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
(4) While the child is still a baby in arms, his mother will sing to
him, and dance him on her knee. This is her first attempt to initiate
him into the mystery of music; and the response that he makes to her
proves that she is a wise teacher, and is appealing to a genuinely
natural faculty. It will not be long before he begins to dance and
sing for himself. Watch the children in a London court or alley when
a barrel-organ appears on the scene. Without having any one to direct
or teach them, they will come together and dance in couples, often
with abundant grace and charm. Nature is their tutor. Her own rhythm,
of which the musician must have caught an echo, is passing through
their ears into their hearts and into their limbs. No instinct is
so spontaneous as this. A child will whistle or sing while his mind
is engaged on other things. If he is happy he will dance about as
naturally, and almost as inevitably, as the leaves dance when the
breeze passes through them.
We will call this the _musical instinct_. So elemental is it that man
shares it, in some degree, with other living things. The birds are
accomplished musicians, and their movements, and those of many other
creatures, are full of rhythm and grace.
In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand
his being, by going out of himself, in response to the attractive
force of beauty, into that larger life which is at the heart of
Nature, but which is not ours until we have made it our own. We will
therefore call these the _AEsthetic Instincts_, and place them in a
class by themselves.
(5) From a very early age the child desires to know the why and
wherefore of things, to understand how effects are produced, to
discover new facts, and pass on, if possible, to their causes. In
response to the pressure of this instinct, the child breaks his toys
in order that he may find out how they work, and asks innumerable
questions which make him the terror and despair of his parents and
the other "Olympians." No instinct is more insistent in the early
days of the child's life. No instinct is more ruthlessly repressed by
those to whom the education of the child is entrusted. No instinct
dies out so completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely
utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type
has done its deadly work. It has been said that children go to school
ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. This
gibe is the plain statement of a patent truth.
We will call this the _inquisitive instinct_.
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