The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-DayChamberlain, Alexander Francis
Science
The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day
Chamberlain, Alexander Francis
Child rearing; Children -- Folklore; Folklore and children
making them see the points of resemblance and of contact with the great
human society, will engender in the minds of the pupils the conscience
of duty and of right; will create in them the primitive feeling of
justice and of equity. And the pupils, feeling that there is a real
association, feeling that they do form part of a little world, and are
not something merely gathered together by chance for a few hours, will
form a compact homogeneous scholastic association, in which all will try
to be something, and of which all will be proud. In this way will the
assemblage of disparate, diverse, heterogeneous elements, with which the
school begins the year, be able to become homogeneous and create a true
school organism. And if the teacher will persevere, whether in the
direction of the school, in the classification of the pupils, or in the
different contingencies that arise, in applying those criteria, those
ideas, those forms, which are commonly employed in society, he will be
favouring the homogeneity of the little organism which he has to
instruct and to educate. He will thus have always before his mind all
the organic, psychic, and moral characteristics of human society and
will see the differences from, and the resemblances to, those of the
school-organism. In so far will he have an example, a law, a criterion,
a form to follow in the direction of the little human society entrusted
to him, with its beautiful and its ugly side, its good and its bad, its
vices and its virtues. This idea of the school as an organism, however
much it seems destined to overturn ideas of the past, will be the
crucible from which will be turned out in the near future all the
reforms and many new ideas."
This view of the school as an organism, a social microcosm, a little
society within the great human society, having its resemblances to, and
its differences from, the family and the nation, is one that the new
development of "child-study" seems bound to promote and advance. Rank
paternalism has made its exit from the great human society, but it has
yet a strong hold upon the school. It is only in comparatively recent
times that motherhood, which, as Zmigrodzki says, has been the basis of
our civilization, has been allowed to exercise its best influence upon
the scholastic microcosm. Paternalism and celibacy must be made to yield
up the strong grasp which they have upon the educational institutions of
the land, and the early years of the life of man must be confided to the
care of the mother-spirit, which the individual man and the race alike
have deified in their golden age. The mother who laid so well the
foundations of the great human society, the originator of its earliest
arts, the warder of its faiths and its beliefs, the mother, who built up
the family, must be trusted with some large share in the building of the
school.
_Child-Sociology._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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