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
The truly wonderful transformations in character that have been
worked in girls and in boys by means of well-organized play have
taught us the moral value of team-work for the older children. In
these games, which come at a period when the child has already
acquired considerable skill and strength, the chief interest is in
doing the best for the team, so that the individual learns the
importance of subordinating himself to a common purpose. He learns
the joy of contributing his best to his "side" without considering
his individual glory or gains. In this way he acquires that negative
but very important side of self-control which consists in the
ability to _avoid_ doing what the impulse would drive him to.
He learns also the importance of dreary drudgery, in his practice
work, for acquiring special skill, and a boy will spend hours in
such dull practice, animated by the desire not to excel some other
individual, but by the desire to help his team win. He learns not
only to take his place in the game, but to judge his companions by
their special ability and by their value to the group, rather than
by clothes or personal feelings or other outward and incidental
facts. All these things the team game teaches as no mere
_instruction_, whether in school or home, can teach.
We have learned from the results of these play activities with all
kinds of children in the city and in the country, of rich and of
poor, that the spirit of the game is not only capable of stimulating
the growing boy and girl to a tremendous amount of exertion, but
also of organizing his or her feelings and ideals into effective
moral and social standards. And when the same spirit is applied to
work, we can get the same valuable educative results, with the
addition of a higher appreciation of work as work than usually comes
from an early experience with doing necessary but disagreeable
tasks. For example, in one city the shop work of classes of boys was
organized on a cooperative basis. The boys worked in teams for the
making of desks or cabinets. The results, as measured by finished
product or by the quality of the workmanship, were far ahead of what
the same instructors could get from the same boys when the attempt
was made to stimulate the workers by means of prizes and individual
rewards. Children can learn to work together as well as to play
together. If you have noticed that two workers very often do half as
much work in a given time as one worker, it is because they have not
learned to work together--they have been denied the opportunity of
learning this, and now take occasion, when they do get together, to
do almost everything but work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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