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
(2) The child desires, not only to enter into communion with other
persons and other living things, but also, in some sort, to identify
his life with theirs. Watch him when he is playing with other
children, or even when he is alone, except for the companionship of
his dolls and toys. He is pretty sure to be _acting_, playing at
make-believe, pretending to be something that he is not, some
grown-up person of his acquaintance, some hero of history or
romance, some traveller or other adventurer, some giant, dwarf, or
fairy, some animal, wild or tame. He plays the part of one or other
of these, and his playmates play other parts, and so a little drama
is enacted. If he has no playmates, his dolls have to play their
parts, or his toy animals have to be endowed with life, so that they
may become fellow-actors with him on the stage that he has selected.
No instinct is more inevitable, more sure to energise, than this.
We will call it the _dramatic instinct_.
In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand
his being, by going out of himself, through the medium of sympathy
and imagination--twin aspects of the same vital tendency--into the
lives of other living beings. We will therefore call these the
_Sympathetic Instincts_, and place them in a class by themselves.
(3) From his very babyhood the child delights in colour, and at a
very early age he learns to love and understand pictures. Then comes
the desire to make these for himself. Give him pencil and paper, give
him chalk, charcoal, a paint-box, and other suitable materials, and
he will set to work of his own accord to depict what he sees or has
seen, either with his outward or his inward eye. Give him a lump of
clay, and he will try to mould it into the likeness of something
that has either attracted his attention, or presented itself to his
imagination. In all these attempts he is trying, unknown to himself,
to express his perception of, and delight in, the visible beauty of
Nature. This instinct will expand, in the fullness of time, into a
strong and subtle feeling for visible beauty, and into a restless
desire to give expression to that feeling.
We will call this the _artistic instinct_, the word _artistic_ being
used, for lack of a more suitable term, in its narrow and
conventional sense.
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