The Pot of Green Feathers.
by T. G. Rooper, ESQ., M.A., H.M.I.
Volume 4, 1893/4, pgs. 211-219
[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 III.
I have shown, then, that when the child called a pot of ferns a pot of green feathers, he was by no means using a name without attaching any meaning to it, and that he should have been encouraged for a praiseworthy effort to explain what he saw. It is, however, the business of parents and teacher to help the child to learn exactly what it is that he names. A child, for instance, saw a duck on the water, and was taught to call it "Quack." But the child included in this name the water as well as the duck, and then applied it to all birds on the one hand and all liquids on the other, calling a French coin with the eagle on it a "Quack," and also a bottle of French wine "Quack." Such a mistake in naming is to be guarded against, as obviously tending to confusion of thought. The poet Schiller as a child lived by the Necker, and called all rivers which he saw "Necker." Such an error is less serious as it is easily put right. If the child notes its impressions and refers them intelligently to previous impressions as best it can, then it is not important if he is not quite correct about names. We--teachers and parents--may take a hint from this, and be more ready to give class names to begin with, leaving details to come later. Teach the child in front of a picture of a herring (or better, pictures of herring, sole, and pike) to say "That is a fish" first of all, and only afterwards "That fish is a herring." For teaching general names, such as bird, beast, fish, and reptile, in presence of pictures of eagle, cow, herring, and adder, has a twofold use. The class name (fish, beast, &c.) thus given (1) directs the child's attention to a few points among many, and those easy to grasp, and hence is a guide to the child's mental powers, which are apt to be overwhelmed by the number of individual impressions of things, all disconnected and isolated, much in the same way as in an intricate country full of cross-roads: your way is made easy if you are told to ignore all other tracks and follow the road bordered by telegraph-posts, and (2) it enables the child to understand the usual conversation of its elders and the words and language in books. Grown-up people use general terms in daily conversation which children only slowly acquire without help from teachers. Many of these simpler class names are easily taught and are a pleasure to the children to learn, for they answer to the natural early stages of elementary reasoning. Country children often have a small vocabulary of general terms compared with town, and less understand the language of books, but, on the other hand, from exercising their senses on objects and being brought into close contact with out-of-door work, they often have a greater real power of observing and interpreting things outside themselves and greater originality in this respect than town children who are sharper in talk and society. However, both kinds, the knowledge of language and the mastery of objects, should be taught together, for both are indispensable in life.
Young people are perhaps quicker than older people to note superficial resemblance of things. Because, no doubt, they have fewer old impressions stored in the mind wherewith to compare new impressions, and comparison among a few things is more rapidly and expeditiously made. They have to pay for this advantage, however, because they are liable to misinterpret impressions--to call a pot of ferns a pot of feathers, to refer impressions to the wrong group in their mind, groups with which they are accidentally and not logically connected. What is more, objects are not so clearly distinguished--set over against each other--with children as with grown people. Children hardly distinguish themselves into soul and body. They know of their undivided personality--body, mind, and soul--that it moves, feels happy, sad, hungry, &c., and they attribute the same feelings to all other things. Birds, beasts, and inanimate objects are like affected as themselves. "Jack the dog is thirsty," "Poll is angry," Kitty is sleepy," "the stars blink," "the engine goes to bed," "the knife is naughty to cut me." They do not distinguish between figures of speech or metaphors and realities. Their minds move in a region of twilight, in which the real and the unreal, the true additions to knowledge, the actual gifts of the senses are confused and blurred and altered by the additions which the mind itself makes to them, and they cannot separate the one from the other. To this stage of mental progress, how appropriate are fables, allegories, fairy stories, parables, and the like. If any one thinks that it would be better if the child's mind could move only in the sphere of the exact I would reply, (1) that this does not seem to be Nature's process; (2) that, looking to the mode of growth of the mind, it does not seem even possible, and (3) that, if you try to keep the child's mind to exactness, you may clip and pluck the wings of imagination. Now, without imagination there is little advance in knowledge, and little discovery in the sphere of science. In the sphere of morality, without some imagination you are quite unable to put yourself in the place of another, which is the basis of sympathy and mental support, and the foundation of the social fabric. The mere sight of a neighbour's joy or sorrow does not awaken sympathy. Three little children were thrown out of a train in an accident, and one was frightfully mangled to death, but the older two, who were unhurt, and could not realise what had happened, stooped down and went on plucking daises with unconcern. In the case of young children you can hardly go too far in the way of associating new learning with personal feeling, even at the expense of exactness, and the infant-school teacher who, in a lesson on the sun, instead of dwelling on its roundness, brightness, and heat, began by calling it a lamp in the sky, lighted in the morning and put out at night; lighted for men to go about their work, and put out for them to go to sleep, showed a true knowledge of the key that opens the door into the child's mind. This information is not exact, but inasmuch as it is based on what children understand and like to hear about, it finds a ready entrance into their minds. But it is clear that what is to the child its natural mode of expression is arrived at by the teacher only through imagination, and hence arises the teacher's difficulty. It is a useful hint to study the children's own lead and follow it. School necessarily limits the child's life. You cannot bring all creation into the four walls of the class-room. But what you lose in extent you gain in depth: you lose variety, you gain in concentration. Before school-time, all things engage the child's attention in turns, and nothing long. At school he has to attend to a few things, and to keep his attention fixed upon them for short periods at first, but for increasingly longer ones. It is a matter of practice and experience to find out what things most readily arrest attention, and in what way information can best be conveyed so as to arrest attention, and it is in these matters that the skill of the teacher comes in.
