What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in ParticularHolmes, Edmond
Philosophy
What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular
Holmes, Edmond
Education
All this is taken for granted in Utopia, and the child's life is
therefore one of unimpeded, though duly guided and stimulated,
activity. Every instinct that makes for the expansion and elevation
(for growth is always upward as well as outward) of the child's
nature is given the freest possible play, and the whole organisation
of the school is subordinated to this central end.
In order to find out what are the instincts which make for the
expansion and elevation of the child's nature, and which education
ought therefore to foster, we must do what Egeria has always done, we
must observe young children, and study their ways and works. Now
every healthy child wants to eat and drink, and to run about. Here
are two instincts--the instinctive desire for physical nourishment,
and the instinctive desire for physical exercise--through which
Nature provides for the growth of the body. How does she provide for
the growth of what we have agreed to call the soul? We need not
be very careful observers of young children in order to satisfy
ourselves that, apart from physical nourishment and exercise, there
are six things which the child instinctively desires, namely:
(1) to talk and listen:
(2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word):
(3) to draw, paint, and model:
(4) to dance and sing:
(5) to know the why of things:
(6) to construct things.
Let us consider each of these instincts, and try to determine its
meaning and purpose.
(1) The child instinctively desires to enter into communion with
other persons,--his parents, his brothers and sisters, his nurse, his
governess, his little friends. He wants to talk to them, to tell them
what he has done, seen, felt, thought; and he wants to hear what they
have to tell him,--not only of what they themselves have done, but
also of what other persons and other living things have done, in
other times, in other countries, in other worlds. Later on, the
desire to talk and listen will develop into the desire to write and
read; but the desire will still be one for communion, for intercourse
with other lives.
We will call this the _communicative instinct_.
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