teacher of religion this loMmledgic and onder- standing is no less fswraitial — indeed it is more essential since his task Is so much greater than ^g^ for die teacher of secular subjects. The day has to Be- gone by when it was thought that knowlec%e of j^^^^ spiritual tnitii was the only thing needfol in J^^ order to teach chikhen. No doabt the influ- ence of many such teachers has been abidii^ ; no doubt they have been die means of inculcating the h^^faest principles of life and conduct in those idio have come under their tnflnence. But, on the wholes can it be said that the teadiing of religion has been what it m^^ ? Has instruction in the Christian fiuth been so wisely (banned and so accurately imparted that the results obtainedare coomiensurate with the efibrts expcoded? Have the Sunday sdioob built up around themsd ves and the Church iHiose faith they set forth a loyal and devo te d body of well-trained and well-taugfat adherents who value their mission and support it at some cost of sdf^^acrifice ? We can hardly s^ so in the hoc of fiicts. No doubt a part of the &ilure is due to the conservative tendency in all rdigkxis movements and ofganizatkxis iHiidi fears to adopt new and untried mediods lest the loss fay their fiufaue diouki be greater than the gain by their siMxesiSL Hence improvement in trarhing meiliod U^ further bdund in the sphere of rdigkNis instmctkm than dsewbere. But this is not all the cause of the want of snocess. Our teachers have had but htde oppor- 10 Child Stiidy tunity of training, and so have felt themselves handi- capped as against the professional day-school teachers. They have felt too a want of orderliness and aim in the subjects to be taught ; and this perhaps has contributed more than anything else to the general disinclination to take up a work where so little guidance can be obtained, and wherein the results to be looked for are so problem- atic. Even in the case of those teachers who have had the opportunity of gaining in training courses a know- ledge of the technique of teaching, there is oftentimes still the feeling that something more is necessary to make it certain of achieving the desired results for the child. When we ask what this may be, we are finally driven back to the teacher's knowledge of child-nature. Not only what and how am I to teach, but also what and how does the child learn from my teaching, is the question which, as a teacher, I must always be asking : and I can find no answer to this question except from the child himself — the answer, that is, which observation of his nature gives me. This is true no matter what may be the subject to be taught, whether it be a secular subject like geography or history, or whether it be religious knowledge. It is necessary then for us to consider the child's de- velopment from age to age if we would understand both what he is able to appreciate at any given period, and the best method of imparting it to him at that period. We need to know the child's developing capacity for religious knowledge of different degrees of difficulty ; we need to know what spiritual truths he is capable of assimilating at each period of his life ; we need, that is, to organize the teaching and training of the child in religion round the nature of the child himself In this great task, no less than in the details of technique, we shall find the study of child-nature our sufficient guide, because it will reveal to us the stages of development through which the child's religion passes as it comes to maturity in communion with God. II. PERIODS OF CHILD-LIFE. There is a very general agreement that the age of child- hood can be divided into certain well-nmarked, though roughly defined, stages or periods. Two stages in par- ticular are quite clearly marked out — that of babyhood at one end of child-life, and that of adolescence at the other. The former ends when a child attains its third or fourth year ; the latter begins at about the age of fourteen and lasts until twenty or later. Between babyhood and adolescence there is an intervening period of about ten years, which, by common consent, is again roughly divided into two sections — childhood, lasting till the eighth or ninth year, and boyhood and girlhood, between this and the age of adolescence. There is, however, rather less agreement about the defining years of these two stages ; they are rather rough and ready approximations, and characteristics of individual children are taken more into account in them — but of this point we shall have more to say later. The periods thus marked off by general observation are well worth our notice as students of child-nature, because they give us rough "averages" which jj^"^" are capable of being used as standards by which from to estimate how much particular children diverge ^tand- from the normal. We may not assume that these " averages " or " standards " express more than veiy rough approximations to accuracy ; but they serve sufficiently well for an observant person to say whether a particular 12 Child Study child is "up to standard," "behind his age," or ''differ- ent from ordinary children" — whether, i.e. he is normal, subnormal, or abnormal. It requires no special know- ledge of children to know that individuals do show much divergence, in one way or another, from the standard or average child. In physique and in mental qualities no two children are alike. Thus a boy A may be a " sub- normal" child of, say, nine years of age. In forming this judgment upon him we first picture in our minds the qualities of the " normal " boy of this age. This boy ought to show a good number of those qualities. For instance he ought to be of a certain height and weight of body; but A is thin and has not grown as he ought. Then the average boy of this age likes an outdoor exist- ence, is glad to go to school alone, likes to run and jump and test his strength and speed against his fellows ; and when at home and in school he takes a lively interest in things that are going on, and shows by his questions and answers that he understands and reasons. But our sub- normal child rather shrinks from outdoor exercises, has little strength and does not care to test it in rivalry, especially when games are at all rough. His mind is dull and slow ; he shows little interest in things, and is quite content to do as little mental work as will keep him out of trouble. Prolonged attention is impossible to him ; his mind will not concentrate upon important facts, and he is much behind the average child in in- telligence. It is easy to see why such a child is classed as subnormal. Or again, a girl B of fourteen years, with gipsy blood in her veins, is very strong physically, large-limbed, heavy-featured, with coarse straight hair brushed back from a narrow forehead, lack-lustre eyes set beneath heavy scowling brows, has a wide nose, thick lips, and thick neck. She resents being reproved, and quickly shows ill-temper which turns into a sulky rpood lasting for hours. As regards intelligence she is slow and back- ward, unable to follow simple reasoning, and to do Periods of Child- Life 13 much more than reading and writing. Here we have an "abnormal" child who requires special educational treatment. These two individuals differ from the " average " child, the one being below the standard, the other departing from it in many ways. We recognize them as excep- tions to the general rule, and as we separate them and mark off their differences from normal children of their own ages, we see the necessity of trying to understand individual children whom we have to teach. We may not assume, therefore, that once we have formed an average of children and adopted it as our standard, we have done all that is necessary to understand child-nature at any given period ; nor can we treat all children of a given period alike as if they showed but unimportant deviations from the general pattern which exists in our own minds. It is necessary that we should have such a standard in mind in classifying children generally ; but it is no less necessary to take note of individual diver- gences from it if we are to teach and train every child that comes under our care, and particularly so when the divergences are very marked. The ages at which the different periods of child-life be- gin and end are likewise worthy of notice. We cannot do more than mark them by a year or so, because the transition from one stage to the next is gradual. One has often heard the remark, " He is ceasing to be a baby," or, "She is growing into a young woman ". The transi- tion phase takes some time before it is complete. The earlier characteristics are replaced only slowly by those that belong to a later period : and these characteristics are mental and spiritual as well as physical in their nature. The ages of transition differ, too, to some extent in country and town children : the latter as a rule develop a little earlier than the former. Similarly they differ to a greater extent in children of different races. It is well known that children in southern lands develop to maturity much more rapidly than those in the north of Europe, But in 14 Child Study the same country and race there is general agreement as to the average age of each transition. Of these ages of transition the longest is that of adol- Periods ^scence in which the boy or girl grows into the and De- young man or young woman. As we shall see fining later, this period is very important, and the life that results from it is that which, as a rule, comes to be the life that will be lived for the next fifty years. It is no wonder, therefore, that this age becomes increas- ingly important to students of child-nature since it in- volves such consequences. Then the age of babyhood is well-defined by the dependence of the child upon its parents, not only for food, but for protection. As baby- hood passes into childhood, the little one learns to be more independent of its parents for protection, itself avoiding danger as well as warding it off. Childhood seeks pleasure in growing independence, forming new social groups of friends for itself in which to give rein to its larger life in the school and playground. Boyhood and girlhood not only seeks this independence of parents, but actually does pass a large part of its time in society outside the home, learning to accommodate itself to all kinds of conditions, and to exercise its individuality in manifold ways. Thus at each stage, while the child is living the characteristic life of that stage, it is also pre- paring for the succeeding period. Hence though acquir- ing new powers from year to year, there never comes a definite point at which we may say that one stage has ended and the next has begun. Our standards, in other words, are not arbitrary or exact, but rough and ready generalizations, open to slight modifications, as we ac- quire new knowledge of child-nature. One such modification we shall premise at this stage, dividing the age of boyhood and girlhood into two parts, which we shall call for convenience *' junior " and " senior ". The former will extend from about the age of eight to eleven, and the latter from eleven to fourteen. There seems to be enough difference in the characteristics of Periods of Child- Life 15 children at these two periods (see Chapters XI and XII) to warrant this. To sum up results at this point, we have the following periods of child-life : — 1. Babyhood, extending to the third or fourth year. 2. Childhood, extending to the eighth or ninth year. 3. Junior boyhood or girlhood, extending to the eleventh or twelfth year. 4. Senior boyhood or girlhood, extending to the four- teenth year. 5. Adolescence, extending to the twentieth year. Just as we have modified one general period by divid- ing it, so we shall expect that increasing knowledge of children will enable educators to define other periods more sharply if the facts collected concerning child-nature warrant this ; though as children of the same age differ very greatly, it will probably not be possible to do more than take '* averages " within those periods. But with in- dividual children the case is different ; and child-study brings us into touch primarily with individuals whose development from stage to stage we can watch and re- cord. It is possible to note the appearance of various instincts, emotions, mental changes, and physical changes in any individual child, and so to cater for him educa- tionally with some degree of accuracy as he advances from one period to the next. As we come to understand individuals better, to trace their advance from immaturity to maturity, and to catalogue every step of that advance as we observe it, it follows that our knowledge of " the average child " will likewise improve in accuracy, and we shall be in a better position to plot the materials and the methods by which teaching and training should be most advantageous to him. This holds good in religious as well as in secular education. It is always true that this pro- Periods ceeds " here a little, there a little, line upon line, QJad- line upon line ". But we ought to know when ing. each " little " is able to be absorbed, at what age a child 1 6 Child Study can take in and assimilate this or that set of facts, and reason from the facts to the doctrines underlying them ; and this we can only do when we know the nature and attainments of the individual children whom we teach. In considering the materials for religious education, and the methods for using those materials, we cannot neglect the nature of the child and his development if we would find adequate results from our work. It is not enough to form an outline idea of " periods " into which we shall force all individuals — necessary as these periods are for preliminary classification of groups of scholars. We must seek within the periods for general resemblances between children, and also for personal idiosyncrasies. Only so shall we be sure that our work with individuals will be fruitful. We have perhaps said enough to show that the Sunday- school which is ungraded is an anomaly. Some prin- ciple of grading must be adopted to secure any possibility of successful teaching. The ideal principle would be that of attainments — children being classified accord- ing to their knowledge and ability to acquire new know- ledge. This, however, is not always possible. In default of it, a day-school grading is better than none at all, the standards reached in the day-school serving as the founda- tion for the Sunday-school work. This forms a good basis of classification if the superintendent knows what syllabus of religious knowledge is taught in the day- school. Where there are several day-schools in the dis- trict allowance must be made for variations between them. A third method is that by age of scholars. This, as we have seen, makes use of the periods into which child-life is roughly divided by general observation. It ought to be modified considerably in individual cases as knowledge of special children is obtained. With this proviso it serves well enough to begin with; but this, and the system of classifying children into periods, ought to be gradually superseded by classification according to ability and attainments. We know that we are pleading Periods of Child- Life 17 here for an ideal system in which class-teachers and super- intendent work together for the good of the whole school by fostering the good of the individual children com- posing it. But we believe it is possible to every well- organized Sunday-school which will set itself to the task of getting to know all the children who come to it, their individual natures, and the ways in which each reveals his own personality. III. THE GROWING INFANT. During the first year ot a baby's life, in addition to the few instinctive movements which it uses for the pur- pose of nutrition, there are other movements brought into play by its nervous mechanism. These are called reflex and automatic movements. They involve such actions as shrinking when falling, the utterance of various sounds as the organs of speech become more practised, stretching forth a hand to grasp an object, clutching a finger held out, and all kinds of spontaneous and random movements made to accommodate the little one to the world around it. Many of these movements are inexact at first, quite failing to achieve their object ; but the child makes ex- periments, some of which succeed, and these it repeats over and over again until "practice makes perfect". Further, movements that were simple at first gradually become more complex — a ball is not simply thrown any- where, but is propelled in a certain direction, not very accurately at first, but with greater accuracy as the use of different muscles is learnt. By the end of the first year the baby has learnt to define and co-ordinate various large muscle-groups, repeating those actions that attain good results, and eliminating others that are not good. In this selection we have the beginnings of voluntary action, the commencement of the play of the child's will to secure a purpose. The dawn of voluntary activity marks also the begin- Mental "^"^ ^^ ^^^ thought and emotion : for purpose Begin- involves the idea of an aim to be achieved, and nings the idea of successful achievement gives pleasure by anticipation. So we are led to look for the basis ot i8 The Growing Infant 19 the child's intellectual life in the idea of purpose^ for the basis of its emotional life in the idea of pleasure^ and for the basis of its volitional life in the capacity which it has for making a variety of responses to the impressions which come from objects in the outside world. It is in this beginning of intellectual, emotional, and voluntary ac- tivity that we catch the first glimpses of dawning " mind " in the child ; and from this beginning the whole complex nature of its personality develops. One factor in the development we can observe as we watch a mother playing with her infant. She shakes a rattle in front of its eyes, then places it in its hand, or she rolls a ball slowly across the table to attract her child's notice. The little one laughs and crows with pleasure, and shortly learns to perform the same actions. The mother is starting to develop the child's intelligence by using its capacity for feeling pleasure and for respond- ing to her efforts by similar actions to her own. The baby takes up these activities, and learns to perform them for itself through its power of Imitation. How large a part imitation plays in the child's life from the stage when it begins to observe people and things is manifest when we notice the line of ^^' the child's development. The baby learns by degrees to produce sounds from the rattle similar to those produced by the mother ; the ball thrown is directed back again. Cries of animals are copied — the kitten's mew, the dog's bark — just for the mere sake of copying. Probably walking is learnt in this way ; certainly talking is, as can be seen by the efforts of the child to imitate its elders, and by the curious mistakes it makes in repeating words which have been only once or twice spoken in its presence. By the age of four the child has learnt many things by this method of imitation, and not the least im- portant among these is the knowledge how to reproduce from former experiences actions which it desires to per- petuate, such as how to walk and run without falling, how to control the organs of speech, etc. The mental process 20 Child Study gone through in this development through imitation is : — first a certain act done by another was perceived, then the idea was formed of reproducing this act, and finally, by imitation, repeated through failures and successes, the right activity was produced and practised until a degree of perfection was obtained. Between the ages of four and seven years imitation becomes less slavish and more dramatic — it ceases, that is, to be content with merely copying another's acts and begins to put originality into what it sees other people doing when imitating them. For example, the child now throws its ball into a far corner of the room instead of returning it directly, and then laughs aloud. The doll which before was merely knocked and battered now comes to have a personality of its own similar to the child's personality, and is supposed to talk, walk, sit up, sleep, and wake — to participate in the child's life. The small girl invents a washing-day for doll's clothes ; the small boy desires to sew ; both imitate mother, but make slight differences when doing so. Im- agination comes into play so that the child's acts are not mere copies of the acts of older people, but show a novel colouring and charm which issue from the child's in- dividuality at work upon them. Children love to dress themselves fantastically at this stage ; the boy wears a helmet and sword to be a soldier ; the girl will readily wear a crown in order to be a princess. The writer remembers two children, who had witnessed a religious procession in France, coming home to perform the same actions in a large kitchen ; a large spoon on a string served for the censer, the holy water was duly sprinkled from a bucket with somewhat dire results to the floor, and the Latin chanting developed into an extraordinary babel ! Whereas the child's memory was most used in the stage Im- ^^ slavish imitation when other people's doings agina- were copied as exactly as possible, imagination *'°"' plays the chief part in dramatic imitation as it constructs new activities from old ones. It is not too The Growing Infant 21 much to say that as the wonder of the world of fact and fancy breaks in upon the child's mind imagination invests nearly all things with the charm of personality. The doll lives a life similar to the child's own, a life at once per- sonal and pictorial, and it can do all that the child can do. The kitten is assumed to wish to share its play v/ith the child, and when it objects is ** naughty ". Objects are spoken to as if they were alive and are brought into the child's life. Out of the known facts of its own life a child constructs a world of make-believe. The chairs and cupboards in a room may become cages for all kinds of whimsical animals that never had an existence except in an imagined world. The charm of a ragged doll is greater because as a rule it has shared so much of child- hood's experiences ; broken toys have unique value for the same reason. One child of our acquaintance at this age lived each evening in Turkey the wonderful life of a prince, with a new mother who was a queen, and hordes of slaves to wait upon them both. The power of " make- believe " is the result of imagination combining with the tendency to imitate. Together they fashion a new world of possible activities only limited by the hard facts of the material things which are too obdurate to share the full life of dramatic imitation. It is at this stage that the capacity of the child for personal religion begins to show itself. So far the wise parent has used the spontaneous imita- ^^^^^ tion of the child to teach it simple " prayerfulness " to Re- rather than " prayers ". The memory of the child Jjg^?"^ will have been exercised in learning the words jng. of simple hymns and texts and prayers, and in acquiring the habit of folding its hands, shutting its eyes, kneeling down, and speaking to God — " like mother does " — by simple imitation of her words and actions. How much the child understands at this stage is not the important question. Imitation, as such, does not aim at understanding ; its only purpose is to acquire habits of right action. But as soon as imagination begins to enter 22 Child StuSy into possession, then actual participation in the events of the spiritual world is possible, for the child transfers its knowledge of the material world to " the land of God ". The home relationships are transplanted by imagination into the life which it begins to live with God as Father. The love which home shows, the tender care which home furnishes, the guardianship of the parent — all go to make up the child's idea of God. Prayers come to have a meaning ; and every prayer has its appropriate answer which God, in his capacity of Father, always gives. But there is no sharp severance between the material and the spiritual world at this stage. The events of the material world are taken up into the spiritual world, or rather God is interested in them both, because to a child a parent is interested in all that interests a child. No doubt the child's conception of God is of '' a big man " ; but it is so, because the " big man " is symbolic of power to do what the child requires. A Person with attributes of Love and Power is thus the first idea of God that a child forms. The exercise of that love and power by God covers the whole range of the child's life, every being which comes within its ken, everything which comes within the sphere of its interests. It is therefore perfectly natural for the child to pray ; and this is the stage when all its unfolding life should be brought to God in prayer. A small boy of six, when saying his prayers one night in the presence of a nurse who was hurrying him to bed, looked up and said, "Don't you know that I have the whole world to pray for?" The strange prayers which children sometimes make are due to their belief that God is interested in all their world. These prayers should not be checked. They are the natural way in which the developing child pictures the relation of this world to God. The obvious deduction from these facts is that the years between four and seven are those in which the child's prayers should be made personal by giving it good examples to use, and by teach- ing it to pray in its own words concerning everything within the sphere of its owai interests. The Growing Infant 23 In these two ways (i) by cultivating the child's " prayer- fulness" from the early days when it is beginning to talk, through the natural power of imitation which the child possesses, and (ii) by using the developing power of dramatic imitation to teach " prayer " concerning all its interests, the parent is employing the nature of the child at each stage to further its knowledge of God and of the relationships subsisting between God and the world. It i^ safe to say that there is no difficulty to a young child in learning about and appreciating the facts of the spiritual world. All life is mysterious ; Jiater- the natural world is full of mystery. To find yet ial and another unseen world beyond and behind that ^^^. . which is seen is only to have one more mysterious ual." ' thing to fathom. The child's credulity, by which it has to take so many things in its environment on trust, helps it to span the distance between the seen and the unseen quite easily. But we must remember that it is the age of facts — mysterious facts it is true, but facts all the same. The love of God is a fact meaning good things in the way of clothes and food, and protection ; the infant Jesus is a fact for the child to love ; the angels are beings whose existence and work once known are never doubted — they belong to bed-time and serve to make the darkness light. Not theology, but appreciation of the beauty of the spiritual world and all it contains of reality and of life, this is the child's religion during early days at home, very concrete, but very mysterious in its beauty. We ought to take care that beautiful things are used to open the child's heart to God. Parents who have nothing of all this to give to their little ones are to be pitied since they miss the purest joy of watching the spirit of the child spreading its wings for flights into " a land that is very far off " from adult life, but easy of reach to the unsullied soul of a child. Love, beauty, and joy are the three words that best express the governing principles of the religion of a little child as it begins to find its way through the world of 24 Child Study nature to the world of spirit. Love it learns in the fos- tering care of the home and transfers that love to God ; beauty it learns in the things of nature, and looking " through nature up to nature's God " finds Him the Source of all created beauties : joy it knows from the human love which gives and the earthly beauty which pleases, and its thoughts of God's love and God's beauty are all transfigured with a heavenly joy. Little children are en rapport with the spiritual world ; they only require to hear of its mysteries that so they may enter in to possess them. Their credulity and trustfulness are keys to unlock secrets " that are hidden from the wise and prudent but revealed unto babes" by their converse with the mysteries of life. IV. DEVELOPING INSTINCTS IN THE CHILD. In addition to the instinctive movements used in imita- tion, there are others which make their appearance ggif. as the child develops, and as each plays a part Preserv- in life so there is a rightful place for each in re- ^'^°"* ligion, which is the use of life for God. The Instinct for Self-preservation includes certain of the early and cruder instincts, e.g. that of feeding which appeared soon after birth. There is no discrimination between the things that enhance life and those that thwart it in the early stages of existence. The mere stroking of the child's lips with the finger will induce a reaction. Everything is carried to the mouth for several months, though this may be due in part to the inherited sensitiveness of the skin of the lips, which makes it possible to learn most readily by them the tactual qualities of objects. But however this may be, the hunger of the growing child is rapacious, and is of use for the nurture of his frame. With the passing of months the child begins to * 'enjoy" his food, i.e. to taste it not merely for the pleasurable feeling of satisfaction which it gives, but because the taste in itself is pleasant This enjoyment reaches its greatest height at the age of five or six years. It was at this period that a small boy was found with a mouthful of cherry-stones ! Only with the growth of knowledge is discrimination made between things hurtful and bene- ficial ; the parent exercises discrimination for the child during the long stage of infancy. These two factors, then, the feeding instinct and the watchfulness of the parent, are helps to self-preservation. 