I am not sure that if the teacher's art is to be summed up briefly it may not be described as of developing the power of fixing attention. For instance, when we present a picture or even an object to a child, neither object nor (still less) picture explains itself. The object needs to be pointed out piecemeal, and all its parts called attention to separately, for the child only sees it as a whole about which it can say but little and soon tires of. The picture but very partially represents the objects which the artist depicts, much being suggested and left to the imagination of the beholder. Even when we say we actually see an object we forget how much of what we think we see is really inference from some small part of what we see, and nothing is more deceptive than merely ocular evidence. Thus, pictures of things which the children have seen are much better to commence with than pictures of things which they have not seen, and the former should serve as a preparation for the latter. But even pictures will only go a certain way in making known to us things past and things remote, facts of history and geography. The greater part of advanced instruction must be conveyed by words. Is it an historical scene treating of? the child and many grown people interpret all by their own experience; towns and houses in history resemble in his mind those with which he is familiar; men and women move about in the dresses of his near neighbours; their aspect and language are in his mind the same as those of his people with whom he daily converses. Such inaccuracies may be partly corrected, but in the main they are unavoidable. History cannot be communicated with complete truth; the lives of men and women personally unknown can be only partially conceived. Hence Goethe says, "The past is a book with seven seals." The best plan is to read the past with one eye on the present. Look at the pictures of the Holy Family as drawn by Italian and Dutch painters. The chief fact which they intended to depict is not obscured, but made clearer by the painter having made the homely surroundings French and Italian, rather than original. In history and geography, in order to help the child to understand old times and realise what distant lands are, we must store his mind with conceptions based upon frequent observations of present time and of his own home and its surroundings. How far such observations may carry the student in interpreting the unseen, is proved by the beauty and correctness of the description of the Alpine countries, which were written by Schiller before he saw the Alps. In history the most human part of the narrative takes the firmest hold of the mind, and the story of King Alfred and the cakes, though not a very noble historical anecdote, serves at least to fix the name of the king in the child's mind, who would not so easily remember the peace of Wedmore. Eating he knows more about than making treaties. We may now trace the process of acquiring knowledge in its more advanced stage. The child has now learnt that the pot of ferns is not a pot of feathers. Perhaps, however, he has only seen one kind of fern--say, a Lady Fern. After a few weeks he may see another--perhaps a Maiden Hair. The points of resemblance between the two make him say, "That is a fern:" the points of difference hinder the process of assimilation and make him doubt; in the end, the mass of old impressions resembling each other overpower impressions which differ, and he says "this is a fern," and in doing so he enlarges his conception of what a fern is.
Let us now suppose that he comes across a good teacher who shows him many kinds of ferns, and points out the difference between ferns and flowering plants and mosses. Every fresh distinction, every observation of a new fern helps to modify his previous knowledge. Old and new impressions react to each other. But now mark how essentially the same and yet how different are the two mental states, the earlier one, namely, when the child, I would say the child's mind, recognises of its own accord the second plant as a fern by means of its previous acquaintance with another fern, judging from a more or less superficial resemblance, and the latter state of mind when he has learnt all the scientific distinctions by which a fern is classified in a different class from flowering plants and mosses. We have now passed from Infant School learning to the instruction which is appropriate to the Upper School and the advanced classes. The child has outgrown a state in which the mind reasons unconsciously, and has arrived at a state in which reasoning is conscious; he has left behind a condition or stage of development in which he was at the mercy of his impressions, and has progressed to a state of mind in which he can compare, check, and control his impressions. He has passed from a state in which he unconsciously accepted what was present to his mind, to a state in which he can infer, judge, and critise. The pot of ferns is now seen to have more points in which it is unlike feathers than points in which it resembles them. Of the many impressions derived from looking at the pot of ferns, the feather-like impressions which at first stands out from the rest and forces itself on the mind, to the exclusion of the other impressions which would, if attended to, modify the judgment, is now by means of conscious reasoning brought under proper control and put in subordinate position. What appeared to be a fact is now seen to be a fancy, and after all a fancy which expresses some element of truth--viz,. the resemblance between ferns and feathers.
These considerations, perhaps, throw some light upon Dr. Allbutt's warning to parents about the dreams and illusions of children. The fancies of childhood, he thinks, are sometimes the ante-chamber of insanity in adults. I do not think he intended to knock on the head many poetic and popular conceptions about children's pretty fancies, as was stated in some evening review of his remarks.*
* CHILDHOOD'S DREAMS: IMAGINATION OR INSANITY?
