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
(6) After analysis comes synthesis. The child pulls his toys to
pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct them, and so be
the better able to control the working of them. The ends that he sets
before himself are those which Comte set before the human
race,--"savoir pour prevoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour deduire,
afin de construire." The desire to make things, to build things up,
to control ways and means, to master the resources of Nature, to put
his knowledge of her laws and facts to a practical use, is strong in
his soul. Give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours in
building and rebuilding houses, churches, towers, and the like. Set
him on a sandy shore, with a spade and a pail, and he will spend
hours in constructing fortified castles with deep, encircling moats
into which the sea may be duly admitted. Or he will make harness and
whips of plaited rushes, armour of tea-paper, swords of tin-plate,
boxes and other articles of cardboard, waggons, engines, and other
implements of wood.
We will call this the _constructive instinct_.
In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand
his being, by going out of himself, through the correlated channels
of theory and practice, into what I may call the machinery of
Nature's life,--an aspect of that life which reveals its mysteries to
reason rather than to emotion, or (to use the language of Eastern
philosophy) to the faculties that try to find order in the Many,
rather than to those which try to hold intercourse with the One.[16]
Whichever channel he may use,--and indeed they are not so much two
channels as one, for each in turn is for ever leading into and then
passing out of the other,--his concern is always for "facts," for the
actualities of things, for "objective truth." We will therefore call
these the _Scientific Instincts_, and place them in a class by
themselves.
There are six instincts, then,--six formative and expansive
instincts--which Nature has implanted in every normal child, and
which education, so far as it aims at being loyal to Nature, should
take account of and try to foster. Two of these are _sympathetic_;
two are _aesthetic_; two are _scientific_. In and through the
sympathetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of _love_. In
and through the aesthetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of
_beauty_. In and through the scientific instincts the soul grows in
the direction of _truth_. It is towards this triune goal that Nature
herself is ever directing the growth of the growing child. The
significance of this conclusion will unfold itself as we proceed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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