25 26 Child Study A secondary instinct found within the instinct for self- Fear preservation is that of fear. The shrinking of a baby from falling is the first expression of it Possibly the crying of a young baby when held by cer- tain poor nurses arises from this instinctive fear. Loud noises, unaccustomed sounds, very bright lights, are sufficient to stimulate a child's fear ; while the familiar crooning of the mother will allay it. Many reflex move- ments on the part of a young child, such as throwing up its arms when suddenly aroused from a comfortable sleep- ing position, are expressions of fear. By the age of three or four years, children will often not willingly go into a dark room. When asked to explain why, they simply reply that they " do not like the dark ". No doubt the enemies of primitive man lurked in darkness, and the in- stinct to shun the dark is an inherited trait in children, even though it be an unreasonable one. Similarly children take aversions to certain people, pictures, and places — no doubt the prejudices are again unreasonable — because of their evoking feelings of fear. A tiny girl of our acquaintance could not be induced to look at the picture of a cat in a certain book because of its staring eyes. The development of imagination requires that great care be exercised in the choice of children's stories lest they evoke the sense of fear. Ghost stories are quite able to make an adult's blood run cold ! But this feeling of fear expresses itself in various ways. The commonest is flight. The child of five sometimes acquires the practice of leaving his parents in order to explore his own world ; but terrify him, and home he runs to hide his face in mother's apron. His flight to safety is caused by the instinct for self-preservation. The open eyes, distended nostrils, opened lips, and tense muscles of the extended arms of a child in the act of running away from some terrifying object are all indi- cative of a foe from whom the child must save himself by these manifold exertions, each of which has a part to play in the act of flight. To the open eye refuge is more Developing Instincts in the Child 27 apparent than to the eye which is half-closed ; the dis- tended nostrils and opened lips enable large quantities of air to be taken into the lungs and cries of help to be raised while running ; the tense muscles of the arms will at once relax when sanctuary is reached, or when the strength is spent Where flight is impossible the instinctive expression of fear is a crouching attitude, in the attempt to present as small an object of attack as possible. The shrinking of the falling baby, the lying down of a spent hare, the '* ducking " of a boy's head, are all alike in this respect. To creep into a cupboard, or to hide under a bed, is only a more intellectualized form of the same desire to avoid attack. A young child hides its face for the same reason. In later life the causes of fear decrease in number with the increase of knowledge. But even so, fear teaches prudence at all stages, and is therefore serviceable to well-being, provided that it is not excessive and does not result in paralysis of function, as is the case with the fascination exercised by serpents over their fear-stricken victims. But on the whole the motive of fear is not serviceable to the work of education. The nature of childhood demands joy, and fear lessens this. Unreason- ing fear is harmful, and the wise parent or teacher will never employ it with a child. The stupid play of unedu- cated parents with their children sometimes takes the form of causing frights to the little ones. This cannot be too strongly deprecated. Similarly threats of future punishments, unspecified in their nature, induce deceit on the part of children to avoid the occasion of their fears. The wise teacher will seldom threaten, never indeed except in specific terms. With some nervous children it may be necessary to show up unreasonable fears. Mother will go into the dark room holding her timid child's hand the while she shows that there is no need to be afraid. The experience will be repeated as often as fear is shown, until the ground 28 Child Stu^y of fear is shown to be baseless. Similarly the teacher will arrest the development of unreasoning fears, substi- tuting for them expressions of joy when they are dis- covered to be groundless. Much can be done in this way by teaching children to hold themselves bravely, to make the usual carriage of their bodies upright, their arms free to move, heads held up, chests advanced — in a word teaching them to meet the world and not to shrink from it. There are fewer causes of fear than any child supposes. A third feature in the instinct of self-preservation is fighting. Where the object is deemed to be jj^^ *' less powerful than the child the tendency is to remove it out of the way by overcoming it. A small boy armed with a walking-stick, was found vigor- ously belabouring his mother's chignon, the while his cheeks became a deep red and his eyes sparkled, as he ejaculated from time to time, " Kill it ! " The tendency of young children to bite, scratch, and smack their opponents upon provocation, which in later life develops into combativeness at school, is well known. Anger is the basis of this instinct. It expresses itself in bodily form by the clenched fists, scowling brows, closed lips, distended nostrils, and general attitude of attack. These instinctive activities are serviceable to the purpose they would achieve. The fists are clubs to beat down an opponent ; the scowling brows and closed lips protect eyes and teeth ; the distended nostrils enable deep breaths to be taken, and the chest expanded for attack. Sometimes the upper lip is raised to show the canine teeth — a reminiscence of the time when the child's ancestor fiew upon his foe like a wild beast. Distortion of the features by anger is not a beautiful thing to see ; inarticulate cries of rage are dreadful to hear. Both formerly served the purpose of terrifying the foe. In later childhood and in manhood the angry cries of early childhood develop into " bad language ". What is the duty of parents and teachers with regard Developing Instincts in the Child 29 to anger and fighting ? In young children anger often results from a depressed bodily state. Normal health and comfort remove irritability. A bad-tempered child should be watched to see if its bodily health is suffering in any way. It is useless to meet anger with anger. In school-life the teacher who is nervous or irritable will often foster combativeness in the class, whereas brightness and a placid demeanour will go far to smooth ruffled tempers: With normal children the tendency to fight is not aroused except by a sense of injustice. Sweet reasonableness on the teacher's part is the method of curing it. It should not be forgotten, however, that the fighting instinct has its rightful part to play in life. The child as it develops must learn the meaning of competition in order to take a worthy place in the battle of life. Later, at about the age of eight, it begins to take the form of rivalry — the child aspires to be first in work and in play; and, what is more important from the teacher's point of view, combativeness has to be used in resisting the evil and in fostering good within the sphere of character. Thus, in its early stages, the fighting in- stinct is but a crude form of social action adapted to this early period of the child's life ; for by it he learns the method of self-preservation against an opposing world. Some amount of combativeness is necessary to the spiritual well-being of the child, since thereby he makes evil his foe and learns to fight the battle of the soldier of Christ against the world, the flesh, and the devil. It is significant that many of the figures of speech under which the Christian life is portrayed call this fight- ing instinct into activity. We all know the appeal which the picture of St. George in shining armour con- quering the dragon makes to children. The most usual metaphor by which the Confirmation candidate learns the meaning of the rite for himself is that of the young knight going forth to battle, receiving his armour from his King in readiness for the fray. St. Paul in setting 30 Child Study forth the purpose of the Christian life for his converts uses the boxing competitions of Greece as his example (i Cor. IX. 26). The wise teacher will pursue the same method. The fighting instinct subserves self-preservation. It can be spiritualized and used to foster that heavenly prudence which attacks evil lest it destroy the soul. Somewhat akin to the instinct of self-preservation is the Individualistic Instinct. Up to the age of v?du' *^^ ^^ three years there is no distinction made aiistic by the child between the self and the outer world. ^- Only gradually does it learn the difference be- tween " me and mine," between its own person- ality and the world which is constantly coming into relationship with that personality. It is for this reason that the child so far is quite unselfish. It gives as easily as it takes. It will share its own food with the kitten, and just as readily appropriate the kitten's food for itself. There is no feeling of benevolence in its giving, nor any gratitude in receiving. Self and world form a single unity at present. Only gradually does the child learn that the world outside sometimes destroys its comfort by appropriating things which are desirable ; and it learns this through many channels of sense. With the dawning knowledge of this difference be- tween self and not-self, the child ceases to be interested in its toes and fingers as such, and attends more to the results of their actions upon the world in giving pleasure or pain. By the age of four it begins to scheme how to gratify the self which is now clamouring for pleasure. Actions begin to be planned so that their effects may satisfy this desiring self. The child plays with the coal- box which contains mysterious pleasures, if it can only be opened. Some children will calculate how to obtain approval from parents. This is the age when reward follows good action, and the wise parent will not hesitate to cultivate habits of goodness by furnishing suitable rewards therefor, either material, or words of praise. Developing Instincts in the Child 31 The child is wrapped up in its own self — a wise pro- vision of nature for allowing the development of person- ality. Up to the tenth year this selfishness persists. The good things of life are sought because they foster individuality. The sweet-shop holds an important place in the child's world during this period, and covetous desires are strong. Competition becomes rivalry in sport and school- work. The " collecting instinct " is used for gathering cigarette cards, marbles, and the stamps which are used to encourage attendance. No prize is more valuable than the first that the child wins, because it is the guarantee of pre-eminence of the self To be captain of a football or cricket team, to excel in games, to be at the head of the class, to have as a friend some well-known person remarkable for strength or skill — all these are at their root selfish, and minister to the individualistic instinct. Note how often the structure of sentences at this age begins with the first personal pronoun : I can do this or that ; my property is best ; my father, my mother, my uncle are the most important people in the world. This tendency persists through life. Alexander Smith once wrote an essay entitled '' On the Importance of a Man to Himself". The individualistic instinct is the foundation of that " proper pride " which, conventional though it be, has yet saved many a person from falling into gross faults of character. To ''play the man" is a real ground of appeal both in the things that belong to this world and in the things that are of the Spirit. A healthy state and a healthy church must have as mem- bers people who will dare "to be themselves," to show their individuality. The moment will come when the individualistic instinct must be subordinated to the good of the community ; but in a healthy normal child who shares the common life of school-companionships it is desirable that the full play of individuality should be checked rather by the pressure of this common life than 32 Child Study by a set of stringent rules for conduct imposed by authority. Some rules, of course, there must be, but they will be as few as possible consistent with good discipline, and will not seek to impose artificial restrictions upon the proper development of individuality. A martinet discipline creates machines, not men and women — ruffians or rebels, not self-disciplined characters. The bully is not thwarted by stern rules, but by careful watchfulness on the teacher's part ; he has to be checked by authority from carrying his individualistic tendencies to extremes. The weakling, who will not exercise his individuality as he ought because of fear, must be en- couraged by authority and praised for the efforts he makes. Defect of the instinct is as much to be deplored as its excess : the namby-pamby child is hardly less of a horror than the bully. Both have faults of character which can only be corrected by watchful and wise teachers, who will treat these faults by methods that appeal to school-life, and not by fixed rules. In this way each case will have individual consideration. By means of the instinct of self-preservation the child Use of learns to live and to find a place in the world In- where he can go on living despite hindrances ; stincts ^g individualistic instinct enables him to de- ligious velop his personality to its full extent, i.e. to Train- live his own life as a human being. Is there, *"^* then, any use for these instincts in religious train- ing? 1. The Self-preserving Instinct — We have seen that the three chief factors in this instinct are Feeding, Fear, and Fighting. We shall consider these in this order. {a) Feeding. — The tendency of the child to seek those things that satisfy its hunger, and at the same time give pleasant taste, can be used to foster its knowledge of, and dependence upon God as " the Giver of all good things". Since it so happens that the child's capacity for enjoyment develops until it reaches its climax at about the age of six years, we have here a guide for Developing Instincts in the Child 33 directing its thoughts Godwards more and more in prayer for a continuance of blessings, and in gratitude for those supplied. The child's requests for good things should be made the ground for teaching it prayerfulness ; while its thanks to parents should be used daily for teaching gratitude to God as the Dispenser of " the blessings of this life ". This is not only the natural method, but it is also the only reasonable method of teaching the child love to the Heavenly Father for all His goodness. (b) Fear. — This is more difficult to employ usefully, and needs tact and skill. The best and most fruitful method of employing fear is to make it teach lessons of Divine protection and deep reverence. Thus the child who is afraid of the dark will be taught that God is in the dark- ness to protect, just as much as in the light ; that He sends the darkness for the good of all creatures — " birds, and beasts, and flowers soon will be asleep," and will not fear because God keeps them all, and little children with them. Just as He sends the darkness, so He will " lighten our darkness " with to-morrow's glorious sun- shine which we shall like all the better when sleep has refreshed us to enjoy it ; and there is nothing to fear in darkness since there is always safety with God and the angels watching to keep us free from harm. Then the child's thoughts should be more and more touched to reverence for the God Who always sees in the darkness as in the light. Who so wisely orders day and night for our good, and Who keeps us safe when we sleep as when we wake. Towards the end of infancy fear should be further used in teaching the child to avoid wrong-doing. Again there is a difficulty in applying the instinct without at the same time letting it result in terror or in callousness. Probably the best way is to make use of those material things which the child fears because they do it harm, make it suffer pain, when touched or handled. The kitten scratches, the dog growls and bites, wasps and bees 3 34 Child Study sting, fire burns. When the child is old enough to know their harmful properties, and to realize that pain is the natural consequence of disobedience to parents' orders, the idea should be transferred to God's orders. God's orders are like parents' orders in that they are for the child's good, to prevent him from suffering pain. All wrong-doing must, therefore, be made painful in its effects, at first physically, then morally. The parent will show sympathy with the child's suffering, but will at the same time show grief rather than anger at the dis- obedience which has caused the suffering. The sight of a grieved mother is often much more efficacious to pre- vent repetition of wrong than the scolding and smacks which come from anger, though in early stages these must be sometimes employed with other punishments to teach fear of disobedience. But by concentrating the child's thoughts more and more upon the wrong of its acts of disobedience, instead of upon the resulting pain, the moral and religious side of the child's nature receives training. It learns to fear wrong-doing not so much from physical consequences to itself, as from the knowledge that its act is likely to wound another whose goodness is shown in so many ways, and whom it would be cowardly to hurt. This attitude towards wrong-doing once secured in the child, it can readily be turned God wards, and the tendency to evil be checked by the fear of grieving the good God. This surely is the desirable way in which to train the child to regard sin and evil. W Fighting. — As the combative tendency is useful to the preservation of the child's own life, so it can be turned to good effect in moral ways in strengthening the child's will to resist evil. Anger in all its degrees lies at the root of the fighting tendency, and it is often necessary for anger to rise in order that a child may be courageous. But the child's anger is very often unreasonable ; it is vented on things, as well as persons, that give pain. It can therefore be used at a very early stage in teaching the child not only to avoid but to resist hurtful things, in fostering Developing Instincts in the Child 35 courage to endure pain when pain comes, and in reveal- ing to the child that there are many things in life that ought to be regarded as inimical. Among such things will be those that tempt the child to wrong-doing, and so bring grief to others. The attractiveness of these things will then come to be regarded as harmful, and so will be resisted by an effort of will since they cause ** moral pain " to the child through the suffering they cause to others. It is by gradually attaching this moral pain to things that tempt the child that he learns to fight the battle of right against wrong, to actively " resist evil " whenever and in whatsoever attractive form it may appear. But further, as the child learns the meaning of being Christ's soldier, its fighting proclivities must be used to attack evil without as well as within. The courage that stands up against unseemly language and rebukes its user is only a higher degree of the same courage that rescues an animal or a human being from woes that have come upon them. The combative instinct is protective in such cases, and it can be strengthened by enlisting its aid on behalf of weakness and helplessness. Further, it must be remembered that there is such a thing as righteous indignation against the cause of suffering, and that the will can be strengthened to active effort first to check and then to attempt the removal of this cause. In such ways does the child learn the real meaning of Christian ministry — the ministry that was Christ's Who said, " For their sakes I sanctify Myself". The full development of this necessarily comes later in life than childhood when combativeness is more self-centred ; but it ought to be kept in view throughout early training and made use of when opportunity occurs. 2. The Individualistic Instinct. — Those tendencies that lead the child to express his own individuality have already been traced from selfish origins to their issue in self-discipline which brings out the best that is in us. This development is from the unrestrained to the re- 3* 36 Child Study strained, from the lower to the higher, from the physical to the moral, from the natural to the spiritual. Actions done in early years out of regard for material well-being, in later life are done for the sake of others. The selfish child learns to become subject to discipline for the sake of others as important as itself In early life the individ- ualistic instinct makes the child regard God's love and care as being exerted simply to enable it to acquire all good things for itself Its prayers are concerned very largely with those things that are regarded as personal goods. It desires to appropriate as many blessings as possible. But as it finds a world in which other people's welfare is closely connected with its own, so its prayers can, and ought to be, extended as knowledge widens. Similarly there are found to be limits to the things which a child can look upon as its personal property. It may not take other people's belongings indiscriminately. It learns the self-discipline of contentment — a moral quality which makes it able to endure being thwarted and dis- appointed without falling into despair ; and here we find the beginnings of that courage of soul which can be fostered into real self-denial for the sake of others, lead- ing on to self-denial for the sake of God. Such small acts of self-denial as are possible to a child are by no means easy to carry through, though they will be entered upon with great enthusiasm. It must be the aim of the child's parent or teacher to encourage the child to plan them for itself, and then to give sufficient stimulus to set the will to complete them when planned. A boy or girl of six years will often plan to keep Lent in some little way. Probably after a few days the idea will grow weak ; but at the first signs of weakening the will must be stimulated to make it persist in carrying out the original resolution. This can be done by recalling the reasons for making it, by showing approval of the child who keeps his word, and by expressing disapproval of any suggestion to brgak it. The purpose is to train the child to habits of will, habits of endurance and self- Developing Instincts in the Child 2>1 discipline, and to teach it to regard these habits as among the best things in life. For it is true that habits of goodness are not only good in themselves, but they check and hinder worse things by giving them no opportunity to develop. Every ap- pearance of a motive that makes for self-discipline should be noticed and its growth encouraged by the parents' approval. Thus the will is given that *' gratuitous ex- ercise " which Prof. James has taught us to regard as the foundation of a strong character. And not only should the parents* approval be affixed to this persistent action of the child's will, but in order that it may be shown to have a spiritual value the child should be taught that God approves of it likewise. In this way the moral qualities of consideration for others, acting for their interests, forgetting self in another's needs, acting unselfishly towards relatives and companions, re- pressing cowardice and arrogance, and generally of try- ing to live a larger life than a selfish person does, can be made to take the colouring of religion without making the child a prig. It is this colouring which makes morality a spiritual thing, and gives the child an idea of the character of God as well as an idea of His personality. When the child begins so to live as to try to please God by a self-disciplined life, then that life be- comes the practical expression of a personal religion. Thus from early years the child may learn that religion is not something extra to life, something which belongs to Sundays and not to weekdays, but efforts and actions and habits of will performed day by day for the purpose of pleasing God — in other words, that religion is life lived for God. In this way the personality of the child reaches its highest possible development in producing a God- governed, self-disciplined individual who by his training acts habitually in the ways that God demands. Thus the individualistic instinct is used to subserve the training of a religious personality. V. WONDER, CURIOSITY, INTEREST, ATTENTION. Plato called wonder '' the parent of knowledge," inas- much as by it the mind is directed from one der!" object to another in order to gain new impressions, just as a bee wanders from flower to flower to gather honey. Wonder is concerned with the exterior qualities of new and unusual objects. Every child mani- fests it within a few months of birth. The baby staring at the bright light of a sunbeam, or gazing into its mother's face, or turning its head to find the cause of an unwonted sound, or feeling surprised at the soft touch of the cat's fur upon its outstretched hand, is actuated by wonder. Surprise probably begets this feeling in the first place — surprise at the manifold unknown objects in the child's environment and the different qualities they possess. No thought-process accompanies wonder beyond an elementary response of the mind to a new impression. Wonder might in fact be regarded as a mere feeling of " whatness " towards the objects of the outside world. Its effect is seen in the instinctive play of the sense-organs over those exterior objects in order to gain new impressions from them. Thus wonder serves to direct the instinctive activities of a child in such a way that clear-cut, definite sensations are obtained, and memories of these sensations registered for future use. We never quite lose this simple feeling of wonder. A cloud of unusual shape floating across the sky, a sudden loud report, a knock from a golf-ball unperceived 38 Wonder, Curiosity, Interest, Attention 39 in its flight, have power to make us wonder for an in- stant by the surprise they generate in us. But the wonder is like that of a young child, merely momentary ; the feeling in later life passes almost instantaneously into something more intellectual as we ask ourselves, What's that? But for some months the baby cannot ask itself this question in any way. It must go on being surprised and wondering at the many new things which the world contains. Watch a baby of say ten months playing with a silver rattle as it sits in a high chair at a table. For a moment it shakes the rattle, knocks it on the table, then holds it still a moment to look at a door opening, then another knock, a glance at the cat walking across the room, a look at mother, and so on, all in the space of a minute or so. Every new sensation makes some im- pression upon the tiny brain, and the wandering of the various sense-organs to catch these impressions is the result of the child's feeling of wonder. Of course there will be many a return to the same thing until the striking qualities of that thing are known, and then it loses its capacity for exciting wonder in the child. Thus the condition upon which wonder is kept alive is novelty, change. As soon as the novelty wears off, as soon as change gives place to sameness, wonder dies. To keep the feeling alive in older children who come to school the teacher must be prepared to give much care to pro- viding plenty of striking objects and pictures for illustra- tions of lessons, and in later years must seek for new methods of treating well-worn subjects. Curiosity has been called ' intellectual wonder '. It is curiosity that rivets the gaze upon a small cloud floating in the sky to see if it may be an aero- 5^""°' plane. It is curiosity that prompts a child who has seen the gas lit by a match to try the experiment of striking matches in an odd corner. It is curiosity that furthers all inquiry into causes of things, and forces a child to ask the questions that no philosopher can answer, 40 Child Study be he never so wise. What is a butterfly made of? How tall is an angel ? Are the stars holes in heaven ? These are some instances of 'intellectual wonder'. Not always, however, are the questions expressed in words. In the case of the motor child they are seldom asked if any kind of activity on the part of the child will supply the answer. Curiosity here takes the form of getting at the inside of things to find their hidden properties. The destructiveness of some children is an instance of the working of curiosity. A small girl pro- ceeds to undress her new doll to find how like she is to herself; her brother cuts the doll open to find the squeaker. Nothing is sacred from the prying eyes and ready hands of curiosity. A double contrast between wonder and curiosity is thus presented : (i) whereas the former is constantly seek- ing fresh objects, the latter aims rather to know the old thoroughly before passing on to the new ; and (ii) while wonder is satisfied by receiving impressions from the outside of things, curiosity always seeks to know their inner nature and is not content with mere surface-know- ledge. Thus the pictures in a book which wonder prompts a young child to turn over rapidly because they are bright in colour, retain the curiosity of an older child who wishes to know what they are about, the various details composing them, and their relation to the letter- press. Curiosity therefore always presupposes some experience of an object, while it purposes to add to that experience. So long as an object can exhibit new pro- perties, so long will the curiosity of a child be attracted to it. It is not necessary for the teacher of a class older than babies to find new objects for every lesson ; for as soon as wonder has become intellectual, as soon, that is, as the child is able to see that the commonest things possess properties which they are ready to reveal to curious minds, then the teacher will do well to make use of these things in order to stimulate curiosity and keep it alive and alert Wonder, Curiosity, Interest, Attention 41 Curiosity, therefore, is an instinct which lies at the foundation of the process of discovery. The attraction of the unknown stimulates the activity covery. to pry into it, just as the call of the desert or of the snows is felt by the adventurous traveller, and makes him equip his expedition to explore its mysteries. It is the incentive to knowledge without which man would be content with just as few ideas as the world brought to him ; but shice he possesses it he must for ever search to satisfy it. Not indeed that the search will ever be ended with perfect satisfaction in this world ; he must wait " until he knows even as he is known ". But meanwhile, just because he is endowed with this instinct, he presses on to a goal at an infinite distance away under the stimulus of this instinct. By it he seeks for likenesses among things that differ, and gathers together *' things new and old" in his search for truth, thus getting to know the unfamiliar by relating new aspects of it to his former experiences. In this way he constantly enlarges the bounds of his knowledge, even though in so doing he quenches his curiosity by satisfying it. Yet from the larger knowledge thus obtained there are many more directions which his curiosity prompts him to follow, so that in the very act of satisfying it he is able to renew its youth and to keep his intellect active. Curiosity is like the phoenix rising new-born from its ashes. But we must now pass from the instinct of curiosity to consider the feeling of Interest which objects intcr- and ideas create in the human mind. A child est. of a year old cannot but be interested in the preparation of its food. A little later it begins to know that being dressed means going for a walk with mother or nurse, and manifests excitement accordingly. Then a variety of objects within its environment are found to have charms of their own, and arouse the child's interest in them. Interest thus accompanies wonder, and later directs the child's curiosity to attempt discovery of hidden properties. It cannot be too strongly realized 42 Child Study by the teacher that the feeling of interest is thus " spon- taneous," that it is first called into play by objects in the external world, and that these objects continue to foster it for several years, in fact that never do they wholly lose their power over the human being. This spon- taneous type of interest must therefore be utilized to the full during the early years of school-life by providing in the school-environment such things as will foster it. Further, it is an educational maxim that lessons to young children must always awaken spontaneous interest from the ''Introduction"; and this is best secured by using some attractive object or picture at the outset. In later years spontaneous or direct interest is to some extent replaced by "derived" or "indirect" interest. An instance from adult life would be where the student of Roman history takes up the study of coins in order to gain more light upon his subject. He is directly interested in Roman history, but in coins only so far as they increase his knowledge of that subject, i.e. his inter- est in them is derived or indirect. Young children show much the same characteristics; for example, they will try to do tasks in themselves uninviting, provided that there is a reward of some kind to be obtained after successful efforts. Hence the value of a well-kept mark system, at any rate during the early years of school-life ; in later years, when children are more ready to be interested in a subject for its own sake, the mark system may well disappear, and with it rewards and prizes. The same method applies to the use of the story- form in teaching. In early years children are deeply interested in stories as such ; their interest is direct. Only indirectly can they be interested in the doctrinal or practical application of them. Hence at this age the moral will not be too strongly pressed. But as children grow older the place and purpose of the story as a method of instruction are changed ; it is now to be used as an illustration of some difficult or uninteresting theme, rather than to be made the foundation of the Wonder, Curiosity, Interest, Attention 43 lesson-method ; it will exemplify and apply the doctrinal part, giving to abstract truth a concrete expression. The period in which this alteration of method is possible is during the pupil's transition through the junior school. The change will necessarily be gradual, since it means the drawing away of the child's direct interest from the attractive story to the truth underlying it. This, how- ever, is the real aim of the teacher — to win direct interest to truth — and the method employed must be made to subserve this aim. There is always a danger lest this aim should become obscured ; lest the child's direct interest should j^^^^^. be retained too long by the method of the lesson est and and fail to pass on to the more important under- Amuse- lying truth which must be taught. In other words, amusement is apt to take the place of interest. How are the two to be distinguished ? Mainly by the fact that whereas an interested child puts forth effort, an amused child is simply passive. An interested person always makes use of his interest in some way, either to improve his knowledge, or to achieve some other result ; an amused person looks upon life for the time being as a pastime, and does nothing with it except to be entertained pleasantly. No lesson should be merely amusing ; effort- ful interest should be stimulated until some activity of niind or body takes place. It is possible to test this at any moment in a lesson by a sharply directed question or two calling for exercise of thought on the pupil's part. Occasionally one child will be selected for this exercise, at another time the questions will be distributed over two or three members of the class. When interest is hard to win a change of method will often prove effective ; thus, if the teacher has been doing much of the talking, it may be well to ask one of the class to continue a description, or possibly a small amount of writing can be substituted for oral work so as to lessen the tension of listening. At the close of the lesson the amount and value of "expression work" done by a 44 Child Study class is a good test of the interest which the lesson has evoked. Some notice will be given by teachers to what is called "the curve of interest". This curve varies somewhat for different people ; but it has certain well-marked phases for the generality. In every lesson that is given the curve rises to its highest points through the interesting features, and sinks again when uninteresting points are dealt with, or when children are tired. Changes of teach- ing method cause the curve to rise, while monotonous treatment of a subject must cause it to fall. While a story is told the curve rises until the climax is reached, and then falls rapidly while the moral is drawn out. Similarly there are certain subjects which cause the curve to rise, e.g. stories like that of David and Goliath ; and others which cause it to fall, e.g. definitions which are to be learnt by heart. It is possible to plot out a child's curve of interest in both the Old and New Testaments. In the former it will rise from the early narratives in the Book of Genesis until the end of the stories in the Books of Samuel ; then it will rise and fall with the varying interest of the events re- corded in Kings and Chronicles ; and finally it will sink when the prophetical books are read. In the New Testament the curve rises through the Gospel story, but begins to sink in Acts, continues to fall through the Epistles, and rises again with parts of the Apocalypse. Such curves form a rough guide to the materials in which a child is naturally interested. In order to learn a child must *'pay attention " to the subject in hand. It has already been shown that tioiT." attention follows the lead of interest ; and atten- tion may therefore be defined as interest directed to mind-effort. The human-mind is so constituted that, except when we are in deep sleep, we must attend to something or other. As soon as curiosity is stirred, inter- est begins its work and attention follows. During the early years of child-life long-continued and concentrated attention is impossible ; weariness soon ensues upon Wonder, Curiosity, Interest, Attention 45 effort and the mind seeks relief in following some new line of interest. Hence the need for short lessons in junior classes, for variety of subjects and for variety of treatment. The kindergarten teacher needs to possess much sympathy with the waywardness of child-life, as well as consider- able adaptability to meet new circumstances, if she is to be successful. As the child grows older its power of attention grows also, and training in habits of attention will foster this growth. The lessons will gradually be lengthened, closer attention will be demanded, and the child's efforts will be put to increasing exertion as it passes through the higher classes of the school. In addition, voluntary attention, i.e. attention which calls for exercise of will, will be more and more employed to give this training. We have seen that there are two kinds of interest, direct and indirect ; we see now that there are also tw® kinds of attention corresponding to them. That which corresponds with direct interest follows the course of the entrancing story simply because it is entrancing. With this the teacher finds no difficulty. All that is necessary is to know the story, to arrange it methodically before- hand, and then to recount it to the class in a graphic manner with suitable aids, such as objects, models, pictures or blackboard work. Provided that the teacher is inter- ested in the subject there is not much difficulty in interest- ing the class. The early narratives of the Old Testament and the various incidents of the Gospels are capable of winning such immediate attention because their appeal is to the direct interest of the class. But when the less interesting parts of the Bible have to be taught, or the moral has to be pointed, or the definitions of the Catechism have to be learnt by heart, as they must be sometime, then attention must be won to them by in- teresting teaching methods which require much more thought on the teacher's part to prepare, i.e., by appeal- to indirect interest. A teacher's skill is best shown in making uninteresting facts live for children through care- 46 Child Study carefully thought-out devices and illustrations which will secure attention while pressing home important under- lying truths and their application to life. Much of the art of teaching lies here, and no part of the teacher's work so strikingly shows the difference between an artist and an artisan as the ability to retain interest in a subject naturally uninteresting. But there must be no confusion in the mind of the teacher between " interest " which wins effort of attention and *' amusement" that merely serves to distract attention from important issues. In the former, the instinct of curiosity is awakened and controlled to produce specially directed mental effort on the child's part ; in the latter, wonder flutters amiably from object to object butterfly-like, attracted by some novel quality, but having gazed and sipped the sweets it starts on the sunshine path once more without accomplish- ing much lasting good. The serious business of teaching demands that the teacher should ask himself of any method which he wishes to employ : Is this method likely to call forth the effort- ful interest of my pupils, or will it end simply in amusing them ? Will they respond to it by trying to learn that which I wish to teach, and which, without this method, they would not be inclined to learn ? As teachers we are bound to appeal to child-nature to find what the child wishes to learn and the methods by which his interest can be obtained ; we cannot afford to ignore the nature which we are called upon to instruct and train. As teachers of religion we believe that our work is necessary to the well-being of children, and we may not soothe our souls with the comforting assurance that something else than the uninteresting Catechism, or the hardly more in- teresting application of a lesson to life, " will do just as well ". To read a story, or tell a tale, or discuss a foot- ball match, during the short time that can be devoted to teaching religion, is not only an amiable confession of weakness on the teacher's part but a serious loss to the children who are present for another purpose than this. Wonder, Curiosity, Interest, Attention 47 It substitutes amusement for interest, it cultivates the taste for mere pastime and destroys the moral quality of effort which ought to be used in gaining a hold upon truth. There is a legitimate use for these things, but not during the lesson-time. When we have to resort to them as substitutes for teaching, then it is time to ask ourselves whether we are really alive to our mission, and if we are taking all the trouble we might take in thinking out our teaching-methods upon a real doctrine of child interest ; for this must in every case call forth responsive efforts from the child to meet our own. Again we see the necessity of learning from the child in this matter, for if we are to obtain attention to what we teach it must be along the line of the child's interests, not by compulsion from outside them. VI. THE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-ACTIVITY. Every form of life manifests activity of some kind as it progresses from the simple to the more complex. The seed under suitable conditions of warmth and moisture increases in bulk as it begins to germinate. The plant grows in size as it puts forth life more complex in form than that of the seed from which it sprang. The lower animals, inasmuch as their life is more complex than the life of a plant, show activities that are more varied ; but as they have comparatively few needs beyond those which their natural environment readily supplies, and since they quickly adapt themselves to their environment, the range of their activities is far less than those of human beings. Man has not only to adapt himself to environment, but also to make environment conform to his thoughts and feelings and will. Consequently, though like the lower animals he must first learn how to adapt himself to his environment sufficiently to preserve his life, yet in order to live a truly human life he must be able and willing so far to modify his environment as to make it minister to his well-being, to satisfy all the higher desires which raise him above the level of the brutes. But while the activity of a tree is limited to growth, and while the activity of the lower animals is largely devoted to acquiring size and strength, and only to a small extent to acquiring skill, the activities of man are mainly directed to attaining skill, at any rate after the first few years of existence. Life is more complex in man than in any other creature. The same organs and 48 The Principle of Self-Activity 49 muscles must therefore perform many more activities for man than for the lower animals. The hand, which the monkey uses to grasp a nut and convey it to its mouth, for man has to perform not only such an office but a thousand other things, from grasping a smith's hammer to wielding the brush of a Raphael along lines that by their beauty will express his mind and spirit to after ages. Strength is of course needful to every human being, but skill is mdre desirable to enable him to live a human life. It is hardly to be wondered at therefore that nature should provide tree and animal and human being with an endowment suited to the special form of life which each exhibits, and which shall enable them to produce the highest possible results in that life. This endowment is called " the Principle of Self-activity ". It exists in every kind of sentient life in some form, in its highest form in human beings. Its purpose is a double one in animals and man, viz. to assist growth and to make for develop- ment. Growth means increase of size and strength; development means increase of power to use size and strength. A baby grows by stretching its limbs, kicking its heels on the bottom of the cradle, throwing its arms and legs about as it lies on the floor, stretching its hands and body to reach an object, and so forth ; and it per- forms all these actions in accordance with the principle of self-activity. Young animals grow in much the same way ; a kitten or a puppy gains strength for its legs by using them. But in the case of the lower animals, the strength once gained, there is but little further exercise of it for the purpose of gaining additional skill. An in- telligent dog will use his strength to scratch a hole in the ground where he may hide a bone. Horses have been known to unbolt the stable door in order to get a better feed in an adjoining field. But such instances are rare and we always regard them as exceptional. The human being on the other hand constantly uses his strength in new ways, and unless he does so we regard him as ab- 4 50 Child Study normal. Hence to develop a full human life the prin- ciple of self-activity must find its greatest scope in man. In a healthy animal the exercise of this power is always Self A pleasurable. The baby crows and laughs when tivityand it performs its baby exercises. A kitten runs Plea- after a paper ball because the activity is pleasant. ^^^' A puppy bites and jumps at one's hand' because this exercise is a delight. We call all such pleasure-giv- ing self-activity Play. The play instinct is a natural char- acteristic of young animals and young children. It used to be thought that play consisted of the expenditure of surplus energy. There is no doubt that the energy of the young is very great ; but inasmuch as pleasure is experi- enced in all forms of self-activity, it seems that the only limit to the playfulness of children is the feeling of weariness which ensues upon expenditure of energy in play. There seems no place therefore for surplus energy, and we are bound to look for a theory of play in other directions. If we observe the play of a kitten we shall see that it Play- goes through exactly the same actions in trying activity, to catch a paper ball as the cat does in catching a mouse. In other words, what was play in the kitten serves a useful purpose for a cat. Similarly the puppy as it bites and jumps at the hand held out performs actions which will be serviceable in after days when fighting other dogs. In the child's play its actions to gain strength, stretching, kicking, waving its arms, and shouting, are again the actions that will be of use in later life. The activities of play are practices for the later activities of work which makes use of the same muscles in performing similar actions but with a different purpose in view. In other cases early play is prepara- tory for later play, and later play for work ; but pleasure always accompanies the play activity, and it is t/ie ac- tivity itself which is sought in play rather than any pur- pose which the activity may accomplish. Play differs from work therefore in that in work the end is looked to as likely to give pleasure after the activity to achieve it is The Principle of Self- Activity 51 finished, but in play the activity itself is regarded as plea- surable. This can be seen by noticing the difference be- tween an amateur and professional cyclist. The former enjoys the cycling apart from any other reward ; the latter finds his chief pleasure, not in the activity, but in the re- ward for speed — the activity is work more or less enjoy- able according to circumstances. The same action may thus be either play or work. A small boy will go a long way to ring a door bell and to avoid the consequences ; the same boy finds it troublesome to ring the same bell when it means taking a message for mother, and may only do so to keep in mother's good books. As a rule, however, all forms of exercise are pleasurable to young children by reason of the great principle of self-activity which un- derlies their nature. The play-instinct shows a general line of development through life. In early years it is chiefly concerned with exercising the largest muscle-groups of body, arms, and legs. No fine adjustments are needed as yet to accommo- date the young child to his environment ; he only needs to grow and gain strength. A baby's play is in the largest sense free and unrestrained ; the whole body is concerned in it, and no control is exercised over its movements be- cause control is unnecessary. From the age of two to four years the play begins to be purposive to some extent. The child can now walk well and has fairly strong arms, so that to move and carry things from place to place is a joy. Helping mother to dust a room, or father to dig the garden affords scope for further exercise and greater pleasure since there is some aim to the activity. What struggles there are over heavy chairs and large plant-pots, which must be moved to satisfy the principle of self- activity ! As the idea of purpose develops, so does the quality of the actions performed. Play becomes more refined, more skilful, requires more precise muscular adjustment, brings into exercise the smaller muscle-groups to obtain the accuracy necessary to attain the end desired. The 4* 52 Child Study chair that was simply moved must be put in a certain position ; the plant-pots that were just carried from one place to another must be arranged in a certain way ; a box of bricks is capable of similar arrangement ; skittles are set up ; soldiers are moved into lines ; and in a hundred other ways the smaller muscles of arms, hands, and fingers are exercised to accurate movements to accomplish some particular aim in view. A little later, at five or six years, still more delicate adjustments of these smaller muscles are attempted, as for instance in drawing pictures of animals, men, trees, and engines ; in crayoning outline forms with suitable colours ; throwing a stone at a mark ; trying to hit a ball with a stick or to kick it in a certain direction ; sewing with needle and cotton, etc. All such attempts fail at first to achieve their aim ; but greater exactness comes with repetition of the experiments, until at length a certain skill is obtained. It can be seen from the foregoing examples that the more purposive play becomes, the greater is the skill necessary ; and the greater the skill, the greater is the intellectual factor involved in it. Thus as the play activity pursues its way through childhood, the mind uses formerly acquired strength and skill in evolving more complex forms of play. Several successive sets of actions are undertaken to achieve a single purpose. Thus a child of eight will seek for a cane, a piece of string, an umbrella wire, and a piece of cardboard in order to make a bow and arrow and a target wherewith to try his skill as an archer. Or he will gather together an old box, a piece of coloured cloth and his sister's dolls to make a theatre. Similarly a girl will go through the elaborate process of dressing and undressing all her dolls in order that they may go to sleep properly. Or she will take a delight in the laborious preparations for a doll's tea-party, and in properly clearing away after- wards. Every one knows the delight of playing at " shop," and the careful reckonings that are made. Even The Principle of Self- Activity 53 the ** quiet " child is self-active enough to find pleasure in being the shopman and in dealing on principles of strict honesty. A lump of clay or plasticine is an endless source of pleasure between the ages of six and eight years, and with very little instruction the child learns to model quite well. After the age of eight or nine the child's intellect develops rapidly, and the play-instinct both makes use of it in new games and helps in its development by putting it to new exercises. Games involving some amount of guessing are now attractive. Thus the first and last letters of a word are given, a number of crosses standing for the missing letters which have to be supplied. Arrangements of noughts and crosses within squares are made by two opponents alternately, the purpose of each being to get them into straight lines and to prevent the other from doing so. Riddles are fascinating, and puzzles likewise. All these things provide practice for energies that will be service- able one day in the more practical problems of life. At the same time that these quieter forms of the play- activity are occupying attention and developing skill, other games are coming into prominence which provide for strength to be exercised. Cricket and football, races, athletics of all kinds gain a place in a boy's life; while somewhat less violent forms of the same muscular exercises are adopted by girls as their feminine equivalents, e.g. net-ball, hockey, skipping. At first they are indulged in simply out of a feeling of rivalry, the player wishing to surpass his fellows in strength, or speed, or endurance. With the development of the social instinct and its use in school and club life, the feeling of rivalry, though it never quite dies out, becomes subordinated more and more to the desire for co-operation with others to obtain a victory for the club. This again involves more of the intellectual element being imported into the game, since tactics often achieve more than individual prowess. So that even here skill 54 Child Study comes to take the place of strength, and the mode of play becomes a training serviceable to the activities of work done later in and for society. But once again let us notice that in the play it is the activity itself which gives pleasure all the time that it continues, whereas in the work done in later life it is mainly the pleasure of the good result to be achieved at length that prompts a person to undergo the toil and hardship necessary to obtain it. In middle and later life play becomes more and more recreative and recuperative as work demands Recrea- jj^q^q ^nd more of concentrated energy for its accomplishment. It then takes the form of change of energy. Thus the clerk tied to his office all day spends his leisure in some form of bodily exertion, such as walking or gardening. The business man turns his attention to billiards or cards perhaps. The manual worker finds recreation in newspapers or books or in watching other people play football matches. Not superfluous energy, but some alternate form of using his energy, is the principle on which he acts in selecting his recreation at this period of life. In old age the play activity gradually ceases, declining perhaps through some form of quiet amusement, until it at length departs altogether ; and with its departure the principle of self- activity dies away also, and then bodily life itself comes to an end. We have dealt at length with the play- form of self- Educa- activity because of its prominence in childhood, tional and because it must be made use of in the educa- Uses. tion of children to some extent at least in early years. The young child learns through play : the very purpose of play is, as we have seen, to fit it for later life. To take away from educational method such a powerful factor in life is to deprive the child of a great source of joy in learning, and to dispense with a great teaching aid. Rather must it be the teacher's aim to turn it to good ac- count in the kindergarten, and by means of it to take away The Principle of Self- Activity 55 the feeling of drudgery from needful effort which the child must make in order to learn. Similarly as play develops in complexity and becomes more social in its nature the teacher will use it to lead the child to solve difficulties for himself as far as may be, and to impart that moral sense which is involved in the phrase " playing the game ". It is a fine stimulus to right action, and a great incentive to doing tasks that call for extraordinary or long-continued efforts of will, as well as perhaps some considerable amount of self-sacrifice. In later life the play-activity takes useful forms in pursuing interests and hobbies which, if they do nothing else, serve the purpose of keep- ing men and women out of mischief in their spare time, and direct their minds to higher things. But the principle of self-activity works in other ways also besides that of play. As soon as attention is fixed upon the end to be achieved rather than upon the pleasurable performance of reaching it, the activity be- gins to take the form of work ; and in this sense children begin to work at an early age. It is astonishing what pains they will be at to accomplish a desired result, carry- ing heavy loads piecemeal in quantities suited to their strength, arranging and rearranging details in the scheme, putting themselves to great labour in fixing up the pre- liminaries. All that is necessary from the child's point of view is that the end of the work should be considered possible of achievement, and that the pleasure of anticipa- tion should be strong enough to make the child venture and then to induce the effort necessary at various stages. This work-activity is thus also as real a factor in child-nature as play-activity: indeed it is hard to dis- tinguish the point at which play ends and work begins. Were there no pleasure in activity, there would be no such thing as play: were there no pleasurable anticipation of an end, work would never be undertaken. The one passes into the other by gradations — it is only from the point of view of the individual undertaking them that they are distinguishable. It is quite possible that what 56 Child Study to one person would be play, to another would be work, and vice versa. But on the whole we may regard that as play which brings most pleasure to the process of doing it, and that as work which finds most pleasure in the end to be achieved. This consideration throws considerable light upon the ^ j^ transition from kindergarten methods to those and more suited to older children. While the training P^^^- of children in early years has to make use of play- activity, the teacher will not fail to let it be seen that certain results, pleasurable to the child, are thereby accomplished. Thus some such remark at the end of a kindergarten lesson as : There, now you know all about this or that, or. What a good piece of work you have done to-day, will throw stress upon the result attained, and prompt the child to effort in other directions to obtain similar results. In this way the work-activity is stimu- lated, and the child learns to take a higher view of his efforts and of his own worth as a useful human being. All this can be done in the kindergarten. As the child passes through the middle and senior grades of the school the teacher will throw more and more emphasis upon the value of the child's person and work — upon the results he can achieve by steady persevering effort both for himself and for his fellows — and so win him from the nearer and more transient pleasure of play to the more remote and enduring pleasure which comes from serious toil to ac- complish a definite purpose which when fulfilled will be a lasting benefit and an abiding joy. The bearing of this upon the child's religious training is evident. While in early years the Sunday tion.