Children's Rights: A Book of Nursery LogicWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
General
Children's Rights: A Book of Nursery Logic
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Child rearing; Children; Children's rights
We all believe thoroughly in the influence of mind on body, the inward
working outward, but we are not as ready to see the influence of body
on mind. Yet if mind or soul acts upon the body, the external gesture
and attitude just as truly react upon the inward feeling. "The soul
speaks through the body, and the body in return gives command to the
soul." All attitudes mean something, and they all influence the state
of mind.
Fourth: The melody begets spiritual impressions.
Fifth: The gestures, feeling, and melody unite in giving a sweet and
gentle intercourse, in developing love for labor, home, country,
associates, and dumb animals, and in unconsciously directing the
intellectual powers.
Learning to sing well is the best possible means of learning to speak
well, and the exquisite precision which music gives to kindergarten
play destroys all rudeness, and does not in the least rob it of its
fun or merriment.
"We cannot tell how early the pleasing sense of musical cadence
affects a child. In some children it is blended with the earliest,
haziest recollection of life at all, as though they had been literally
'cradled in sweet song;' and we may be sure that the hearing of
musical sounds and singing in association with others are for the
child, as for the adult, powerful influences in awakening sympathetic
emotion, and pleasure in associated action."
Who can see the kindergarten games, led by a teacher who has grown
into their spirit, and ever forget the joy of the spectacle? It brings
tears to the eyes of any woman who has ever been called mother,
or ever hopes to be; and I have seen more than one man retire
surreptitiously to wipe away his tears. Is it "that touch of nature
which makes the whole world kin"? Is it the perfect self-forgetfulness
of the children? Is it a touch of self-pity that the radiant visions
of our childhood days have been dispelled, and the years have brought
the "inevitable yoke"? Or is it the touching sight of so much
happiness contrasted with what we know the home life to be?
Sydney Smith says: "If you make children happy now, you will make them
happy twenty years hence by the memory of it;" and we know that virtue
kindles at the touch of this joy. "Selfishness, rudeness, and similar
weedy growths of school-life or of street-independence cannot grow in
such an atmosphere. For joy is as foreign to tumult and destruction,
to harshness and selfish disregard of others, as the serene, vernal
sky with its refreshing breezes is foreign to the uproar and terrors
of the hurricane."
For this kind of ideal play we are indebted to Friedrich Froebel, and
if he had left no other legacy to childhood, we should exalt him for
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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