Disguised Teaching by MRS. C. M. SNOW

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 14, 1915

Disguised Teaching

By MRS. C. M. SNOW

MRS. C. M. SNOW

A Catholic priest said, “Give me a child until he is twelve years old, and I don’t care what you do with him after that.” This is a very broad statement, and yet it will serve to illustrate the mother’s vantage ground of close association with her children during their most impressionable years. This is such a happy, holy time, and any thoughtful, practical mother will seek to make the most of it; for there is so much for the children to learn, and youth time flies so quickly.

Useful lessons in every vocation of life may be thoroughly taught when the children think they are only playing. A boy’s parents who are endowed with mechanical genius will direct him in making toys and tools. Some corner may be considered his shop, even if the partitions are imaginary. When small jobs of mending or making are required, it will be rare sport for him to do the needed work if it is sent to Mr. Walter (or whatever his name may be) Carpenter. If knives need sharpening, or anything is to be done in the line of blacksmithing, it may be sent in the same way to one of the other boys, if you are so fortunate as to have several boys.

Lawn cutting falls to the lot of the young gardener. Even when at certain seasons of the year the whole family turn into gardeners, planting seeds or raking leaves, one of the children may be elected to the position of officer of the day, or the children may choose sides to divide the little company into rival teams.

Instead of lessening father’s and mother’s dignity to enter into a combine to thus make play of work, their influence with the children is magnified, and toil becomes pleasure. Home occupations are the greatest of forces, the most subtle, the most powerful, in the training of children and in keeping them in the home environment. By this means the parent may to a great extent influence the character and the future of his child. “Home occupations for the children when rightly conducted mean good behavior when young, strength of character when more fully grown. They are the groundwork, or foundation, of their whole afterlife, for in their work and play they are only performing, in miniature, the pursuits they will follow when fully grown. They are watching others older than themselves, and their whole ‘vocation is endless imitation.’ How important, then, is the occupation which employs their time!”

If there is sickness in the house, or mother or one of the children needs rest and quiet, the children will enter happily into the hospital game. Select one child for the doctor, another for the nurse; the others are patients. Thus valuable lessons may be taught along these lines, as well as the needed rest secured.

We cannot imagine any little girl without a family of dolls, however crude their framework. In caring for these, if rightly directed by mother, she can learn all the essentials of baby tending, and even laundering and dressmaking. With her toy stove and dishes she can learn to cook and serve meals properly. (And this is a good lesson for boys to learn also, and is becoming more and more required in camping parties, etc.)

A little later, mother may be company in her own home for a meal, or even an occasional day, and the little lady take full charge of the home. How she will enjoy it! And it will broaden her character and help her to develop into a self-possessed, self-reliant girl—one who will be a lifter, not a leaner.

In assuming the rôle of company, mother should not lounge about, but observe all the courtesies and etiquette that she desires her child to observe when she is some one else’s company. She should personate with gentle dignity each character that she adopts in the game, realizing that it is a lifetime lesson to her child, whose whole “vocation is endless imitation.”

A child learns without conscious effort, absorbs knowledge as plants do sunshine and air. Development of the mind should be as natural as growth of the body. If given the right materials to feed on, this will be. Teaching is in reality only furnishing mind food of the proper quality and sufficient quantity.

The active mind of the child is ready to grasp at anything. It acts as continually as the heart beats. Then why not give it something worth while to think about? A skeleton in the medical student’s room fascinated the little three-year-old boy. Soon he could name and locate every bone in his own little body. Before little Paul was two years old, he could name each of the one hundred birds in the colored plates of “Bird Neighbors” and “Birds That Hunt and Are Hunted.” As soon as he was able to talk, he could repeat several beautiful poems that had been his lullaby as he nestled in my arms.

A lady whose literary advantages have been considerable, asked me one day if I did not run out of stories to tell my children. When I replied in the negative, she said: “I mean true stories. Well, you will when they are older.” I should not dream of telling my children an untrue story, but though her prophecy was made many years ago, it has never come true. How can it, when the world is so full of wondrous revelations in land and sea and sky? So many wonderful events have occurred in earth’s history, and are taking place with such rapidity, that the fund is utterly inexhaustible.

The history and geography of this and other countries interest and educate little minds when personal history is woven in. The names of rulers and the stories of their lives; Bible stories; the struggles of famous inventors and what they accomplished; lives of authors, missionaries, generals; history of certain battles and sieges and conquests in earth, air, and water; the voyage, landing, and subsequent history of the Pilgrim Fathers,—where is the limit to our resources? Even the story of a little seed—the possibilities wrapped up in its tiny brown covering, its life in the ground and afterwards—possesses an interest for the receptive little minds surpassing that of fairy stories.

The beauty of this sort of teaching is that it is not restricted to set times and places. It fits in with work and play and rest and study and recreation, and it requires no effort on the part of the little folks, for they are human interrogation points: they desire knowledge, and information acquired in a conversational or semistory form is longer retained than if learned in a set lesson. For instance, my children will not forget who commanded the Medo-Persian army in the capture of Babylon, because I told them the story of little Cyrus’s babyhood,—of how his royal grandfather, made envious by a dream he had before the child’s birth, obtained possession of the infant and commanded a trusted servant to put him to death. Instead of carrying out his promise, Harpagus, the servant, privily intrusted Baby Cyrus to the care of a herdsman, who brought him up with his own children. Bits of biography of prominent historical characters like this invest them with a personality far ahead of the vague ideal that the name alone conveys.

Does this teaching take time and thought, and is it a bother? As child and as mother I have found it a delightful pastime, a rejuvenator of youth, a forget-me-not chain of hallowed memories binding to a peaceful, blessed association.