*^^' kindergarten must, in common with the day-school kindergarten, make use of the play-activity of childhood to begin the task of religious teaching, yet from the first attention must be called to the work accomplished through play — work which shows itself in the child's increasing knowledge of spiritual facts and in the application of these facts to his developing The Principle of Self-Activity 57 spiritual life. Then in the years that follow the teacher will emphasize these two sides of the child's religious training increasingly, his purpose being to make the child desirous to know spiritual facts for their own high worth as knowledge and wisdom, and desirous to apply them to life because they give lasting benefit and abiding joy to those who carry them out in action and character. In this way the motives which a child has for learning re- ligious truths will be deepened and strengthened; for these motives will gradually cease to be connected with the transient pleasures associated with the play-activity, and will be allied with efforts of will to accomplish per- manent results in shaping moral character through toil and struggle. So will religious knowledge pass onwards into spiritual activity shaped by faith in God and by effort to accomplish His will, and the common life of the child of man will glow with the glory of the child of God. The self-activity which is thus worked into spiritual action prevents religion from becoming sentimental and mawkish. Delight in outward forms and ritual, in stories of heroism, and admiration of Christian characters wheresoever exemplified, must be used to stimulate the child to imitation of them in order that they may pro- duce results that are practical. It is the practical religious life of the growing child — his spiritual activities — that we must awaken and sustain. Otherwise there will be plenty of "good intentions," but failure of "resolutions," and we shall have substituted "religious- ness " for " religion ". The child is open to receive our teaching, and to carry it out in obedience to command, or along the line of suggestion. The latter is the wider path, because it leaves larger scope to individual ex- pression. The teacher who says at the close of a lesson, " Now, during this week I shall do so and so," and then asks for volunteers to co-operate with him, is far more likely to stimulate his class than if he gave an order. The writer remembers an instance of such suggestion leading a class to read the Gospel of St. Mark from 58 Child Study beginning to end during one Lent Season. Naturally the method of suggestion was varied from week to week ; but the aim throughout was to utilize the children's self-activity usefully for the purpose of acquiring know- ledge and applying that knowledge to life. A high seriousness of tone can be induced in children who are made to feel that they are accomplishing results that are valuable for themselves and for others by employing their self-activity usefully. Those who have had to train King's Messengers and such-like bodies of children know how keen is the zest with which they enter upon head- work and hand-work whereby such results are shown to be possible. The same idea can be made to run through all religious teaching and training by fixing attention upon the co-ordinate facts of knowledge and service. For in spiritual things as elsewhere these two things must go together, and the child must learn to know in order to know how to do. Knowledge will then be properly related to service, and self-activity will find its pleasurable exercise both in study and in work. VII. THE EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD. The emotional life of a child develops from simple, rudimentary feelings of pleasure and pain. For P^^^- some days after birth the whole of the child's life ^nd apparently consists of alternating feelings of Pain, comfort and discomfort, the latter rising occasionally into actual feelings of pain. When the child begins to take notice of things, to receive sensations — say, at six months — these sensations are each accompanied by their appropriate " feeling-tones " of pleasure and pain. Thus a dazzling light causes the child to wince and turn away its head because of the painful accompaniment of the sensation produced in the child's mind. Similarly the movement of a brightly coloured ball or other object attracts and fixes attention upon it because of the pleasurable feeling-tone which accompanies the sensations received. It is therefore through these contrasted feelings, and through the colouring that they give to experience, that a stimulus is given to the child to exercise his powers in retaining what is pleasurable and in rejecting what is painful. Since every sensation that comes has an envelope or setting of pleasurable or pain- ful feeling, there is from the beginning in these feelings a rough guide ready furnished to the properties of objects amid which the child has to live, and a stimulus to remember those properties as they make themselves known through the sensations they give. Thus nature makes provision for appropriate reactions on the part of 59 6o Child Study the child, and it expresses its feelings in characteristic ways, which we have called instincts. Each feeling has therefore its appropriate expression. Emo- Pleasure is expansive, and it causes the child to Expres- seek to retain the pleasure-giving object. Pain sion. is contractive, and it makes the child shrink from the objects that cause it. The very expression of these feelings enhances them, as may be seen by the increase of pleasurable feeling which comes when some huge delight is expressed not only in the " look " of pleasure in the child's eyes, but in the spread of activity over the whole frame — voice, arms, body, and legs all co-operat- ing by their movements to give a rapidly expanding pleasure. Not only is this the case in early life, and with the simplest forms of mental activity, but when the actions of the mind become more complex, as in imagination, association, and reasoning, they are accompanied by feelings of pleasure and pain. Here, however, the feeling is likewise less simple than was the case with that ac- companying sensations. It is not now a mere feeling, but is linked with intellectual elements which enter into it and fuse with it. Thus the feeling of pleasure which a child of five has in the sight of a flower is very much more intellectual than that which a one-year old child will have in seeing a brightly coloured ball. The form of the flower, its colours and scent will all take their part in promoting the former child's pleasure, while the purpose of plucking it may well add its quota of pleasure by anticipation of possession. Similarly the simple feeling of pain which a young child experiences from the scratch of a kitten, changes into a complex feeling of anger at two years or so. This complex feel- ing is an emotion, for it includes the feeling of pain and also certain intellectual elements which go to make up "resentment," viz. imagination that kittens exist for the sole purpose of giving pleasure to childhood, memories of former pleasurable experiences derived from The Emotional Development of the Child 6i this kitten, and expectation that it will always behave in this way. When it does not fulfil this expectation, there is at first a momentary simple feeling of pain from the scratch, and then the feeling of resentment, compounded of pain and the thought of the cause thereof, which rapidly deepens into real anger and vents itself in some form of revenge. Thus anger is an emotion, complex in its nature, and composed of various feeling and intel- lectual elements, but with the feeling elements predomi- nating. There are, of course, varying degrees of anger, from the mere angry spasm which marks "a quick temper," to that amount of passion in which a child is "beside himself with rage ". Similarly the emotion may spend itself in a moment, or may develop into a sullen " mood ". The quick-tempered child as a rule soon forgets and forgives injury; his wounded feelings quickly heal and his anger passes away at once. Rage as it rises into prominence loses ipore and more of the intellectual elements until it becomes almost mere feeling. The right treatment is, first to try to divert the child's attention from the cause by giving it something else to think about or to do, and then to show the unreasonableness of such outbursts. With developing intelligence the intellectual elements in the emotion should be strengthened until the feeling elements are subordinated. When the child has learnt this he should be trained in the exercise of restraint, to give time for the intellectual elements to become operative and to keep the expression of the emotion within the bounds of reason. With a sullen child the treatment is much the same in character, though temperament and health have to be considered and due allowance made for them in the way of lengthening the process necessary to effect a cure. We have analysed this emotion at such length in order to show (i) that it is complex, and (ii) that in excess it is harmful to the child's well-being and must be corrected by restoring the balance between feeling and intellection. 62 Child Study The same is true with all the emotions exhibited during childhood. It is not nature's way, however, to endow the child with emotions which would be unserviceable to it at this stage of its existence. Hence all its emotions are crude, strong, and quickly tend to express themselves in the general actions of its whole body. This is necessarily so when it is realized that the finer, rjiore carefully adjusted activities of the muscles have yet to be practised, and that they are not as yet able to express the finer shades of emotion. Thus we must look for such strong general emotions as anger, fear, joy, sorrow, dislike, and love to appear in this early stage — the cruder emotions which call forth the cruder forms of bodily activity. Again, some of these emotions appear earlier than others. Fear is felt after six months ; anger first shows itself at sixteen months ; joy at about the same age ; dislike not much before three years ; preferential love at about the same time ; and sorrow at the age of four years. It is to be noticed, however, that each of these emo- Emo- tions tends to pass over into one or other of the tionai rest Thus when the cause of fear is either Transi- partly or wholly known, fear abates somewhat as a rule and dislike or animosity takes its place. A young child during early months often shrinks from a bearded man, but by the age of three it evinces all the signs of dislike. Probably a good deal of the cruelty which children past the age of five practise upon flies, insects, and animals, is to be assigned to this transition from fear to dislike. Similarly joy attaches itself to persons and objects which possess the capacity to give pleasure ; and when the child-mind discovers this capacity, the emotion thereby aroused is love. Hence the little girl of four or five loves her dolls and her mother indiscrimin- ately, since each in turn excites joy ; but after that age, with the development of intellect, she loves preferentially, mother standing first, and then the dolls in a well-arranged scale of worth. The small boy of the same age has a The Emotional Development of the Child 63 large endowment of " cupboard love," and shows similar preferences for those who satisfy it. Up to the age of ten, however, boys and girls are much alike in their emotional, as they are in their in- £j„q. tellectual equipment. After this age we may tional expect to find slight, but increasing, differences Colour- between the two sexes until full emotional develop- ment is attained. This can only come, however, as the necessity for sex-distinctions appears. Up to this time the emotions are few in number, and they depend for the variety they give to life upon two things : (i) the relative proportions of intellect and feeling combined in the same kind of emotion at different times ; and (2) the tendency above noticed for one kind of emotion to pass by gradual stages into another kind. These two things give a rich colour-scheme to the days through which childhood passes. With differences of physique manifesting themselves in the two sexes, the colour-scheme of the emotional life likewise changes for each sex. The anger which a boy feels and exhibits in the fighting instinct, more quickly exhausts a girl ; and at the same time she is more sensitive to the influences which public opinion brings to bear upon her in this matter. This sensitiveness now rapidly develops in girls, partly no doubt because by physical constitution they are not strong enough to fight against what is conventional. Hence it follows that they more quickly refine their emotional natures than do boys, or in other words, that the subtler emotions more quickly develop in girls than in boys. The crudest forms of anger are replaced by a less blunt, but more shrewish kind, which tends to die away more quickly since its conventional expression does not get beyond a kindling eye or a biting word. Dislike and animosity, which in a boy are expressed in open actions of a hostile kind, a girl more successfully hides beneath a pleasant exterior until favourable opportunity comes for exhibiting them, but in ways that hurt mentally rather than physically. 64 Child Study But in the period intervening between the emotion and its expression there is time for new elements of thought to be added to the original emotional complex ; and these so far modify it that it may pass through various phases before it is finally expressed or passes away with- out expression. It is, however, with the appearance of the parental instinct that the emotional life receives its most pathy. rapid development in both sexes. Prior to this, ex- cept for the play of the emotions already existing, there appears to be a retardation of emotional development while the reasoning powers of the mind are exercised, and while the body gains strength to meet the critical period of adolescence. Nature's law of compensation is operative in this : one function cannot be fully exercised without compensatory retardation of another. Hence the child from ten to fourteen gains but few new emotions in order that the rational and physical powers may have full scope in preparation for the subsequent period when they will go through much strain. One of these new emotions — Sympathy — is, however, worthy of special notice. It is compounded in part of imagination, in part of a feeling of tenderness towards another person. By imagination the person who sympathizes puts himself into the position of another in order to understand a particular situation in which that other has been placed. The feeling of tenderness added thereto constitutes the emotion of sympathy. Of course there is some sym- pathy with others from very early life ; but it is largely imitative, and chiefly felt when the actual event which calls for sympathy is seen. Thus a young child kisses its mother's hand when she is hurt, or strokes her face when she cries. But these expressions of sympathy are reserved for very few persons. Often even father does not obtain such favours. It needs the gregarious instinct to appear — the instinct that drives children to congregate — before sympathy extends its range ; and this does not take place till a short time before the appearance of the The Emotional Development of the Child 65 parental instinct. But with the appearance of this instinct sympathy is at once called into play on a large scale, because to share the common life the child must, by sympathy, share the joys and sorrows of his friends. This he does by projecting himself through imagination into the events which happen to them and which they recount to him ; and by passing through these events in imagination, he finds himself possessed of similar feelings to those which they first experienced. This represented experience then, whether of another's joy or sorrow, brings a tenderness to all those who share a common life, and helps to chasten selfish natures into unselfish- ness, and so to soften the cruder emotions that new com- pounds appear. Thus feelings of benevolence, gratitude, pity, as well as tender joy and tender sorrow, are awakened into life as the result of sympathy ; though it is the development of the parental instinct that makes them fully operative during adolescence. When the age of adolescence is reached the emotional life is very active in all its manifold phases, ^j^q. It is the period during which the emotions receive tions in their quickest, widest, and deepest development. Adoles- It is the age when the interior life is going through the greatest storm and stress, when new instincts are in full play, when all thought and all action is full of significance. The adolescent is therefore thrown back as it were upon himself, upon this amazingly varied inner life, and he naturally tries to understand it as best he can. Teaching received in past years, childhood's be- liefs and opinions, are marshalled afresh, estimated and judged in the light of new knowledge and rapidly widen- ing experience. Is it any wonder that the romance and charm of the new world should sometimes be sufficient to cloud the brightness of the world to which he has grown accustomed, and that with the larger emotional life aroused in so many new ways the old practices and the old faith of childhood should be shaken to their foundations ? Well is it for that adolescent whose early 5 66 Child Study training in habitual actions, in self-discipline, in endur- ance, shall have wisely anticipated this stage of unrest, and whose early teaching shall have taught him, not only the truth, but the beauty and attraction of goodness. Much of life at this period being thus inly lived, we realize that many of the joys and sorrows, the strivings and searchings of heart, the sudden gushes of his emotional life, are hidden within the adolescent's own being, and that he will not easily reveal them. As he is ready to give sympathy, so he welcomes it, provided it be not obtrusive and inquisitive. He warms towards one who will give him time to reveal himself He is not at all anxious ** to give himself away " to any chance comer, or to people whom he meets from time to time only, because he would first make sure of himself and his own sentiments. His emotions are thus secret, not for the light of common day, attaching themselves to the most unexpected persons or things, often very transitory because neither the persons nor things fulfil his ideals completely ; and so we must be content to expect this secrecy and this ebb and flow of the emotional life. For it must be recognized here as elsewhere that nature's law of compensation still works. When the emotions have been strained for long in one direction there will be some reaction, depending largely upon the kind of emotion called into play. Thus at one moment the adolescent will be generous to a fault ; at another as selfish as it is possible to be. His likes and dislikes rapidly succeed each other, and are equally strong. He will enjoy the calm beauty of a summer sunset, and also the noisy ex- citement of watching a football match. Because he is so concerned with his own inner life, he is very critical of the emotional life of others and of the things that affect it. He despises everything which affects others but would have no power to move himself So gradually there is set up in his mind a kind of '' scale of worth " among persons, objects, and events according to their power to touch him emotionally, to unfold the innermost The Emotional Development of the Child 6"] parts of his nature, and to make him realize himself and his surroundings. In religion, those elements that have so far been merely external now come to have a similar inner Inner significance for the emotional life. The appeal of |j.|^*Jg music, art, ritual, etc. — the " setting " of religion of Re- — is probably greatest at this time ; but unless it Hgion. is to end in a mere emotionalism it must be made sym- bolic of deeper realities. The adolescent wants to make these deeper realities part of his own experience. Further, the fact of God and of His rule over the universe is like- wise conceived as a personal fact, i.e. conscience becomes very active as affecting the feelings, in some cases even taking away a good deal of the pleasure from life until some bad habit is either conquered, or allowed uncon- ditional sway in despair of conquering it. Similarly the sense of sin awakens, and is easily stirred to full activity by missions, revival meetings, and other religious events which are calculated to appeal to the emotions. Both sexes are wont to attend these meetings, and it is not uncommon for individuals to fall in love while apparently bent upon the very different purpose of finding a method of getting free from sin. Sympathy of aim and the ex- pansiveness of the emotional life, together with the de- velopment of the social instinct, and the relief afforded by the law of compensation which works to provide a set-off to self-analysis, all have much to do with making the sexes seek each other's companionship. It seems well to notice this trait, and to regard it as nature's pro- vision against the emotional life becoming too self- centred, too conscious of itself, and too reserved. Whether we will or no, the tendency of adolescents of opposite sex to form friendships is one that will assert itself; the aims of the teacher must then be to see that these friendships are known to and approved by parents and guardians, and that they do not hinder religious ex- ercises. Both these things are possible without much difficulty. It is better that the friends should be induced 5* 68 Child Study to tell their own parents than for the teacher to do so. The friendship can be used to stimulate each party in it to keep the other to religious duties. Ideal conditions under which such friendships may be countenanced can be laid down by teachers and clergy ; and it certainly is within the province of the Church to recognize and allow for this natural development of adolescence, and to consecrate it to highest uses. Friendships such as this may be used to further religious development since they can be made to serve the purpose of bridging over a difficult time of life in which many are, for a time at least, alienated from religious influence because they feel that there is no individual sympathy and care expended upon them. If we can show that the Church is able to recognize and care for them under all circumstances, in adolescence as in childhood, they will not depart to seek understanding and sympathy from a world which is less stern and harsh in its judgments, and more attractive, because less prejudiced against human nature's orderly development. One further point in the emotional development of the adolescent may here be noticed, viz. the feeling of loyalty which he possesses towards institutions to which he belongs. Here he can lose himself for a while in the company of his fellows. Club-life of some kind must be provided for him ; and so long as this is made attractive he will gladly share in it. But it must make some de- mands upon him if it is to retain his loyalty — it must call upon him to give, as well as to get. If this institu- tional life is begun before adolescence is reached, whether it be in the form of guilds or clubs, it must now be much more fully developed. For this reason there ought to be a definite break between the two forms, the latter having rules that are loftier in the ideals they set forth, and more stringent in the demands they make, though never being impossible for the adolescent to carry out. The appeal to loyalty must be made as strong as possible by dwelling upon and making much of the opportunities The Emotional Development of the Child 69 which such institutions afford for social service and the help given by friendship and fellowship. Thus will loyalty be trained to support institutional religion as it is found in the life of the Church, and we shall then have less cause to deplore the loss of those who in their younger days were taught and trained to value the Church's faith and practice. VIII. THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD. In childhood's early days the various objects in the world around are striving to make themselves and their qualities known to the child's mind. Multitudes of impulses proceed from these objects to the different sense-organs — eyes, ears, nose, skin — and the only kind of response which the child can make to them is some form of bodily activity. The mechanism for making this response is the brain and nervous system. The response that is initiated from nerve-centres we call reflex action ; that which comes from the brain is called instinctive action. When a child withdraws its hand at the prick of a pin this action is reflex ; it is done without thought and is originated from a nerve-centre. When a child cries for food the action is instinctive ; it comes from the brain. Both activities are heritages from ancestors who found these activities useful, and perpetu- ated them in their descendants. If the child had to live an animal existence only there would be no need of any other actions than these. But since it must live a human life it must learn to dis- criminate between objects which are beneficial and objects that are harmful to life. This it does by noting qualities and remembering them. One object may give various kinds of impressions through different organs of sense. At one moment a bell is seen, at another heard, at another its weight is tested by the muscles, and its hardness explored by the skin. Further, different ob- 70 The Intellectual Development of the Child 71 jects affect different senses and cause different responses to be made to them. A bright light affects the eye, and eye-muscles and neck-muscles are adjusted to make clear sight possible. A bell when rung affects the ear, and the child learns to turn its head in the direction of the sound. In these ways different objects come to be characterized by the purposes which they serve in the child's world, and they are grouped according to the appeal which they make to the various senses. The child's memory plays a great part in this grouping of similar things. Their powers of affecting the various senses are stored in the mind, as are also the various appropriate responses made to them, and the pleasurable or painful feelings they evoke. But with memory another factor comes into play, that oi Association. The sight of the bell will call up the sound which it makes in ringing. The tick- gocia- ing of a watch near a child^s ear prompts the com- tion and mand ' ' Show me " or " Open it, " when once this ^}^^^^' has been done. Memory is strengthened by this exercise in forming new associations. How rapidly a child does associate is seen by its power to learn to speak, to sing, to walk, to commit to memory nursery rhymes, to find its way about in the complex world with which it is surrounded. The chair in a room is a thing to stand by for a baby learning to walk, but for an older child it is a thing to sit on in imitation of adults. A spoon to a baby may be knocked upon the table because it is as- sociated with producing noise ; to an older child it is as- sociated with meal times. Thus not only do associations once formed tend to persist in memory, but there is a con- stant tendency for new associations to be formed with growing experience. The remembrances of separate ob- jects are like a pack of cards continually being reshuffled for the next game, or a box of bricks which can be built into ever new designs. We call this power of forming new association groups the child's Plasticity. It is this which makes the child's developing mental life so interest- 72 Child Study ing to watch. Every new experience of the world de- mands a resorting of the mind's stock of remembrances, and this resorting is done without effort by the plastic mind of the child. Every teacher will do well to notice that in the memory of sense-impressions and the mind's power of association, which is ready at all times because of plasticity to form new groups of mental facts, the founda- tion of the child's education is laid. Just as no child comes to school without some experiences of life, so there is always some remembrance of those experiences, some grouping of them, and some ability to form new groups through plasticity, which the wise teacher will use fully in the early years of school-life. It is, in fact, upon these factors that the kindergarten system in infant schools bases its methods for training the intellectual powers of children. The use of objects, models, pictures, and stories, it is re- cognized, has an important part to play in enabling children to memorize and put together (associate) new sense-im- pressions. Plasticity of mind which is natural to every child is used in grouping these impressions into new com- plexes, which in their turn give a new outlook upon the world, i.e. new knowledge. In the sphere of religious knowledge the same process is pursued ; for knowledge of the contents of the spiritual world does not differ in the way in which it is built up from knowledge of the contents of the material world. Both are based upon sense-experience. The teacher may have a prejudice perhaps against using pictures or models or blackboards, supposing that such things are unspiritual. But since it will even then be necessary to make use of words to express thoughts, and to express them inade- quately, there is still some use made of the child's sense- experience. For the child's knowledge of God as Father, however it may be taught, whether through description or by simple pictures or blackboard work, is ultimately grounded in the experience of the human father's char- acter ; and similarly the pictures of angels are only of use to transfer to the spiritual world the idea of that ministry The Intellectual Development of the Child 73 which is most materially helpful to the child — the gentle ministry of womanhood — hence angels are