Another instinct of the child is the use of pencil and paper. All
children like to express themselves through the medium of form and
color. If you simply indulge this interest by letting the child go on
indefinitely, there is no growth that is more than accidental. But
let the child first express his impulse, and then through criticism,
question, and suggestion bring him to consciousness of what he has done,
and what he needs to do, and the result is quite different. Here, for
example, is the work of a seven-year-old child. It is not average work,
it is the best work done among the little children, but it illustrates
the particular principle of which I have been speaking. They had been
talking about the primitive conditions of social life when people lived
in caves. The child’s idea of that found expression in this way: the
cave is neatly set up on the hillside in an impossible way. You see the
conventional tree of childhood—a vertical line with horizontal branches
on each side. If the child had been allowed to go on repeating this sort
of thing day by day, he would be indulging his instinct rather than
exercising it. But the child was now asked to look closely at trees,
to compare those seen with the one drawn, to examine more closely and
consciously into the conditions of his work. Then he drew trees from
observation.
Finally he drew again from combined observation, memory, and imagination.
He made again a free illustration, expressing his own imaginative
thought, but controlled by detailed study of actual trees. The result was
a scene representing a bit of forest; so far as it goes, it seems to me
to have as much poetic feeling as the work of an adult, while at the same
time its trees are, in their proportions, possible ones, not mere symbols.
If we roughly classify the impulses which are available in the school,
we may group them under four heads. There is the social instinct of
the children as shown in conversation, personal intercourse, and
communication. We all know how self-centered the little child is at
the age of four or five. If any new subject is brought up, if he says
anything at all, it is: “I have seen that;” or, “My papa or mamma told
me about that.” His horizon is not large; an experience must come
immediately home to him, if he is to be sufficiently interested to
relate it to others and seek theirs in return. And yet the egoistic and
limited interest of little children is in this manner capable of infinite
expansion. The language instinct is the simplest form of the social
expression of the child. Hence it is a great, perhaps the greatest of all
educational resources.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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