Then more positively--his instruction should be well differentiated.
He should in every possible case be given inducements to express
himself. Let him recite a great deal. Give him simple verses to
repeat. Keep him talking all you can. Show him his mistakes with the
utmost deliberation and kindliness of manner; and induce him to repeat
his performances in your hearing after the correction has been
suggested. Cultivate the imitative tendency in him; it is the handmaid
to the formation of facile habits of action. In arranging the
children's games, see that he gets the very active parts, even though
he be backward and hesitating about assuming them. Make him as far as
possible a leader, in order to cultivate his sense of responsibility
for the doing of things, and to lead to the expression of his
understanding of arrangements, etc. In it all, the essential thing is
to bring him out in some kind of expression; both for the sake of the
improved balance it gives himself, and as an indication to the
observant teacher of his progress and of the next step to be taken in
his development.
It is for the sensory child, I think, that the kindergarten has its
great utility. It gives him facility in movement and expression, and
also some degree of personal and social confidence. But for the same
reasons the kindergarten over-stimulates the motor scholars at the
corresponding age. There should really be two kindergarten
methods--one based on the idea of deliberation, the other on that of
expression.
The task of the educator here, it is evident, is to help nature
correct a tendency to one-sided development; just as the task is this
also in the former case; but here the variation is on the side of
idiosyncrasy ultimately, and of genius immediately. For genius, I
think, is the more often developed from the contemplative mind, with
the relatively dammed-up brain, of this child, than from the
smooth-working machine of the motor one. But just for this reason, if
the damming-up be liberated, not in the channels of healthy
assimilation, and duly correlated growth, but in the forced discharges
of violent emotion, followed by conditions of melancholy and by
certain unsocial tendencies, then the promise of genius ripens into
eccentricity, and the blame is possibly ours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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