pictorially represented as women. Sense-experience is of service therefore in rapidly and adequately building up spiritual impressions, and we shall make a vast mistake unless we follow nature's guidance in this matter. It is through concrete presentation that the child learns spiritual truths ; and this the kindergarten takes advantage of. The same holds good of the Middle School and Senior School, though to a less degree as regards objects and models. Here the concrete presentation takes the form of "religion in action" in the lives of men and women whose actions and characters furnish the materials for building up a system of religious truths. This system will depend for its value upon the relative emphasis which the teaching method places upon its component parts. "From the concrete to the abstract" is therefore an axiom which holds good in religious as in secular edu- cation ; and we shall fail to give the best impressions and the most striking effect to our teaching unless we hold fast by this principle. One has only to watch a child turning over the pictures of a book to know that the ideas gained from them will last far longer than those gained from much description. To test this it is only necessary to put a question or two upon the topics illustrated even after the lapse of a considerable period. The writer's ideas of many Bible stories are still summarized in the memories ^of certain pictures seen in childhood. But in another way the child makes use of the concrete to foster his mental development. Just as every sights impression from objects in the world outside tends and to be stored up in the memory, so another side Sounds. of memory-work is to reproduce pictures of them when necessary. The mind thinks pictorially. The word "orange " calls up a vision, a picture of an orange. The words ''Sing a song of sixpence" make us hear a certain tune sung to those words in childhood's days. Some people can recall the taste of an apple or pear, the 74 Child Study touch of a piece of sacking or a piece of velvet, the smell of lavender or musk. The most accurate mental repro- ductions are those of sight and hearing ; only exceptional people, or those who have had special training, make accurate use of the other sense-pictures, though they aid in recalling the total impression of an object, e.g. an apple, or an orange. But by far the great majority of people recall sight-impressions much more readily than impressions of sound. It is easier for nine children out of ten to draw a given picture from memory than to tell again a story which they have heard. Most children can recall the blackboard summary of a lesson much more readily than the descriptions which teacher has given. Would it be wise then to rely upon words spoken when so many memories are visual memories ? '' Eye- mindedness " in children is a fact which shows itself far oftener than " ear-mindedness ". What teacher does is always remembered much longer and reproduced much more easily than what teacher says. There can be no possible doubt of the importance, the necessity indeed, of the concrete as the starting-point from which we must begin if we are to foster a child's intellectual development. We can accomplish our aim of giving knowledge of facts which have spiritual worth only by grounding our teach- ing upon sense-experience, only by using the senses which God has given to every child as the means whereby knowledge is to come into his mind and to be used there by memory, imagination, judgment and reasoning. We pass on now to consider briefly the child's powers Images ^^ Imagination and Ideation, the powers which and his mind has of forming mental pictures and Ideals, ideas. In its simplest form, imagination is the power to make mental copies of impressions re- ceived through the senses. Give a child an orange to play with, and from it he will receive impressions of roundness, yellowness, roughness of skin, and a certain smell and taste. If the orange is removed, all these impressions can be mentally pictured either separately or The Intellectual Development of the Child 75 together as existing in one object. The picture thus formed in the mind is the " mental image " of an orange, and the power of the mind which forms this mental image is "imagination ". Every child possesses this power to some degree, most children to a considerable degree. They can readily recall what a person is like when the person himself is absent ; they quickly repro- duce sounds made by animals ; they recognize likenesses between different things once seen. It should be noticed what a large part is played by the senses in giving correct impressions for imagination to copy mentally. In the ordinary use of the term, imagination implies rather more than being able to reproduce sense-impres- sions, as for instance, when a child fashions for itself some whimsical animal such as never existed in the natural world. But even in such cases we shall find upon analysis that each of the parts composing the whole picture is the mental image of some beast well known to the child. Thus the animal of imagination may have a cat's head, a bear's body, a bird's legs, and so forth. The child's imagination uses old elements to fashion new compounds. The old elements are copies of past im- pressions ; the new compounds result from the piecing together of these copies in the mind. Children of six years old and onwards are sometimes given to day-dreaming. Thoughts come and go, pictures are formed in the mind rapidly and unrestrainedly; the boy will fancy himself a soldier doing valorous deeds, the girl will picture herself a great lady with numberless servants ; and both begin to build ''castles in Spain ". In this uncontrolled play of Fancy images of former experiences are used in new combinations, and the child peoples his mental world with " airy shapes and forms of things unseen ". But when fancy is con- trolled, when it builds up its pictures line by line and piece by piece so as to produce a certain result, as an artist applies his colours or as a poet visualizes the ^6 Child Study scenes he would describe, then this controlled fancy — which is rightly called Constructive Imagination — is serviceable to intellectual development. The child who shapes his visions to accord with the details of a story related by his teacher is making mental progress. What guidance does this process of the child's mind afford to the teacher ? Since a child's thoughts are thus pictorial, it is necessary that the teacher should so arrange the facts that he imparts as to form a series of mental pictures, arranged in an order which the child's imagination can follow and piece together. This can be done only by careful preparation of the subject before the lesson begins, the whole subject being analysed into mental pictures which form a series. If this has been done properly, the teacher's mind when she stands in front of her class is, as it were, a kind of cinematograph, the several consecutive pictures that pass across it as she describes them taking their place in giving a complete record of the whole story for the child to carry away when the lesson is ended. If the teacher's mental pictures are vivid and sharply defined, the impressions which they give to the class will be similarly clear and distinct, and the children's constructive imagination will develop. The pictorial power of the mind is more often used Memory i^ producing images of things seen than images Pic- of things heard. Most poetry employs visual ^'^^^' images. Take for example the first verse of Gray's " Elegy ". The first line only gives us an audial image — an image of sound ; the other three lines give visual images. Children see these images readily enough, and can often be induced to draw their impressions. As a rule the sound-images of children are far less vivid and distinct, though when words are set to music a great gain in this respect is found to result. A poem which has words imitative of the sound of church-bells recalls the sounds they make much more readily when set to appropriate music. With regard to the comparative vividness of The Intellectual Development of the Child 77 visual and audial images, it may be observed that the books of the Bible which make the strongest appeal to children are those which most strongly visualize persons, places, and events. The early narratives and histories, the Gospel records, and the Apocalypse do this ; and these are the same books which stand highest upon the "curve of interest" (see Chapter VI). The last-named book in particular, presenting as it does spiritual truths in concrete form, is of great use in appealing to the imagina- tion of children ; that it is not oftener used in illustration is both remarkable and regrettable. Such a picture of heaven as that given in Rev. VII. 9-17, can be used to teach many truths and to enkindle many aspirations which will not soon be forgotten by a child. It is necessary now to distinguish between a " mental image" and an "idea". As we have seen, the former is a copy which the mind makes of an im- pression previously received through one or other of the senses. An idea consists of that copy together with a background — a mental image plus its meaning. Thus the mental image of an orange is the picture which the mind forms after seeing an orange. But when around this picture there gathers a meaning, a setting of thought, a background of knowledge — such as that an orange is pleasant to taste, costs a penny to buy, comes from North Africa in a ship, and so forth — then the mind forms an idea of an orange. The value of ideas thus depends upon two factors : (i) the accuracy of the mental pictures of objects which the mind forms ; and (ii) the richness of the background in which these mental pictures are set. To ensure the first factor is the purpose of the sense-training given in the days of early childhood. The second factor is of in- tellectual growth, and this never ceases so long as the mind is able and willing to add to its store of knowledge, i.e. so long as plasticity remains. Consider how the idea of David the shepherd-boy grows. First the child is shown a picture of a lad of sixteen or so in the dress 78 Child Study of an Eastern shepherd. Any subsequent mention of David recalls the picture as a mental image. Then follows the forming of the background, the setting to this picture. It comprises knowledge of the facts of David's life — his care of the sheep, his fights with the lion and the bear. Then there will be added descriptions of the hills round Bethlehem, the character of the country — its desert places and streams and oases — with the consequent difficulties of the shepherd's task. Other features of the shepherd's work in rescuing, leading, carrying, tending the lambs and sheep will be noticed. Then the results of this life upon David's character, and the knowledge of God's care which he gained from his task, will be exemplified from Psalm XXIII. Little by little this background is built round the picture, and the child's idea of David grows and expands with each new addition to knowledge. The teacher's business is to provide opportunity to the child-mind for its ideas to enlarge in this way. It is a mistake, therefore, to limit the growth of ideas in early life by teaching hard and fast definitions. ofTdeas. Rather should they be left plastic, ready to ex- pand " as knowledge grows from more to more". The right method is to train children to form accurate first impressions by careful observation, and then to help them to gather round these impressions a gradually in- creasing stock of facts to form a setting of knowledge. The children will be led to make tentative definitions of their ideas from time to time as knowledge grows and becomes more accurate. In this way the teacher will be able to keep control of the children's mental efforts, enlarging and modifying the background in which mental images are placed, until at length full ideas are formed. By this method nothing has to be unlearnt by the child ; all his knowledge is made serviceable to the purpose of attaining truth, which depends not so much upon right definitions as right ideas. Moreover, this is the method which the child employs to educate himself, the method The Intellectual Development of the Child 79 of nature. It is expressed for us in the phrase " Ideas before Words ". The words in which an idea is clothed may take two forms of expression — description and definition. Dggcnp. Young children describe ; they rarely define. De- tion and scription differs from definition in that when de- Defini- scribing an object a child enumerates all its qualities, whereas when defining it he gives only those qualities which serve to mark out the class of objects to which it belongs from every other class. Thus he would describe the Hill of Calvary as a skull-shaped mound, situated outside the city of Jerusalem, " a green hill far away, without a city wall," etc. He would de- fine it as " the hill on which our Lord was crucified ". The process of definition requires much clearer dis- crimination than the process of description ; qualities that distinguish one object or group of objects from an- other are harder to estimate than those that belong to a single object or group. It is not to be expected of children that their definitions will be accurate until their power of judgment has had time to develop. Simi- larly we shall expect young children to be interested in descriptions, but uninterested in definitions which are, as a rule, beyond their power to grasp. Because it is desirable to keep ideas plastic dur- ing childhood, and because definition is too difficult a process for a young child's mind to perform, it is necessary for the teacher of religion to leave definitions of religious truths to a later stage of the child's develop- ment when they will be useful in fixing knowledge accurately in the mind. When, however, a child can be led to frame tentative definitions of his own these should be accepted and used, provided that they do not conflict with facts. Thus from a lesson which taught that Baptism, Prayer, Confirmation, and Holy Communion gave " grace " a class of ten-year-old boys framed the definition, " Grace is God's gift of life, support, strength, and food tor the soul". At the close of a lesson in 8o Child Study which various examples of people who prayed and of their prayers had been given, a child of nine defined prayer as " speaking to God in a heavenly way ". Again, after considering the story of Isaiah's call and the story of the Penitent Thief, a class of thirteen -year-old girls defined faith as " that which puts us on the inside of things ". Such definitions are both allowable and useful, (i) because they come after a thorough examination of facts by the children, and (ii) because they express the children's own ideas in words which best express their meaning to themselves. That the words used should be inadequate or inaccurate does not matter at this stage so long as they show that right and true ideas are forming in the minds of our children. We shall not be over anxious to ask children to accept our definitions of truths ; but we shall take care, by selecting our lesson-material wisely and then leading the children to exercise their minds upon it, to see that true ideas are implanted, leaving the process of definition as a further work for their minds to do. This must not be taken as implying that texts, hymns, Use catechism definitions, and other forms of sound of Mem- words have no place at all in early religious ^^' training. On the contrary, since memory in young children is very strong and plastic, it is well that these fundamentals should be learnt in early life. But there is all the difference between parrot-like repetition of meaningless words and phrases, and an intelligent grasp of their underlying ideas which will make repetition useful. xA.ll formulae to be committed to memory should first be explained to some extent. This explanation may not be very full, but it should be sufficient for the stage of understanding which the child has reached, de- tailed enough to allow some general idea to be formed, and interesting enough to secure the child's attentive effort to learn. Only thus can the teacher be sure that he is building upon a solid foundation, and that his teaching will not The Intellectual Development of the Child 8i consist of giving meaningless sets of words to be memor- ized. We desire that children should be making use of their religious knowledge during childhood to enable them to live religious lives. It is not our aim to store their minds with dogmas and definitions which will be of use only in later life. The ideas that underlie dogma are simple enough for all children to grasp. The form of words in which dogma is expressed is often very difficult for children to follow. When the ideas have been formed the child's capacity to understand definitions will have increased and can be utilized in making memory- work attractive. Thus, if it is desired to teach some portion of the catechism, the teacher will first select ex- amples to unfold its meaning, and as he gives these ex- amples during the course of his lesson he will make use from time to time of the words to be memorized, gradu- ally making the class familiar with them and at the same time filling them with meaning. At the close of the lesson a short period of silent repetition, followed by test- ing one or two members of the class, will serve to fix the words firmly. Home-work exercise may be set to write out the repetition so as to secure accuracy of wording. This method of employing the memory is in accordance with certain principles which experiments have found to be observed. They are as follows : — 1 . To commit anything to memory most people re- quire several repetitions. 2. When the meaning of a passage is already known it is more easily and quickly memorized than an entirely new set of words. 3. The eye assists the ear, so that a text written upon the blackboard is better remembered than the same text repeated without this aid. 4. Repetitions are most effective when they are dis- tributed ; thus if twenty repetitions are allowed, it is better to give them in four separate groups of five with a short interval between each group, than in a single group of twenty without such intervals. 6 IX. THE DEVELOPMENT OF WILL. An instinct is a blind tendency to respond to a stimulus in such a way as to achieve a result beneficial to existence — a tendency to act without foresight of the end to be obtained. Instinctive acts are always per- formed in the same way. If then the child had to rely upon instincts through l^- all stages of its development, life would be a ^jjjI merely mechanical set of responses to environ- Will. ment, and no such thing as individuality would be possible. But as we have seen, the development of imagination and thought enable the child to conceive of purposes, to picture and think out how a given action, or set of actions, will achieve these purposes. There is evidently a great difference in the quality of the action of throwing a box of bricks over the floor, and that set of actions which in later life builds the same objects into a house or church. In each case, of course, the child is only fulfilling that principle of self-activity which it must use in some way. But there is no similarity between the ends achieved by the respective actions, nor indeed are the actions themselves alike in their origination or their performance. The difference between them does not lie simply in the amount of thought expended in doing them ; there is another factor to be taken account of, viz. the expenditure of will-power in pursuing the latter course until the consciously conceived purpose is attained. The essential difference therefore between an instinc- 82 The Development of Will Ss tive act and a voluntary, or willed, act lies in the fact that the latter is undertaken in order to attain a purpose already pictured in the mind, whereas the former, though purposive in its results, is blind. The exertion of the will is the mark of all voluntary action. Between the feeling and the instinctive expression there is no break. Between the idea of an end and the activity necessary to achieve it there is always a gap which must be bridged over by an effort of will. At what precise moment in a child's life will comes to be exercised it is impossible to say. But however simple the end pictured, so long as effort of will is involved in order to attain it, there is voluntary action. Thus the attempt of a child to feed itself by carrying the spoon to its mouth is voluntary. The tendency to imitate be- comes voluntary when the child begins to try to talk. The earlier instinctive sounds are analysed, and those that are useful for the purpose of speech are practised, while the others are largely omitted. Syllabic sounds are next united into compounds, until words are uttered which con- vey some meaning. By this process of analysis and synthesis words are fashioned into sentences, and the child's purpose of making itself and its needs understood is at last accomplished through many successive acts of will whereby the mechanism of speech is perfected. The essence of willed action is therefore that it at- tempts to accomplish some purpose which is foreseen. But between the consciously conceived Action, purpose and the execution of it by action there is an interval during which the mind is at work. Let us suppose for a moment that a child is engaged in colouring with crayons some picture, and that while doing so an organ-grinder with a monkey appears in the street outside ; and then let us analyse the state of the child's mind torn as it is between the two interests. There is first the desire to see the picture completed, and secondly, the desire to see the antics of the monkey. Between the two desires the child must exercise choice. So there 6* 84 Child Study ensues a moment or two of deliberation — ** to be or not to be" — during which the alternate pleasures are weighed in the balance. This period is occupied by some such thoughts as : I can finish the picture another time, but shortly the monkey will move on elsewhere — the picture when finished will not give me such pleasure as watching the monkey now — I often draw pictures, but I seldom see monkeys, and so on ; until at length the desire to see the monkey prevails over the desire to go on drawing the picture. Then the will in response to the more ardent desire finally issues a command to the muscles of the legs to move the body towards the window. Now even from so simple a case as this it can be seen that voluntary action is not the simple thing it appears at first sight. It involves deliberation between two sets of conflicting desires, then choice in the direction of one of them, and finally the issue of that choice in an act of will which influences the muscles of the body by putting them into purposeful activity to attain the end wished for. And unless this act of will is made, the end consciously foreseen may become merely the object of thought, or the object of a wish. Unfruitful wishes — wishes which never become anything more — are apt to make children discontented, just as they make adults envious. It is obvious, therefore that the true educator is one who has the power to stimu- late children to try to convert the mere wish into the effort of will necessary to make the wish fruitful in re- sults. There are two abnormal types of will which the Abnor teacher ought to observe carefully. They are mal (I) The Explosive Will, and (2) The Obstructed Types. Will. These we purpose to consider. (i ) The Explosive Will. — All ideas tend to find some out- let in action. The principle of self-activity is a sufficient guarantee that both instinct and will find their proper issue in action. With some children, whom we have styled " motor," little time intervenes between the idea of an act and its accomplishment. The constraint that The Development of Will 85 ought to inhibit many actions is not exercised ; and the idea of action is enough to fire off the explosive will to bring the action about. With such children, as we have already urged, extra provision must be made for the use of their ** motor" characteristics. This is not to say that the explosive will must be endured because it cannot be cured. On the contrary, the child must be checked from time to time as he is about to embark upon some new activity, and its reasonableness or unreasonableness shown by analysing the purpose for which it is under- taken. The child must be shown that some amount of deliberation is necessary to actions that are really valuable, and that methods of doing them are improved by some expenditure of thought and care. Such train- ing is imperatively necessary in all education, and particularly so in religious education, where it is im- portant to make a child realize that all sin can only be resisted by self-restraint, and that some classes of sins can only be avoided by running away from them when once their effects are known. The teacher's work is therefore to train the possessor of an explosive will first to human, and then to heavenly prudence. (2) The Obstructed Will. — This type stands at the opposite end of the scale from the former^ It deliberates so long that the time for action often passes before anything decisive is done. ** Function is smothered in surmise," is Shakespeare's way of expressing it. He gives us the picture of such a person in the character of Hamlet. Though prompted by injuries to his own family and himself, and though urged on to revenge by a visitant from another world, he halts between his desire for revenge and the actions necessary to accomplish it. Children, as a rule, are not so definitely marked out in this category ; their innate love of self-activity prevents such a characteristic from becoming very manifest. But every teacher knows that there are lazy children of both sexes who dislike to be disturbed or goaded into activity, and who when they are pressed take the shortest route 86 Child Study to giving satisfaction. First the cause of the obstructed will must be ascertained. It may be hereditary or constitutional, and then the only means of helping is to give stimulus in plenty to draw out the volitional effort. Praise for such effort should be freely bestowed at first, decreasing gradually unless some noteworthy achieve- ment has to be marked. Cessation of effort should meet with reprobation as well as with the loss of some pleasure or privilege. Where, however, hereditary or constitu- tional defect is not the main factor in causing the obstructed will, it will be necessary to turn elsewhere to find the cause. It may, it often does, lie in bad home conditions — poor feeding, bad ventilation, overcrowding in our large towns. Sometimes the child is in a low state of bodily health and requires a tonic. In other cases he may not be getting enough exercise, or may be growing too fast for his strength to keep pace. Here we notice the close connection of the moral with the physical condition. Where it is possible for the teacher to suggest or to provide remedies for physical defects this should in all cases be done, as oftentimes there results an improvement in volitional power. But apart from these efforts, the only way to encour- age the feeble will to work is to find inducement strong enough to set it going. There is generally some line of activity in which the child is interested, some desire which will cause him to put forth effort to obtain its fulfilment. It may be an arduous task to discover this, but the task is worth undertaking for it generally reveals good qualities in the child of which otherwise we should be in ignorance. The teacher builds upon these, praising them and strengthening them, and so utilizing them as a centre of operations for strengthening the whole moral character and giving it new opportunities for develop- ment. When activity is shown in any good direction it will be further stimulated by encouragement to persever- ance until it becomes, or is on the way to become, a habit The Development of Will 87 One peculiar type of the obstructed will is found in the obstinate child. Here the tendency is for the will to become set upon some particular line acy?