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
What is the culture of the child's expansive instincts likely to do
for him?
I will weave into my answer to this question my knowledge of what has
been done and is being done in Utopia.
It is through the medium of his own exertions that the evolution of
the child's instincts is carried on by Egeria. It may be possible to
lay veneers of information on the surface of a child's mind, but
it is not possible to lay on veneers of growth; and growth, not
information, is the end at which Egeria has always aimed. If a child
is to grow, he must exercise his own limbs, his own organs, his own
faculties. No one else can do this for him; and unless he does it
himself, it will never be done. The school life in Utopia is
therefore one of constant activity. The habit of doing things, of
doing things for himself, of doing things by himself, is gradually
built up in each child. There is no forced inertness in Utopia,
no slackness, no boredom, no yawning. And the activity which is
characteristic of the school is always the child's own activity. The
child himself is behind everything that he does. The child himself
is expressing himself in his every action. Mechanical activity, the
doing of things, not merely at the bidding of another, but also under
his minutely detailed direction, is as foreign to the genius of
the school as is the passivity of the helpless victims of the
unenlightened teacher's "chalk and talk."
The first consequence, then, of the training of the expansive
instincts which is given in Utopia is the building up in each scholar
of what I may call the habit of rational activity. In many schools
the energies of the child are systematically dammed back, till at
last the springs of his activity, finding that no demand is made upon
them, cease to flow. In Utopia the sluices, though always regulated,
are permanently lifted, and the energies of the child are ever
moving, with a strong and steady current, in whatever channel they
may have chanced to enter. So strong, indeed, and so steady is the
current that it maintains its movement long after the child has left
school. The employers of labour in the neighbourhood of Utopia will
tell you that there are no slackers or loafers in the yearly output
of the school. Egeria recently received a visit from one of her
ex-pupils, a girl of fourteen who is at home keeping house for her
father, and who said to her in the course of their conversation: "I
do just love washing days; I get up before six and start. Then, when
all the washing is done, I scrub everything bright in the copper
while I have the hot soapsuds." Accustomed as he (or she) is from his
(or her) earliest days to sincere and fearless self-expression, the
Utopian child is entirely incapable of indulging in cant; and the
genuineness of the sentiment which dictated those words is therefore
above suspicion. To work vigorously, to do well whatever he (or she)
has to do, is a real pleasure to the Utopian child. Indeed his whole
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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