The next consideration is the atmosphere in which a child can best
develop character by means of these experiences. A young child is a
stranger in an unknown, untried country: he has many strange promptings
that seek for satisfaction; he has strong emotions arising from his
instincts, he feels crudely and fiercely and he must act without delay,
as a result of these emotions. He is like a tourist in a new strange
country, fresh and eager, and with a similar holiday spirit of
adventure: the stimulation of the new arouses a desire to interpret, to
investigate and to ask questions: it arouses strong emotions to like or
dislike, to fear, to be curious; it leads to certain modes of conduct,
as a result of these emotions. Picture such a young tourist buttonholed
by a blasé guide, who had forgotten what first impressions meant, who
insisted on accompanying him wherever he went, regulating his procedure
by telling him just what should be observed and how to do so, pouring
out information so premature as to be obnoxious, correcting his taste,
subduing his enthusiasm, and modifying even his behaviour. The tourist
would presumably pay off the unwelcome guide, but the children cannot
pay off the teacher: they can and do rebel, but docility and
adaptability seem to play a large part in self-preservation. For the
young child freedom must precede docility, because the only reasonable
and profitable docility is one that comes after initiative and
experiment have been satisfied, and when the child feels that he needs
help.
The world that the free child chooses represents every side of life that
he is ready to assimilate, and his freedom must be intellectual,
emotional and moral freedom. In the school with the rigidly organised
time-table, where the remarks of the children provoke the constantly
repeated reproach: "We are not talking of that just now," where the
apparatus is formal and the method of using it prescribed, where home
life and street life are ignored, where there are neither garden nor
picture books, where childish questions are passed over or hastily
answered, where the room is full of desks and the normal attitude is
sitting, where the teacher is teaching more often than the children are
doing, there is no intellectual freedom.
Where passion and excitement are instantly arrested, where appreciation
for strong colours, fierce punishments, loud noises, is killed, where
fear is ridiculed, where primitive likes and dislikes are interpreted as
coarseness, there is no emotional freedom. A child must have these
experiences if he is to come to his own later: this is not the time to
stamp out but only to deflect and guide; otherwise he becomes a weak and
pale reflection of his elders, with little resource or enthusiasm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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