*"' of action to the exclusion of others that are possible and desirable. The physical characteristics of the obstinate child are well known, the rather coarse features, thick and pouting, or thin and hard lips, slightly overhanging eyebrows, wide nose and cheekbones, large neck and limbs, and stiffly-built frame. His mental characteristics are that he is often slower and duller than normal, reticent until provoked, and then un- governable in the expression of his emotions. It does not do to "cross" such a child because of the results. At home he is generally pampered or beaten unmerci- fully. In school where he comes under restraint he resents discipline and is apt to show his resentment in moods that range from sulkiness to violence. The idea of opposition having once entered his mind he shows his obstinacy in carrying it out to the end. How is a child of this type to be treated ? If the ideal of small classes obtains in the school there is greater op- portunity for special treatment than if the classes are large. A teacher with a bright cheerful expression generally has a good chance with such a child. The first thing to do is to win his obstinacy to your side ; and he is generally as fervent in his loves as his hates. Show him by trusting him in small ways that you do not ex- pect anything except normal behaviour such as others show. Refuse to recognize his unspoken claims to ex- ceptional treatment by treating him as an ordinary per- son with ordinary endowments. Look for good qualities to manifest themselves in him, and by a word of approval put him on good terms with yourself and with himself Sometimes his native obstinacy will rise despite your best endeavours ; but if you have yourself well in hand and can take up some new line of thought, putting all your effort into it and so carrying him with you, the mood will pass. Occasionally it is well to suggest a change of 88 Child Study action : give him something to do such as fetching a book, cleaning a board, opening a window — anything to dis- tract his mind from the fixed idea which holds it during obstinacy. The clash of wills, the teacher's and the child's, must be averted as long as possible by " shunting " the child upon another track. If, as must happen some- times, the teacher and child do come into active opposi- tion, the teacher 7nust win and the child must give way. This, however, will only be in the last resort to extremes when all else has failed ; and even then if the conflict comes in Sunday-school it is far better not to resort to physical force to quell the offender or to expel him, but to wait until the session is ended and then to take what steps seem most suitable for punishment. It is some- times possible to bring a child of this kind to his senses by appealing quietly to his better nature, telling him that you did not expect such conduct from him, and generally emphasizing his good qualities and all they stand for in his character. Where such a course fails, there seems no alternative but to expel him for the good of the school as a whole. The training of these abnormal types calls forth all ^, the teacher's adaptability and resourcefulness ; ter and though they are troublesome to a degree, Train- yet they are exceptional and must be regarded '"^' as such. The normal type of child is after all the prevalent type, and it is in training these to do what is right that the teacher's main work must always consist. The forming of character must be the highest task of the true educator. Character shows itself in groups of dispositions and habits. The ability to foster the good and to check the evil as it appears is the mark of a character so trained and fashioned in the early years of life. Character is thus an abiding thing — the hall- mark of a formed personality. But character itself results from repeated acts of will, until right actions — the results of right dispositions — are formed for life. No nobler work can be found than this of fashioning con- The Development of Will 89 sistently righteous men and women ; and when to human righteousness is added spirituality, consecra- tion of the will to God's service as well as mankind's benefit, there is set before teachers the ideal of training character to saintliness. This means habitual action in all human ways that make for righteousness, and in the Divine way that is called the way of holiness. So much is the human will capable of when it is dedicated to highest achievements and seeks its inspiration and strength from God through the means of grace. The struggle and effort to quicken the child's will into ready response to God, attended though it be with many a set- back and disappointment to the teacher, is well worth making since the ideal is so high and the hoped-for result so wonderful. For to the grace-laden will even heaven itself is the promised reward. When we realize that it is not in the great moving world, but in the will of man, that victories are won whose results are eternal, we shall regard our task of moulding spiritual characters as the greatest that could possibly be given to man to perform ; and we shall consider neither time nor effort wasted which, by command, by suggestion, by stimulation of every kind, and most of all by fashioning ourselves to be examples of life and conduct, are spent in setting forth God's glory and the welfare of our fellows through the proper performance of that task. It begins with the training of a child ; it ends with the life of a saint. It begins by issuing a series of commands to the child to refrain from certain acts detrimental to its welfare ; it ends in forming a self-governed, self-disciplined per- sonality. We shall conclude this chapter by summariz- ing the process in three steps : the reader will understand that they are not separated one from another by sharp lines of division, but that they naturally pass from one to the other by gradual transitions without noticeable breaks. (i) The Stage of Command. — This begins when the child begins to understand. The first commands of a 90 Child Study mother are negative, and consist of " don'ts," issued by way of warning against harmful actions on the part of the child It has to learn to inhibit useless and dangerous instinctive tendencies, and to substitute others for them by single acts of will. At the same time that it is learning how to repress its harmful proclivities, it is learning also to form ideas of useful actions, and to develop habits. But the early stage is on the whole that which may be called the inhibitive, or repressive stage of will. (ii) The Stage of Co-operation. — The child having learnt the meaning and value of obedience to commands, the next stage is that in which the parent or teacher invites co-operation in some action to achieve a good result. Here the child's personality is allowed larger scope to express itself in positive ways, but still under con- trol, direction, and guidance. The form of direction is changed from that of a direct command to that of invitation or suggestion, and is expressed by, " It would be a good thing if we did," or " Let us do," so and so. More freedom is allowed with increasing age to choose the time and manner of action, the teacher looking rather to the spirit in which it is done, the efforts put forth in doing it, and the results achieved by prolonged and concentrated efforts of will. This may be called the co-operative stage of will, and should be begun as soon as the child shows any readiness for it. (iii) The Stage of Self Discipline. — Whereas the con- trolling influence has come from without in the two former stages of voluntary action, it now takes the form of conscience and comes from within the child's nature. The negative and positive commands that were issued by authority, and the invitations and suggestions that guidance made use of to direct the will's activities, are now replaced by the promptings of the inner self as its powers grow and ripen with experience. The " age of discretion" is reached; the child must be left more and more to himself to use that discretion. Many restraints The Development of Will 91 are gradually removed, and the whole of life comes to be more under the child's own control. The pressure of society, in which the child now begins to pass more and more of his life, teaches him conventions that he must observe, and at the same time allows him to act with larger freedom of choice and from more varied motives. If, however, the foundation of character has been properly laid in the dispositions and habits acquired in earlier stages, the child will have something very solid upon which to build future voluntary actions. They will tend to take the form of the foundation already laid, be- cause this commends itself to the conscience as " right ". This stage, in which the dictates of conscience are fol- lowed, may be called the stage of self-direction, self-control^ or self-discipline. It is the highest stage of voluntary action, because in it is expressed the whole personality, self-directed, self-controlled, self-disciplined. X. THE CHILD OF THE KINDERGARTEN. We propose in this chapter to bring together some of the more important characteristics of the child between the ages of five and seven years, and to see what bear- ing they have upon the methods that should be employed in teaching him. By far the chief factors to be considered are the innate powers of self-activity evinced in play, and the interest which the child manifests in concrete things ; the two go together in assisting and furthering the development of the child's nature and personality. The objects in the child's environment send innumer- able stimuli to nerves and brain through the various organs of sense, and the child responds to them both instinctively and voluntarily by various activities. Natural curiosity, ranging as it does over all objects in the childish world, fosters activity and directs it to the acquirement of new knowledge. Imitation concerns itself with the actions of living things within the same world, and strives to copy those actions. Imagination is used to produce mental copies of actual things heard and seen, and then to make new arrangements among the elements of those copies. Memory is much more exercised upon things seen than things heard ; while the reasoning powers are chiefly used in forming judg- ments as to the relative shapes, sizes, and weights of objects, and in discovering similarities and differences between the properties of concrete things. The play of the emotions also is dependent upon the pleasurable or painful effects which concrete things have the power of producing in the mind. " Laughter and tears are both 92 The Child of the Kindergarten 93 near the surface " — which is only another way of saying that a child's emotions are tied to those objects which belong to the environment. This concern of the young child with the outer world, the concrete, must of necessity influence greatly the teaching methods used to make him exercise ^^l^'-^^ his mind in ways profitable to himself and to his and the future life. While objects have such an appeal Con- to the mind, it is impossible to ignore them in woJid, any sound method of education. Where self- activity expends itself in discovering the properties of objects, and the relationships that exist between them, the teacher will be following nature's guidance in giving scope for its exercise ; for by it the child learns to edu- cate himself — the most valuable of all lessons — under the teacher's controlling influence. Education thus becomes the process of learning how to relate oneself to environment. This is true of "religious" as of '* secu- lar," education. If there is a spiritual world in existence, and waiting to get itself known to the child, it follows that this spiritual world is as much a part of the child's environment as the material world, and will make its existence known and exercise its earliest influence upon the mind through the ordinary channels of knowledge, i.e. the senses. The child in the kindergarten is by nature a sacramentalist ; the things that appear have hidden properties discoverable in part to observation, and also have the power of producing mental counter- parts. The mysteries of objects lie both in what these objects really are in themselves and in what effects they produce upon the mind that discovers their properties. Religious education therefore makes use of objects, models, and pictures to reveal an encompassing spiritual world to the child mind, and to open that mind to its influences. Without these things the revelation and the influence of the spiritual world is bound to be as poverty- stricken as would be the meaning and influence of ideas gathered from a world containing sounds only. We 94 Child Study cannot dispense with the concrete in the early years of a child's religious education. This conclusion is emphasized by a consideration of the child's self-activity. We have seen that this endowment is used in responding to the outside world, and that this response naturally takes the form of play. The manifold activities of the play-instinct are called into being by the world of objects, and demand a similar environment for their exercise. Play is some form of pleasurable activity, which in early life is concerned with investigating qual- ities of concrete things. Some employment must there- fore be found for its exercise in school life, or education will become a drudgery from which the child will escape as soon as may be to some activity more congenial to its playful nature. It is not depravity or perversity of nature that makes a child desire to play at all times, but the de- mand of his inner being for pleasure to be associated with every activity : and it is the teacher's part to see to it that this demand is fruitfully used by associating the activities with objects that have a capacity for exciting pleasure while they call forth effort to understand them. So it follows that the objects and pictures which the teacher provides will appeal to the child by their own intrinsic qualities for producing childish reactions ; that is, they will be such as appeal to the child's sense of the wonderful or beautiful. This is particularly the case with illustra- tions that are used in the teaching of religion. Ugliness and commonness are to be shunned, since religious feelings and thoughts and actions must from the first be those that are stirred in response to the beautiful in form and colour. In a word, the play-activity of the child is turned into educational channels by providing beautiful things for its exercise. Again, the child is very responsive to "atmos- phere^ phere ". The child's feeling of reverence and its and expression in religious exercises is fostered and ^"^■. encouraged by giving it a proper setting. It is the teacher's work to create atmosphere, to pro- The Child of the Kindergarten 95 vide the proper setting for his teaching so that this teaching may have its utmost effect upon the child's mind and feeling and will. Every teacher knows that this atmosphere is dependent upon two things : (i) the kind of objects that go to make up environment, and (ii) the teacher's attitude towards these objects. With regard to (i), the influence of beautiful objects and pictures is greatest, and next to that the influence of beautiful sounds, as in music from an organ. We have said enough upon the former ; it remains to add that too much care cannot be exercised by the teacher in selecting the hymn tunes and marches to be used in the kindergarten. Every childish emotion can be made to subserve the purpose of religious training if the appropriate musical setting be found. With regard to (ii), the teacher's attitude is reflected in the class without fail. A high seriousness, which need not exclude a smile, a reverent demeanour to- wards the lesson as a whole, and reverent treatment of all objects used in the school, must be preserved by the teacher who wishes to influence children in fashioning the same qualities in themselves. The teacher's general attitude in these respects is part of the atmosphere in which religion is not only taught, but felt to be intensely real. The imitativeness of childhood is strong ; the child is quick to take up the teacher's characteristics and to work them into its own life. Provision being thus made in the kindergarten for child-nature to have its own proper materials and to exercise its own activities in being taught and trained, we have yet to consider some of the ways in which the teacher will make use of these materials and employ these activities in teaching the child religion. First the objects and pictures are for the child's use ; consequently the materials will form the basis p^Q^j. for the child's work. An object is for the child's sion for examination by means of sight, touch, and as Child- many of the other senses as can profitably be employed in discovering its nature. Suppose, for ex- 96 Child Stiidy ample, that the lesson should be upon God's goodness in creating the world. The teacher may come provided with a kitten or rabbit, a bunch of flowers, and an apple or other fruit. The animal will be examined and stroked, the flowers will be distributed to be looked at and smelled, the apple will be tasted. Then, the respective qualities of each will be dwelt upon — their usefulness and their beauty — and so the thought of the child will be led up- wards to the good God Who made them all so wonder- fully. It will be noticed that by this method the child does the work, the teacher suggesting how it is to be done, and by calling into play the various activities, helping the child to form correct and full impressions of the objects presented. It will be obvious that there is considerable freedom allowed to the child in expressing himself, in telling the teacher his impressions, and in asking questions. There is no formal discipline — no telling the child to *' sit still " and listen to the teacher's voice — but in place thereof employment of the child's natural endowment of self-activity in pleasure-giving ways. "To learn by doing," and that pleasurably, is the natural bent of child-nature during the years spent in the kindergarten. For this reason small classes are a necessity if full scope is to be given to every child's activity. It is a sheer im- possibility to teach multitudes of young children. Five or six in a class are as many as the Sunday School teacher can teach efficiently when each has some oppor- tunity for self-expression. There are moments, of course, during the school session when larger bodies can be handled, or when the whole number can be assembled for certain concerted exercises. Thus the preliminary orderliness of the school will be secured by a general march to music so that each class may reach its appointed place without disturbance ; then the hymn and prayers and short repetition of texts will best be done by the whole body. But when once the preliminaries are over, and the lesson proper begins, the separate small classes The Child of the Kindergarten 97 will do each their own work. At the conclusion of the lesson, which must necessarily be brief because of the fluctuation of attention, will come some form of " expres- sion work " done by the children to represent their ideas of the lesson. This may be anything from modelling, or drawing in sand, to crayon work, or the learning of a short text or verse by colouring the letters composing it. Again the whole kindergarten may be now assembled for the general exercises which employ activities while teach- ing practical religion in a new way. Here the baptismal roll and candle, the birthday candles, the prayers and hymns sung for the newly enrolled and those who have had birthdays during the week, keep attention from flagging. This may be followed by learning a verse of a new hymn, or a new prayer, based upon the subject of the lesson, and serving to strengthen the child's impres- sions and ideas. Then a ''missionary march" to music and singing will extend the child's sympathies and prayers and alms to those who are not yet Christians. On re- turning to their allotted places the superintendent may use the opportunity for a general talk, or may emphasize the chief points in the lesson by a question or two, and then follow this with a simple story illustrating some point and colouring the children's ideas with sufficient emotion to make them wishful to carry out in their own lives the practice which the lesson impressed. Finally the session will close with hymn and prayers. Such a plan as this — though its details are modifiable according to circumstances — will provide plenty of scope for employing the concrete, for making use of the principle of self-activity, and for making religious education in early years pleasurable, interesting, and vital. It would be a misfortune to any child to have its early religion divorced from all that makes for joy. The varied treatment given to religious instruction by the kindergarten system, with the numerous aids it supplies, for training a child in reverence in the performance of religious exercises, secure the child's appreciation of 7 98 Child Study religion as a thing of joy. From the teacher's point of view there is no question as to its attraction for the child, and its efficacy as a method of religious teaching and training. The work of the teacher is redeemed from drudgery and weariness by the interest which the children manifest in the use of their own powers to so great an extent in ways that are nature's own. In a word, the kindergarten teacher strives to enter the realm of childhood, not by force, but along the path of humility — "becoming as a little child" in order that the realm of childhood may be claimed as one province in that kingdom of heaven which is His Who was once a little Child. XI. THE CHILD OF THE MIDDLE SCHOOL. In this chapter we shall consider the child of from eight to eleven years of age, and attempt to bring together his chief characteristics. The principle of self-activity, so highly important for the teacher of the kindergarten child to recog- „ nize, still persists in full force ; but it is manifested now as acting in two noticeable directions. Every child has need of some occupation in which to show his activity ; but this activity begins to take two forms, to be separated into two distinct types, to present a cleavage in the nature of children which separates the " mental " or " intellectual " class from the ** physical " or " motor " class. These two stand at opposite ends of a scale : between them will lie the "mixed" type which is partly mental, partly physical in activities. In the mental class self-activity has an intellec- tual bias. A boy or girl of this type is quiet, often meth- odical, wrapped up in books, thoughtful, easily kept inter- ested, caring as a rule but little for sports demanding great exertion, and giving but little trouble from the point of view of class discipline., Generally he keeps his thoughts to himself, or at any rate prefers to tell them only when stimulated to do so by the influence of a similar nature. He often prefers the company of people older than him- self, and drinks in their remarks for subsequent use in his own case. He relies upon other people's experiences of life to a large extent, and learns to live by incorporating them into his stock of knowledge. Often his bodily strength is not great ; he has to live by his wits rather than by 99 7* lOO Child Study elbowing his way through a roughly competitive world, and in thus enabling him to store up other people's ex- perience nature exercises on his behalf her great " law of compensation". The physique of such a child needs careful watching, (i) The It is often under-developed, and the general dis- Mental inclination to exercise makes for decreasing ^ype. vitality, which in extreme cases shows itself in "nerve-signs" such as twitching movements of eyelids, arms and hands, spasmodic contractions of the muscles leading to extraordinary attitudes of the body, limp- ness of supporting muscles causing the child to adopt bad postures of the body when standing, stooping of the shoulders, and in some cases the appearance of a single or double perpendicular line between the eyebrows caused by contraction of the muscles of the forehead. Children showing these nerve-signs should spend much of their time in the open air, either taking walks or in- dulging in some other form of gentle exercise. If good mental work is to be done the body must be kept in health ; subnormal children in one respect are generally subnormal in the other. It is often the case that these subnormals show a species of smartness or shrewd- ness, akin to cleverness, but more allied to calculated cunning than to straightforward intellectual thought. Such children try to find the answer that would please the teacher rather than to reason out a conclusion from data given. Not what is right but what is opportune, is liable to be their motto in employing their intelligence — a motto that is apt to be adopted in behaviour also. Those who have had dealings with such children know how difficult it is to impress them with the idea of" straight- ness " in thought and conduct ; but they know also that an improved physical condition is a great help to im- proving the mental and moral factors as well. But provided that the child's health is normal the " mental " type of child is a very delightful person to have in one's class. His stock of knowledge gained from The Child of the Middle School loi books is always at hand to be used by the wise teacher to answer questions asked by the less intellectual mem- bers of the class. When discipline becomes difficult because of some " funny " answer to a question from an obstreperous child, a quiet appeal to the more sober child for the right answer, and then a word of commenda- tion after it is given, has a sobering influence and quickly restores order. Such a boy or girl comes to gain an increasing influence over the rest so that in the end the " tone " of the class is largely fashioned by the children who are attracted to regard his loyality as desirable of imitation. The thoughtful child will enjoy reading stories of travel, to follow in imagination the deeds of heroes and heroines, to treasure their wonderful discoveries, to gather up the characteristics and ideas of strange peoples, and to work his knowledge into a world of wonderful charm for himself He enters with zest into the loves and hates of others, tracing in imagination their adventures, but all these things in mental pictures. He throws himself into their sorrows and shares their joys, creating for himself the " living situation " in which the actors find themselves. But so far he is prevented from becoming too credulous or sentimental by the fact that much of his life has to be spent in close touch with the concrete at this age. Thus he passes rapidly from the world of imagination to the world of fact, and asks of those older and wiser than himself the question, "Is it true?" He is thus very materialistic, very close in touch with mundane things, very practical in his outlook upon life, and he often sur- prises his teachers by his grip upon realities — his common sense as to the inner meaning of things. Because of his quiet thoughtfulness he marshals facts accurately. To such an one it is useless for the unprepared teacher to give reasons which are unsupported by facts, or which are not based upon full knowledge, with the idea of " putting hiip off". Sooner or later the fraud will be discovered to the teacher's undoing. One hoy of this I02 Child Study age was told by his teacher that the Holy Communion was the Food of the soul. On his return home, he ques- tioned his mother as follows: " Have I a soul? Is my soul starving ? " Pursuing the inquiry he was told that he could receive Holy Communion after Confirmation, at the age of thirteen or so. His reply then took the form, " Then if I go to Holy Communion once every thirteen years, that will be enough for me ! " On another occasion the same boy who had been taught that God's mercy is always extended to those who repent, said that he should do what he liked all his life and tell God just at last that he was sorry, and then it would be all right. We shall not be astonished when, as happens from time to time, the quiet child of the middle school age gives us occasion to pause by presenting to our minds aspects of doctrine and of its bearing upon life which so far we have not considered. The fact is that in all the activities of his mind, whether those activities be reason or imagination, « Ljy. the child of this age has not left the kindergarten ing so far behind as to have lost the appeal of con- ^q"^j Crete things. The "living situations " which he forms in mental pictures are pictures of very real life. He may imagine them, but his imagination makes him an actor in them. The following incident illus- trates the point. A boy of ten had been promised as a special treat that he should be taken to see " A Mid- summer Night's Dream " when next it was performed. Some time elapsed during which he read the play. When at length he was told that a performance was announced his remark was, " Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee : thou art translated ! " His imagination had centred itself in Bottom, and the boy himself had so fashioned the incident of the ass's head and the comicality of the scene, that he was taking the part, by anticipation, of the " rude mechanical " — in other words, that he pictured himself in the midst of the "living situation'* enacting Bottom's part. The Child of the Middle School 103 This illustration serves to explain the interest with which boys and girls in the middle school regard the early stories from the Bible. It will be ^P?