The Vitalized School | Page 8

us all. Every child with imagination is constructing a mythology of his own, and from the gossamer threads of fancy is weaving a pattern of life that no parent or teacher should ever wish to forbid or destroy. Day by day, he sees visions and dreams dreams, and so builds for himself a world in which he finds delight and profit. In this world he is king, and only profane hands would dare attempt to dethrone him.
=The child's experiences.=--His experiences, whether in the real world, or in this world of fancy, are his capital in the bank of life; and he has every right to invest this capital so as to achieve further increments of life. In this enterprise, the teacher is his counselor and guide, and, in order that she may exercise this function sympathetically and rationally, she must know the nature and extent of his capital. If he knows a bird, he may invest this knowledge so as to gain a knowledge of many birds, and so, in time, compass the entire realm of ornithology. If he knows a flower, from this known he may be so directed that he may become a master in the unknown field of botany. If he knows coal, this experience may be made the open sesame to the realms of geology. In short, all his experiences may be capitalized under the direction of a skillful teacher, and made to produce large dividends as an investment in life.
=Relation to school work.=--Thus the school becomes, for the child, a place of and for real life, and not a place detached from life. There he lives effectively, and joyously, because the teacher knows how to utilize his experiences and native dispositions for the enlargement of his life. He has no inclination to become a deserter or a tenant, for life is agreeable there, and the school is made his chief interest. His work is not doled out to him in the form of tasks, but is graciously presented as a privilege, and as such he esteems it. There he learns to live among people of differing tastes and interests without abdicating his own individuality. There he learns that life is work and that work is the very quintessence of life.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. How should dividends on school investments be estimated?
2. What are the inherent rights of childhood?
3. What use may be made of play in the education of children?
4. Explain why adults are often unwilling to co?perate through lack of opportunity to play in childhood.
5. Illustrate from your own knowledge and experience how the exercise of native tendencies may be the means of education.
6. What modes of self-expression should be used by pupils of elementary schools? of high schools?
7. What may the vitalized teacher do to assist in the development of self-expression? What should she refrain from doing?
8. Suggest methods whereby the teacher may discover the content of the child's world.
9. How may the child's experience, imagination, and expression be interrelated?
10. Why is the twentieth century called the "age of the child"?
CHAPTER IV
THE CHILD OF THE FUTURE
=Rights of the coming generations.=--Any school procedure that limits its interests and activities to the present generation takes a too restricted view of the real scope of education. The children of the next generation, and the next, are entitled to consideration if education is to do its perfect work and have complete and convincing justification. The child of the future has a right to grandfathers and grandmothers of sound body and sound mind, and the schools and homes of the present are charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that this right is vouchsafed to him. In actual practice our plans seem not to previse grandfathers and grandmothers, and stop short even of fathers and mothers. The child of the next generation has a right to a father and a mother of untainted blood, and neither the home nor the school can ignore this right.
=Transmitted weaknesses.=--If these rights are not scrupulously respected by the present generation, the child of the future may come into the world under a handicap that all the educational agencies combined can neither remove nor materially mitigate. If he is crippled in mind or in body because of excesses on the part of his progenitors, the schools and hospitals may help him through life in a sorry sort of fashion, but his condition is evermore a reminder to him of how much he has missed in comparison with the child of sound body and mind. If such a child does not imprecate even the memory of the ancestors whose vitiated blood courses through his stricken body, it will be because his mind is too weak to reason from effect to cause or because his affliction has taught him large charity. He will feel that