The Pot of Green Feathers.
by T. G. Rooper, ESQ., M.A., H.M.I.
Volume 4, 1893/4, pgs. 110-117
[Thomas Godolphin Rooper, 1847-1903, was an inspector of schools and personal friend of Charlotte Mason; much of his writing was for her P.N.E.U. meetings. His essay "Lyonesse" describes his time as a student at the Harrow boarding school. After he died (of spinal tuberculosis at the age of 56), Mason wrote a chapter in his honor which appears in her book, "Formation of Character," vol 5 of her series. He never married.]
PART II.
We have seen, then, how each impression that we receive from external objects is consciously or unconsciously interpreted and made known to us by a kind of internal classification through which it is referred to that part of our store of knowledge to which its resemblance connects it. We have now to see that in this process of interpretation of a new impression by that which is old, the previously existing mass of knowledge which interprets the new is itself modified and made clearer. Suppose a child lives in the flat of the fen near Cambridge, and that by going to Gogmagog Hills he learns to form an idea of what a hill is. Then suppose him to be transported to Birmingham, where he goes out to the Lickey Hills. There he will recognize as hills by aid of the previous conception of a hill which he has formed in his mind, but at the same time he enlarges his ideas of a hill, and if he travels further west and climbs the Malvern Hills and the Welsh Hills he will still further amplify his conception. Now let him study the element of geology and physical geography, and learn to trace the connection between the shape of hills and the rock or soil composing them, together with the action of wind and water, heat, and frost, and the word hills will still have yet an extended meaning. Every time you refer an object to a class, as when you say, "Yonder mass--it may be Ingleborough--is a hill," you not only explain the thing about which you are talking (Ingleboro'), but you also add to your idea of the class to which you refer it (hill). The new thing is explained by old or already existing ideas, but for the service which the old does the new in interpreting it, the old idea receives payment or recompense in being made itself more clear. Suppose you have a dozen pictures--apes, bears, foxes, lions, tigers, &c. Then every time you show one of these to a child, and the child learns to say, "that tiger is an animal," "that lion is an animal," he not only learns something about the tiger, the lion, and the rest, but also extends his conception of what an animal is. Hence we can see when it is that learning a name is instructive, it is when the name is a record of something actually witnessed. If, however, you tell a child who does not know what a ship is, or what wind is, or what the sea is, that a sail is the canvas on which the wind blows to move the ship across the sea, the names are only names and do not add to his knowledge of objects.
So far as we have chiefly considered the case where impressions from the outside world or from outward objects are being interpreted by the mind, as in the case of violets, the pot of ferns, and the like; but a similar process goes on wholly in the mind between ideas which exist there after external objects have been removed. Consider how weak fugitive impressions may be strengthened and held fast by this process. Alongside the feeble, and therefore fugitive, impression arises a mass of previously acquired and nearly connected impressions and ideas, dominating the former, and by means of connections with other stores of knowledge, setting up a movement in the mind which lights up the obscure impression, defines it and fixes it in the mind ineradicably. For example: I find a little white flower on the top of Great Whernside, Rubus Chamoemorus. I might notice it for a moment and pass on oblivious. Suppose, however, that it occurs to me next day to think of the so-called roses of vegetation, and how the Pennine Hills were once covered with the ice-sheet like Greenland now is, and how England then had an arctic flora, and how it may be that this flower, which in England only grows 2000 feet above the sea, being killed by the warmth of lower levels, may perhaps be a botanical relic of that surprising geological epoch, and then what interests attaches to that flower. Why, the very spot on which it stands seems stamped in the mind indelibly.
Nothing new, then, can be a subject of knowledge until it is not merely mechanically associated (as a passing breeze with the story which I read under a tree), but associated by a psychological process with something in the mind which is already stored up there, the new seeking among the old for something resembling itself, and not allowing the mind peace until such has been found, or until the new impression has passed out of consciousness. This process of interpreting impressions and ideas by reference to previous impressions and ideas must not be confounded with the reference of such interpreted impressions to self. When you refer this process to self, when you recognize yourself as going through and being the subject of the assimilating process, this is self-observation. You may have this self-consciousness either along with the interpreting process, or after it, or not at all. Dogs, parrots, and many animals clearly interpret impressions and objects as one of a class, as a kitten did who after eating a piece of raw meat, afterwards chewed a ball of red blotting-paper, inferring it to be meat from its colour; but they do not do this with recognition of self as the subject of the process. Children do not appear to be conscious in their thoughts and actions much before they are three years old, and their minds seem at first much to resemble the minds of animals. We may now further apply this principle of the growth of the mind to practical work in the class-room.