^j; noticed that these stories are very dramatic, full to Reli- of action, picturing a life remote from the child's f^°^^ own, yet containing adventure sufficient to colour j^g, it so that the child while reading or hearing the stories can transport himself into the midst of the actors of the drama. Jacob in solitude at Bethel, Joseph in his passage from slavery to princedom, Moses before the burning bush, Joshua the warrior of the Lord of Hosts — all these the child of this age follows imaginatively because their deeds permit him to take part in them. No book contains better material than the Bible for the purpose of creating "living situations " ; and these early stories dramatize religion in such a way that the child- hood of all the world can be touched and stimulated through them to accept the things of God which they reveal. The same is true of the Gospel stories. They touch life at vital points, and the dramatic nature of miracles, parables, lives, and events keeps in them an abiding interest for children. The point to be observed in teaching them is not to press the application too strongly, but just to put forward one definite line of thought or action for the child to see, and to take up, leaving the rest for the child's mind to work out for itself. We now pass to a brief consideration of the " motor " child who shows his proclivities very clearly at ^jj) ^he this period of life. In distinction from the Motor " mental " type of child, he shows his activity in '^^P^* physical ways. As a rule he is strong and healthy, with a good bodily frame, and good muscles which he is anxious to exercise. He is not particularly imaginative, and he prefers games and sports to the indoor life of books. He too likes to fashion "living situations," but he prefers to create them by his own activities rather than to picture them in imagination. His energy seems I04 Child Study untiring, and he will apply it in manifold ways, usefully as in making a rabbit hutch or shaping a model to be used in a lesson, or wastefully in destroying other people's property. It is true of him that " Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do " ; for unless wise provision is made for his bodily energy to find vent it will be used in other ways. In school he must be used, and the teacher's difficulty is to know what to do with him all through a lesson. Out of school he cannot resist a doorbell or knocker ; a tree only exists to be climbed ; and stones lie in the road only to be thrown. Yet he has generous instincts, for this is the child who rescues little ones in distress, helps blind men across busy streets, and will walk miles to collect subscriptions for any object that appeals to him. All teachers know him full well ; the weak teacher shuns him ; the strong teacher often votes him a worry, but loves him all the same because he is so far from being a prig. If the theory is true — and there seems good reason ♦' Reca- to believe it — that the child as he grows " recapit- pitula- ulates " in himself the stages through which the The- r^ce has passed, then we can understand why it ory." is that for some years after the age of nine or thereabouts both boys and girls pass through '* the hunter and warrior stage". They are enacting in their own individual persons the events which characterized one period in the lives of their ancestors. But however this may be, it is a well-known fact that children do pass through this stage. It begins with games of pursuit ; it passes rapidly into games in which cunning is of more avail than speed — this is in accord with the rapidly developing powers of reason at this age ; while in a short time strength and skill are used to attack or defend a hut or mound, or to play the part of a Red Indian in the back-garden. At one moment the boy will be a knight-errant rescuing damsels in distress, at another he will scare them from him with terrible howls and cries. We hardly wonder that the exploits of Samson against The Child of the Middle School 105 the Philistines, or of David against Goliath, should prove attractive to children of this type. Stories of strenuous deeds, whether they be in the sphere of body or of spirit, appeal always. The Temptation of our Lord, His fearlessness at all times and under all circumstances, stories of the Saints who had to contend against fearful odds and were yet victorious in the end, have a charm for such children. The teacher's part is to bring out this aspect of them for the child to imitate. Religion in action is what he demands, and what his nature must have if it is to find satisfaction. No doubt such children require a teacher of wonderful adaptability and great resource to keep their AppH- energies usefully employed during school hours, cation. But something is gained if we realize the motor child's craving for bodily activity, and try to make such provision for it as school-life permits of Children of this type make admirable monitors; they can be used to carry the teacher's books to and from school, to run any odd messages, to prepare the lesson apparatus, black- boards, objects, pictures, books, etc., that may be required to keep classrooms neat, and by way of a special treat to make, or assist in making, under the teacher's direction, any model that may be required. In these ways it is possible to enchain their interest to other details of the lesson — to make them at least indirectly interested in the lesson which otherwise would quite fail to teach them anything at all. To sum up, these two types which we have so far considered, though showing such vast differences by the time they have reached the top of the middle school, yet reveal certain likenesses which guide us in forming great general principles of child-nature during this period. Self-activity in some form or other is a characteristic which must be catered for by the teacher according to the ways in which the individual child normally acts. The " mental " type and the " motor " type must each find that its demands are satisfied by the material sup- io6 Child Study plied by the teacher, by the methods employed for using that material to best advantage, and by the scope that the teacher allows to the individual child to make a natural response. Next is to be noticed the ability of both types to reason and the general tendency to bring reason to bear in practical ways upon the facts presented to it. Reason is a newly discovered power of the mind, and both types of children use it to bring knowledge into touch with life. Hence both types are interested in " living situations " ; the " mental " type makes them by imagination, the " motor " type by action. The former conforms practice to theory, the latter makes theory agree with practice. By the former type doctrines of religion will be held in rever- ence, and subsequent actions will be based upon them. The latter type will pay regard rather to the actions done by religious people, and from these actions will deduce the doctrines which they exemplify. Between the two extremes lie that large number of " mixed " natures, showing neither extreme mentality nor extreme motor qualities, but having natures compounded of varying degrees of both. These constitute the bulk of an average class. They require lessons which allow scope for both kinds of activity ; for them motor activity is a rest from mental work, and vice versa. They make no excessive demands upon a teacher who is interested in his subject, and alert to notice when attention flags so that the teaching method may be varied. A well-pre- pared lesson calculated to stimulate self-activity in various ways, and with plenty of illustration to give " living situa- tions," will in the hands of such a teacher be effective in gaining attention. The kinds of " expression work " at the close will, with such children, be as varied as possible. Finally, as teachers we shall remember that this is not the age at which definitions are to be taught. The child's concern is with the concrete, not the abstract XII. THE CHILD OF THE SENIOR SCHOOL. The period covered in this chapter is that between the ages of eleven and fourteen years, a period in which many of the tendencies of the earlier age harden and several new lines of development open up. At the lower age the demand for facts is still all-powerful. It is the concrete that holds the child's interest. But he has acquired wisdom in his experience of dealing with it. He realizes the limitations of his strength and from pru- dential motives is slower to embark upon affairs in which he thinks it likely that he may fail. For the same reason he will go to the prudential limit in teasing a sister, or worrying a teacher, but not beyond it. He calculates consequences to himself. In Sunday-school he will in- dulge in humour and by-play to his heart's content, and particularly with a teacher weak in discipline; but in day-school he is prudent enough to restrain both for fear of what may befall him. His humour is crude in its character, insensible of any wounds it may inflict, and as a rule does not appeal to an adult. It is the age when " funny answers " are given to serious questions, answers which seem to lack point as regards humour to anyone but companions of the same age. Personal idiosyn- crasies and failings and deformities in other people meet with scorn and often with mockery from boys and girls of this age. There is a ** brutal frankness " about them which makes them heedless of other people's sufferings of mind, and seems to deprive them of any deep feelings of sympathy. X07 io8 Child Study This reads like an indictment of the age of fresh boy- Exterior hood and girlhood, but it states the facts on one World, side for the purpose of calling attention to the lack of the finer feelings, the apparent retardation of emotional development, and the absence of self-analysis. Nature has so ordered that during this age of rapid growth in physical strength, and of development in reasoning power, both should be exercised to their fullest extent upon the objective world of things and people. This is no time for interior things if development is to take its right course of fitting the child in a few years to measure his strength and his wits against a competitive, matter-of- fact world. He is learning beforehand the prudence necessary to meet the hard blows the world can deal. Where this is necessary, nature would have departed from her wonted wisdom had she been lavish of her gifts of deep emotions, fine sentiments, refined sensibility, tender sympathy, and powers of self-analysis. These things must come later, when prudence has learnt how to use them in fruitful ways. Meanwhile, the gaze is directed outwards, and the coarser cruder feelings of pleasure, anger, fear, hate, are mainly those that are capable of be- ing aroused. The love of outdoor games at this age is not- able — the same purpose of directing attention outwards is served by them. Further, these games begin to take the form of violent physical exertion to achieve the purpose of conquest, and this not for the individual so much as for the group in which the child now begins to live his life. But here we find a counteracting factor to the child's Social selfishness. Gregariousness, the tendency to Instinct, congregate, begins to assert itself, and gives rise to another instinct — the Social Instinct. At first this is manifested in love of approbation. Activities are undertaken for the purpose of winning applause. Sports and pastimes which permit of the display of strength or skill, such as football or cricket, now come to furnish op- portunities of showing individual excellence ; it is only The Child of the Senior School 109 by degrees that the individual learns to subordinate him- self for the welfare of his club. The club rules and public sentiment, however, teach him this ; and the pressure ex- erted by the community upon him to make him "play the game " for the benefit of the whole body checks his selfishness of purpose and trains him to look at the com- mon end to be achieved. His own strength and skill are to be used for the good of others along with his own good. It is but a step from this to the development of that spirit which regards the common good as a higher thing than the individual good, and makes the boy or girl pre- fer this, even at the cost of some self-sacrifice. Action for another's good is not usual, however, much before the age of fourteen. Up to this age the social child learns rather the lessons of self-control Pres- through conformity to law. At first the law is ^"'®' purely external, consisting of the will of the teacher. It must, however, be reasonable in the sense that a child of eleven may understand the advantage to himself of obey- ing it. A little later, as the necessity for explicit com- mands decreases, law takes the form of authority. The child's reason teaches him the necessity of obedience to the details of law which authority stands for, but seldom expresses in words. This obedience is helped by the fact that the groups to which the child attaches him- self have their own "codes of honour" which, though at first they exert pressure upon the individual to make him live up to them, soon come to represent ideals of conduct This takes place at about the age of thirteen, and boys and girls should be ** put upon their honour " as much as possible from this time onwards. They learn to value the experience, and it is a good plan for cultivating the class-spirit as a whole. For now the boy or girl has the power of self-direction, and public opinion is an im- portant factor in directing this power into channels where the common good is the main object to be aimed at ; and this is secured by observing the code of honour of the com- munity. Movements like the ** Scouts " for boys, and the no Child Study " Girl Guides " for girls, are attempts to enlist large bodies of children of this age in observing such codes of honour for the promotion of the good of the two communities themselves, and also for furthering the welfare of the larger world. The success of the movements is assured, since they hold their members by the strongest of chains at an age when the community instinct is ready for activity, and when ideals of conduct are beginning to be shaped. That the Scouts have more visible success than the Girl Guides is probably largely due to the fact that girls of this age are more in requisition at home ; but given the same freedom, there seems no reason why the girls should not cohere as much as the boys to learn much the same great lessons. One point, however, should be observed, viz. that from the age of twelve onwards girls develop more slowly than boys ; so that any general movement for girls should be deferred to from six to twelve months later than the age for the corresponding movement for boys. One further point to be observed in this connexion is Symbol- the Usefulness of badges, signs, and special ism. dress, to promote the " gang instinct " which is making its appearance. The call of the external world is still great, and children have preferential tastes with re- gard to it. The badge not only serves as the visible sign of the code which it stands for, but is in itself re- garded as an object of beauty or a mark of honour, to possess which means to be able to win somebody's re- gard. Both boys and girls of this age have strong ideas of their own upon things that are beautiful or the reverse. These ideas may be crude ; but a striking badge or uni- form is one way of enlisting support to a movement. To purchase jerseys for a school football club has been known to improve the quality of the play forthwith. The use of a uniform in cultivating the clan-spirit, or of a common badge to bind the members of a guild together, is out of all proportion to its cost. The teacher of a class of this age will find means of using this propensity for regarding the outward and visible as a sign and badge The Child of the Senior School iii of the inward and spiritual. The child of the senior school is the true sacramentalist ; he understands the spiritual world through the significance of the natural. If therefore he is later to understand the deep things of his own nature, and to use them for God, it must be by his present understanding of the spiritual significance of the things that belong to the world. So that although the boy and girl during this period are apparently not very susceptible to spiritual Applica- things as such, yet there are ways of touching ^^o"- them to concern, methods of appealing to their natures, which are based upon their understanding of the outward symbols of inward realities. It is the age at which the teacher will give instruction in the Sacraments, their meaning, their correspondence with human nature which is itself external as regards bodily form, and internal as regards spiritual essence, and their purpose as Means of Grace. Further, it is the age when teaching upon the nature of the Church should be given, that outwardly she is a corporate society of living beings, while inwardly she lives by the Spirit ef Christ. The significance of Church membership, as realizing the unity of our fellow- ship one with another, and using that fellowship in ministry one to another, is part of the doctrine of the Church — that part which prepares the individual to Mose his life in order to find it ' — the practical application of the meaning of Christian unity to personal life ; this too must be taught in theory and encouraged in practice. It is the age, too, when the teaching given in early years must be centralized, systematized, and made definite, by showing the main lines of thought which Christian doc- trine follows. The story forms of early instruction will now be used rather as illustrations, the purpose being to show how they lead up to the greatest truths of God's dealings with man through Christ. It is the age when Old Testament characters, events, and rites are shown to be types and pictures of New Testament realities and when, for example, Melchizedek, Abraham, David are 112 Child Stiidy seen to be foreshadowings of Christ ; the journey of Israel through the wilderness becomes, as it became to S. Paul, the image of the Christian life (i Cor. x.); the sacrifices foretell the One Perfect and Sufficient Sacrifice of the Lamb of God ; the temple at Jerusalem becomes the pattern of the heavenly temple ; and the life of the nation of Israel with its worship, its failures, its penitence and its restoration by God's love and mercy becomes the example and the warning for all who would follow the path of peace. And in the New Testament the same kind of method is followed. Our Lord was not simply an amiable Philanthropist Who lavished kindness of heart at haphazard upon a spiteful and impenitent nation. The Gospel story shows how He chose out of the nation a company of men — not favourites, but ministers — to be the nucleus of a Society which should grow, and in its growth, spread like leaven through the hostile world. They were people who could guard His teaching, speci- ally chosen to be the treasury of His Faith, specially commissioned to impart that faith to those who would accept His discipline, and put themselves under His sovereignty. This Faith was no nebulous thing, but was a coherent system of truths which though "once de- livered to the saints " has had a history in the thought and life of the Church, and comes down the ages sealed with the blood of martyrs and affirmed by the witness of holy lives. In other words, faith has had a history which is itself continually governed and inspired by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Order. This history we must teach in its outlines that thereby we may both satisfy the intelligence and shape the ideals of children in the senior school. Doctrine, Life, History — these three are the guides to those whose province it is to frame the curriculum of religious knowledge which shall be adequate to the in- struction of children who soon must enter upon the difficult period of adolescence when faith is apt to be shaken, life becomes difficult, and new ideas are formed The Child of the Senior School 113 which are not always true. For the teaching of the senior school must anticipate the adolescent life, provid- ing by anticipation for the difficulties that will then con- front it ; and it cannot do so unless this teaching is systematized — unless the facts and truths of Christian life and Churchmanship are shown to be grounded on great principles of law and order which, existing in the mind of God, are able also to be seen by those who try to know Him and His work in the world. But what principles of God's work shall we try to set before these children ? Where shall we Church look for them ? Believing as we do that Bible and religion is Church doctrine and Church life, we Bible, shall look to the Church's systematization to be our guide. This we find in the Creeds, the Catechism, and the Prayer Book ; for these are formularies that set forth " the mind of the Church," as to revealed religion. The Creeds teach us to know God ; the Catechism teaches us to know His will for us ; the Prayer Book sets forth the means by which we can carry out His will in the details of Christian worship and Christian practice. The Church to teach ; the Bible to prove, illustrate, expand and deepen the Church's systematized teaching — that is the foundation principle. From this others arise, viz. that we may not teach anything as of faith which has not the double warrant of the Church and the Bible to establish it, nor may we leave as mere opinion anything to which the Church in her formularies has set her seal of authority as " necessary doctrine and instruction." The age of childhood which we are considering is emin- ently the time for definite religious instruction. Its ob- jective view of truth, its touch with externals, its readiness to find realities beneath symbols, its power of getting at the heart of things and putting aside appearances, above all its preparation for a time of life at once the most difficult to understand and the most trying to pass through, make it imperative that teachers should try to satisfy its demands by providing instruction such as the nature 8 114 Child Study of this age requires. For the child is attempting to systematize its own life preliminary to the stress that is shortly to come upon it. The child does not know its own need of firm foundation principles ; but Nature knows the need, and tries to supply it. Instruction can follow no better guide than Nature where she so plainly points the way. But just as Nature has her purpose, so must there be an aim for instruction. "What clear purpose shall ments we as teachers of religion set before ourselves in and giving instruction to our children ? Is there any ^^^^' goal which the senior school must strive to reach ? Or are the last years of the child's Sunday-school life to end in nothing more than sending the boy and girl out into the world with a knowledge of doctrine and Church history which may never be of service to the Church whose doctrine and history they are ? We know the appalling loss to Church life which takes place during the age of adolescence, even when the teaching given is definite, and the principles of Church life are known in theory. The children of the Church pass out into the world, but only too often they disappear from the Church's life and become part of the dead-weight of the indifferent and heed- less. Is there no remedy for this state of things? Must we be condemned to watch this ebbing tide, and never be able to bind its power and utilize its latent energies? Is there nothing in child-nature upon which we may seize, and then with fast hold direct it to useful purposes ? Let us return for a moment to the child's desire for fellowship, and to its quest for ideals. Therein it finds principles in action, life instinct with the knowledge which is power, and a method of putting that knowledge into practice. Where else, then, than in some form which will enable it to realize its fellowship and to copy ideals shall we find the necessary method of attaching the child to the Church ? But there must be a rite, a ceremony of deepest significance, if the fellowship and the quest The Child of the Senior School 115 are to mean what they should to the child who aspires to carrying them out. Here again the Church in her wisdom supplies the ceremony in the rite of Confirmation which she administers to those whose knowledge of Christian truth has been systematized round " the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and further instruction in the Church Catechism." The aim of the Senior School must be to give this knowledge and so to prepare all its children for Confirmation — which, whatever else it is, is the consecration by the Holy Spirit of the properly instructed child ere he goes out to fight, in the larger world which he soon must enter, the battle of Christ. For Confirmation is to the child of this age the ceremony of initiation into the life of full fellowship of the Church. But, further, the Church Catechism takes the child beyond Confirmation into that life to which Confirmation is only the prelude and initiation. The life of the Com- municant must be set forth both in regard to its privileges and also in regard to its ideals, and the thoughts should be centred round it more and more as the child reaches the end of his school-life. The Sunday-school is not fulfilling its purpose unless its members are taught to look upon Sacramental life and worship as at once the highest privilege and the bounden duty which member- ship of the Church involves. As the Catechism leaves the child kneeling at the Altar, so should it be the aim of the Sunday-school to lead its scholars thither. XIII. EARLY ADOLESCENCE. "The problem of the adolescent" is the most difficult of all educational problems which a teacher is called upon to solve — how to deal with the boy and girl during the years from fourteen to sixteen or seventeen. Not that adolescence passes into maturity after this age : it con- tinues to the age of twenty-one, or even beyond. Only as a rule after sixteen or seventeen class instruction comes to an end, and other means of guidance have to be found whereby the developing young man or young woman can be helped to come into full possession of a formed personality. At fourteen, in some cases earlier, childhood has passed away for ever. Among the working-classes both sexes have left school, in many cases to enter upon the larger life of workshop or office, or in the case of girls to help mother at home, or to enter domestic service. Having to face the world is in itself a crisis ; but as this is ac- companied with equally vast changes both physical and mental, within the nature of the boy and girl of this age, the period may rightly be characterized as one of storm and stress, of great unrest which it will take years to calm. For think of the bodily development now taking place. It is ** the awkward age " — the age of the ** youth " and the " flapper," when hands and feet feel too large and limbs too long, when clumsiness is calculated to breed either great shyness and reserve, or a don't-care attitude which flouts the sensitiveness of older people. It is the age when the ''motor" girl develops into a tomboy and Ii6 Early Adolescence 117 seeks the company of her brothers in their escapades. The quiet girl subsides into herself and becomes more silent than before. The Parental Instinct develops rapidly in this period. It shows itself outwardly in adornment of person, ^he Boys begin to develop care and neatness ; boots Parental are well polished, gloves appear, often a small ^"stinct. cane to carry, and decided preference is shown for certain styles of dress. Girls notice the modes of coiffure, and imitate as far as they can the combs and ribbons of elders whose appearance they admire. Not consciously perhaps, but none the less as a matter of fact, sex comes to have a meaning which so far it has not possessed. At ** the awkward age " the one sex will avoid the other in order to ^vo\di faux pas ; but the attraction is there all the same, as is seen by the efforts made to stand well in each other's opinions. But self-consciousness forbids anything more than a shy approach though the mutual attraction is strong. The age is also characterized by care for children. The "helpers" in the kindergarten are recruited from both boys and girls who are adolescent. The parental instinct needs to be satisfied by having the care of the young and helpless committed to it. Boys will often take a delight in younger brothers ; while girls at this age are very efficient nurses. But neither sex will do this if it be thought ridiculous or in any way unbecoming. Another instinct, closely allied with the parental, is the Social Instinct which develops rapidly at this ^he age. The girl or boy tends to find companions Social to share the inner life. Friendships become very ^"stinct. real and close, and the qualities which are called out thereby take the developing child out of himself He begins to live for others as well as for himself One form of this social instinct is to be noted in what has been called the gang instinct. School life furnishes many instances of this in the formation of secret societies, each with its own signs and passwords and its own aims. ii8 Child Study The teacher of adolescents will do well to recognize the great force of this instinct, and to enlist it in banding together the units into a body with corporate ideals and corporate activities. Thus the scout-troup enlisted as separate units quickly becomes jealous for its corporate honour provided it has the right sort of scoutmaster. All kinds of side organizations should come out of the main body to multiply the corporate activities, e.g. from the Bible-class there should issue football and cricket- clubs, guild life under a common rule, a common method of alms-giving, and so forth ; but in order to keep these side organizations in proper relationship to each other and to the main body, the greatest insistence should be laid upon the central theme, i.e. the Bible-class unity. Where, however, the aim of the central body is not directly religious, as in the scout movement, then the scout Bible-class will be incorporated into it as a side organization worthy of the same attention as is bestowed upon other kinds of corporate work. It is certain that the teacher must use the social instinct to foster right development during this period, or other- wise it will find opportunities of action which will be detri- mental. The bands of hooligans which still are to be found where adolescents find opportunities to foregather are an instance of such a perversion of this instinct. Girls no less than boys feel the impetus to associate into groups. Societies like the G.F.S. wisely utilize the gang instinct and direct it into proper channels. Its ravages when allowed full play can be read in such a story as " Mord Em'ly " (Ridge). But when harnessed and directed along right ways the gang instinct can be made to subserve the useful purpose of fitting the adolescent to take his place in the larger social world which is now beginning to claim his atten- tion and his energies. It must be recognized, however, that the rules made for associations of adolescents are such as appeal to their reason ; such as, while embodying an ideal, are felt to be possible to be put into practice. Early Adolescence 1x9 The gang instinct urges the adolescent "to play the game," but he must feel that the rules of the game are applicable to himself. For this reason it is well to take counsel of a group before drawing up rules to govern its actions. As the play of a little child gradually shapes itself into organized games in which the leader teaches the value of organized effort, so the rules of the organized game are transferred now to the more serious business of organized life. This organized life demands the oppor- tunity for making its own rules, and this the wise teacher allows by giving the corporate body a share in delibera- tions, permitting it to suggest plans and rules, making use of suggested improvements, and generally seeking to lead rather than control. To play the game is as essential for the teacher as for the taught, and by doing so the adult exercises an influence upon character greater than he knows. Here, however, we pass to another characteristic of the adolescent — his tendency.to follow ideals. In its idealiz- commonest form this tendency shows itself in ing Hero-worship. The imagination of youth is '^^"^- largely concerned with persons and their doings. The preference which in an earlier age concerns itself with things, is now exercised upon people. Friends are chosen for some particular quality, either because they are strong, or handsome, or clever, or for some reason which brings mutual admiration. The qualities which these friends exhibit are then isolated and analysed, in order that they may be admired and imitated. Presently some one is found who possesses these qualities to an extraordinary degree, and forthwith this person is put on a pedestal to become a hero. Every scout finds in his troop some one to imitate and aspire to ; but nobody to his mind comes to be such an ideal as the Chief Scout. Most girls have some bosom friend to share their confidences; but generally there is some older woman who is the embodi- ment of all things admirable. The taste for the ro- mantic which manifests itself at this