Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, HeredityGruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Science
Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, Heredity
Gruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Children
There is abundant evidence that the mental and moral capacities are
inherited in the same way as the purely physical or physiological
ones. We have, however, much more to learn about how to control the
development of the former than about the control of the latter. Yet
this point should be clear to every parent and teacher; whatever the
child's inheritance may be, the full development of his capacities
is possible only under suitable external conditions. What these
conditions are depends upon the combination of capacities that the
particular child possesses. But to find out what these capacities
are we must give the child an opportunity to show "what's in him."
This we can do by placing him in an environment simple enough for
him to adjust himself to readily, and at the same time complex
enough to give every side of his nature a chance to respond. This is
the significance of modern educational movements that seek to leave
the child untrammelled in his responses to what goes on around him.
We have learned that some children will become tall and that others
will never reach beyond a certain height; we seek merely to keep
them healthy by suitable feeding, exercise, rest, bathing, etc. But
in the matter of mental development we have not yet learned that it
is impossible for all children to reach the same degree of
linguistic or mathematical or artistic development, and we try to
bring all of them up to our preconceived standard of what a child
_should_ do in each line. The thing that we need to find out is
what a particular child _can_ do; and then we must give him the
opportunity and the encouragement to do his best. The things we
encourage him to do will be the basis for the habits which he will
form, for the skill which he will acquire--and so for the activities
that will yield him satisfaction and determine his behavior in
relation to others. That is, the things the child learns to do well
will determine what kind of a person he will be when he grows up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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