When something new presents itself to us, it does not as a rule, except when it affects the emotions in some way, arrest our attention, unless it is connected with some thing already known to us. A young child visited the British Museum, and was next day asked what he had noticed. He remarked upon the enormous size of the door-mats. Most other impressions were fugitive, being isolated in his mind. The mats he knew about, because he compared them with the door-mat at home. Among all the birds the only one he remembered was the hen, and passing by the bears and tigers with indifference he was pleased to recognize a stuffed specimen of the domestic cat. The child only remembered what he was already familiar with, for the many impressions from other objects neutralized each other and passed into oblivion. One great art in teaching is the art of finding links and connections between isolated facts, and of making the child see that what seems quite new is an extension of what is already in his mind. Few people would long remember the name and date of a Chinese king picked by chance from a list extending back thousands of years. Facts of English history are not much easier to remember than this for children who are not gifted with strong mechanical memories. Hence the value of presenting names, dates, and events in connection with external memorials, such as monuments, buildings, battlefields, or with poems and current events, and the like. Story, object, and poem illustrate and strengthen each other. It ought not to be hard to teach English history in the town of York, where there is a continuous series of objects illustrating the course of affairs from pre-historic time to the present date. Our object in teaching should be to present facts in organic relation to each other, instead of getting them learnt by heart as a list of disconnected names.
If, then, all the growth of the mind takes place from earliest to latest years, through the apprehension of new knowledge by old, then the first business of the young child in the world is to learn to interpret rightly the impressions that he receives from objects. To receive and master the gift of his senses is his first duty. But this task cannot in the early stages be fulfilled in a strictly systematic way. You cannot present all the world piecemeal to the child, object after object, in strictly logical order. One educationist objected to little children visiting a wood or forest because the different sorts of trees were there all jumbled together instead of all being scientifically classified and arranged as they would be in a botanical garden. The child, however, must take the world as he finds it. Impressions come crowding in upon his mind in such numbers that he has no time at first to paying minute attention to any one. In truth, so massed and grouped are his impressions, that one may almost say that the outer world presents itself to him as a whole--and that it is a matter of difficulty to isolate one perception clearly from its concomitant perceptions. The whole must be analyzed into parts bit by bit. Out of the mass of obscure and ill-defined impressions, educationists should study which are they which stand out and arrest attention more readily, and in what order they do this? We do not find that those impressions are most striking which are logically most important, but rather those to which the practical needs of daily life give prominence--food, clothing, parents, sisters, other children and their experiences. Such are the things that children are most taken up with in the world. But each impression once grasped is the basis or starting-point for understanding another, and thus the manifold variety of objects is simplified and brought within the compass of memory by a sort of unconscious reasoning. A child, for instance, who kept a chicken, but never saw chicken at table, being limited in its meat diet to beef, when at last the chicken came to the table roasted, called it "hen-beef," clearly interpreting by an elementary process the new by the old. Take a child to a wild beast show and observe how he names the animals by aid of a very general resemblance to those he may previously know. The elephant is a donkey because he has four legs, the otter is a fish; and so on. These comparisons are not jests, nor even mere play of fancy, but the result of an effort of an inexperienced mind to assimilate new impressions. The child is only following the mental process which we all have to follow in becoming masters of our impressions and extending our knowledge. Clearly the limited stock of ideas of the child renders it easier for him to make mistakes than for us to do so, but in some matters it is well to remember that we are no further advanced than children, and consequently often behave as such. A little French child, a year old, who had traveled much, named an engine Fafer (its way of saying Chemin de fer); afterwards it named steamboat, coffee-pot and spirit-lamp, anything, in short, that hissed and smoked, "fafer"--the obvious points of resemblance spontaneously fusing together in the child's mind and becoming classified not quite incorrectly. Another child, who learnt to call a star by its right name, applied star to candle, gas, and other bright objects, clearly interpreting the new by the old, by use of an unconscious elementary classification or reasoning. Thus we see the value and helpfulness of language in the process of acquiring and interpreting impressions. Having once separated out from the indistinct masses of impressions borne in upon him from the outside world some one distinct impression, and having marked that impression