Dreams and Education (RLE Edu K) by Hill J. C.;

Author:Hill, J. C.; [Hill, J.C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VI Education

DOI: 10.4324/9780203138632-6

MAny people will admit that the freedom of development advocated in the last chapter is the best way to bring the child forward, but may be rather apprehensive about the difficulty the child will have in fitting himself into the discipline of the school. There is little difficulty. Strange as it may seem to the tired mother of the lively child, the good Infant Mistress prefers lively children. She can steer the infantile activity into the work of the school, and the little seeker after knowledge who caused so much trouble at home, is soon at the top of the class, ready to move to a higher class where there will be fresh problems to conquer.

The modern Infant Mistress may not be quite clear about the theory of education, but she is an intelligent woman, she loves children, and she has a practical knowledge of what is right and what is wrong in Teaching Method. Give her more lively children, and she will soon introduce the Montessori System, so that the little ones will be even less restricted than they are at present; but she is doing marvellously well with the children she gets. The Montessori System and the Dalton Plan are only successful with children whose instinctive interests have been steered into the school work.

Nevertheless, the chief fault of the schools at present, is that they are still dominated to a considerable extent by the “tabula rasa” theory—that the child's mind is a blank sheet on which as much useful knowledge as possible has to be written. And one still comes across many “efficient” teachers who by constant vigilance, and slight but inevitable punishments, reduce their children to the comatose condition most suitable for this process. Only a generation ago, a master who had not his class in this condition would be reported to be inefficient. Nowadays, the strict disciplinarian is not so popular with headmasters and inspectors, but he is tolerated. Soon he will not even be tolerated. Thousands of teachers have changed their discipline on realizing that they were working on wrong lines. When our young teachers understand Freud's contribution to the knowledge of the mind, an improvement in teaching will follow.

Those of us who have tried to teach by more up-to-date methods found ourselves faced with the difficulty that there were on the Time-tables, subjects in which we could not interest the children at all. Some of us for example could not teach successful lessons on “The Verb,” “The Collective Noun,” “Charity,” or “Kindness to Animals.” We could evade the first by making a game of learning that the sheep bleats, the cow lows, the lion roars, the elephant trumpets, etc.; and the second by playing about with a herd of deer, a flock of sheep, a school of whales, a flight of birds, a troop of monkeys, and so on. But when we came to the half hours to be spent on “The Past Participle” and “The Subjunctive Mood,” we were faced at last with the grim reality.

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