In the course of the
meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association held at York last
night, Dr. Clifford Allbutt (of Leeds) read a paper on "The Insanity of
Children," which if its statements be well founded, knocks on the head
many poetic and popular conceptions. Wordsworth speaks of a child's
ideas being a reminiscence of "the fairy palace whence he comes." Dr.
Allbutt sees in them only a step towards the insane asylum. Most people
regard it as a healthy sign if the children have pretty fancies, and
those are thought to be the happiest who keep their illusions longest.
But Dr. Allbutt would reverse this judgment. The fairy dreams of
childhood are only the result of defective organisation, and healthy
growth consists only in their evaporation. Here are some of the chief
passages in Dr. Allbutt's paper: "The insanity of children was the
vestibule of the insanity of adults; in children they saw in simple
primary forms that with which they were familiar in the more complex
and derivative forms of insanity in adults. If a man lived in a vain
show, far more so did the child; if a man's mind was but a phantom in
relation to the world, so fantastic was the child's mind in relation to
that of the man. Fantastic--that was the key to the childish mind. In
him was no definite boundary between the real and the unreal. Day
dreams which in an adult would be absurd, were to the child the only
realities. As the child grew older, and sense impressions organised
themselves more definitely and submitted to comparison, phantasy became
make-believe, and the child slipped backwards and forwards between
unconscious, semi-conscious, and conscious self-deception. Pretty were
the fancies of a child, yet the healthy growth of the child consisted
in their evaporation. But if the growth of the mind were something
other than healthy, then theses fancies kept their empire: they did not
attenuate, and the child did not put off its visions. They were not
likely to forget that the persistence of insanity in children might
prevent the due advance of the organisation of the results of
impressions, and might ultimately, as adolescence approached, leave the
sufferer in a state of more or less imbecility. --Pall Mall Gazette.
It is clear, however, that the crude method of assimilating knowledge, which is natural and apparently inevitable in a child, ought by degrees to yield to more accurate conceptions under the influence of wise instructions. It is one thing to confuse ideas unconsciously; it is another thing to do so consciously. The child makes an unconscious mistake in calling ferns, feathers, but if this confusion is cherished by the child after he well knows the real distinction between the two, and if he acquires or cultivates a habit of mind in which reality is made to give way to make-believe and pretense, the child may lose control over its judgment and become in the end imbecile. The best antidote to foolish imaginings appears to be the time-honoured fables of Aesop, the sacred parables and allegories, and the best modern fancies for children, like those of Anderson or Ruskin. Fantastic the child will be, it is our business to make his fancy healthy.
The object, then, of learning in education is not only to make the mind fuller and to enrich the understanding, but if the instruction be of the right kind, the additional knowledge ought to make the old knowledge more exact and better defined. The method of acquiring the extended knowledge also, ought to have even more far-reaching results than the information itself. Accustomed to right methods of study, the child will learn to be cautious in dealing with fresh impressions, to feel the pleasure of receiving new impressions and the need of care in referring them to their proper class, to realise the danger to which every one is liable of forming hasty judgments, and to weigh evidence for and against a provisional judgment. In short, study ought at least to make the student acquainted with the limits of knowledge in general, and the limitations of his knowledge in particular. The country proverb, "He does not know a hawk from a heronshaw," illustrates the sort of progress that learning should produce in a child. He must acquire at school the power of apprehending quickly and correctly. He must become sharp in receiving impressions, and accurate in referring them to the class to which, not fancy, but reasoned judgment, leads him to refer them. Accurate and complete conceptions, true logical definitions in all matters that we deal with in daily life, cannot be obtained by any of us. We can only keep the ideal of perfect knowledge before our eyes as a guide to us in the path of right knowledge. The educational value of the acquisition of knowledge is to improve the natural powers of thought and judgment, and to enable the learner to deal with the masses of observed facts which press more and more heavily on us as we have to move amid the complications of mature life. In acquiring knowledge, the mind is naturally active, and not merely passive. The active element is most precious, and modern education often tends to strangle it. Yet instruction which does not add increased energy to the thinking powers is failing in his purpose. Learning cannot be free from drudgery, and a great deal of the process of teaching and learning--say what you will--must be a tax on patience and endurance; neither can we entirely dispense with the mere mechanical exercise of memory; but if the method pursued is correct, the drudgery ends in an increase of the energy of the mind, and a desire and a power to advance to new knowledge and discovery.
You cannot undertake at school to fit every child for entering a trade, or craft, or profession, without further learning; but what he has learnt as a child ought to develop his constructive faculties, and to enable him to deal effectively with the matters which he will have to handle in the stern school of life; and if, in addition to this, he has acquired an ingrained preference for the good before the bad, the true before the false, the beautiful before the foul, and what is of God before what is of the Devil, his education has been as complete as it admits of being made. As in the early stages of life, so in the later, our knowledge and our conduct depend as much on what is within us as on what is without. The work of life cannot be well done mechanically; in this every one must be partly original and constructive, for the world is not merely what we find it, but partly what we make it, and what Coleridge has finely said of Nature applies to all we think and do:
"O Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold of higher worth
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor, loveless, ever anxious crowd?
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth."
That education is the best, not which imparts the greatest amount of knowledge, but which develops the greatest amount of mental force.
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