with a name, the child is thenceforth readily able to recognize the same impression, in this instance, that of brightness, when mixed up with quite other masses of impressions, and to fix its attention on that one alone. Thus the word helps the mind to grow and expand. The use of the word is a real help to the knowledge of things. The name when learnt in connection with the observation and handling of an object is not merely a name--a barren symbol for nothing signified--but it is a means of acquiring fresh knowledge as occasion serves. A name thus learnt--i.e., in presence of the object--when applied by the learner to a new impression exactly resembling the former is really an expression of, and an addition to, the mental stores. It is then as the filling in of a sketch, or as the further completion of an unfinished circle. How different is such naming than learning by heart the names of objects without handling the things signified. How often have text-books of science, geography, and history been prescribed to be got up for examination! and how often have the results been disappointing! The student thus taught sees only the difference of a letter in the alphabet between CarboNic Acid and CarboLic Acid, JacobiN and JacobiTe, and a mere transposition of a figure in expressing an incline as 8 inches in 1 mile, instead of 1 inch in 8 miles. The words call up no mental image. The figure 8 is a symbol only, as it does not call up the image of 8 things. A name given in the presence of the object serves afterwards to recall the image or picture of that object, and it does this the more perfectly the more accurately the object is studied in the first instance. Children, for want of language, signify many of their impressions by gestures before they can describe them in words; and gesture language, especially if encouraged, precedes spoken language, besides accompanying it. Children are imitative: they love to act over again what they have seen, especially when much impressed, as in George Eliot's pathetic description of the baby-boy attending his mother's funeral in puzzled wonder, and thinking how "he would play at this with his sister when he got home." With children this "acting," or "playing at being," more resembles talking over, giving expression to, and describing what has been seen, noted, and assimilated, than aimless exercise of the muscles and the intelligence. How profoundly right, therefore, Froebel was in making so much of action-songs in his Kindergarten, and how excellent his games are, in which every action of the child corresponds to some observed impressions with which the child is familiar. Froebel's actions correspond to realities, and are not mere physical movements. They are forms of expression of things. They correspond to facts, and advance the observation and knowledge with things which ought to be familiar with every one, such as sowing, reaping, and the like.
Now to go back to my pot of ferns. The child sees ferns for the first time, and cannot tell what they are. He receives impressions which are new, and these seek interpretation in the manner in which I have described. They hunt about in the mind for similar impressions previously received; at last the impression of the fern attaches itself to the impression of feathers; the crisp curl of the frond and its delicate branches much resemble feathers; it is true there is a hindrance to the judgment; the fern is not quite like the feather; some points are like and some are not; in the end, however, those which are alike overpower those which are unalike and the child says, "these are feathers." The child has not got false impressions; he interprets them wrongly; further study, fresh observation and comparison, will soon rectify the error. Hence the need for taking careful note of children's mistakes, distinguishing between thoughtless answers and those which, although very wrong, arise from mental effort misdirected. Careless answers should be checked, but well-meant thought, even if unsuccessful, should be encouraged. Therefore, an answer like that of the green feathers should be dealt with in the way of praise rather than censure.
Sometimes it is not merely an object that is incorrectly interpreted, and subsequently better understood. It occasionally happens to us that a whole group of thoughts is thus modified by the acquisition of some new knowledge, and instead of the new merely forming an addition to the old it wholly changes it. Such was the result of the teaching of Copernicus and Galileo, and in our own day of Darwin. The discoveries of these men caused such wide-reaching alteration of such preconceived ideas that the new knowledge was at first received with discomfort and mental uneasiness, which caused the discoverer to be looked upon with suspicion, regarded as an enemy, and persecuted. When in the case of an individual, some new conception changes the character in this way by some powerful influence, as in the case of St. Paul, we call it a conversion. Well, then, it may be said, in these cases your position is given up. The new should be regarded by the means by which the old is known, instead of the old as interpreting the new. But this is not the case, for however overpowering the new conception may be for a period of time, yet in the end, the whole store of knowledge in the mind proves too strong for it, overpowers it, and finds some place for it, after which the mind is at peace with itself, and appears to have been enlarged and not diminished or divided by the fresh experience, however strange and unusual it may have been.
(To be continued.)
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