One of the merits of the great English schools and of the free schools
of America is that in them the boys acquire, from necessity, the
independence of sturdy character, and the self-restraint which is
self-imposed. The youth brought up to mind a tutor often fails of the
best discipline.
4. The remainder of this section may be devoted to the further
emphasis of the need of close observation of children's games,
especially those which may be best described as "society games." All
those who have given even casual observation to the doings of the
nursery have been impressed with the extraordinary facility of the
child's mind, from the second year onward, in imagining and plotting
social and dramatic situations. It has not been so evident, however,
to these casual observers, nor to many really more skilled, that they
were observing in these fancy plays the putting together anew of
fragments, or larger pieces, of the adult's mental history. Here, in
these games, we see the actual use which our children make of the
personal "copy" material which they get from you and me. If a man
study these games patiently in his own children, and analyze them out,
he gradually sees emerge from within the inner consciousness a picture
of the boy's own father, whom he aspires to be like, and whose actions
he seeks to generalize and apply. The picture is poor, for the child
takes only what he is sensible to. And it does seem often, as Sighele
pathetically notices on a large social scale, and as the Westminster
divines have urged without due sense of the pathetic and home-coming
point of it, that he takes more of the bad in us for reproduction than
of the good! But, be this as it may, what we give him is all he gets.
Heredity does not stop with birth; it is then only beginning. And the
pity of it is that this element of heredity, this reproduction of the
fathers in the children, which might be used to redeem the new-forming
personality from the heritage of past commonness or impurity, is
simply left to take its course for the further establishing and
confirmation of it. Was there ever a group of school children who did
not leave the real school to make a play school, setting up a box for
one of their number to sit on and "take off" the teacher? Was there
ever a child who did not play "church," and force the improvised
"papa" into the pulpit? Were there ever children who did not "buy"
things from fancied stalls in every corner of the nursery, after they
had once seen an elder drive a trade in the market? The point is this:
the child's personality grows; growth is always by action; he clothes
upon himself the scenes of the parent's life and acts them out; so he
grows in what he is, what he understands, and what he is able to
perform.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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