Every one has heard something of the new teaching--which, by the way,
sheds clearer light over Froebel's warning against arbitrary
interference--viz. that a great part of the nervous instability which
affects our generation is due to the thwarting and checking of the
natural impulses of early years. But this new school also gives us
something positive, and reinforces older doctrines by telling us to
integrate behaviour. "This matter of the unthwarted lifelong progress
of behaviour integration is of profound importance, for it is the
transition from behaviour to conduct. The more integrated behaviour is
harmonious and consistent behaviour toward a larger and more
comprehensive situation, toward a bigger section of the universe; it is
lucidity and breadth of purpose. The child playing with fire is only
wrong conduct because it is behaviour that does not take into account
consequences; it is not adjusted to enough of the environment; it will
be made right by an enlargement of its scope and reach."[19]
All selfish conduct, all rudeness and roughness come from ignorance; we
are all more or less self-centred, and the child's consciousness of self
has to be widened, his scope has to be enlarged to sympathy with the
thoughts, feelings and desires of other selves. "The sane man is the man
who (however limited the scope of his behaviour) has no such suppression
incorporated in him. The wise man must be sane and must have scope as
well."[20]
[Footnote 19: _The Freudian Wish_, Edwin Holt.]
[Footnote 20: _The Freudian Wish_, Edwin Holt.]
Professor Earl Barnes always used to describe the child mind as
"scrappy." How can we best aid development into the wholeness or
healthiness and the scope of sanity and wisdom? For it may well be that
this widening and ordering of experience, of consciousness, of behaviour
into moral behaviour is our most important task as teachers. Froebel
emphasised the "crying need" for connection of school and life, pointing
out how the little child desires to imitate and the older to share in
all that, as Professor Dewey puts it, is "surcharged with a sense of the
mysterious values that attach to whatever their elders are concerned
with." This is one of the points to which Professor Dewey called
attention in his summing up of Froebel's educational principles, this
letting the child reproduce on his own plane the typical doings and
occupations of the larger, maturer society into which he is finally to
go forth.
It is in this connection that he says the Kindergarten teacher has the
opportunity to foster that most important "sense of continuity." In
simple reproduction of the home life while there is abundant variety,
since daily life may bring us into contact with all the life of the city
or of the country, yet, because the work is within a whole, "there is
opportunity to foster that sense which is at the basis of attention and
of all intellectual growth, a sense of continuity."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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