p. 8 | The Child in School

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 15, 1910

The Child in School

If we knew more about our children’s bodies, we might pay more attention to the advice and warnings of men wise in physiology in regard to their education. This fact impressed itself so strongly on John Mason Tyler, professor of biology in Amherst College, that he has written a book called “Growth and Education” to tell us why we are wrong in carelessly accepting much that is really harmful to our children in the present school system.

In the first place, he dwells upon the reason why mothers and fathers must give so much more attention and thought to their children’s health and education than our grandmothers did. The passing of farm life, and the crowding of people into cities and towns, have made the hygienic and moral conditions of our life detrimental rather than helpful.

Life on the farm in the old days was in itself an education for the child. It created in him, naturally, strength, vigor, ingenuity, resource, perseverance, industry, patience, fortitude, courage, skilled use of eye and hand, and many other qualities that now have to be cultivated deliberately by other methods. Learning was revered, and the doses of school which came in a child’s way were only large enough to make him clamor for more. To go to school was a privilege, not a disagreeable duty. A new book

was the greatest and rarest of joys.

A child’s health and education under the new dispensation need care that would once have been quite unnecessary. We can no more bring our children up by traditional precepts, or with no precepts at all, than we can turn our knowledge of kerosene lamps to the regulating of electric lights.

Growth is a very expensive process. The body of a child has not only to perform the normal functions of assimilation, rejection, and renewal; but it has also to provide a larger and more complicated equipment; it actually has to make bodily tissue.

Growth is periodic rather than constant; in both mind and body there are periods of ebb and flow, of rest and acceleration, of systole and diastole. In the pauses the child should be establishing a sinking fund for future expenses; instead of that, he is all the time called upon, so to speak, for his last cent, with the result that when nature makes her heaviest demands upon him, he goes bankrupt. . . . In assigning a child’s work, our question should always be, “What and how much will best promote growth?” Not, “How much can he endure?”

We have attained a much more acute understanding of child nature than those who came before us, as no one who reads old biographies can question; but there is still an enormous amount for us to learn. . . . Nothing, for instance, is more difficult for the grown-up mind to realize than that the frequent interruption and change which spoil adult work, are exactly what the child requires. Our present school system is the product of grown-up minds, made in accordance with their knowledge of their own needs. The hours are too long; the air of the crowded schoolrooms is poison to a growing child, whose need of oxygen is even more vital than our own; sufficient exercise is not provided for. . . .

When it comes to study, we show ourselves equally ignorant or careless of our children’s real needs. How many of us know that the brain in its physical structure is not born as fully developed as the tongue? That a child is positively incapable of profiting by certain kinds of intellectual work, not having the necessary physical organism? It is only when the sensory centers of the brain are full-grown that its higher uses become possible. . . .

We should have far smaller classes, and teachers of greater resource and ingenuity; and every child should go ahead as fast as he can without pushing, and with studying only a few hours a day. Three or four would be enough until he is eleven or twelve. When he studies, he should be incited, even made, to study with all the force that is in him. Nothing hurts a child more, mentally or morally, than a sinecure. He is sure to deteriorate in a class in which the lessons are too easy, or in which the teacher does not know how to make him put forth the utmost of his powers for his age.—Good Housekeeping.