time provides every I20 Child Study boy and girl with a hero or heroine to worship from the pages of novels. Every boy finds somebody to imitate, either a King Arthur, or a Buffalo Bill, or a Deadwood Dick : every girl discovers a heroine such as Florence Nightingale, or Joan of Arc, or Cordelia. It all depends upon the types set before these young people in the literature they read, the biographies they study, and the examples that are set them, which ideal they will make their own. For certainly this is the age of the knight- errant and the fair lady; every hero is the one, and every heroine the other to an adolescent. A teacher can be of service in selecting good materials for fashion- ing ideals in the " lives " that are to be read, and in pre- senting "characters" that are most worthy of imita- tion. Romanticism is fostered by rapid development of the Emo- emotions at this age. The functioning of the Develop- Social Instinct has much to do with emotional ment. development. We have noticed the attempts made to please the opposite sex in matters of dress and personal appearance and in the preference shown for certain styles of garb which are considered both suitable and becoming. This preference extends to other things which are considered beautiful, e.g. songs, pianoforte pieces, certain kinds of poetry, pictures, church ritual, old buildings. The mediaeval period in history attracts a boy or girl who reads, because of its warmth, and glow, and richness of colour. Scott's novels are fascinating because they succeed in capturing this richness and attaching it to persons who are interesting on account of their personal charms. Stories of adventure have great fascination, par- ticularly when they take place in circumstances which are unwonted and somewhat mysterious, or when gigantic difficulties have to be overcome. It is particularly the age of " the quest " ; for adolescence seeks to know itself and its possibilities, and tries to learn both through the ad- ventures of other romantic people who had great purposes in view, Early Adolescence I2I This period of awakening to a larger world is, there- fore, no small strain upon the physical, mental Treat- and emotional nature of the adolescent. The "^ent. world within grows larger suddenly, and seeks illumina- tion from the world without which suddenly grows larger also. There is generated in the contact a new set of responses, and it is no wonder that we often find both boys and girls of this age capricious, moody, wayward, at one moment inclined to be quite sure that their opinions are the only right ones, at another distrustful of them- selves, seeking refuge in confidences which sympathy will readily evoke. The cruder feelings of the former period become softened by the addition of tender emotions of sympathetic joy and sorrow, the perception of the beauti- ful, and the attraction which ideals exercise over develop- ing thought and will. Care must be taken lest by forcing these tender emotions the adolescent becomes a sentimentalist, brooding upon the hard blows which life gives until he ceases to have moral backbone sufficient to stand up and hit back. The age is one which, while ready to follow ideals, is also just as ready to fall into despair when it realizes that to follow them to the end involves struggle and strife, and failure to attain perfection even then. The teacher's work in this respect is to act as a counsellor, not with an assumed superiority, but with sympathy a.id encouragement ; not minding the time spent in listening to the unformed opinions put forward, the rash generalizations that the adolescent makes, but correcting them rather by way of suggestion than by con- tradiction, all the while seeking to give a true view of things and hardening the character to meet them as they should be met. In endeavouring to understand himself and his world, the adolescent is prone to seek the explanation New of both in the spiritual' world. The rapidly de- A\yak- veloping mysterious powers of his whole nature, ^"*"S^- so inexplicable to himself, cause him to seek in every possible direction for a cause and methods of relating 122 Child Stuidy them t© environment. Everything tends to make him regard the cause and the relationships as obscure. Hence this is the age when consolation is sought in some form of religion. For the first time religion of some sort be- comes vitally important. The mysteries within call to the mystery without, seek to co-operate with it, and thus to get an explanation of life. Adolescence is es- sentially the age of " conversion ". In the storm and stress of the ebullient life within " deep calls unto deep," the deep of human nature to the deep of the Divine Nature, asking for peace. This does not come until the storm has spent its fury during the time preceding con- version. As a rule the main elements in conversion are sub-conscious ; the child does not purpose to change the course of his life, though the sense of mystery is strong upon him. The process rather resembles that by which a problem is solved in sleep or when, being laid aside for some days, the answer is found without trouble. In this case the elements of the problem are stored in the brain- cells which, by being shuflFled in sub-consciousness, even- tually give the right combination for the correct answer, somewhat like a lock which has to be opened by a key- word. Similarly the former thoughts and feelings and actions of the adolescent are recombined in subconscious- ness into new complexes which make for a " spontaneous awakening " to a new view of himself, his relationships to the world, and a new order of life in which religion of some kind becomes very personal. That is the reason why ''religious revivals" are thronged by young people. The social instinct, the romantic trend of thought, the craving for ideals to follow, and the parental instinct, all combine to further the quest for the spiritual world by adolescents ; and the tendency to use an instinct to its fullest extent as soon as it begins to function, results in full play being given at this age to the religious instinct, and in consequent conversion. Not, of course, that every adolescent passes with such violence as here described through the process of conversion, be- Early Adolescence 123 cause much will depend upon the nature of the training given and the ideas imparted during the preceding period. A wise anticipation of the workings of the adolescent mind, and a careful preparation for them, will do much to make the transition smoother during this period of upheaval, and to soften the shocks that may be experi- enced. During the period of transition all kinds of ideas will be tried in the balance of the adolescent mind, New many questions will be asked, many opinions ideas, hazarded, while the attempt is made to construct a per- sonal religion. The world of ideas comes to have a value which so far it has not had, and the phases of re- ligious opinion rapidly change in the same individual until settlement is reached during the late twenties. The teacher must thus expect all kinds of heterodox ideas to be incorporated with the religion of the adolescent of fifteen or sixteen. Whatever he deems suitable to life will come into the general stock of earlier received doc- trines. We have found ideas gathered from Buddhism and "Higher Thought" interwoven in the pattern of Christianity. The attitude of the teacher is never to be astonished at novelties of this kind when they make their appearance, and always to treat them with as serious consideration as the adolescent gives to them. The truth is attained at last after much experiment : no good purpose is served by showing or expressing contempt for adolescent experiments. A sympathetic ear, and then a suggestion which will help towards further consideration of the subject is, generally speaking, the best method of helping the tortured soul in its efforts to arrive at the truth. Every teacher of adolescents will do well to cul- tivate the qualities of patience and sweet reasonableness towards them; they will often be necessary. Further, it will not be expected that adolescents will express their opinions or reveal their difficulties before a class. Those opinions will be quite strongly held, but self-consciousness bars the way to speech. The Bible-class teacher knows 124 Child Study how difficult it is to get answers to questions : lessons be- come lectures, and discussion quickly dies down. But something maybe done if boys and girls are allowed to suggest the topics upon which the teacher should speak, and particularly if the "question-slip method'* be in use, whereby a box is kept in which question papers may be deposited from time to time and a lesson set apart for re- plies. In addition, opportunities should be given for in- dividual members of the class to approach the teacher outside the lesson for informal talk, when many diffi- culties will open themselves to a sympathetic listener and the personal interest shown will be a real help to overcoming them. But, with regard to those difficulties, it is found that New they are often much more in the sphere of the Emo- emotions or the will, than in that of intellect, tions. 'pi^g glamour of rapidly developing emotions casts its spell over all thoughts and ideas, and there re- sults a felt, rather than a reasoned, incongruity between life and thought. Similarly actions of will are largely determined by feeling, and there is always the danger lest " the heart run away with the head " in this respect. It is necessary then that the teacher of religion to boys and girls of this age should be one who feels a thrill of interest in the subjects he discusses, and can throw round them a halo of romance and glamour for the benefit of his listeners. Dry definitions and pious talks will have but little effect in stimulating theactionof either intellect or will. Going through a book of the Bible chapter by chapter and verse by verse is calculated to dry up all in- terest in the subject. The adolescent looks for facts and events, not documents ; for life, not definitions. "Acts" is a book often studied in Bible-class ; but how often, alas ! is the subject-matter deprived of all interest, and the teaching bereft of all moral force because it is for- gotten that it is a book of Christian'heroes, and that St. Paul was a man who did other things than wander from one small dot to another upon a map of the Roman Early Adolescence 125 Empire ! What of the life of the Roman world, and of the Christian communities against this background — a life which is reflected in both aspects in the Epistles ? What were the odds against which Christian heroes strove, and Christianity won its way ? These are the things that the adolescent wants to know, because they are precisely the things that help him to fight his own battle of life. De- finitions will come later, when the facts have been gathered together in the mind and are found to have a value for all sides of life, and not to be merely so much intellectual chaff which will be blown away by the strong wind of circumstances. Religion must have a colouring equal to that of other important things in life. Otherwise we shall still hear the complaint that it lacks power over manhood and womanhood, and makes no practical difference to the lives and aspirations of those who profess belief in it. Much more must be done during the adolescent stage in the way of guild-life, continuation classes, and particularly in the way of holding individuals through teachers who will make it their work to keep in touch, not only with groups by interesting them in religion as such, but with individuals who need sympathetic help during this crucial period of thought, emotion, and will. It is useless to approach the problem with preconceived notions ; ado- lescents shatter preconceived notions always, and de- mand from the teacher adaptability to see their point of view, together with willingness to adopt it in teaching them the things of God. XIV. THE RELIGION OF CHILDHOOD. The aim of this chapter is to collect the evidences of the nature of the religion of childhood in its different stages. What are the data from which we estimate childhood's religion ? They are of three kinds : (i) the ideas of children so far as they can be obtained from children's own descriptions ; (ii) the definitions which children give of religious truths ; (iii) adult reminiscence of childhood's days. The first of these are the most to be relied upon in getting to know what a child thinks of spiritual things since they give first-hand impressions ; the second are next in value, inasmuch as when a child has got to the definition stage its beliefs must be fairly clear ; the third are the least important facts, since much that the adult thinks that he remembers of childhood's days is produced in later life and read back into the early period. Yet, indistinct as are the memories of childhood to most adults, they are valuable for adding completeness to the evidence available. First then is there any evidence for the existence of a " religious instinct " ? It will be remembered that we dealt with emotions and instincts in chapter VII., and showed that they were the inner and outer forms of the same fact. Is there then any distinct "re- ligious emotion" corresponding with a "religious in- stinct " ? The question has only to be put in this form to receive an affirmative answer. Every child has a feeling that there are Higher Powers — a feeling, rather than a thought. Perhaps it is that this feeling is gener- 126 The Religion of Childhood 127 ated by observation of human beings with greater strength than his own. Certainly this feeling is within when the child fears solitude and darkness for example — even though this fear may be inherited from ancestors to whom solitude and darkness were full of danger. But this fear is nevertheless real, and in nervous children it is the cause of many pangs of suffering. We would not, how- ever, base the religious emotion of a child upon fear of the invisible, though some writers of authority have been inclined to do so. Rather would we seek for it at somewhat higher level — in the tendency to find mystery in the simplest phenomena, and to account this mystery spiritual in its nature. No doubt the fears of children do partly account for this spiritualizing quality of the mind ; but not entirely so. A child feels no fear of the whispering breeze, nor of the fluttering butterfly, but it asks : Why does the wind make a noise ? What makes the butterfly fly like that? On all sides there are mysterious things ; and the feeling of wonder, combined with this sense of the mysterious, seems to be the ground of religious emotion. A French experiment was made with a certain deaf- mute. He was kept from all intercourse likely to engender religious emotion. One day, however, he was found in rapt gaze upon the mountains in the distance. The question that had framed itself in his mind was, " What is behind the mountains?" This question, though not put into words, was an inquiry into the mystery of the unseen. He answered his own question by kneeling to an imaginary big man smoking a pipe from which the smoke rolled as cloud-masses over the mountain-tops. The feeling of wonder at the sight of the dense clouds combined with the sense of the mysterious, and together they fashioned that religious emotion which prompted the untaught boy to express it instinctively in the action of kneeling to an unseen being who had power to a de- gree surpassing that of an ordinary man, though of the same kind which humanity possesses. It is in this 128 Child Study direction then, rather than in fear, that we would look for the earliest forms of the religious emotion. It needs but little teaching from a mother to give a development to this emotion by naming the unseen mystery by the name of God. Probably the child does not experience towards Him anything more at first than the feeling of wonder combined with the sense of the mysterious. There is for a child no great gulf fixed between the material world and the mystery which saturates it through and through. The child is the true mystic. The world of sense runs up at every point into the world of spirit, is indeed the medium through which he enters into communion with the spiritual world, and so with God. The idea of personality attaches itself at length to this Divine Being, transferred again from the experience which the child has gained of personality in its action upon the material world — the personalit}'' of the ''big man," of father perhaps, who is stronger than the child to mould the world to his will, and so of One Who is stronger even than father. That is a delightful time in every child's life when father co-operates with him in securing his joys, lifting the weight which is beyond the child's strength, moving heavy articles of furniture to find an errant ball, showing wondrous skill in making boats, in spinning tops, in winding up gramo- phones, and in planting seeds to produce flowers. Strength and wisdom are made manifest by fathers and other " big men " in a thousand ways. What wonder then if these qualities, when transferred to God, make it an easy matter for a child to know Him as a powerful Creator and wise Worker Who every day has it in mind to add to the pleasures of the child's life ? There is no feeling of fear in this species of religious emotion — only wonder and the sense of mystery, uniting with intellectual elements in an idea of personality, which though spiritual is yet fashioned of human shape. And as it is the father's wish to foster the child's happiness, so the response of the child to him is that of love — a response likewise The Religion of Childhood 129 transferred to God. In some such ways as these is the child's idea of God and of his relationship to God, built up. Hence it comes about that there is in a child whose home life and surroundings are good, a sense of intimacy with God, rather than a feeling of fear ; for in that home life feelings of love and trust will be much more promi- nent than feelings of fear. This love and trust, as it allows to the child great freedom of natural expression of its inner life, engenders the same attitude towards God. Many of the religious sayings of children betoken this intimacy which they feel towards Him. A child who was being scolded by her mother answered " God doesn't like cross mothers ! " There is, indeed, a felt re- lationship between the child and God which covers all the details of life. The sense of right and wrong appears early in life, and this is quickly taken up into the sphere of the child's religious emotion. The feeling that " God would not like it " is a strong deterrent in childhood ; while its opposite is a powerful stimulus in cultivating a sense of duty. Children of six years are well awake to the voice of conscience as the whisper of God, as can be seen by putting such simple questions to them as the following : Suppose you are down the street and mother calls you, what must you do ? And if you don't run quickly, what does God say ? But if you do run quickly what does He say then ? The answers that come are as fol- lows : (i) Run quickly : (ii) that's wrong ; (iii) that's right. In early years the sovereign claims of conscience are re- cognized as absolute. It is only with added experience of life that these claims are disputed and that religion sometimes takes the form of a bargain — again due to the sense of intimacy with God. The child's recognition of God's beneficent power is blended with the desire to ob- tain the best that he can by doing what God wants. " If God pleases me I will please Him," is the form the bargain takes — " I will be good so long as God is good to me ". It is this spirit of conditional goodness, so often met with and so dif^cult to deal with, which renders the 9 130 Child Study parent or teacher of children after the age of nine or ten almost helpless ; for this is the stage preliminary to that trafficking with conscience which makes the will feeble to resist trial and temptation when it comes, as come it must. The only way of meeting it is to train the child from earliest years in forming definite religious habits, consistent modes of action, which will not fail when con- science is tested in times of stress. To return to the earlier years of life, the child accepts without question ideas that are taught, and puts into practice actions that conform with those ideas. It has not learnt the meaning of untruth or deception either in itself or in others. It has to accept what is said without demur, and it does so because it is credulous, believing that everything is for its good. The credulity of a child permits that simplest of all creeds to be accepted whole- heartedly — " God is love ". It is only when reason comes to assert itself that childish faith is questioned, and this does not happen as a rule till adolescence is reached. Then the world suddenly grows larger and a way through it has to be found — a way which involves doubt as well as faith. But for the present, up to the age of ten or eleven at least, the teaching given by authority is un- questioned. The responsibility that rests upon the teacher of religion is therefore a heavy one in these re- spects : (i) that he must teach nothing which has to be unlearnt in later years by the child ; (ii) that he must not substitute opinions of his own for facts and doctrines which have the weight of authority to support them ; and (iii) that he will not pass off upon the child as reason and knowledge things of which he is either wholly ignor- ant or even partly so. It is better to defer an answer to a difficult question — and children ask very difficult questions sometimes — until later when the truth can be arrived at by further study or thought, than to give an immediate answer which may be entirely wrong, or be- side the mark. The child's credulity may accept it for the time, but in the end its effect is bound to be to cause distrust and doubt to germinate and grow. The Religion of Childhood 131 After the age of ten, dififerences in the sexes with re- gard to the religious instinct show themselves. While both are still susceptible to a " religious atmosphere," this susceptibility is more marked in girls than in boys. Cer- tainly girls are more impressionable by outward circum- stances at this age, this being due, in part at least, to the earlier development of the finer shades of emotion. For this reason the practice of ritual, the appeal of a beautiful ceremonial in worship, and the pleasure derived from re- ligious exercises, are stronger in girls than in boys dur- ing the senior-school age. Up to this time there is hardly any noticeable difference between the sexes in these respects. Both take delight in the outward expres- sion of religious feelings. After this age boys like " see- ing it done," but do not take kindly to " doing it " unless they have formed the habit in earlier years and continue it now without self-consciousness. Imitation also is stronger in girls, and this combined with their m^re im- pressionable nature certainly helps them to make use of religious forms much more readily than boys. Not that the expression of religion is a matter of indifference to boys; one has only to omit some accustomed piece of ritual to know from the criticisms they pass that their disapproval is strong in proportion to their sense of the fitness of things. And though under ordinary circum- stances they are too self-conscious to take a part in the ordering of ritual, yet when dressed for the part they are ready enough to do it with all dignity. Environment therefore is a help to both sexes in respect of training to religious practices ; but boys in the senior school are slower than girls to work this environment into personal significance — they need to be helped in this by being given personal interests, and by having personal duties to perform. For this reason it follows that after the age of eleven or twelve a boy's religion often shows its in- tensity most in quiet moments at home, a girl's when she is about some more public exercise. During the period from ten to thirteen years it should 9. 132 Child Study be noticed that in both sexes the rapidly developing powers of reason are applied to find order, consistency, and definiteness in religious truths. Children want to know the reasons for their faith, the principles on which that faith is constructed. If permitted they will ask many questions upon foundation facts ; not that religion is a very personal thing at this time, but that it affords scope for the exercise of intellect upon its truths. " Was it not wrong of God to allow the Israelites to steal the gold and silver from the Egyptians," asked a girl of twelve. ** I can't see why, if God is Almighty, He lets people sin when He doesn't want them to," said another girl of about the same age. '* What's the use of going to Church when you can be good without going," urged a boy of thirteen when asked why he had given up going. "If God is everywhere, why is it necessary to build churches," was the question of a boy who was asked to collect for a new building. Two things will be noticed about chil- dren's reasoning : (i) it applies principles already arrived at to test new applications of truth to practical life, (ii) it makes use of external facts very largely, and seldom deals with character. With regard to (i) this is a preliminary to a greater sifting during the adolescent period. The mind is being sharpened for its later work in connexion with the birth of new emotions, instincts, and thoughts in adolescence when all that has gone before is tested afresh in its bear- ing upon a larger life. With regard to (ii) the child makes broad generalizations from concrete events, and these are very often imperfect since they fail to take into account the internal factors which mind supplies through emotion and will. The external is only in process of being worked into personal significance ; experience has yet to add its quota to knowledge, and the time for this is not for many years yet. It is good for the child at this stage to have its attention called to external things, and not to be concerned overmuch as to their meaning for character, before the complex functions of adolescent The Religion of Childhood 133 life make their appearance and call for self-examination. This concern of the child for external things, and for the objective aspects of truth, is also connected with the re- tardation of emotional development, and the crudity of sympathies and sentiments. At this age there seems less respect for religious observances, persons, and things than at any other time in childhood. The callousness with which boys and girls in this period will turn religious instruction — particularly if it be of the mildly pious type — into a jest, is quite in line with the externality of their lives as a whole. The teaching required is that which instructs in doctrine and gives good illustrations of the way in which doctrine has always affected the lives of those who are most worthy of the child's imitation. To make faith reasonable, and to show that doctrine is practical, is the work of the teacher at this period. If sometimes the teacher's susceptibilities are shocked and hurt by the apparently little part that reverence plays, let it be remembered that this is a phase which the child goes through, and that behind this phase there are other factors at work which keep the child interested in the reality and greatness of the spiritual life. But while it is true that the majority of children during this period are only preparing for the life of " vital re- ligion " by exercising their reason upon its claims and by watching its effects in the lives of others, it is also true that there will always be a certain number who can and do make religion an intensely serious personal con- cern. The influences of home, friends, companions, and teachers will have much to do with this rather exceptional early development. It is often possible to force such a development, but we doubt the wisdom of too early maturing the emotions and sentiments to bring this about. The methods of the very emotional teacher or preacher may produce a kind of hot-house plant which will be unable to resist the austerities of adolescence. On the whole it would seem wiser to make our watch- word at this period "instruction" rather than "conver- 134 Child Study sion ". No doubt many children do dedicate themselves to God at this time of life, but this self-dedication is quite different, both in its causes and results, from the excitation which the phenomena of conversion manifest. The calm, resolute will to follow out God's will is certainly what we desire the growing boy and girl to have, and as teachers we do well to keep that before us as our aim in the training of character. But to over-stimulate re- ligious emotions at this age leads often to the weakening of personality, and to that sentimental type of religion which likes the outward expression, but fails to live the life. The essential difference between true religion and its sentimental imitation lies in the worth they respect- ively ascribe to the will and the emotions. The former acknowledges no worth in right feeling as such ; all stress is laid upon right doing. The latter gives a much higher value to emotion, and in times when feelings are cold is apt to be either neglectful of right doing, or even easily stirred to wrong. Let us then be content to accept as our guide in in- struction and training child-nature as we find it. Where there is no manifest desire for a deeply devotional life we shall realize that its hour has not yet come — that for the present our task is to give knowledge, so far as in us lies, for future use, to show knowledge in practice in ideal lives, and to prompt the will to copy those ideals in action. If we are faithful in these things the hour will yet strike for the child to make these things the founda- tion of his daily life, because he will have been prepared for the crucial years of adolescence by this instruction and training, and he will know to whom he may go with confidence for help when the days of difficulty come. PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, ABERDEEN THE PRINCIPL ES AHD HISTORY OF TEACHING WORKS BY JAMES SULLY, M.A. Outlines of Psychology. Crown 8vo, gs. The Teacher's Handbook of Psychology. Crown 8vo, 65. net. Studies of Childhood. 8vo, 12s. 6d. net. 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